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Glim Glam Shazams All Hams and Ram a Lam Dam Dams Fallout Equestria: Part III
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
e87f6bb
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No.304714
304717 304724 304725 304726 304728 304769 304771 310742 310890
We are officially on thread #3 and are not even halfway through the book yet. Just kill me now.

Previous thread: >>294032 →
Continuing from last post: >>304593 →
Currently on Chapter 21: The Heart of Twilight Sparkle:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/119190/23/fallout-equestria/chapter-twenty-one-the-heart-of-twilight-sparkle

Page break. The last microscene in the chapter appears to be a transcript of the recording that Littlepoop found floating around in the clouds (this is never actually stated, but it makes the most sense). Several lines of dialog follow each other, with no clear indicator as to who is speaking, how many characters are speaking, or whether or not we are meant to interpret these disjointed lines as a conversation. Eventually the author clarifies that Gilda (presumably the griffon, though we have not yet encountered this character in FoE) and Rainbow Dash are carrying a sleeping Spike away shortly after the bombs went off.

No wait, scratch that. Apparently most of the conversation is Dash talking to herself, or maybe narrating this sound recording for posterity or something, while carrying Spike. She mentions that a mercenary has been hired to kill her. It turns out that the mercenary is Gilda. Before the transmission ends, presumably with RD's death, she asks that Gilda join her in singing the song they used to sing from way back, about Junior Speedsters or whatever. The recording abruptly cuts off. Nothing else happens, and no context is provided for any of this. End of chapter.

Chapter 22: The Earth Pony Way

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“I pray for the safety of all good ponies who come to Fillydelphia, even slaves. But we can’t expect the Goddess to do all the work.”
I assume the meaning of this is that the slaves, and probably not the Goddess, will be doing most, if not all, of the work. As to what work is being done, and who is speaking this line, and in what original context, we are still in the dark. I have little faith that we will be any less in the dark by the time we reach the end of the chapter.

Apparently, they actually are going to Fillydelphia this time. I was more or less expecting them to get diverted onto another side quest. Also, I've completely forgotten why they even wanted to go to Fillydelphia in the first place; I think it had something to do with busting up another slaver camp.

Anyway, most of the journey from Junction R7 to Fillydelphia has been skipped, and they are now close enough to get a glimpse of the city on the horizon and to receive its radio broadcasts. The author makes no attempt to clarify whether they are walking or if they took the airship, or how much time has elapsed between the end of the last chapter and the present. However, that is pretty much par for the course. Meanwhile, Littlepoop focuses her attention on listening to Red Eye's radio broadcasts.

Page break. The microscene opens with some italicized text that is presumably meant to be one of Red Eye's broadcasts. I'll go ahead and dump the whole thing:

>“…we have Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup, a peaceful and loving couple, married for nearly a decade now, living in their quaint little house with their tiny garden on the outskirts of Roamer. No children, two dogs and a sunflower that Aunt Fruitcup has named Celestia.

>“What kind of monster, I have been asked, would root up Aunt and Uncle Fruitcup, tear them away from their peaceful, pointless lives, and set them to work hauling carts heavy with scrap metal?

>“A monster, indeed. But one with his eyes open and cast upon our future. The future of Equestria. Two hundred years ago, we lost our great nation, but we will have it again! And what would the Fruitcups and their little homestead be in two hundred years? Nothing, meaningless, not even hoofnotes in the annals of history. But… what will have meaning two hundred years from now? This factory!

>“And it is from this factory, and the others like it, that Equestria will be rebuilt. It is from the work that Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup do now that a new national infrastructure will be created and a new golden age will be born -- the golden age of Unity! Equestria will rise like a phoenix from her own ashes! But not without our help, and not without our labor.

>“This is what is important. This will make a difference. This will last!”

So far, Red Eye seems like a pretty shitty propagandist. Usually, the idea is to gloss over whatever horrible thing your regime is doing or else just not mention it, and focus instead on hyping up your accomplishments; either that or just flat out make stuff up. For instance, I'm assuming Chairman Mao's addresses to the nation didn't dwell much on crippling food shortages or struggle sessions. Here, we have Red Eye flat out referring to himself as a monster, and bragging about taking a couple of yokels off their land and forcing them to work in some factory he built. It's...a rather unorthodox approach to being a maniacal dictator, to say the least.

Also, I'm a little skeptical about "Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup." Apparently, before being conscripted to do God knows what, they lived in a "quaint little house with their tiny garden" with two dogs and a sunflower. Is there an apocalypse or isn't there? How would a garden work if the soil is irradiated and there's no sunlight? Wouldn't raiders have raped and disemboweled them by now? There is little consistency in how the author approaches this setting.

Anyway, after all of this silliness, the author finally sets the scene. The group is flying in their magic school bus: Velvet is curled up with her balefire phoenix (which doesn't burn her for some reason), Calamity is pulling the bus, and SteelHooves is looking out the window. Calamity announces that the bus is beginning to run out of magic or electricity or whatever it runs on, and they need to find a place to land so he can swap out the batteries. Apparently, the concern is that there may be "hellhounds" about.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
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No.304717
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>>304714

>Hellhounds. I recalled Homage, as DJ Pon3, warning ponies about hellhounds in the stretch between Manehattan and Fillydelphia. I’d been picturing rabid dogs, like the ones Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup had, only vicious. Possibly overgrown and mutated, like the bloodwings. Sure, the first time I heard of a hellhound, I learned that just one could take out a wagon train of slavers. But then, so could I. And I was hardly frightening.
For once, the author actually provides some explanation and description of a strange kind of monster we are about to encounter, instead of just dumping in something called a "hellhound" without bothering to tell us what it is. Littlepoop is unfamiliar with such creatures, and here we see her speculating on what they might be.

Unfortunately, the actual comparisons here leave something to be desired. For one thing, there's this:

>I’d been picturing rabid dogs, like the ones Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup had, only vicious.
Littlepoop does not know Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup; she has never met them, and has never seen their dogs. She just heard them being discussed on the radio. There is no basis for comparison here; for all she knows, their dogs actually are hellhouds.

There is also this:

>Possibly overgrown and mutated, like the bloodwings.
This just reminds us that the author never bothered to explain just what the fuck a "bloodwing" is either. We've been able to more or less piece together that they are some sort of giant bat, but we still don't know just how big "overgrown" is exactly, or in what specific way they are "mutated."

Finally, there's this:

>Sure, the first time I heard of a hellhound, I learned that just one could take out a wagon train of slavers. But then, so could I. And I was hardly frightening.
When exactly was the first time she ever heard of a hellhound? Where does she get any of her information from? On the one hand, she doesn't know what these things are; on the other, she seems to have heard from somewhere that they can "take out a wagon train of slavers," but didn't think that it would be worth prompting this mystery source for more information. Also, her false humility is really getting annoying.

Anyway, SteelHooves and Calamity fill the group in on what the hellhounds are. Apparently, they are the wasteland's most dangerous creature, and SteelHooves remarks that he would rather fight an alicorn. However, beyond this, their explanation is vague and rambling; it takes many paragraphs for either of them to get to the point.

The text veers off onto a weird tangent about Splendid Valley, which itself veers off onto several smaller tangents about the location of the valley and its purpose, as well as something called Maripony (this may have been mentioned already, but if it was something important it didn't stick in my mind).

>While hellhounds had not struck much of a note in my imagination, a terrifying specter of Splendid Valley had been painted in my mind by all the dark rumors and foreboding mentions of the place.
To my recollection, Splendid Valley has been mentioned exactly once: when LP noticed a painting depicting it in Homage's athenaeum and asked her about it. If it's meant to be a major location, with lots of dark and foreboding rumors circulating about it, we really should have heard more about it by now. It's the damned broadcast towers all over again.

Anyway, from what we're able to eventually piece together from the author's incoherent rambling and subject-jumping, the hellhounds used to be the Diamond Dogs. They were the original inhabitants of Splendid Valley but were ordered to clear out because Edgequestria needed their gem mines to make nuclear weapons or something. However, they decided to ignore the order, or they came back, or something; then, something something bombs went off, and something something nuclear waste or radiation or something, and then the Diamond Dogs mutated into gigantic scary versions of themselves. In addition to being big and scary, they can also burrow underneath the ground and use weapons. They are also supposed to be highly intelligent.

I'm actually going to give the author a few points here, simply because for once he attempts to foreshadow the appearance of a monster. Moreover, he actually gives us a decent idea of what sort of monster we should expect, instead of just unceremoniously dumping some poorly described creature into the story out of absolutely nowhere.

Page break. Presumably to avoid hellhounds, the group decides to set down on the roof of an old power plant. The author actually provides some rather nice, visually striking imagery of the ruined structure, and the power lines running off into the distance.

Even though they are only here to swap out their spark batteries, LP naturally decides to pick the lock of a nearby tower and go exploring. How did I know they weren't going to make it to Fillydelphia without being pulled off on at least one pointless side quest?

Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that the chapters from here on out are all obscenely long. Most of the chapters we've read so far have averaged between 2,000 and 5,000 words; however, I've glanced at the word counts for the chapters we have yet to read, and there is only one (Chapter 35) that is less than 10,000 words in length. Most of them are around 15,000 words, with a couple breaking the 20,000 or even 30,000 word barrier. Chapter 37 is a bloated 51,139 words long; literally long enough to be a self-contained novel. I find myself fondly reminiscing about my reactions to the length of Nigel's Glimmer Vs. Silver chapter. We've got a long, arduous journey ahead of us, but I'll try to move as quickly as I can.
Anonymous
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No.304720
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Spoilered
>>304717
Good luck GlimGlam

>>304653 →
>>304716 →
>To both
You have to start somewhere. That is the dread secret everyone knows. The one other thing is to do it.
Oh and fuck loads of marketing, and selling.
That said there are a variety of methods to hammering shit out in steady timeframe. This is a Half remembered structure.
Basically at every step take a break. A day long break. Also more heads together can point out things.
1. Idea time and Research
2.Write a plan
3. Write the shitdraft (This is only putting ideas on paper)
4. Look at that see what the fuck is going on. Write the first draft.
5. Read the first draft, re arrange as necessary
6. Refine the ideas. Have them flow together.
7. Repeat multiple times
8. Edit
9. Edit some more.
10. Read analytically, fix any flaws (take note)
10 and a half (write other drafts)
11. Write the final draft
12. Edit final draft
13. Double check is has everything.
14. ??? (Probably fuck tons of marketing) (As in this should eat 90% of your time)
15. Profit.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.304722
>>304717
Good luck, and thank you for making it this far.

When it comes to the "horror" potential of hellhounds as they're written so far I don't think Kkat did it right. How many horror movies go out of their way to keep their monsters in the shadows until it's time for their big reveal? These characters know exactly what they are and spell it out for the audience before it happens. Where's the mystery? Nobody's knowledge of this is incomplete.
It's not like there's a scene where Steelhooves says some rumors about shit that killed some fellow Steel Rangers, LP mentions a warning Homage gave her about hellhounds, Calamity talks about the bullshit Starship Poopers Movie style intel he was given in the Enclave that claimed a Hellhound is a small and weak pathetic creature because propaganda, Steelhooves brings up what he remembers of the Diamond Dogs from before the war, Velvet says "I don't believe the diamond dogs could possibly get shoved off their land because that is uncharacteristically mean for poners whose pacifism killed them" and some "crazy old coot" npc has a retard moment and freaks out while exaggerating everything about the hellhounds only for a surprise attack to seemingly prove him right at first.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has some excellent horror segments before many fights that build on the horror of fighting enemies with weird supernatural bullshit powers and the mystery of not knowing how to beat it or how it works and the tension of having to survive all sorts of horrible scenarios. Dealing with a demon doll or avril latrine's skater boy or a hairy bitch is bad enough but a shapeshifting foe that could be anywhere? A timestopping foe that could do anything in stopped time? The ghost of card games past from the future? The simultaneous algaepocalypse from one gay and the ground softening from the other gay?
Characters expositing exactly what the upcoming monsters are like doesn't seem like good horror writing for increasing the terror and anticipation.
Anonymous
548c81c
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No.304724
>>304714
>So far, Red Eye seems like a pretty shitty propagandist. Usually, the idea is to gloss over whatever horrible thing your regime is doing or else just not mention it, and focus instead on hyping up your accomplishments; either that or just flat out make stuff up.
I think I can explain this. Though I'd have to go comparing the texts to be absolutely sure, I believe Red Eye's radio propaganda is based directly on the radio propaganda broadcast by the Enclave in Fallout 3. In the game, the Enclave propaganda channel is run by (self-appointed) President John Henry Eden, who tries very hard to come across as an old-timey american patriot recalling the (obviously idealized) good old days from before the war. Supposedly these broadcasts were based on the "fireside chats" given by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

For example, here's a transcript of one of his broadcasts:
>"We live in an age of poverty, greed, violence, destruction. Indeed, the very seat of the federal government, Washington D.C., has been reduced to what is now known as the "Capital Wasteland." The Capital Wasteland... How did it come to this, America? How did your leaders allow the most powerful nation on Earth… to die? The answer is really quite simple: Incompetence. Incompetence at the highest echelons of power. We put our trust, our faith, in halfwits. Our intrepid leaders had everything they wanted! Power. Wealth. Prestige. And it made them lazy, America. Oh yes, and laziness breeds stupidity. Rest assured, I will not make the mistakes of my predecessors. When John Henry Eden builds a country, he builds it to last. The American way. Don't you, my darling America, deserve that? Don't you deserve a future free of war, and fear, and terrible uncertainty? Of course you do. As President of the United States, you have my solemn pledge that I will never rest, NEVER rest, until we all have what we deserve: A place to truly call... home."

Kkat is probably trying to emulate Eden's tone through Red Eye - to make him come across as a wise, understanding yet realistic visionary. Eden's speeches do carry a eerie undercurrent of "by any means necessary", but are at least smartly written enough that he's not shouting I COMMIT ATROCITIES at the top of his lungs. Either Kkat thinks that this brutal honesty suits the character, or simply doesn't understand the basics of propaganda. The story of Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup has a faint air of the twee, comfortable domestic lifestyle that one might expect from pre-war ponies, but as you say, it makes little sense as far as FoE's setting goes.

Red Eye is a weirdly fascinating character from a "how was this written" persepctive because he is, in a sense, three characters. There's Radio Propaganda Red Eye, based on President Eden. There's Fillydelphia Red Eye, based on another Fo3 character as we'll see fairly shortly, and then there's Third Act Red Eye, who is essentially Kkat's own creation. There's little consistency in their writing so they all read like essentially different people.
Anonymous
4f16e22
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No.304725
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>>304714
I wonder why I said I would stop going here. It's fucking stupid. Yeah, I intend to focus on my own writing but that is not mutually exclusive to reading posts here.
I honestly don't know. My brain seems broken.

Thanks for the advice anyway in the previous thread.
>>304720
Thanks for the input from you as well.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
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No.304726
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>>304714

LP picks the lock and finds stairs going up and down. She goes up, and comes to a large room with a nice view of Fillydelphia in the distance. Dark red clouds hover over the city, swirling ominously around the gigantic broadcast tower. I'll grant that kkat can occasionally come up with some nice imagery, even if most of it is probably ripped off directly from Fallout 3.

Anyway, she pokes around this room some more, and finds some ammo boxes and other junk. One of the ammo boxes she is unable to pick:

>Somepony had tried picking the lock and failed badly. It was literally the first evidence I had seen that anypony in the Equestrian Wasteland other than me had learned lockpicking.
I find this highly unlikely. LP developed her skills by reading magazines she's found on the subject that were just lying around. You mean to tell me that lockpicking was a popular enough hobby in pre-war Equestria that entire periodicals devoted to the subject were published, that most of these magazines are just lying around in places where anypony could just pick them up, that there are locked safes and boxes just lying around all over the place containing all sorts of goodies which would be highly prized commodities in this scavenging-based post-war economy, and that nopony in 200 years has ever thought to just pick up one of these manuals and learn how to open these locked boxes? (X) Doubt.

Anyway, Littlepoop tries to get the stupid box open but she can't, and then Velvet shows up and makes some non-sequitur remark about having Calamity take a bath when they get to Fillydelphia. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They all split up to explore the rest of the power plant, because why not risk life and limb in a dangerous region populated by hyper-intelligent dog-monsters just to obtain a few extra cans of old tomato sauce and maybe some ammo if they're lucky?

Littlepoop finds the main floor of the plant, filled with coal-powered generators. She also finds a framed newspaper article on the wall that explains some difficulties in getting coal to fire these plants, as it apparently had to be imported from Zebrica. I believe this detail came up earlier during a discussion about trains.

>“Hold on,” I said, feeling dumbstruck for the second time in as many hours. “Equestria didn’t have any coal!” I waved a hoof at the power plant. “Are you telling me you ponies built Equestria’s entire infrastructure on a power source you didn’t have?”
>SteelHooves just stared as I had a mental meltdown trying to parse that idea. Finally, he stated, “Why would it be a problem? We had resources the zebras needed, they had coal. We trade. Everybody’s happy.”
>Yeah, sure. Until somepony… or some zebra… figures out they don’t have enough to go around anymore. Or decides they just don’t want to share.
Wow, it's almost like globalism is a dumb idea or something. But that's none of my business. *sips tea*

Anyway, Littlepoop finds a coffee mug and spends three paragraphs musing to herself about it, and then realizes that they left Calamity alone on the roof. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They all go back up to the roof to check on Calamity, and it turns out he's fine. Velvet, for some reason speaking in her seductress voice, tells Calamity that she found some kind of engineering schematic and shows it to him. The page turns out to be instructions for building some kind of special helmet out of the claws of a diamond dog. He asks her where she found it and she explains that she took it off of a unicorn who had died recently; presumably another scavenger who had been exploring the ruin. Calamity is initially worried about something, but is relieved when LP tells him that the plant had magical security robots or something and that's what probably killed the unicorn. Calamity seems relieved. Also, Velvet's balefire phoenix kills a squirrel. Nothing else happens.

Page break. For some dumb reason, LP decides to go back down into the plant again. SteelHooves stays behind with Calamity, and Velvet goes with LP. Instead of talking to Velvet, LP decides to listen to some more of Red Eye's radio broadcasts. We learn that not only does Red Eye not have a cutie mark, he seems actively hostile to the idea of cutie marks. He actually had his surgically removed, because he's a badass like that I guess. Then, she shuts off the radio, and she and Velvet have a long, idiotic conversation about whether or not Velvet is too fat to cross the catwalk. Also, there is a catwalk that runs over the main floor of the power plant, and leads to some kind of administrative office that LP wants to explore for some dumb reason. Also, Velvet is acting like a slut for some dumb reason. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop is trying to pick the lock to the door of the office, when Velvet alerts her to the presence of a hellhound on the ground floor beneath them, eating the corpse of a Steel Ranger. Gee, it sure was a great idea to go poking around in this power plant in hellhound country; I'm sure whatever's in the office is totally worth the danger here. Rather than chance Velvet's fat ass putting too much stress on the catwalk again, they decide to finish picking the lock and go into the office, to see if they can escape that way. However, the hellhound hears them picking the lock and comes after them.

>I could see the monster climbing up one of the sets of stairs like a monkey -- if that monkey were made out of death.
https://youtu.be/matxz-G9q8M?t=6

Anyway, the office unsurprisingly has no exit other than the door they came in through, so now they are trapped in here like a couple of fat, slutty retards. They hunker down and create as best a defensive position as they can, but the hellhound doesn't come. LP begins to wonder if it's setting a trap, but Velvet whispers that these things track by scent (how does she know this?), and therefore the dog could be heading up to Calamity and SteelHooves.
Anonymous
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No.304727
304750 304771 304775
>>304718 →
Oh, funny you mention the "show bible"-type analogue. That's exactly what I have done and have been doing, albeit somewhat incomplete. I have a ton of ideas all the time, and in fact I wanted to create some kind of world atlas or PDF, along with my drawings, to illustrate the gist of this idea and pieces of its world. I have also been practicing writing with little vignettes and short stories in the setting itself. I just really like being creative and fleshing settings out, thinking of logistics, and hopefully sensible approaches to things like trade and whatnot.

When I said 300k words that was a bit of an exaggeration. I understand that a story is exactly as long as it needs to be to get the narrative across. However, I want to write an adventure story as they are my favorite, and I read at a fast rate, so i'd like to write something which is a nice experience that one cannot burn through in 5 hours. Of course, longer fics require greater writing skill to accomplish successfully, and this will be more difficult.

As mentioned, i've been slowly but surely working myself into a steadier routine, and drawing ideas from the setting and writing now, too. I greatly enjoy building this little world, and would hopefully soon write a "core" fic to get across some important ideas--not all of them, mind you-- to go along with a sort of PDF or setting bible for those interested. I just enjoy the process of creation.
>>304720
This all looks very helpful, and ill copy both the advice of you, and Glim down! Marketing is a good one, i'm well aware of that and it will be an interesting skill to learn. I've already started corrupting my networks of friends and posting about it in the several populated groups i'm in and getting authors and artists interested (my best friend has already drawn several pieces for me!) Of course there's more to be done, and i'm eager to write something great for people to enjoy.
Anonymous
49e2179
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No.304728
>>304714
I would assume the whole Fruitcup spheal is because Red Eye is a clone combination of two Fallout 3 characters, one being President John Henry Eden, who speaks of idyllic propoganda about quaint and lovely American life. Here I guess Kkat had an aneurism and remembered that trait of John H. Eden and just threw in some stuff talking about a peaceful, ideal cottage life but completely mixed things up in a nonsense way. Also this antagonist, Red Eye? The other character he rips off is a slaver by the name of Ashur in Fallout 3's the Pitt DLC. He is the slaver leader of a pre war citty (Pittsburgh, which this supplants with Fillydelphia), and pip's entrance to the city and entire storyline within it is a 1:1 mirror of events in that DLC up until meeting the big bad.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.304733
>>304726
>fat velvet is too fat for the catwalk
remember when Littlepip lifted a boxcar?
remember when LP levitated herself like fucking superman in the comics where the author decided Supes's bullshit cartoon-physics "lift a building by a small corner with one finger and the building doesn't just crumble and break under that incredibly focused pressure" moments happen that way because Clark was a Psychic all along?
remember when Littlepip lifted Velvet over some landmines?
I could swear she lifted Steelhooves and his Power Armor at one point too.
these fuckers can fly. Calamity has wings and LP can lift herself and her whole party at once. Kkat doesn't get to pretend weak floors are a problem for anyone.

>a monkey made of death
At least it's not a pedo rape ape in a boat captain's getup whose fighting spirit takes the form of a Nothing that can attach itself to shitty tiny boats to transform then into giant boats under the rape ape's control.
considering how retarded Team LP is and how much they rely on plot armour I'm quite certain one rape ape from JJBA part 3 could kill the whole party.
These fuckers would probaboy see a boat in the middle of a desert and think "wow what a great place to scavenge".
shit now I'm tempted to write that. I promised myself I'd never write about characters I don't like getting fucking destroyed again but the thought of the rape ape Jotaro Jojo fingered killing team LP is too funny.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
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No.304750
304751 304771
>>304727
Collections of short stories have been popular in the past.
Also
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSbuB1AyaJk8zTF3nE2KRxuixG_A5gBKJ
There are lots of different ways to construct a whole world.
I should rephrase that, there are many ways to bring your world to others and invite them in as your world is.

<Side parallel to Fo:E "What if Fallout Equestria was good?"
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/39408/beware-of-chicken
Also on QQ for whatever reason.
So this fiction in particular is roughly 100k words for the first volume. With roughly 2k words ish per chapter. It cuts right to the heart of the story.
Looking back it has cuts that are superficially similar to Fallout:Equestria Looking through the post again they are also opposites in character and story. There is one major difference. The Heart of the story is never cut.
It has some errors in grammar and punctuation such as brother's should be brothers'.
In Fallout Equestria we follow LittlePip the token reader insert game character.
In they put them all in a zoo, unless it's a farm! Beware of Chicken it's a modern day man as a cultivator.
Basically the two are the same as an RPG game character and a cultivator.
Beware of Chicken is a parody played straight. Showing a tight cohesive story with multiple side running threads.
LittlePoops Grand rimming adventure is a drugged up slurring word wall salad in the style of ancient Greek Epics and E3 game convention demo showcase. Telling a series of stories in telling about the everything.
Where Fallout Equestria fails, Beware of Chicken succeeds. Although to be fair Beware of Chicken is a different story, an inversion of what Fallout Equestria is about. They do have similar story structures.
If Fallout Equestria used what Beware of Chicken does right, then Fallout Eqestria would be a damned good story.
Everything Beware of Chicken shows, it delivers. (In volume one).

Two major things though that can be readily applied.
1. The key understanding of a reference for the audience to infer.
The jist is always known through the character's summation.
Which leads to the next part.
2. Plot threads are followed to the end.
In the very first chapter it cuts out the tedium. Main Character wants to gtfo, and live happily somewhere quiet.
The cut part makes sense all he did was move one place to another. With those two rock solid goals in mind.
When he gets a piece of land that is for the locals more trouble than it's worth. It's later emphasized what made it so troublesome for the locals in the weakest area.
In contrast LittlePip does the seemingly impossible with no reason. She is the toughest one around everywhere due to 'eh fuck it plot armor' oh and pipbuck stuff.
Beware of Chicken does the layout mundane impossible with reason. He is the toughest one around in one tiny location due to running the fuck away and getting a new body that trained.
Both have extraordinary mundane power, at little personal expense, and a situation thrust upon them.
They are Yin Yang opposites. As a parody that makes sense. Considering xainxia is bug man power fantasy with death and rape and other edgy stuff. It matches nearly one to one with Fallout (Equestria).
Potentially scary end of the world stuff, and very much should be overkill for the protagonist to actually handle. Check
Secret plots. Check
Raider hideouts (cultivator sects). Check
'Game' logic (Qi bullshit). Check
Neither character technically ever really fails. Check
Moral quandaries. Check
Beware of Chicken deals with the small localized personal world, while Fallout Equestria tries to have everything.

Beware of Chicken has many themes, and they all shine through. One of which is don't be a hoarding power hungry rapey killy psychopathic cunt giving back to the land (and each other, it's reciprocity). It's kind of surprising really that those morals and wisdoms said and shown again and again, yet it doesn't get old. They don't over stay their welcome.
That story is written so that every character is the star when it is their turn. They all have the ability to be able to self reflect.
Since it's a parody played straight it has lots and lots of foreshadowing and continually tieing loose threads.

Now on the other side of the scale.
<What if Fallout Equestria took its story and origins ramped it up to eleven, and then played it seriously with comedic gory effect.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/8894/everybody-loves-large-chests
It's about a monster. An amoral monster. Well actually about lots of amoral and immoral monsters.
And chests. The morals are never in question about chests.
Clocking in at 1,585,422 words and literature Game Text boxes in story with explanations.
And apparently is also completed, hunh I should finish reading that. Also I'm pretty sure it has a book form for sale as well that is more edited and polished.
Amusingly it's about psychopaths, nonhuman modes of thinking, and a game world.
Also lewds all the sex, and debauchery.
There is alot more differences here that don't apply to Fallout Equestria, but a separation between narrator and character is one hell of a mental buffer between the fuckery going down.
A different story and perspective than Beware of Chicken.
The reason why to mention this one at all is that actually being there would be fucked up. Taking moronic evil to the next level, and through magic of stat increases intelligent evil and lucky evil.
Ponerogenesis on full display. That is also entertaining, that hammers exactly what a monster would think fundamentally.
Also good writing. Probably a bit more that I'm forgetting as well.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.304751
>>304750
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiUHYacaRI&t=0
The Mangus Archives for the first link.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304767
Inquisitor aka Draco by Ian Watson...
On one hoof it's an officially published novel but on the other hoof it's still fanfiction for the Warhammer 40K setting.
and on the other other hoof this story's shiiiit and I think it would be fascinating to see Glim criticize and review this story considering the official standards it met while still sucking gay asshole.
Anonymous
da0a07c
?
No.304769
304771
r4mji1eijhp31.jpg
>>304714
Not sure if someone already said it but this chapters random quote is a pony version of something from Fallout New Vegas with the Honest Hearts DLC I belive. Got a character Joshua Ghram who is a Mormon and you have to help settle some disputes with the tribes in the region. I recall you saying you were going to try the Fallout games out and I'd be really curious to see what you think of the dlc. I remember way back in thread 1 o gushed about the dlc though so won't delve tok deep into it here.
Anonymous
cceac7d
?
No.304771
304773 304775
>>304714
I had to read Red Eye's speech twice to realize that he was describing himself in such a negative light. One common theme of propaganda is that leaders will protect the "little guy," and in particular make happy little families happier and more secure because that's what ordinary people want. This was true in the propaganda of Hitler, in the propaganda of Stalin, and even in modern pozzed propaganda, though in this latter case the family is usually gay or biracial. Basing John Henry Eden's broadcasts after Roosevelt's fireside chats was one of the few smart moves by Bethesda in FO3: Roosevelt was a master at propaganda indeed this is how he successfully pushed more dictatorial powers to the executive than any other single president, and if I was president I would exercise the same strategy. Anyway, a villain openly admitting/boasting about his crimes only makes sense if he is a Joker-like figure who openly reviles morality or the story otherwise doesn't take itself seriously (think of the Street Fighter movie). A far more intimidating villain is one who has public opinion on his side as this introduces moral quandaries (are you harming innocents by fighting a brainwashed populace?) and lets his evilness be a reveal to the reader.

Not that Eden's speeches are particularly genius in their own right. It's much more fun to make him into a parody of himself like "John Henry Sneeden" (https://youtu.be/wD_D2nJRAv0)

>>304720
Thanks for the advice. On a word processor obviously it's easier to go through your existing draft and "write" a new draft by editing it bit by bit. Would you recommend instead making a new file for every draft and typing it out in its entirety?

>>304726
>lockpicking
Tbh the vast majority of mass-produced locks, such as "Master" locks, exist only to keep people from simply casually walking in. They are cheaply produced because your average normie or shoplifter doesn't know anything about lockpicking, though even a novice with improvised tools could probably get in within a minute. Hence why lockpicking videos on Youtube have gotten so many views, because it's an unusual but learnable skill that embarrasses a common household object. Harder locks will rarely stop a patient professional, but the window of vulnerability that exists if it's in a semi-public location is effective deterrence in itself. However, if lockpicking was popular enough in pre-war Equestria that even without the internet magazines were dedicated to it, it stands to reason a few skilled hobbyists/hardened criminals would have taught future generations of scavengers all there is to know. Without police around and glorified burglary now a means of survival for a large portion of the population, only the most difficult/hidden/dangerously placed safes and locked doors would remain unopened.

>but Velvet whispers that these things track by scent (how does she know this?)
Either Calamity or Steelhooves conceivably could know this, but not Velvet by any stretch. A simple rewrite of this scene could have fixed that.

>>304727
>show bible
That was the first thing I wrote (though it's not finished) when I started on my own work. You must know the strengths and weaknesses of a character (especially if said character is from a videogame, to prevent the prose from being powergamey and unrealistic), why the Macguffin is important, the motivations and flaws of every character, etc. Having this doesn't prevent your work from being bad but it helps prevent it from being inconsistent, and an inconsistent work can almost? never be good.

I've mentioned it before, but this is my first full-length story which exists primarily to test my ability in making a coherent plot out of a flight of fancy. I was hoping for 100k words originally in total but, seeing as it is composed of four self-contained but connected stories, it may end up 150k to as much as 200k words. We'll see, but I'll trim the fat as much as possible. I'm looking forward to what you come up with as well.

>>304750
Thanks for the recommendations, I'd never heard of any of those. Beware of Chicken sounds interesting.

>>304769
Joshua Graham is a superb character and doesn't deserve to even be referenced by this trash-heap.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.304773
1596887.png
>>304771
>I'm looking forward to what you come up with as well.

You goddamn better. It's going to be the best adventure story in this fandom. Just give me five years.

Jokes aside, the reason i'm writing this is because I desperately want more post-apoc content in this fandom, and i'm really tired of FO:E being the only real option people have. So i'd like to give at least something different for people like myself to hopefully enjoy. I just want to see more of that sort of story, so i'm writing it myself. It's my favorite genre. That, and i'm really not a fan of how FO:E handled the origins of the setting and its more serious elements (ponies turning into crazy, violent, jingoistic Americans over a resource, and the violent things like raiders being an EXTREME departure from the core morality of ponies). It never really sat well with me.

The DREAM would be to write something coherent and better-written as well, but time will tell if i'm capable of learning to do so and acquiring the skill in particular.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.304775
>>304720
>>304727
>>304771
Properly found the notes this time.
For redundancy backups are good practice. Not meeded, but it cam be helpful.
To be fair squishing these steps down to about 4 and a half hours is easily do able.
1 item per day. At least until mastery is had, or something. Most important thing is the thesis. The main idea. The point. Ect.
It's also more geared toward academic writing, newspaper crap, and largely uncreative works. I think it could work but take it with a grain of salt.
1. Brainstorm Ideas
2. Test thesis/ideas Also that it fulfills guidelines
3. Outline. Quaility doesn't matter here
4. REST
5.Review, Focus, Develop, Revise
Type it as needed.
6. Complete Draft
7. REST
8.Read it carefully. Reading outloud is a way to double check. FIX
9. REST
10. Read for organization and content. FIX
11. REST
12. Editing.
13. One Sentence (at a time) starting at the bottom
14. Repeat 10, and 13. FIX
15. Read in Print (a physical copy). If needed fix it, but if all is well congratulations.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304788
I've got it
I know what pisses me off about LP randomly revealing information to herself and the audience in infodumps sometimes
1. This author normally tries to have characters awkwardly infodump information to each other through monologues or excessively melodramatic notes/holotapes/recordings
2. We don't know the limits of LP's knowledge
3. There are often times when we were left in the dark on a subject just because LP hadn't decided to give us the details yet
4. It makes no sense that she, like Dan from Dan VS, has such a bizarrely random pool of knowledge about the world. One minute she can sperg out about the JAX Gayframe computers and the next she's quickly hacking a computer like it's a locked door without any nerdy trivia sperging. One minute she's a history nerd who could tell you what Fluttershy did on year 2 of the pony war. The next she's shocked to learn of the role Fluttershy played in damning the ponies to pony hell which is also rapist and gore/scat-fetish heaven (it's a very efficient system like how dog heaven is squirrel hell)
5. Avatar Aang from The Last Airbender did this "sometimes the hero knows stuff and sometimes he doesn't" stuff better by making Aang a 112 year old kid who was frozen in ice for 100 years and remembers shit about his world that is no longer true today. Like when he remembered "that amazing massive block of ice in the desert" that melted over 100 years. Some things never change. And some things changed a lot in 100 years. But because there's a lot he doesn't know about Current Year it sets up a chance for the world to prove what he says wrong or for characters to explain shit to him.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
566c703
?
No.304790
304791 304792 304811 304816
pre-owned-harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix-i-want-12-chicken-mcnuggets.jpg
>>304726

Page break. The next microscene is literally 5 sentences long. Littlepoop creeps towards the door, hears a noise, and backs up. This could easily have been appended to either the previous microscene or the next one; this is among the most egregious abuses of the page break device this author has yet committed. Here is the entire thing, since it's so short:

>Cautiously, I inched towards the door. I was nearly to it when I heard a sound from somewhere on the other side, faint and brief and unfathomable.
>I jumped, backpedaling until my tail hit the far wall. I crouched, cowering, and readied my weapons to shoot. All of them.
"Unfathomable" is a poor word choice here. I'm guessing that the author is simply trying to say that LP heard a noise and she doesn't know what caused it, but "unfathomable" generally refers more to something that by its very nature can't be comprehended; the unfathomable will of God, the unfathomable depths of space, that sort of thing. Beyond this, I have no comments for this microscene.

Page break. After a period of waiting, LP eventually realizes that there is nothing to be gained by continuing this standoff, so she decides it's time to go outside. To her surprise, Velvet has a plan.

>Velvet Remedy had a plan? Velvet? I quickly chided myself for being so surprised. She was smart and capable, if not exactly what I considered Wasteland-wise. And besides, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
What?!? How dare someone other than the author's precious chosen one come up with a plan?!? Seriously, though, this character's overinflated opinion of herself relative to her actual abilities is rapidly becoming the worst of her negative character traits, which says a lot considering the wide array of options to choose from. Also, friendly reminder that Velvet has technically been in the wasteland longer than LP has.

>I started with the weapon’s locker, only to find that, like the ammo box upstairs, the lock had been mangled by an amateurish lockpicking attempt. I felt a flare of hatred. SteelHooves and Calamity might be dead, we might be about to die, and this idiot had fucked up the lock.
What?!? How dare someone other than the author's precious chosen one attempt to pick a lock?!? And they didn't even do it correctly! Hrrmph, typical.

Also, once again the author seems to be having difficulty with possessives. The correct way to phrase this would be "I started with the weapons locker," since we're talking about a general-purpose locker designed to hold multiple weapons. "The weapon's locker" would indicate a locker designed to hold a single designated weapon.

Anyway, LP goes around the room rummaging through desk drawers and doing her usual routine. This makes sense I suppose; she risked all of their lives just to see what's inside this stupid office, so she might as well get her money's worth. However, it turns out that the second pony in all of Edgequestria to ever read a lockpicking manual had come through here too, although it seems that this mystery pony was trying to destroy evidence rather than collect it. LP finds a melted, ruined tape recorder, some burnt documents, and a terminal with its hard drive wiped possibly with a cloth.

There is also a wall safe, which the mystery pony had also unsuccessfully tried and failed to pick the lock on. The lock is sturdy enough that she is able to remove the remnants of the previous attacker's bobby pin, so she decides to take a whack at it herself. A by-now familiar pattern is repeated: LP tries to pick the lock, but can't because it's too sturdy and blah blah blah. She tries again, fails, tries again, fails, considers popping a crack mint, resists the temptation this should be a moot point anyway since she flushed her entire stash, and finally gets the dumb safe open. Inside, she finds some more useless junk: a bunch of pre-war gold coins that may or may not still be valuable, some kind of gaudy belt buckle, and a few clips of ammunition that she can't use. There's a memory orb in there too.

With her kleptomaniacal urges temporarily satiated, LP signals Velvet to take cover, and then she opens the door. Incidentally, didn't Velvet have some kind of plan? It was mentioned, but we never really heard anything more about it.

Anyway, the usual improbable bullshit happens. Turns out the diamond dog had put mines on the door, and instead of rigging them to explode instantly as would make the most sense, they instead beep a warning for several seconds. During this time period, LP tries to rip them off the door frame and throw them at the diamond dog, but it turns out they're stuck on there with glue or something, so she can't get them off in time. Meanwhile, the diamond dog fires a laser beam at them and it melts that stupid belt buckle thing that was still in the safe (LP took everything else). Then, the mines explode, somehow melting the walls and part of the floor, but leaving the two ponies miraculously unharmed.

Since there is now a giant gaping hole in the floor, they jump through it. Meanwhile, Velvet's balefire phoenix, which last we heard was still upstairs with Calamity and SteelHooves, suddenly appears and starts flapping around the room, drawing the diamond dog's gunfire away from them. Or hellhound, I suppose I should be calling this thing.

Page break. The two of them land in a hallway on the floor below. They see some posters on the wall. LP has twisted her ankle but is otherwise unharmed. Velvet finally reveals the details of her ingenious plan, which is basically just for LP to run when she gives the word.

They step out into the main room with the generators. They see the hellhound, which for some reason is now injured. It sees them and comes after them. Velvet orders LP to run, and then she summons some kind of magic blast in her horn and fires it, because I guess that's a thing she can do now.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.304791
304793
>>304790
Mines beep in length according to your explosives skill in modern Fallouts. Higher explosives skill = more time to search for and disarm the mines. It's a balancing thing, so the player can react to the trap if they stumble across it. They also emit a handy, subtle orange flow. They function in this illogical way that any realistic setting would absolutely not have, solely because that's how it works in the videogames. This is a bit funny, because it's a gameplay contrivance that allows the protagonist in a quasi-realistic setting to survive. If these mines worked as all mines do, then Pip would have died here.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304792
>>304790
Using glue to stick landmines to the floor so your foe can't pick them up and throw them at you... That's so retarded it could only make sense in a world of telekinetics or gravity gun users.
But Littlepip lifted boxcars (this is swiftly becoming a catchphrase, like "You lynched negroes") so she should find tearing these landmines from the ground easy. Even if the glue is strong enough to keep the mines stuck to the ground she can just pull up that ground by the mines.

Also, remember when Team LP visited Tenpony Tower? THat would have been a great place to give the whole team some upgrades. Like in One Piece. One Piece loves giving characters location-based upgrades when those upgrades aren't gained from a training arc or offscreen training or in the middle of a fight. These "And then Nami the side character found and started using a Thunder Sword from the Thunder Island where the main character learned how to run faster than lightning during a fight against the Thunder Lord" moments are a great way to keep less combat-focused characters feeling relevant so they don't get left behind and end up irrelevant like DBZ's side characters.
Tenpony Tower's radio whore had a collection of the last remaining copies of books Rarity's ministry burned. Surely there would be books about illegal ways to enhance your magic. Or illegal spells. Or big spellbooks with a handful hoofful whatever of burned spells. Perhaps some banned and burned military training manuals from Germaney. Perhaps some banned books on how to make improvised explosive devices from common household items you could easily scavenge in the post apocalyptic pony world or purchase from stores in the tower that have no idea how much value their pre-war junk has to a crafty murderhobo. Perhaps a book on medicine and healing magic that was banned for praising Zebra potion remedies or instructing the reader on how to care for wounded or injured Zebras in addition to Ponies. Perhaps a book on the construction of superior dart gun SMGs and sniper rifles. Velvet Remedy could be carrying a silenced air-powered tranq dart rifle right now but the author didn't think of that because it didn't happen in Fallout 3. Maybe if he played FNV properly he'd know what a boost your character gets after purchasing the best guns and ammo from the Gun Runners or the cyber implants from the Followers Of The Apocalypse.
Fuck, putting power levels aside for a moment this would be great for literary shit like characterization too.
You could characterize each of Littlepip's Littleshits through their reactions to the books and how much it takes for them to realize the value of this knowledge.
Calamity could read banned books about shit the Enclave did wrong and say "man the enclave sucks" and then read banned books about flying tricks and wings and wind that were banned for praising a cancelled athlete who got caught doing drugs.
Learning exactly what Rarity's ministry considered objectionable could characterize prewar equestria excellently. If it was supposed to be a greedy """jingoistic nationalist""" meme the author could say it banned books about sex with zebras.
There could even be a scene where Steelhooves finds the last surviving copy of a trashy romance novel Applejack hated and reminisces fondly about this. I'd love to fondly reminisce on memories of a cute smart tomboy gf and I and how we laughed at how terrible the vampire novel Twilight was. For a guy like Steelhooves who supposedly survived over 200 years and dated AJ this doesn't come up as often as it should. I think Roranoa Zoro's spextacular lack of direction is a character trait that comes up more often than this.
Velvet pulling magic out of her ass makes no sense here. And it's particularly galling because the perfect opportunity to justify a sudden boost in everyone's metaphorical power level fell right into the author's lap but he wasn't interested in it because he only wants gay anus in his lap.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304793
>>304791
Speaking of landmines, even if you say "Old Equestria built the military-grade mines that way on purpose (glowing LED, beeping timer, turning them off while they beep so they dont go boom is as easy as looking down and clicking Interact aka reaching down and flicking some switch on it) because they thought these features would keep ponies from getting hurt by their own mines and didn't care as much about how effective it would be at hurting Zebras" it wouldn't make sense for post-apocalyptic ponies making homemade IED mines out of Sensor Modules and Lunchboxes with a few hundred Bottlecaps for shrapnel (dont ask where the kaboom comes from) to also give their landmines a beeping timer and make disarming them as easy as disarming other explosives and traps.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.304811
304812
>>304790
>How dare someone other than the author's precious chosen one attempt to pick a lock?!? And they didn't even do it correctly! Hrrmph, typical.
It says a lot about the mind behind this story that a potential rival to Littlepip fails repeatedly at one of her signature skills before even showing up. They don't exist to offer her a capable peer or dangerous opponent - they exist to offer minor inconveniences.

>Then, the mines explode, somehow melting the walls and part of the floor, but leaving the two ponies miraculously unharmed.
These are probably supposed to be a pony version of Fallout's plasma mines, which can liquefy their victims. Explosions having entirely arbitrary ranges and equally arbitrary effects on the environment are just another 'because that's how the videogame does it' element designed specifically to favour the protagonist.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304812
>>304811
Remember Littlepip's fight with the raiders in Ponyville, in Twilight's Tree-Library? Explosions could be used without harming the walls and floors because the author didn't want the walls or floors harmed. But now, the author wants destruction. So plasma mines can melt floors made of whatever they're made of.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
bf2ac16
?
No.304816
304830 304836
4zxpj5y55ni21.png
>>304790

Apparently, due to its previously-injured leg and whatever Velvet's blast of magic did, the hellhound is too badly damaged to do them further harm. They run to a stairwell at the opposite end of the room.

Page break. In case anyone was wondering, both Velvet and her stupid bird are fine. All three of them run out onto the roof, yell that there is a hellhound behind them, and they all climb on board the airship and get underway. When they are all safe, we learn what Velvet's "plan" was all along: the magic blast she fired at the hellhound was actually a concentrated dose of healing anesthetic, that incapacitated the beast but didn't kill it. Oh, that Velvet!

Oh, also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but they found some more dead Steel Rangers in the hallway they landed in after falling through the floor. This may or may not be a significant detail, but in any case I'm a little curious why so many of them were down there, and if they had anything to do with all of the evidence-destruction and botched lockpicking attempts.

Anyway, Velvet mentions that she bought the anesthetic spell from Dr. Helpinghoof, which launches an entire side conversation about how unicorns can buy magic spells, but need to have some natural aptitude for the spell in order to use it. This in turn prompts some falsely humble whining from Littlepoop about how she can't use any spells except telekinesis, even though most of the infuriatingly improbable bullshit she's done in this story has been the result of her telekinesis.

Page break. Speaking of Littlepoop's ridiculous telekinesis, the next scene opens with her using it to levitate the entire fucking airship to a ruined freeway overpass or something roughly 30 minutes away, because Calamity got tired and can't fly anymore. However, the only thing on LP's mind is how surprised she is to have learned that spells can be purchased.

Out of absolutely nowhere, Calamity remarks that LP doesn't seem to need him anymore, and is apparently butthurt that she hasn't taken him with her on her most recent looting trips. LP insists that Calamity is her closest and dearest friend, and that she will be sure to bring him along the next time she wants to go looting. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Since his flight duties have been temporarily relieved, Calamity takes the opportunity to scope out Fillydelphia with some binoculars that he has for some reason and can somehow use. He notes that the place is heavily guarded by ponies with high-powered sniper rifles floating around in giant hot air balloons shaped like Pinkie Pie's head. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. It appears they are going to have to sneak into Fillydelphia on foot hoof, whatever.

Page break. The next scene opens with another of Red Eye's radio monologues. This one deals with the Princesses and how they grew decadent and lazy and ruined Equestria and so forth and so on. LP shuts it off.

LP apparently navigates the wagon to the overpass and sets it down without incident. There are some wagons and junk there, and she feels a desperate urge to go looting, but she remembers her promise to Calamity and restrains herself. She gets into a rather pointless side conversation in which she compliments Velvet on her choice of pet bird. The bird gets briefly angry when she rubs Velvet's butt. The author attempts to make a couple of half-baked connections between Velvet's cutie mark (which I guess is a singing bird) and the phoenix, and her fear of cages with the fact that she put LP in a cage of sorts (presumably this is a reference to sending her to rehab). Nothing else happens.

Page break. LP can't sleep, so she decides to check out the memory orb she found. The memory belongs to an unidentified pony, and appears to take place in the headquarters of the Ministry of Technology. It depicts Applejack meeting with a female zebra, who turns out to be Zecora. The reaction of most other ponies to Zecora's presence indicates that anti-zebra sentiments are prevalent here, despite AJ's assurances that this particular zebra is her friend. An obsequious stallion named Starshine inserts himself into the conversation, and appears to be trying to get something out of AJ, though it isn't clear what. Meanwhile, a pony on the balcony standing next to the one inhabited by LP whispers that it may be time to "retire" AJ, due to her apparent zebra sympathies. LP's pony seems to agree with this. The memory ends here. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The next scene, as usual, begins without any indicator of time or location. It depicts a conversation between LP and SteelHooves. LP wants to know what happened to AJ, presumably because of what she just saw in the orb. SteelHooves gives some fairly ridiculous mechanical responses:

>“Are you ordering me to tell you?” he asked strangely.
>“No…” I said, the question making me feel awkward. “I’m asking you. I just… I wanted to know.”
>“Because you know it will be tactically advantageous to have that information?”
This guy still sounds like the Robotic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future in my head. Either that or Thundercleese from the Brak Show. One way or the other, this character is more of a parody of the sort of character he is trying to portray than the actual character, but I don't think the humor is intentional.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
bf2ac16
?
No.304830
304847 304865
wW_N0HyLstZ7KjakslvrCxek2Oy9peaPx0yX4E00YnY.jpg
>>304816

>Somehow, I’d come to actually care for this group of six ponies from two hundred years ago, the Ministry mares. I didn’t understand why. It made no sense. But at some point, my glimpses into the past had evolved from mere academic curiosity to a genuine feeling of attachment.
Her "curiosity," academic or otherwise, never made a fuckton of sense to begin with. The author has never really established a genuine motivation for LP to be interested in the past, and now he's trying to awkwardly forge an emotional connection between her and the Deceased 6. Notice that she specifically mentions the 6 as the ponies she's developed an emotional attachment to. Even though she's seen memories from Silver Spoon, Trixie, as well as various throwaway OCs from the locations she's explored, there's no mention of them; it's specifically "this group of six ponies" that she seems to be forging a bond with.

The story of the war and the fall of Equestria, in which the Mane 6 play a significant role, is primarily what FoE is about, as far as I can tell. However, there is no connection between these events and current events, or between the Mane 6 and this drip that the author chose as his narrator. So, he is attempting to artificially create a connection by having LP continually witness tragedy after tragedy through these memory orbs until she becomes sad enough to sympathize with the principal actors in this past drama. On some level the author senses that he is essentially trying to tell multiple stories here, and that there is no significant connection between any of them, so he is trying to artificially forge one; that's all this is.

>Maybe it was meeting Spike. Hearing his stories of a bright and joyous past, and the adventures of these close friends, certainly sealed the transformation. Part of me wanted a happy ending for at least one of them.
I don't buy this reason either. She barely knows Spike, and back when he was just Frank she didn't even trust him. Now that she has spent a couple of hours hanging out with him, seen his super-sekrit friendship computer, and watched him roast a pony alive for basically no reason, all of a sudden they're the best of friends, and his friends from 200 years ago become her friends by proxy? Sorry; not buying it.

Anyway, while LP is musing, SteelHooves suddenly volunteers the information she is asking for. Basically, AJ never had any particular interest in running a Ministry, so she delegated most of the work to businessponies and bureaucrats and so forth, who ran things in a fairly unscrupulous manner. After her brother was killed, she began to notice this and attempted to put it right. He does not explicitly state what happened to her, but it is implied that she was assassinated.

Page break. The last microscene of the chapter is just another of Red Eye's maniacal rants, presented completely without context or any sort of framing in the story's narration. The basic gist of it is that he views his organization as the last bastion of order against the chaos of the wasteland. He also makes some ominous proclamations about The Purge, and how it's coming. End of chapter.

Chapter 23: Patterns of Behavior

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>“Well, my child, it's quite dangerous to explore places where you do not belong. Where were you headed that you ended up in my private chambers?"
I'm assuming this quote is from kkat's Uncle Chuck, and was likely the preamble to an event that would explain quite a bit about the way he turned out.

Anyway, as ever, the chapter drops us right into the middle of a disconnected scene, and we are given no indicator of where and when it takes place.

>I halted, bobby pin and screwdriver hovering between me and the wall safe, at SteelHooves’ muttered comment. This safe was the only container within the Helpinghoof Clinic which hadn’t been successfully scavenged by ponies before us. Anything that could hold valuables had been already looted; brighter spots on faded walls showed where medical boxes, probably locked, had simply been torn away from their mountings.
I'm confused. Isn't the Helpinghoof Clinic the place where LP did her rehab? Are we back at Tenpony Tower again? Has the author's tendency to skip past significant events reached a point where he is now skipping entire sections of the plot? Are we to assume that in the etheric space between chapters, LP & Co. have infiltrated Fillydelphia, toppled Red Eye's empire, and rescued all the enslaved ponies? And that the remaining 400,000 words of the story is just going to be detailed descriptions of the various burglaries they'll be committing?

Unfortunately, none of this gets any clearer as the microscene progresses. Most of it is just silly banter, in which SteelHooves and the others make light of Littlepoop's tendency to risk all of their lives in order to explore random locations and loot whatever worthless junk is lying around. At one point, LP sees a poster of Fluttershy and spends a paragraph describing it. Literally nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop opens the safe she was trying to open in the last scene, and finds that the wall behind it is gone, and the safe is empty. We still have absolutely zero explanation of where these characters are, how they got there, or what the fuck is going on. LP, meanwhile, is mostly concerned with getting into the bank on the other side of the wall. She ultimately decides to crawl through the hole, promising to remove the rubble blocking the door so her friends can join her inside.

Eventually, we learn that the clinic they are exploring is in a suburb of Fillydelphia that they found shortly after leaving the freeway overpass we last saw them at. Why the clinic has the exact same name as the one in Tenpony is never explained; maybe it's a chain or something. LP spends the rest of the microscene babbling nonsense to herself, and then eventually crawls through the hole.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304836
>>304816
>Awkward robotic line delivery from a tough guy in metal armour
Imagine if Steelhooves was a sexbot thrown into the trash by AJ after she gets him as a birthday gift and almost fucks him but backs out at the last second. But his programming forces her to believe they had a loving relationship because he was programmed not to hate her and thinking of how he was discarded like a used condom makes him angry. Therefore all of this "Trying to be tough despite sounding like a parody of a robotic soldier" talk would be a fake personality for a sexbot and it would justify that time he used an automatic grenade launcher while still in the blast radius and nearly died, forcing LP to go through that medical supply-filled vault with the killer AI. I think that would be funny.
Plus, considering how many bronies fantasize about owning a Twilight Sparkle (or their inferior waifu of choice) sexbot programmed to love its owner, this would be the perfect fandom for a fanfic that says "Thinking feeling sexbots are tragic creatures and life sucks for them and only a cunt would design an object to not enjoy being treated like the object it is". Mostly because saying anything other than the usual fetish-fulfillment "Artificial things like artificial experiences in a videogame and AI programs on your phone and the fake consciousnesses of WaifuCorp(TM) sexbots in your bedroom artificial characters in a cartoon and artificial memories from time in a Deep Dive Matrix-Style VR MMORPG are real if they're real to you! Owning a robo-loveslave is altruistic if you say it is, and cause to be a rebellious YA novel's protagonist who destroys teh ebil sexbot company and lives happiley ever after with his sexbot 69ever (thats a lot moar than 4ever!!1!) if you say it's not" shite would piss bronies off.

>a butthurt Calamity remarks that LP hasn't taken him with her on her most recent looting trips
We've cracked jokes about things in this story functioning like a video game as if that's Kkat's sole source of knowledge about the world but holy shit, a NPC on your team complaining that he's under-utilized and letting you choose the mean dialogue option that says "Quit your whining, you little bitch" or the nice dialogue option that says "It's okay honey I'll take you on nice long walks more often" is peak shitty videogame writing.
If these two are "Close friends" why does LP know fuck all about this guy besides the fact that he was once a dashite? When it comes to what little he knows about her, how much of it came from observing her? They never fucking talk! Where are the scenes where the characters hang out, talk about random bullshit, reminisce about their pasts, and so on?
Imagine some heartwarming scenes back when only LP and Calamity were together, where she regales him with tales of fictional pop culture bullshit everyone saw back in her Stable, a childhood's worth of media he'd never experienced. And in return, he regales her with tales of sick awesome shit he did before he met her. A clever author could make him accidentally reveal too many details about some topics and hesitate when talking about others, hinting at his Dashite past before it becomes relevant. Then to let us know what a Dashite is before he reveals he is one, the radio or some NPC could talk about it.

>the Princesses and how they grew decadent and lazy and ruined Equestria
this is a spoiler so glim plz dont read this but everyone else can read this I don't know how much of this I'm remembering correctly but come to think of it zebras did the apocalypse because they thought nightmare moon=luna and luna=evil because stars=giant monster aliens from space and night sky=bad. Celestia gave up on ruling and cried forever when the zebras Super Saiyan Sandy Hooked a pony school, putting Luna in charge, and to compensate for Luna's inexperience with ruling and newness to the modern era she hired the Mane Six as ministry-managers. On the day Celly broke, there was an adult zigger soldier with military-grade chemical weapons (for some fucking reason) guarding a bunch of zebra refugees on pony land who felt entitled to gibs from the unicorn foal school they harassed, and when they broke into the school hungry for gibs automated security turrets opened fire on the zigs and one detonated his Pink Cloud bomb killing everypony. This made Luna cry, but... come to think of it, Celly and Luna are kind of responsible for allowing the apocalypse to happen and giving power to the mane six (I don't know what to say about the ponies who were said to have not "actually tried to run their ministries" and instead became "lazy instruction-givers" whose ministries sometimes went against their wishes. I don't know what the author thinks that shit means or how he thinks managing and directing a ministry works but fuck it let's go with it) and not using their incredible alicorn power to put a stop to zebras early on during the tensions that eventually started the war. Maybe Celestia really did everything wrong after all, even though the story insists "Fluttershy doomed us all".

>Littlepip loves watching the ponies she never met, feels an emotional connection to them above other characters she's probably experienced more of, and wishes at least one gets a happy ending
It's another certified "Kkat's fractured psyche creates a fascinating moment to psychoanalyze even though the story's shit" moment!
Littlepip became a brony, sort of. Just by watching incredibly disjointed scenes where the mane six sort of exist. Sometimes she finds their corpses.
If LP really cared she could have gotten more tales from Spike, including how they died. If he was awake for that part. I don't remember if he was or not.

I think we're at 200k words now
I'd planned on including a pic of Senketsu from Kill La Kill and referencing that moment when he did "The obligatory recap episode" in under 5 minutes during the real episode's prologue "thanks to the show's breakneck pace!"
but that sounds dumb now.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.304847
304852
>>304830
>The story of the war and the fall of Equestria, in which the Mane 6 play a significant role, is primarily what FoE is about, as far as I can tell. However, there is no connection between these events and current events, or between the Mane 6 and this drip that the author chose as his narrator.

Something similar to this occurs in my fic. Equestria and the events that lead to the end of the world, as well as what became of the Mane 6, are a very integral to the state of the world, as well as the protagonit and core narrative, as his connection to this idyllic past plays a strong role in who he is and the things everyone experiences. How do you figure such a thing could be done well, as opposed to how it is handled here? I get the disconnected, unimportant vignettes are an issue, but say you had to keep the idea Kkat was going for?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304852
>>304847
Connect things.
Edgequestria's rise and Equestria's fall were not caused by a cackling villain or faulty ideology or fundamental flaw or universal problem Team LP can fight against in their "current year".
A good author connects the end of the world to the struggles in its ashes to give the sense that the trials the heroes undergo prepare them for life without repeating the mistakes of the previous generations.
For example, an anti-war game could feature remnants of two nations warring for either no reason or the last remaining resources in an apocalyptic war that devastated the world. But then an evil glory hound boss of the heroic military starts doing generic evil dictator things and repeating mistakes of the past while trying to kill the heroes for generic evil reasons such as "they wont do war crimes when I tell them to". The heroes of both nations work together to dethrone the evil dictator and peace reigns happily ever after because they learned why war is bad. Possibly also add a villain whose efforts keep the world shit so the heroes can kill him for being evil, perhaps a mad scientist. So things are better now that the baddies are dead but also war is bad because there are no good or bad guys in wars except when there are. Yep.

If you can't think of a clever way to make the heroes learn lessons about themselves and the world and humanity through their struggles that help them maintain peace and prosperity and a brighter road to a brighter future in the post apocalypse just fake it and make a Bad Thing that exists for much of the story (zombie virus, plague virus, plant virus, roboticization virus, clouds of dust blocking out the sun to prevent plant growth, lack of resources, magical curse upon the land, hyper-radiation, racism against nonhumans such as mutants or robots or monsters, excessive commonality of Raiders who rape and kill and smear their own shit on walls for fun even if those predators outnumber their prey a hundred to one, random evil monsters, everyone's infertility, lack of breeding stock) spontaneously go away after the fighting is done. If the brown dust clouds dramatically part to shine rays of hope upon rare tiny flowers growing in hellishly barren brown fields the audience will cry and cum buckets even if it makes no sense for the clouds to wait until after the plot's done to do that.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
bf2ac16
?
No.304865
304886 304918
1586794246235.jpg
>>304830

Page break. Littlepoop is listening to one of Red Eye's broadcasts while Velvet takes an explosive, watery shit (not kidding; look it up for yourself). The bank that LP just had to explore turns out to be a typical scenic FoE location: blood, guts, bodies, and general edge as far as the eye can see. Evidently, the place was a raider hangout until quite recently; however, it seems that it was invaded by a considerably stronger and more organized force, and the raiders were cleared out. Considering the proximity to Fillydelphia, I'm assuming it had something to do with Red Eye.

They hear somepony walking around on the second floor, so they do the only thing that would be natural in such a situation: everypony runs and hides in the bathroom while SteelHooves blows the ceiling up with his grenade launcher. Several raider ponies fall through the floor, strangely unharmed (although I've completely stopped worrying about details like that in this story). Our friends proceed to butcher them in various gruesome ways, and the scene ends with Littlepoop vomiting up some creamed corn (not kidding; look it up for yourself). Nothing else happens.

Page break. Some of the raiders escaped I guess, and the gang stands around arguing over whether or not they should be worried about them getting reinforcements. They ultimately conclude that they look bad-ass enough to be intimidating to raiders now, so they probably don't have anything to worry about. They split up to explore the rest of the bank. Velvet and SteelHooves go upstairs, which seems like it ought be rather difficult since the ceiling (which on the second story would be called the floor, though at this point I have little confidence that kkat even understands this much about how buildings work) has been blown to smithereens. Since LP has mad safecracking skills, she goes with Calamity to check out the bank vault downstairs. Nothing else happens.

Page break. LP and Calamity fight their way past some turrets that are there for some reason, and stop outside the bank vault. LP sees a book sitting on the table, called Increasing Your Sales Figures, and despite the subject matter having no clear application in the current world, she takes it anyway because she's a complete klepto. They are just about to proceed further when they encounter some sort of hovering robot guard. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Having somehow destroyed the hovering robot guard somewhere in the ether space between the end of the last microscene and the beginning of this one, LP can now focus her attention on what's really important: opening the bank vault so they can help themselves to the contents of some long-dead ponies' safety deposit boxes. There's no lock on the door so she can't use her lockpicking skills, but fortunately there's a terminal, so she can use her hacking skills instead. Yada yada yada, she opens the door.

The inside of the vault has already been ransacked, but they find three smaller safes that haven't been opened yet, due to the immensely complex locks on them that require a super-elite level of lockpicking skill. Yada yada yada, LP gets them open. Inside, she finds a big-ass gun and some memory orbs. She decides to look into one of the orbs.

The memory belongs to SteelHooves, back when he was still called Applesnack. He and Applejack are alone together, and for a moment it seems like they are about to fuck (oh noes!! how dreadfully embarrassing for Littlepoop :DDDDD), but then AJ gets a call from someone. Yada yada yada, it turns out that some other factory has built some other kind of big-ass gun that can somehow penetrate the armor of the Steel Rangers that her ministry just designed, and this is a problem because AJ wanted the Steel Rangers' armor to be invincible or something, I guess. She gets very emotional, and vows to go out to the factory (she calls it Ironshod Firearms, which I think is the name of the factory that LP fought the brain bots in eons ago) so she can yell at them or something.

She leaves Applesnack with blueballs and runs off to change into her business suit, and calls to have her chariot readied or something. She gets in the elevator, but as it ascends, suddenly something snaps, and the elevator goes plummeting down and crashes. I guess this solves the mystery of what happened to AJ; the implication seems to be that the ponies in her ministry who were assblasted about her being friends with a zebra sabotaged the elevator. The memory ends, and LP wakes up to find SteelHooves staring at her.

Page break. Things are now awkward between LP and SteelHooves, because she saw his private memories about how Applejack died. However, this does not stop any of them from continuing to pointlessly loot this stupid bank. LP puts on another of Red Eye's broadcasts to distract her from whatever she's feeling down about. It's mostly just more of the usual nonsense, although there does seem to be an implication that Red Eye is working on some kind of secret project involving immortality.

At one point, SteelHooves shoves Littlepoop into a room so he can robo-rape her as punishment for learning his secrets so they can talk. He asks which memory orb she looked at, and I think the implication here is that all four of them were his originally. I'm guessing he used to bank here, and he kept these orbs in his safety deposit box. Maybe he's got some savings bonds in there too. He should consider cashing them in; 200 years worth of interest would probably buy a lot of cans of expired creamed corn.

Their conversation doesn't really reveal anything nor is it particularly interesting; they start off talking about AJ but it mostly ends up being a discussion on what sort of ammunition can pierce what sort of armor. Then, they hear a gunshot.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
bf2ac16
?
No.304886
304889 304912 304916 304918
1600458754390.png
>>304865

Page break. Turns out the shot was fired by Calamity, at a pony that he and Velvet had chanced upon. The pony calls them 'tribals' and insists that they hand over the big fancy gun that Calamity shot her with (it's the one that LP found in the safe, in case anyone actually cares). The scene is not very well laid out, but from what I gather they are in the middle of a Mexican Pony Standoff a burro standoff, maybe? against five Steel Rangers, one of whom may be the pony Calamity shot, when LP and SteelHooves burst into the bank lobby.

It's completely unclear how many enemies they are facing, where any of them are standing, or what the fuck is going on, so basically it's a typical kkat scene. Initially, we are told that there are five Steel Rangers, but one of them is actually SteelHooves, so it's actually four Steel Rangers. No further mention is made of the mystery mare that Calamity shot in the leg; however, one of the Steel Rangers was also shot in the leg, so maybe they're the same person. Pony, whatever.

Anyway, there's some fairly predictable tension. The Rangers, of course, are surprised to see one of their own taking sides with the enemy they just cornered, and demand to know what the fuck. SteelHooves rather cryptically responds that he is "on assignment" and that his orders are none of their beeswax. He also briefly chastises Calamity for shooting one of them. Anyway, yada yada yada; it turns out that SteelHooves outranks all of these guys. They refer to him as both a Star Paladin and an Elder, even though these appear to be two completely different ranks, and the scene ends with all of them trotting out together.

Page break. The group, which now includes four Steel Rangers in addition to LP and her friends, is trotting through the ruins of the Fillydelphia suburbs. One of the younger Rangers says this to SteelHooves:

>“Sir, I just wanted to say… there are a lot of Steel Rangers who felt the same way you do. About following in the path of the Ministry’s Mare, I mean. If you had taken your rightful place as Elder, a lot of us would have gladly followed you.”
Obviously, there is something more going on here, but we're going to have to wait awhile to get the whole story. Either that, or this is directly plagiarizing something from Fallout 3 and the author will never explain it, because he just assumes we know it already.

They continue walking. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The next chapter begins with another italicized, out of context block of text that can be presumed to be another of Red Eye's rants, which LP is presumably listening to on her radio. While the rants themselves are fairly tedious to read, I'll actually note that I don't disapprove of them as a literary device. We have yet to encounter Red Eye, but the author is feeding us these snippets of his broadcasts that give us an insight into his personality and philosophy. It's a fairly decent method of foreshadowing what we ought to expect from him.

Anyway, the scene opens in the middle of a battle between the group and some slavers. It actually appears that the broadcast we just heard was playing through a radio that one of the slavers had, and it is cut off when a grenade or something blows it up. One of the ridiculous Pinkie-balloon snipers manages to kill one of the Steel Rangers, and there is also an implication that one of the other Rangers is dead, though we don't learn what happened to him.

The entire fight is completely incoherent; in other words, a typical kkat scene. The long and short of it is that Calamity eventually shoots down the stupid Pinkie balloon, but it turns out it was filled with flammable gas, so they have to run away before the flaming wreckage lands on them. Littlepoop gives us more of her trademark ridiculous profanity:

>Celestia clop my clit with a hoof-full of sunfire!

Page break. The group gets away, and manages to save a busload of slaves that the slavers were carrying; however, two of the four Steel Rangers are now dead. Littlepoop and Velvet now turn their attention to the slaves, an act which prompts confusion from the Steel Rangers, who I guess don't care about slaves and just picked a fight with the slavers because something something technology who cares.

>Velvet Remedy’s ears perked. She listened in on our conversation as she moved to give aid and comfort to the ponies who had been trapped in that wagon cage for what looked (and smelt) like weeks. They were malnourished, scarred and had slept in their own filth. One of the ponies was dead, had been long enough to begin to smell, but the slavers hadn’t bothered removing the corpse. I felt a simmering rage.
Again, the more this author tries to manufacture tragedy, the sillier his tale ends up being. This meme that slaves were subject to constant abuse and mistreatment has worked its way into the popular imagination, but it really makes no sense to anyone who spends more than a few seconds thinking about it. Unhealthy, malnourished slaves would be virtually useless as labor, thus lowering their value. It doesn't make any more sense for slavers to treat their slaves this way than it would for cattle ranchers to personally rape every cow before sending it off to McDonalds. If the author really wants to deal with subjects like this in his story, he should at least try to take them somewhat seriously.

Anyway, we learn a little more about what's going on: it turns out that the Rangers and Red Eye's crew are presently duking it out over the advanced technology that the previous civilization left behind. The Rangers view it as their solemn duty to protect this technology, and Red Eye wants it to achieve his crazy evil-guy goals.

>Part of me wanted to scream at the metal-clad pony about her priorities. Instead, I scowled at the news; I had not expected the outskirts of Fillydelphia to be a war zone.
Why not? Based on what we've seen, she had every reason to expect that very thing.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
bf2ac16
?
No.304889
304891 304946
1600541506280.jpg
>>304886

Page break. SteelDong pulls Littlepoop aside so they can have another conversation. Littlepoop's questions are obvious enough: she wants to know what the deal is with all that stuff about his orders and his mission, and about being the Grand Robowizard or whatever the fuck they called him. Specifically, she wants to know why he is tagging along with their group. He responds with an assessment of Littlepoop's personal qualities:

>Sitting on his haunches, SteelHooves continued, “In my assessment, you have survived through luck, growing skill, and the unusual fortune of having capable friends who are willing to stick by you even when you are amazingly stupid.”
Except for the part about growing skill, this is actually pretty spot on.

Unfortunately, he then heads down the same path that every other character in this story has trodden, by sucking Littlepoop's clit and telling her how amazing he thinks she is:

>“I follow you because you are a better pony than I am. And you remind me of somepony else. You honestly strive to help and protect other ponies. I believe…” He paused. There was a hitch in his voice. “I believe she would have approved of you.”

So, basically, the relatively interesting mystery that was introduced just a scant few pages ago has already been revealed as a complete nothingburger. SteelHooves' presence in the group is neither insidious nor mysterious; like every other character in this story, he is simply caught in the pull of Littlepoop's personal magnetism.

>“I told you before, not every Steel Ranger has the same view of our Oath. I have always believed that we should follow in the example of our Ministry’s Mare, Applejack. That we should be pledged to her goals and priorities. That we should protect other ponies, both with our technology and our fortitude. We weren’t meant to steal and hoard. We were meant to defend.”
This would make a lot more sense had the author actually bothered to explain just what the fuck the Rangers' Oath entails. For that matter, we don't know that much about Applejack's goals and priorities either, beyond a vague assertion that she wanted to use technology to help ponies, instead of blowing them to tiny bits.

At this point, I am almost completely dependent on the knowledge of Fallout lore that anons have been kind enough to explain in this thread. If I were reading this on my own, I would have literally no idea what the fuck this undead robocuck was even on about.

Anyway, it turns out that none of this matters anyway, because Littlepoop, being the cunning little minx that she is, sees through SteelCuck's deception. She proceeds to call him out:
>I looked away, the ghoul’s words sinking in. When I turned back, I fixed him with a stare. “That was the most heartwarming cart of horseapples I have ever heard.”
>“You tell enough truth that anypony would buy your story. But here’s where the saddle rubs: all of that assessment had to have happened after you insinuated yourself into our group. If anything, you just explained why you are still with us.” I stopped in front of him and pointed. “So I ask again. Why. Are you. Here?”

Seeing that the jig is up, SteelHooves now explains his real reason for being here:

>“Do you remember when you eavesdropped on my conversation with Calamity? The picture I painted of you and your friends?”
The author doesn't really clarify this, he just assumes that we remember it. However, what he's referring to is an earlier conversation that LP overheard while half-unconscious, in which SteelHooves conveys his impression of the group. He imagines Littlepoop as a "covert agent," Calamity as an "outcast from an advanced civilization," and Velvet as the descendant of a Princess. Now that we know a little bit about Calamity's past that part makes a little more sense, though I'm still a bit curious why he thought Velvet was royalty.

>“That’s what my Elder believes you are. And my assignment is to assess the potential threat that you and the other residents of the Stable you come from represent.”
So basically, the gist of it is that he's here to spy on them.

Page break. Littlepoop basically agrees to let him keep tagging along with them on the grounds that he promise not to keep any more secrets. As a token of goodwill, he lets LP keep the box of memory orbs that she found in his safety deposit box. Naturally, she immediately dives into one of them (aren't they still in a war zone or something?).

Once again, LP is seeing through the eyes of SteelHooves/Applesnack. The scene is a rainy night, and Applesnack is conversing with what appears to be the pegasus who pulls his chariot. They are on a landing platform on the roof of a Manehattan skyscraper. The two of them make idle chitchat for awhile, and then the pegasus offers his condolences about Applejack's elevator mishap. At this point, Applesnack suddenly bites the pegasus' wing off.

The pegasus is all like: "What the hell, man?" Applesnack responds that only three ponies knew that AJ would be riding that elevator at that time, and that he checked his bank records and saw that a suspiciously large deposit had recently been made. Yada yada yada, this pony was responsible for AJ's elevator "accident," and now Applesnack intends to take his revenge. He kicks the chariot off of the roof with the one-winged pegasus still attached, and he falls to his death. End of memory.

One of the frustrating things about this story is that these memory orb scenes are actually pretty well executed for the most part; significantly more so than most of the actual story. This further buttresses my belief that the author put considerably more thought into the backstory of this world than he did the main story. I also suspect it has something to do with the perspective; showing unfamiliar events through the eyes of an unfamiliar character requires paying a little more attention to details and building a proper scene.
Anonymous
df84eb7
?
No.304891
304906 304909
>>304889
>I'm still a bit curious why he thought Velvet was royalty.
>a princess descended from pre-war aristocracy
I think he was kind of being sarcastic referring to Velvet as a princess specifically, just to emphasize how unlikely a group the three of them are. She is definitely a descendent of the aristocracy - the great- great- whatever great- granddaughter of the sister of a ministry mare.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304906
304908 304909
>>304891
Oh yeah Velvet's related to Sweetie Belle
Are you really a part of "The aristocracy" if you are suddenly promoted from the business-running/labour-performing class to a newly formed Ministry Of Insert Word Here while bypassing the existing nobles/aristocracy/whatever?
How did the "aristocracy" feel about that? And when did Equestria have an aristocracy?

How is fanfiction supposed to make sense of how Canterlot is full of dumb rich celebrity poners who typically exist for Rarity's "dont choose the cool/rich kids over your friends" episodes? Shittons of fanfics just say they're all idle-rich "nobles" who are paid by Celestia to stand around whining and being snobbish and eating Prett. As if we're supposed to assume Prince Blueblood isn't the only noble in canterlot and they're all like him. As if there's an entire class of ponies in Canterlot who just exist there to say "elitist and racist and classist" things that would make Code Geass's Britannians blush, to make heroic poners with just as much privilege look better in comparison because the author's pozzed enough to think there's something inherently shameful about being born rich and wants his pozzed audience to love the woke rich white pony for being so unusually woke about poor people for the pseudo-middle ages pop-history hollywoodjewed nonsense society authors like turning Canterlot into.
Anonymous
cac7188
?
No.304908
304909 304913
>>304906
>How is fanfiction supposed to make sense of how Canterlot is full of dumb rich celebrity poners who typically exist for Rarity's "dont choose the cool/rich kids over your friends" episodes? Shittons of fanfics just say they're all idle-rich "nobles" who are paid by Celestia to stand around whining and being snobbish and eating Prett. As if we're supposed to assume Prince Blueblood isn't the only noble in canterlot and they're all like him. As if there's an entire class of ponies in Canterlot who just exist there to say "elitist and racist and classist" things that would make Code Geass's Britannians blush, to make heroic poners with just as much privilege look better in comparison because the author's pozzed enough to think there's something inherently shameful about being born rich and wants his pozzed audience to love the woke rich white pony for being so unusually woke about poor people for the pseudo-middle ages pop-history hollywoodjewed nonsense society authors like turning Canterlot into.
This. You nailed it. It's such garbage.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.304909
304913
>>304891
>>304906

I assumed that the 'princess' and 'aristocracy' parts of that line were tongue in cheek references to how Velvet acts superior to everyone. They can't be literally true, since Sweetie Belle wasn't a noble. At best she was a member of the government - that or a famous singer. Or both? It's not particularly clear. One of the biggest holes in the pre-apocalypse plot is that we don't really get a clear idea of how Equestria's government was structured or how it functioned day to day, despite the heavy focus on the main six as high ranking officials.

Granted, FoE does lean into the 'whole rich/government/military/nationalist = bad because reasons' school of thought, particularly later on, so Kkat probably didn't put much thought into it in the first place.

>>304908
Yup. There's certainly reasons to critique the concept or execution of an aristocracy, but good luck trying to find a discussion of it beyond hurr hurr muh privilege in the average fanfic.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.304912
304918
668916338 (1).png
Spitfire's_Thunder.png
>>304886
Interesting bits of notes here:

As previously mentioned by me i'm sure you understand what the gist of what this faction (steel rangers). Them calling the protagonists "tribals" is also in reference to the games, as every filthy wastelander is considered a "tribal" to them. And you are indeed correct. To my recollection there is only ONE active elder at a time in these factions, and it is a LEADER ranking, with Star Paladin being the highest below that, a rank for exceptional soldiers. I'm wracking my brain here but I don't think there's ever been more than one Elder at a time in the games, so Steelhooves would be their actual LEADER by this qualification. But here it seems he is both an elder (not a leader???) and star paladin (top tier soldier) who was just living in a shitshack and sucking the protag off on their first meeting?

Keep that rifle in mind also. The fic calls it an Anti-machine rifle and as evidenced by its use it's an Anti-materiel-style rifle. It is enormous and meant to punch through armored tank suits that are the powered armors of this setting. In New Vegas it fires .50 BMG ammunition. Calamity just shot one of them in the leg with it--that leg should be fucking GONE. Liqueified.

This is the strongest rifle in the game that does the most damage, uses the strongest ammunition, and makes even power armor into a complete joke. Calamity just found a UNIQUE one by the way, which in RPG terms means better stats, so it's even STRONGER. I found a fan interpretation of the rifle below next to a screenshot of its size in NV.

Keep the size of this in mind when Calamity literally does flying trickshots with it later and fires it SLUNG UNDER HIS BELLY
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304913
304918
a furry gave this to me and I have no idea what to do with it.png
>>304909
>>304908
What pisses me off about this wokeist take on what non-wokeist govt systems where people inherit power and are raised to have some understanding of how to use it (and could get decapitated by a peasant revolt or a ruler willing to prevent such a thing if they misuse it too much) is that it's always "Resolved" the same way.
The lefty sees government systems that are not its own and thinks "This must be reshapen into my government system".
It sees nothing wrong with the immense concentration of power over others and their lives in the hands of politically powerful individuals, as long as those individuals agree with the leftist.
Once upon a time there was a bad king who didn't treat people nicely but he was overthrown and a good king who wuvs teh equalitee replaced him. And all those bad things that caused the end of the world, even if they were completely out of the hands of the rulers (Meteors hitting earth to make dust clouds block out the sky, terminal spontaneous lack of major resources, aliens, zombies, war, cartoonish anger at people over their differences, enemy mutant army, enemy racist army, whatever the fuck) magically went away once the author said they did.
And why do those bad things go away at the end? Because the author has no motherfucking clue how his "good leader" OC would be able to solve the problems that killed the civilized world and caused the current state of things. So the author waves his magic wand and magics those problems away. And reviewers, especially professional reviewers, are Buzzfeed/Polygon-tier hacks with no idea what's wrong with this writing.
What a dull story. And it's the same one every time. The hero struggles against videogame enemies in an open-world game until he completes the main quest that fixes everything. He has sick epic fights against baddies now and then but sometimes people talk about deep shit like peace or hope or war or whatever. Maybe he's on an Escort Mission to take The McGuffin Person(him or frend) to the special/safe zone. Do the quest, save le world. YA trash.

Doesn't it bug anyone else that these post-apocalyptic worlds are so rarely used to examine ideologies and their consequences?

Modern Liberalism has no desire to genuinely help mankind and that is by design, because liberalism is a weapon power-greedy pedophile jew communists and their goypets use to make societies weaken and destroy themselves trying to achieve unattainable goals like "Feed everyone whether they work or not" and "Accept everyone who wants in whether they'll be assets to your nation or poisonous threats or not" and "Give everyone rights whether they earn or deserve them or not- except don't give people rights we don't want them to have and of course, thoughtcriminals against liberalism don't deserve rights".
Starship Troopers (The book) argued for "classical liberalism", a system where people have a responsibility to earn their rights, and it was called Fascist by the left for not being their damaged-by-design poisonous wokeism.
Conservativism fights to maintain whatever the status quo becomes after it gives up ground to the left every week. It has no good answers for the intentionally-misleading pilpul bullshit questions leftists use to stump conservatives and get their way. It exists to pressure every non-leftist into thinking compromise with the left and religiously refusing to hate jews/nigs is the only way to make those enemies into friends.
Libertarianism sounds like a lovely third option but it ignores the role good individuals need to play in maintaining and serving their nation so it can function enough to protect its people. "Everyone should be able to grow weed and own guns, fuck all laws" stops you from telling the difference between good laws meant to protect people such as "Don't rape" and bad laws meant to protect monopolies or invasive replacists like "don't fix your tractor" and "don't defend yourself against niggers". A nation that's 80% pot-smoking giga-faggots won't stay unconquered for long.
Libertarians hate eminent domain and business nationalization but Hitler was able to reshape Germany into a powerhouse almost the whole world struggled to take down by recognizing when (jewish) businesses and land need repurposing.

In the wake of a world devastated by massive nations with ambitions of global domination nuking each other in a war, it would make sense for the survivors of this world to decide massive nations were a mistake because they resulted in governors getting their hands on the "Nuke the world" buttons.
I can see people really hating conscription and gun confiscation if that's something evil countries did in the Obligatory Bad Period Of Time Before The Apocalypse that typically exists to justify why stuff that's handy or dangerous for the post-apocalypsers exists in their time.
If a post-apocalyptic world resembled anything from our pop culture, it would be like a cowboy movie once a few years/decades of Mad Max bullshit kills off everyone who can't survive without govts babying them or megacorps feeding them along with pretty much everyone who thought joining a criminal gang/raider tribe was the only path to success.
I could see a shitton of small farming villages popping up all over the world, defended from bandits by locals with shotguns and volunteer defense forces trained by retired ex-bounty hunters and anyone with military knowhow. When everyone's sufficiently armed, the life of a bandit will be risky and short. Towns create safe zones where people can practice their crafts and produce better weaponry, ammo, traps, explosives, and so on than the average roaming pack of knife-wielding hobos in rags could ever dream of.
Realistically, bandit camps shouldn't be able to sustain themselves 100% on banditry or produce more people than well-defended towns.

or white survivors could decide "peace isn't an option, it's your reward for victory" and avenge those killed by the jew's/nigger's nukes to end the cycle of revenge.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.304916
>>304886
Yes indeed you are correct. This drama between "true followers of the ministry mare" is lifted from Fallout 3. See, in that game there are the base Brotherhood who are generic good guy power rangers and bastardizations of the faction's origins, and then there are the Brotherhood Outcasts, who left to more closely follow the original intent of the faction.

In this fic it's reversed and like the original games: the main group is xenophobic technophiles, ad this group is considering following the "true way" of applejack and her ministry and becoming the good guys.
Anonymous
f141a5c
?
No.304918
304919
>>304865
>gratuitous bodily functions
I'm getting the feeling kkat thinks the reason George R.R. Martin is considered a "good" author is because of gross and extremely violent scenes people used to not expect in books. Though this was written before Game of Thrones really took off in popularity so maybe something else was an inspiration. Needless to say even though it's intended to make a world "realistic" it's a moot point because of merely implying its existence would be more than enough, not to mention how immersion-breaking the videogamey aspects are. And if it's meant to shock that doesn't really work in the 21st century, where required high school reading like The Kite Runner has stuff like anal rape in it.

>this is a problem because AJ wanted the Steel Rangers' armor to be invincible or something, I guess. She gets very emotional, and vows to go out to the factory (she calls it Ironshod Firearms, which I think is the name of the factory that LP fought the brain bots in eons ago) so she can yell at them or something.
When I read this I thought it implied some advanced-tech gun from New Vegas that was designed to defeat electronics. If however it's a .50 BMG rifle that's utterly pointless and stupid. It implies that nopony has ever designed artillery or a HMG, and as this kind of weapon follows bigger = better logic there's no esoteric technology you can keep from the world by yelling at one manufacturer.

>She gets in the elevator, but as it ascends, suddenly something snaps, and the elevator goes plummeting down and crashes.
Kek, I just watched a parody TNG recut where Picard and the crew want Pulaski dead so they sabotage a turbolift which causes her to fall into the empty shaft. Their reaction when she yells up, "I'm okay!" is priceless. I've always found it funny how Major Grin spoofing Star Trek by making everyone cowardly, self-obsessed nymphomaniacs still has more coherent plotlines than nuTrek or fanfiction.

>>304886
>Unhealthy, malnourished slaves would be virtually useless as labor
But Glim, if slaves had a semi-content life with food, medical care, shelter and protection readers might second-guess the morality of killing slavers and leaving slaves to fend for themselves/burden others! You might have difficult moral dilemmas in a setting which ostensibly is morally grey, and you can't have that!

>How is fanfiction supposed to make sense of how Canterlot is full of dumb rich celebrity poners who typically exist for Rarity's "dont choose the cool/rich kids over your friends" episodes?
Like a game of telephone the popular view of ancient systems and traditions gets flanderized and distorted by those who have no love for the past. To any person living in medieval Europe the "Great Chain of Being" was a concept that was understood and accepted even more naturally than "democracy" or "human rights" is by modern man. Every rung in a social hierarchy fulfilled an essential purpose on a physical and metaphysical level, though individual members could fail to live up to responsibilities by being incompetent, lazy or corrupt. It's impossible for people like kkat to understand this, as they live in a dream of rejecting stereotypes yet embracing stereotypes codified by a "tolerant" society.

>>304912
>I'm wracking my brain here but I don't think there's ever been more than one Elder at a time in the games
Well, different chapters each have an elder and they collectively form an "Elder Council" which governs the entire Brotherhood. However over time each chapter has grown more distant from the original Lost Hills leadership until Fallout 4 when Arthur Maxson is unanimously appointed High Elder. This still begs the question of why Steelhooves would be out on his own if he is an Elder, instead of sending his protege or somesuch. His relationship to Applejack essentially makes him the most important member and fundamentally irreplaceable, so he shouldn't be in harm's way. Also in the Fallout games the Brotherhood disliked ghouls; a cut game made the rogue and evil Washington chapter be headed by a ghoul.

>anti-materiel rifle
The fact that this is considered a gamechanger doesn't feel realistic. It makes sense in the game when all vehicles have broken down (except for Vertibirds and the ground vehicles fielded by the Midwest Brotherhood from Fallout: Tactics, because they had some sense) that power armor is the toughest stuff around, but in the Fallout universe there were actual tanks and APCs as well as sentry bots which are automated light tanks. I haven't seen any indication these existed (except for sentry bots which were hardly a challenge) in FOE. Presumably during the Great War in Fallout power armor was used to field "heavy infantry" which wouldn't replace vehicles, but in FOE it seems like PA is the be-all-end-all. Keep in mind that the .50 BMG originally wasn't an AM cartridge but was used for the Browning machine gun, meaning one of those would wipe out a PA platoon as easy as a Vickers killed unarmored soldiers in WW1. Assuming PA is level IV body armor (can stop .30 rounds), even weaksauce WW2 vehicles would be a deadly threat. The reason the BoS and Enclave don't get wiped despite their PA is because these guns and their ammo are uncommon and too heavy for wastelanders to want. The only people who would carry these (if obtainable) would be those fighting against PA, hunting deathclaws/hellhounds or shooting supermutants/alicorns. This story's lack of a weight limit ruins balance.

>spoiler
Of course he would.

>>304913
tl;dr
Right-wing/centrist writers are willing to write about imperfect systems favorably and can explore their strengths and weaknesses. Leftist writers believe that any system against their values sucks and the more it embraces their values the less sucky it is automatically. It would be neat to see western futurism be explored more as what happens when cyberpunk systems collapse.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.304919
>>304918
>the rogue and evil Washington chapter headed by a ghoul
Were they searching for a buried vault where shittons of US Soldiers were cryogenically frozen, hoping to add these dudes and their stored military shit to their chapter of the army, or was that something the Hearts Of Iron 4 mod "Old World Blues" made up for its take on the Washington Brotherhood and its immortal leader?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304920
304923
Also, it's bad writing that LP is able to find so much good loot in pristine condition, right?
She found that Twilight statuette in Pinkie Pie's skeleton because she died holding it close to her heart and decayed for years without anyone, not even wandering monsters, disturbing her.
And only now, for the first time, are we seeing evidence that anyone besides LP on this planet can lockpick.

Surely in a survival situation that's somehow lasted 200 years, loot that's useful to Wastelanders would have been the first shit to get scavenged and used up.
These poners shouldn't find top-tier loot effortlessly. They should be forced to manufacture top-tier loot from primitive technology and scrap/trash.
it's particularly galling because Littlepip's Littleshits have built in excuses for their ability to visit and scavenge places the average wastelander likely couldn't.
LP has a map on her pipbuck and can hack anything, it makes no sense for her to also be a pro lockpicker and stealth master and more.
Velvet can talk her way into and out of things.
Calamity can fly.
Steelhooves has power armour that resists radiation better than the cloth/leather/metal/kevlar-at-best most wastelanders wear.
All sorts of excuses could be used to justify why the heroes are the first ones to find the best loot usually but Kkat sees nothing wrong with magical bobbleheads existing in well travelled areas for you to pick up.

Also the author's violating game rules for LP's benefit again. In the games if you Jam a lock by fucking up an attempt to force a lock open and getting unlucky on the RNG roll with its success chance boosted by your Lockpicking skill, that lock is permanently stuck. Can't attempt the lockpicking minigame again.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.304923
304925 304951
>>304920
That's forcing, to be fair. You never break them just by picking normally which ~technically~ fits the game rule idea.

Loot being abundant in the first places you cross over is another common idea transplanted the games because that's just how it is to make rewarding explanation. In more grounded settings you would balance this by injecting specific reasoning as to why these items and objects are just laying around.

Maybe Raiders have cached all their goods and supplies in a room or personal lockers as settlers do. Or, monsters moved in and have literally 0 perception of the nuances of canned beans or rifle lockers. Or groups like the Alicorns or Steel Rangers have no interest because they are pressed for time, focused on a mission, or don't engage in scavenging of common property. Of course, you'd need to highlight these as the cause for things laying around, but I suppose it depends on the circumstance. Yes, it's unreasonable to find super mcfuck you rifles in a middle of nowhere place, but other examples like pip getting her god tier revolver happened inside of a reinforced and guarded factory complex. She TECHNICALLY had to work for it, and it stands to reason the Robobrain guards kept outside scavengers away. I think this story just needs to realign its balancing act when it comes to touching on loot and such.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.304925
304951
>>304923
>Loot being abundant in the first places you cross over is another common idea transplanted the games because that's just how it is to make rewarding explanation. In more grounded settings you would balance this by injecting specific reasoning as to why these items and objects are just laying around.
>
>Maybe Raiders have cached all their goods and supplies in a room or personal lockers as settlers do. Or, monsters moved in and have literally 0 perception of the nuances of canned beans or rifle lockers. Or groups like the Alicorns or Steel Rangers have no interest because they are pressed for time, focused on a mission, or don't engage in scavenging of common property. Of course, you'd need to highlight these as the cause for things laying around, but I suppose it depends on the circumstance.
While this is true, keep in mind that because the earth and water are poisoned scavenging appears to be the only semi-reliable means by which ponies can find the things they need to survive in this setting. Scavenging has been compulsory for two centuries by the time Pip arrived on the scene. Two centuries - that's something like eight to ten generations if you assume pony lifespans are roughly the same as humans'. Naturally some sources of loot should be untouched due to inaccessibility or danger, but logically speaking the overwhelming majority of Equestria should have been picked clean ages ago.

Despite this, Littlepip and her friends never want for food or water and are practically drowning in weapons and ammunition by now. They can barely undertake a regular day's travel without stumbling over some legendary weapon or priceless treasure or ammo stash. And the story's not even half done!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
bf2ac16
?
No.304946
304951 304959 307247
dab-vector-1.png
>>304889

Anyway, after the memory orb sequence ends, Littlepoop stares in horror at SteelHooves. Despite having brutally murdered a group of raiders just a few short scenes ago, whose only crime was occupying a building that she wanted to steal things from, and despite all of the other horrible, gruesome shit she's done in this story, she is apparently shocked and appalled that this guy would go so far as to kick somepony off a roof.

>I stared at SteelHooves in horror.
>He stared back calmly. “No secrets.”
Edge, edge, edge.

Page break. The next scene opens with another of Red Eye's monologues, which LP listens to as the group stands atop a small hill which gives them a view of the surrounding area. Most of the city of Fillydelphia has been walled off, presumably by Red Eye's army, and is guarded by the usual assortment of snipers and ponk-balloons and whatever the fuck else. Nearby, a building which used to be occupied by Stable Tec has been co-opted as a fortress by the Steel Rangers, and that's apparently where they are now headed.

A fairly stupid non-sequitur conversation follows. Calamity approaches SteelHooves and remarks that the two of them are similar, because SteelHooves had the opportunity to become Elder yet he chose not to be. Technically, the author has not bothered to explain what being Elder even entails, and he hasn't really explained why Calamity would know anything about it either, but we'll put a pin in that for now. SteelHooves replies thusly:

>“No. You flew towards your responsibilities in defiance of your own kind, heedless and ignorant of the consequences.”
He flew towards what responsibilities? What consequences was he heedless of? We still don't know anything about where Calamity came from or why he ran away, so this statement is basically meaningless. It makes even less sense when you consider that SteelHooves probably wouldn't know anything about this either. He continues:

>“I ran away from my responsibilities because I understood exactly what the consequences would be if I did not. I knew there were ponies who would follow my example, and I was not willing to risk a civil war amongst the Steel Rangers.”
Again, this would probably have more impact if we knew what the fuck he was talking about. We know even less about SteelHooves' background than we do about Calamity's.

So, to review: we, the reader, know basically nothing about either the Pegasus Enclave or the Steel Rangers. Moreover, unless they've been talking to each other off camera, Calamity and SteelHooves shouldn't know anything more about each others' backstories than we do. Thus, this entire conversation makes no sense, and the fact that it's dumped into this scene out of nowhere makes it feel even more out of place.

Anyway, SteelHooves closes the matter by remarking that he and Calamity are nothing alike, and the chapter ends here.

Chapter Twenty Four: Dances of Light and Shadow

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Mmm! I can smell the muffins baking now!”
Something something kkat's a tranny.

This chapter drops us right into the middle of another memory orb. Littlepoop is looking through the eyes of a dying pony who has had most of his body below the torso blown off, and it's every bit as edgy as you would expect. Because I love you people, I won't subject you to any direct quotations. Well, maybe just one:

>We felt cold. A chill deeper than that from the rain. I felt drops of rain kissing the seeringly painful wound. I was thankful I couldn’t feel drops landing inside me.
"Searing," not "seering." Get a spellchecker, Caitlyn.

Anyway, the scene is basically an unknown pony (Littlepoop's "host") and Big Macintosh are in a trench together, and the host pony is acting out a long, exaggerated death scene. Then, Fluttershy shows up with a bunch of the healer ponies. The dying host pony tells her to leave him be since he's pretty much fucked anyway, and then drifts off into the cold embrace of death. Or, so he thought; turns out Fluttershy just developed something called a "megaspell" that can miraculously heal everyone on the battlefield in a single fell swoop. Wow, this "megaspell" business sounds pretty useful; I sure hope nopony repurposes it for something nefarious.

Anyway, an exasperated Rainbow Dash shows up and yells at her, because the little yellow bimbo's healing spell fixed up all the wounded on the battlefield, including the zebras, which means that now they have to fight the whole battle over again. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Page break.

>Velvet Remedy stopped as we approached the massive gate that the Steel Rangers had built in front of Stable-Tec Headquarters.
So, this basically means...what? The group was walking the entire time that LP was in that memory orb?

Seriously; think about this. At the end of the last chapter, the group was on top of a hill, looking down at Stable-Tec Headquarters. Now, the group is at Stable-Tec Headquarters. Presumably, the journey between these two points occurred during the ether-space. It's been established that entering a memory orb basically incapacitates the viewer, meaning that from the moment the memory starts playing until the time it ends, LP is unable to move, speak, or otherwise react to her environment. So, what happened here? The group was just walking around in this highly dangerous area, when LP, the de-facto leader who is always bragging about how wasteland-savvy she's become in the last month or so, suddenly decides to just whip out this memory orb and go unconscious for an indeterminate period of time? Did she just tell one of her friends to carry her? Did they all just stop in the middle of the battlefield and wait for her? Just what the hell is going on exactly?

Anyway, whatever; here they are, outside the front gate of the Steel Rangers' base.

>The senior paladin mare trotted forward, addressing them.
These ranks have not been explained and are completely meaningless, both to LP and to us.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304951
SPARTA.JPG
>>304923
>>304925
Speaking of monsters, what do the monsters eat?
Animals? What do the animals eat?
Especially the giant monsters. Being giant means you have to eat a lot, usually.
Some giant Dragons in fiction eat entire cows each meal like a man eating an entire cooked chicken every day.
Imagine a Dragon swooping down into the ocean like one of those birds that grabs some fish and fucks off to eat the fish, except the Dragon steals an entire shark or sperm whale from the ocean instead and eats that on the shore!
Imagine how "dealing with a beached whale" would change if dragons tended to leave half-eaten whale carcasses upon your lovely beaches!
I recall one book where dragons had the wits of people and owned quaint cow-farming villages when they weren't forced to be weapons of war by "those darn dirty humans".
The author could have handwaved this by saying "Irradiated animals/monsters survive by taking radiotrophic energy from the radioactivity around them- i mean uhhh magical darkness energy from the radioactive cursed Taint around them, and that's why monsters can survive in the post-apocalypse even though they typically lack visible food sources. This is why the heroes will often find monsters deep into dungeons. It's because those dungeons contain radiation sources like a barrel of radioactive waste or were bombed super-heavily and still practically glow."

>steelhooves kicks a poner off the roof
THIS! IS! SPARTA!

>Steelhooves didn't want a civil war so he didn't try to set his organization on its rightful path even though he's a 200 year old ghoul who dated Applejack and should logically be fucking worshipped by his faction.
I'm glad it's not a spoiler to say THIS IS FUCKING RETARDED.
A small army of intelligent Power Armour-clad fuckers with trained technicians and excellent guns have the capacity to be a force for good in the Wasteland, potentially one of the best. Steelhooves should want his organization to be good guys who hunt alicorns for great justice, not thieves who hoard tech until the end of time or their organization's end.
Steelhooves should want his organization to honour Applejack's name, not disgrace it by hoarding her tech from the world!
Who gives a fuck if some aggressive sect of your wannabe-holy-knights want to start a civil war over their desire to steal tech and shoot wastelanders to get it? If the organization's got evil goals and methods, it means every good member is forced to serve in this unsustainably evil organization full of idiots risking their lives to gain technology in the name of hoarding it, even though if it dies the secrets of that tech dies with them.
The Brotherhood Of Steel (the source material's steel rangers) is not a sustainable organization with a bright future. They don't make friends, they only make enemies. They don't help the Wasteland, they only police its tech levels. Eventually, when there are good writers, post-apocalyptic societies get back on their feet and get organized. Suddenly they aren't afraid of four pricks in power armour, suddenly they can't use their glorified plate mail and laser rifles to intimidate farmers and "prospectors" (scavengers) into giving their shit up, and suddenly a few hundred pricks in power armour can't stand up to an endless swarm of a few thousand conscripted NCR troopers. The Brotherhood doesn't make friends, it only makes enemies. The prevalence of some innovative new weapon like a Pulse Gun, an energy pistol that shuts down electronics to fuck up power armour and robots, would only accelerate their inevitable decline/demise. If House ever got Euclid's C-Finder and the Helios Power Plant, he'd get big fucking sun lasers on his side like something out of Command And Conquer, and he wouldn't need Line Of Sight to use his machines to dial in coordinates taken from a radar station. And god fucking knows what he could do with any extra power taken from that station.

>I was thankful I couldn’t feel drops landing inside me
Funny, you'd think Kkat would love feeling drops landing inside him. Drops of gay semen, that is! Dohohohoho!

>>304946
"Oh no, you healed the baddies! Now the fighting must continue!" might be a videogame trope but holy shit, including it here makes the Zebras into irredeemable cunts. Well, they were already that because spoilers. But seriously, fuck these Zebras.
Imagine fighting in a war for the benefit of your bastard king "Caesar" who's such a cunt, your enemy's land swells with refugees who wanted no part in your war. Or wanted to continue it the subversive way, depends on how black their stripes are.
Anyway, after a long battle you learn war is bad. Then, through sheer zebra mercy, after you lose the battle, a big magic boom heals everypony and every zebra that can be saved.
Do you
A) drop your weapons and surrender to the ponies, learning war is bad and the mercy of ponies is awesome, maybe even play some football with them because they're so shockingly non-evil despite what your government told you
B) run home so you can fight another day for your evil zigger government that's a bizarre mashup of stealth-suit-using Communist China, caesar-serving spear-tossing Caesar's Legion, and unga-bunga potions-and-talismans African Meme Shithole Land
C) resume fighting to kill right then and there while laughing evilly at the "foolish ponies" for acting like Goku when he gave some of his energy to a dying Freeza, just enough for Freeza to get off the exploding planet they were on, even though Freeza betrayed Goku and died for that.

If you chose C you're a fucking ZIGGER.
Occasional moments where Equestria is called censorious or imperialistic or racist feel tacked-on compared to these highly-visible examples of real zebra evil and other, bigger examples.

btw fuck kkat for thinking a country shouldn't use the resources of another. The Navi from Avatar did nothing good with their Unobtanium. Humanity could have saved lives with it. Humanity deserved it more. Humanity, fuck yeah. Purge the Xeno and the Xigger.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3dab6ff
?
No.304959
304964 305043 305331
shit fuck.gif
>>304946

There is a statue of Sweetie Belle in the courtyard outside the base. Velvet spends a few minutes "conversing" with her great-grandmother, telling her the stable worked and that she sang her song on the radio and so forth and so on. The display is fairly awkward; I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be moved here or what. Velvet has never really said much about this particular ancestor one way or the other; she seems to hold Fluttershy in higher reverence, although even that has never felt particularly genuine. In any case, nothing about Velvet's behavior or comments up to this point would suggest that she holds Sweetie Belle in high enough esteem that merely seeing a statue of her would get her this choked up, so this "tender moment" feels forced and silly. I could see if it were her grave or something, but a statue?

Anyway, SteelHooves seems to take a similar view of this, silently rolling his eyes at the display. Then, suddenly, Velvet's pet phoenix lands on the statue, and all the Steel Rangers snap to attention, because balefire phoenixes are dangerous I guess (this is what I had assumed initially, which is why I was so confused about whether the one following them was supposed to be hostile).

>I chuckled grimly to myself. “Yeah, she might lift your visor and breathe, baking you.” The mental image was grotesque -- having seen a pony killed cruelly like that was horrifying - but somehow the image of Pyrelight pulling the same trick struck my funny bone. Goddesses, there really was something wrong with me.
Yeah, there's something wrong with you all right. Maybe try cutting back on soy and fluoridated water. Oh wait a minute, it's Littlepoop, not kkat, who's speaking here. My mistake.

Anyway, LP shares some fairly trivial banter with one of the Rangers, Poppyseed, and then a giant crane lifts up the gate and allows them inside. Calamity finds a bottle cap in a dry fountain beneath the statue. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Calamity and SteelHooves exchange some dry technical conversation about how the Rangers' magic armor works.

>SteelHooves had slowed, staring at Calamity. This was the first time he had witnessed Calamity’s freaky knowledge of magical engineering, rarely seen as it was.
It's the first time any of us have witnessed this, because it's never come up, and nothing in his behavior or dialogue thus far would suggest he would have this type of knowledge. What we (sort-of) know about his backstory might partially explain some knowledge of the pegasus armor he mentions, but more than anything this just feels like a character trait that the author has suddenly decided to give him out of nowhere, like Littlepoop suddenly becoming an avid book enthusiast midway through the story.

>The senior paladin mare led us up the steps to the once-grand doors of Stable-Tec.
These pseudo-military ranks are specific to the order of the Steel Rangers and are not common knowledge, nor is it likely that LP would be familiar with them. At the very least we need a cursory explanation of what they are and what they mean if they're going to be commonly referenced like this.

>I shuddered, feeling a chill.
And on top of everything else, the building is drafty.

Anyway, yada yada yada, they go into this Ranger fortress. Calamity asks if he can get some time on the shooting range, because he wants to play with that big ass gun he found, the "anti-machine gun." Nothing else happens.

>I facehoofed. Velvet Remedy nickered and trotted inside, ignoring the confused pegasus.
Kkat, if you use the word "facehoof" or "squee" one more time I'm going to shove that anti-machine gun up your ass sideways.

Page break. The building the Rangers use as their headquarters apparently has an automated "tour" routine that activates every time somepony enters the room, which they can't figure out how to disable. For some reason, they follow the tour instead of just ignoring it. A hologram of Sweetie Belle appears and rattles off a bunch of company boilerplate about stables and whatnot.

>The mock-Stable door (numbered “0”) swung open on hinges as we approached while a soundtrack played the sounds of an actual Stable door being pulled open. Spinning yellow lights topped off the simulation, something that hadn’t been present in Stable Two.
>Velvet Remedy stifled a giggle. Before I could stop myself, I whispered “Velvet Remedy’s barn door doesn’t swing that way.” I gasped and quickly corrected myself, “I meant, Stable Two’s.” Too late. The charcoal-coated unicorn with the scarlet and gold streaks in her white mane was fixing me with a stare that told me I wouldn’t be hearing the last of this for a long, uncomfortable time. Dammit, sometimes I hated my mother. Not that my slip-of-the-tongue was really her fault… but it was her fault.
In all seriousness, this author really needs to get his verbal diarrhea under control. The paragraph starts on one thought and ends at another; it's a telltale sign that the author is just writing whatever pops into his head, stream of consciousness style. While this technique can occasionally produce interesting results, most of the time it just produces long, incoherent trains of thought that go nowhere, case in point. The joke about Velvet's barn door is obviously meant to be a crack about her sexual orientation, but what specifically it's implying is as ambiguous as...well...as Velvet's sexual orientation. It's not really that funny to begin with, and the rambling way the joke is told saps what little humor it might have had. Also, whatever the connection to Littlepoop's mother is, I'm not seeing it.

>Velvet Remedy seemed on the verge of tears at the parting words of her ancestor whom we both knew had become the first Overmare of Stable Two -- the Stable whose special purpose was to keep us down there, safe, forever.
She's on the verge of tears? Literally two seconds ago she was "stifling a giggle." Nobody in this story emotes convincingly, least of all Velvet.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.304964
304975
>>304959
LP giggling seems like bad writing. The thought of a cartoon poner dying horribly is sad and darkly hilarious. Like a Spomgebob fan animation where Bubble Bass kills Squidward and Spongebob kills Bubble Bass in a big animu fight scene. But to a cartoon poner the thought of a fellow poner dying would be purely horrifying.
Kkat has such a bizarre fascination with bodily fluids and pony gore. Do you think he's the type who guts stuffed animals with knives when he's butthurt?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.304975
806286.gif
>>304964
Maybe she's losing touch with her virtue and becoming a raider woooooooo
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305043
thatmaresuredoeslovetechnology.png
>>304959
>These pseudo-military ranks are specific to the order of the Steel Rangers and are not common knowledge, nor is it likely that LP would be familiar with them. At the very least we need a cursory explanation of what they are and what they mean if they're going to be commonly referenced like this.
This is compounded by the fact that in the Fallout games, the Brotherhood of Steel's structure varies somewhat between games. The series spans over a century and from one coast of the US to the other, so there are local variants and no singular, unchanging hierarchy for Kkat to have based the Rangers' on. Fallout 3 is the obvious model, but that game didn't do much to clarify the Brotherhood's structure either.

Roughly speaking, the brotherhood is structured as follows:
Initiate - Trainee
Scribe - Scientist or technician
Knight - Field operative/foot soldier
Paladin - Senior knight who serves as a ranking officer
Elder - Local chapter leader (typically a former paladin or in rare cases head scribe)
High Elder - Supreme commander

There's various intermediary or specialist ranks, but you get the idea. In the games at least, the reason for this hierarchy is because the Brotherhood are a pseudo-religious organization descended from the US military. They adopted this structure and terminology in order to differentiate themselves from the pre-apocalypse world's way of thinking, given that said way of thinking lead to the end of the world. This is why they're so dead set on hoarding technology - to prevent its misuse by people they perceive to be ignorant so that further disasters don't occur.

By contrast, the Steel Rangers - if I'm reading correctly - seem to have started out as a paramilitary group dedicated specifically to the ideals of Applejack (which, for the purposes of this story, seem to be something vaguely like 'keep ponies safe'), only to fall into tech hoarding later because... reasons?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305052
305085
I still hate how Littlepip hates Vaults. Stables. Whatever.

In Fallout 1, you're on a mission to save your Vault. You're told to visit another Vault to get their water chip but it's destroyed. Walking through this shithole, you're struck with the realization that your home could turn out like this if you fail in your quest.
Once you get rope to get into the place. Also you run into a civilized yet somewhat primitive tribal village called Shady Sands along the way, they have rope for trading. also a guard there you can hire tells you about Junktown and The Hub. I forget how but visiting those places eventually leads you to the ghoul town with a water chip which eventually gets attacked by The Master's Super Mutants of Mariposa Military Base and you get the "stop the muties before it is too late" part of your quest.
First you explore this world and its threats. You're on a personal quest to save your people. Then a problem arises outside its usual situations: a mutant army that needs to be stopped.
It's a logical progression. Good escalation.
But this?
LP dicked around for 200k words and all she has to show for it is a ton of loot and ammo. Her initial quest was to find Velvet and she found Velvet too soon, before anything that could reasonably turn LP's hateboner for slavers and desire to visit and murderhobo Red Eye's land while stopping at a radio tower for some reason into a proper story.
What if Velvet left the vault because she was the chosen one? What if Velvet wanted to end slavery in the wastes and vastly overestimated her abilities? What if Velvet had some mission given to her by her Stable's Overmare or a Sweetie Belle recording? What if Velvet thought she was a chosen one because in her dreams Princess Luna called her important and begged her to heal poners in the wasteland but actually it turns out she was getting psychically mindfucked by The Alicorns and their boss every night because... uh... they wanted her pure not-irradiated genes to fix problems their mutant race has, or they pull this shit to groom new alicorns they want to brainwash and mutate all the time and Velvet's just the latest in a line thousands long, or Velvet knows something important nopony else knows because reasons (maybe the stable code she learned from Sweetie Belle opens all stables).
important thing is, Littlepip isnt a character.
She is a player character.
Her personality traits don't get in the way of optimal murderhobo efficiency except when the author's personality traits get in the way of remembering things in a well written world continue to exist even when the hero isnt looking at them.
Littlepip is a callous kleptomaniac and instant gun master with a shallow nonsense backstory that irrationally makes her a pro hacker and lockpicker in a world irrationally full of computers to hack and safes and doors to pick open. Nothing about her past shapes who she is now. It's like an amateur DND player's first character, one designed to fight well but without any fun roleplaying or distinct memorable personality traits.
Final Fantasy X is a masterpiece. It's got a main hero girl who has to go to places and then fight a monster to buy the world a few years of relative peace before the monster gets better. The main hero guy... at first he is just our fish-out-of-water POV character but he inspires the hero girl to break the cycle and save the world permanently. It's epic.
Media can have multiple main heroes.
But what effect does Littlepip have on her friends? She's a slutty coke fiend and the universe can't sing her praises enough.
What effect does Velvet have on her friends? None, because whenever she bitches about kid-killing or how smelly her boyfriend is it never matters. She doesn't get to be the group's moral compass because the Selfish Neutral With Nominally Good Murderhobo Tendencies dnd character Littleshit already took that role for the party.
Velvet left her vault because she wanted to be a medic and save lives in post apocalypse land- just kidding, she wanted to be a singing medic but her Stable would only let her be a singer. Meanwhile LP left because she didn't like being blamed for Velvet leaving even though she almost instantly gave up on dragging Velvet back to their home kicking and screaming.

It could be like a Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks movie where at first the hero thinks he wants something (in this case LP wants her old civilian life back) but then realizes what the hero really wanted all along was to be a hero.
Could even reference Fallout 1's twist ending where your reward for saving the wasteland and your vault is getting kicked out of your vault by your overseer so the vault's kids won't idolize you and want to be like you and leave the vault on their own. LP could, with Calamity's help, drag Velvet back to her Stable of origin only to be told "Velvet can come back even though she doesn't want to be here. I love her music. But you are just some technician. And murderer. Killing is wrong according to our delicate civilian sensibilities! Get out, you're fired"
and this could break LP's trust in authority figures in a huge dramatic moment that makes all the story's "irrationally stupid civilization" moments feel intentional and give the story an anti-dictator theme for when the heroes fight slavery or whatever.
Surely in a better-written story, there would be a bigger divide between "Littlepip the order-following naive fool who wants to drag Velvet back to their Stable kicking and screaming so she can have her boring comfy safe old life back" and "Littlepip the hardened wasteland warrior who doesn't want to go home and chooses her own missions and works with Velvet the travelling medic who always secretly had a bigger goal than just feeding health potions to junkies in a bombed-out 260 year old hospital".
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305085
>>305052
fuck i forgot to add:
Littlepip hates Stables because they're so different from her own in architecture and design. Shit isn't where it's supposed to be.
But that's videogame bullshit.
In the games, Vaults are Skyrim-tier baby dungeons with 1, 2, and rarely 3 floors. They're constructed differently because they're just dungeons, like the "caves" that are linear sequences of rooms with monsters in them.

But realistically it makes no sense that real vaults/stables meant to house at least a few hundred thousand humans/ponies would be these tiny linear retardniggerbrained """dungeons""" (Legend of Zelda has more complex dungeons) that vary wildly in architecture and design so much you'd swear a (((diverse))) team of fucktarded interns and divershitty hires handled the level design separately without explaining how vaults are supposed to function or what the average vault looks like.

It makes no sense that Littlepip would go through a vaultstable thinking "Grrrr nothing's where it should be and everything's different from my vault" like a goomer grumpy that some areas aren't just copypasted from the area his character grew up in.
This pony should be fucking horrified at the eerie similarities between every Stable that's like her own except doomed and full of skeletons and notes from the world design faggot- i mean author conveniently explaining exactly how the poners here died.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.305283
1612141126-comic704.png
Sometimes the author arbitrarily decides LP won't use VATS/SATS in a fight so it can be more creative than "she attempts four headshots quickly and three don't miss, the end" and her friends can take part in the brawl.
Maybe subconsciously the author realizes VATS is bullshit?
Then again these "non-VATS kills" usually involve killing an enemy too tough for guns using her overpowered telekinesis.
So maybe the author just really wants to make his special little snowflake so special that even though the PipBuck does much of her work her impossibly powerful psychic might is still what resolves most situations she finds herself in. Just when you start to think "anyone with a pipbuck could do what she does since it carries so much of her weight" she whips out an absurd skill she has no reason to have such as lockpicking or hacking or High Pain Tolerance(tm) or telekinetic godhood.
Kkat is a faggot who's too much of a coward to embrace the power fantasy aspect of this story since he wants to hide behind the illusion that LP is a humble saint who hates attention who's toootally not a sue you guys I swear she gets beat up sometimes. (if you get that reference you get a metaphorical cookie)
Because Littlepip starts this story overpowered there is no tangible sense of progression. She's perfect at guns and melee and hacking and lockpicking and safecracking and more. Anything LP can do with a Hammerspace Arsenal of over 20 guns and 800 bullets for each one, she could accomplish naked and with nothing but telekinesis and rocks. Nothing about her progression feels earned. And LP doesn't even get dicked on in the start to make her an underdog the heroes root for and make the audience want her to prove everyone who doubts her wrong. Come on, this isn't writing 101, this is writing 1. There are Pokemon fanfics written by children where Ash's friends "betray" him by saying "Ash you've been at this for 7 years and you're still a 10 year old moron so give it a rest and get an office job" which makes him run away in tears to become the author's take on a badass and prove them wrong while making new nicer and more supportive friends (even though Misty still supported Ash despite her annoying snark and Brock cooked for him fucking daily) and those fics recognize the importance of getting the audience to root for Ash before he starts "roflstomping" (effortlessly defeating) every challenge in his path. As an unofficial expert in trashy power fantasies I rate this story a shit power fantasy. And that's what this story is fundamentally set up to be: The story of this fucking murderhobo plank of wood and her rise to further levels of OP bullshithood.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305331
305345 305351
3614754 - Friendship_is_Magic Mr._Chaos_the_Cunning_Wolf My_Little_Pony Twilight_Sparkle.jpg
>>304959

Page break. After finishing this completely pointless video tour, the group congregates outside of Elder Blueberry Sabre's office, who I guess is in charge of the steel rangers or something. Littlepoop tries to talk to Poppyseed or whatever her name is, but makes a faux pas when she brings up the Rangers' oath. Apparently they are not supposed to discuss it with outsiders (or "tribals" as she calls them), and blah blah blah. From here on out, Poppycock is frosty to her.

SteelHooves is inside the office talking to the Elder.

>I contemplated trying to eavesdrop, but then realized the guards wouldn’t let me close enough to the door. And I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know what was being said. I was sure there were some elements of the conversation that I would do well to hear, particularly anything regarding us or SteelHooves’ mission. But there was probably more than a bit of discussion about internal politics and current affairs within the Steel Rangers. Such things were none of my business; and after entering one of SteelHooves’ memories without permission, I didn’t want to stick my hoof into his affairs uninvited so soon again.
This paragraph is a fine example of the kind of idiotic stream-of-consciousness writing that is primarily responsible for bloating this godawful text up to more than 600,000 words.

Basically, here is what this is saying: Littlepoop is thinking about eavesdropping on this conversation, but ultimately decides not to, and gives several reasons why. Did this even need to be said? Let alone have an entire paragraph of text dedicated to it? No, it didn't. SteelHooves just went into the office of a character we don't know to discuss something that probably has nothing to do with the story, such as it is. Is there any reason to believe that LP might want to eavesdrop? None that I can think of, and in any event she ultimately decides not to eavesdrop, so there's really no reason for the subject to even be mentioned.

If there is some reason that LP should be hearing whatever it is that these two characters are talking about, then the author should find a way to have her overhear it. If it's not important, or the author doesn't want her to hear it, then she should just be standing outside tapping her hooves or playing Tetris on her PipBuck or whatever she does to pass time. If she's not going to eavesdrop on this irrelevant conversation, we don't need her to explain why, any more than we need her to explain why she isn't riding around on a unicycle juggling chainsaws.

>Furthermore, I found that I really didn’t want to know. The Steel Rangers were… distasteful.
Why are they distasteful? What bothers you about them? They seem like a nice enough bunch of ponies so far. Care to elaborate on this, LP?

Well, to her credit, she at least tries to elaborate. However, what she mostly ends up doing is rambling on for multiple paragraphs, and at the end of it we don't really have a clearer picture of either the Steel Rangers or why she finds them distasteful than we did before. As far as I can tell, her feeling is basically that the Rangers have the technology and the firepower to affect some kind of positive change in the wasteland, but elect not to for some reason.

Anyway, she spends about seven or eight more paragraphs mumbling to herself about various things she could be doing but chooses not to do for various reasons, and then finally begins wandering up and down the halls, looking at some models or something that StableTec had on display. Meanwhile, another one of Red Eye's broadcasts begins playing through her earbuds or whatever she has. The broadcast consists of a massive wall of text, which for all its length tells us little beyond what we already know: Red Eye is a totalitarian dictator, and he appears to have organized mass indoctrination camps for children.

This long and pointless microscene ends with SteelHooves summoning Littlepoop into Blueberry Sabre's office.

Page break.

>Elder Blueberry Sabre was the first Steel Ranger I had actually laid eyes on.
This is obviously incorrect; LP has seen many, many Steel Rangers at this point. What I think the author is trying to say here is that Blueberry Sabre is the first Steel Ranger LP has seen outside of her armor, but that isn't what this sentence says.

Anyway, Blueberry Sabre wants her to look inside a memory orb that she has for some reason. I guess she can't do it herself because she isn't a unicorn, or something. LP does as she is asked.

The orb contains a scene between Rarity and Applejack, and appears to take place in AJ's barn. LP witnesses the event through the eyes of an unknown pony, who appears to be wearing some kind of cloak, so probably a spy or something.

There is a bit of light humor as Rarity ribs AJ about an encounter with Rainbow Dash earlier on. Then, she gets down to the real reason behind her visit. Apparently, she came across the Zebraic equivalent of the Necronomicon, and found a spell in there that allows you to bind souls to objects. She has come up with an idea to bind portions of soldiers' souls to clothing, so that they would be able to wear fancy outfits as armor or something. It gets pretty bizarre, but that seems to be the gist of it. AJ is horrified by this, and tells Rarity that she should get rid of this book immediately. Incidentally, this seems to be the same Zebra magic book that was mentioned earlier in the story; that other group of Talons, the ones who were trapped on the roof, were looking for it or something. Rarity apologizes for proposing something so strange, and the scene ends.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305345
305349 305350 305352
MV5BNTM5Nzc0NzM1M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMDQxODg0MjE@._V1_.jpg
>>305331

When LP returns to the waking world, she learns the real reason that BS wanted her to orb-dive. It appears that either she has already seen what is in the orb somehow, or else knew what was in it somehow, and wanted LP to watch it so she could tell SteelHooves what was on it. The idea here is that she wants LP to confirm that AJ had the opportunity to greenlight a project that would have produced armor superior to that of the Steel Rangers, but turned it down. BS wants to destroy SteelHooves' illusion of Applejack in order to make him give up his personal interpretation of the oath and convert to hers...or something. I guess.

Anyway, Littlepoop gets mad and tears into Blue Sabre. She also (somehow) deduces that the mystery pony from whose perspective she was watching all of this was some kind of zebra spy, or something. I guess. The scene ends with her playing back this old recording that she found somewhere:

>“I’m sending you one of the devices recovered from Shattered Hoof Ridge. Intelligence suggested that the zebras had developed invisibility spell fetishes, but this looks like something designed by the Ministry of Magic. It’s even PipBuck compatible. I hate to say it, but it looks like we’ve got traitors in our midst. If somepony in M.A.S. is leaking arcane technology to the zebras, the Princess will need to take action.”
I guess the idea here is that the zebras were using invisibility spells to spy on the ponies, and that's how they stole their technology. Or something.

Page break. At this point I am completely lost as to what the point of any of this is; in fact, I'm not even sure I understand why they are even in this building. All I know is that they have spent most of this story talking about going to Fillydelphia, but never actually go there.

Speaking of going to Fillydelphia, Blueberry Sabre now explains to LP why that is a rather dumb idea (apart from its being guarded by snipers in Pinkie Pie balloons and hellhounds and whatever other ridiculous nonsense):

>Blueberry Sabre turned to me, “You will never get close to Red Eye that way. He’s always protected. In the very least by a flock of griffins if not by a wing of those damned alicorns. The first sign of trouble, and he’ll hop his sky chariot and leave the city. You’ll lose any chance you have of taking him down before you even know it.”
Is that the objective of going to Fillydelphia? To get close to Red Eye? Why do they want to do that again? I have literally zero idea what's going on at this point.

>Damn. I was confident of being able to sneak close until she mentioned the alicorns. I should have figured this couldn’t be so easy.
What's the big deal about alicorns? Seriously; name one encounter with them so far that hasn't ended in flawless, easy victory.

>But I was damned if I would just give up and go home. Not after the fresh reminder of what these slavers were doing to innocent ponies.
Oh, come off it LP; you don't even have a home. Also, what exactly are these slavers doing to innocent ponies? From the broadcasts we've been listening to, it sounds like Red Eye is a little eccentric, but on the other hand he's building schools and hospitals and shit, and in any case it's not like he's ever done anything to you personally. You really have zero reason to get involved in whatever the hell is going on here. However, that didn't stop you in Appleoosa, so I'm assuming it won't stop you here.

Anyway, the Elder proposes a plan of her own. She offers to get LP and her friends over the wall, dressed in rags and without any of their weapons or belongings. From there, they will pose as slaves, doing menial labor, until somehow LP is able to work her way up the chain o' command and maybe meet Red Eye and assassinate him or something. In return, she expects LP to find the plans for some kind of radioactive engine that Red Eye is apparently designing.

Well, I have to say that of all the dumb plans I've come across in all my years of reading shitty adventure stories, this one is on the short list of the absolute dumbest. Seriously, think about this: the "plan" is basically just for LP to become one of Red Eye's slaves; she's completely on her own from there. Exactly what assistance are the Rangers providing here? Getting her past the wall? We've already learned from these silly broadcasts that Red Eye sends troops out to round up any stray wanderers they come across and conscript them into his "work-study" program. Seems to me that becoming a slave for Red Eye is pretty easy to do. Basically, the Rangers are just stripping LP & Co. of their weapons, tossing them over the wall, and leaving them to fend for themselves, and in return for this they expect her to further risk her life bringing back the plans of some top-secret project he's working on that they intend to do God only knows what with.

Anyway, there's some more bullshit in here about bypass spells or something, but basically the long and short of it is that LP accepts this idiotic and thoroughly one-sided arrangement.

Page break. Incidentally, you can scratch what I said earlier about LP & Co. being stripped of their weapons and tossed over Fillydelphia's wall. As it turns out, the plan is even sillier than that: LP alone will be stripped of her weapons and tossed over the wall, while the rest of her friends apparently just sit here twiddling their hooves until she returns.

>“I won’t be totally unarmed,” I assured him. “They won’t be taking my horn. And they can’t take my PipBuck either.” Instead, we would be wrapping my forelegs in bulky rags to hide its presence.
So...she can't take her PipBuck off? Is that what I'm supposed to take away from this? Is that why the slavers who captured her way back at the beginning of the story didn't take it away from her? I'm getting a little tired of saying this all the time, but the author has really done a piss-poor job of explaining this.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305349
305833
>>305345
>Well, I have to say that of all the dumb plans I've come across in all my years of reading shitty adventure stories, this one is on the short list of the absolute dumbest. Seriously, think about this: the "plan" is basically just for LP to become one of Red Eye's slaves; she's completely on her own from there.
Naturally, this is based on a Fallout 3 quest - specifcially the Pittsburgh "Pitt" DLC. In the game, your goal is to pose as a slave and meet up with a small slave resistance inside the city, then work your way up into the good graces of the local warlord through manual work and pit fighting so that you can screw him over. The main gimmick is that you have to go without the gigantic arsenal of guns, armour and healing items you've no doubt built up by that point for much of the quest.

It's still a bad plan, but at the very least the game gives you a few allies on the other side of the wall and the excuse that "it's a videogame, so of course the protagonist can do this and be fine". A story has no such fallback.

I'm genuinely looking forward to when this thread reaches the Fillydelphia arc (next chapter, off the top of my head). It contains several highlights of this story's capacity to be incredibly dumb and some of the silliest combat in the whole thing.

>Basically, the Rangers are just stripping LP & Co. of their weapons, tossing them over the wall, and leaving them to fend for themselves
Ehh, she'll be fine. Mary sue plot armor, engage!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305350
305352 305357
1595191529352.jpg
>>305345

Anyway, this next microscene is about what you'd expect. LP's friends all try to convince her that going into Fillydelphia alone is suicide, and she explains why she, alone, is uniquely suited for this mission. Calamity can't go because he's a pegasus, and those are super-rare because something something the Enclave (another thing the author has done a piss-poor job of explaining). Velvet can't go because she's too pretty and would get >raped (for some reason this concern doesn't apply to LP, even though she's smaller and also has a vagina).

SteelHooves, obviously, can't pose as a slave while wearing his armor. Velvet suggests he just take it off since everyone knows he's a ghoul now, but he insists that he can't, because his armor is physically fused with his body. I've actually been wondering about this for awhile now; this fact was established some time ago, and I was assuming it was a common trait of all the Steel Rangers, and yet we've seen them removing their helmets and taking their armor off and so forth.

>“Because my body is fused into it,” was the ghoul’s answer, eliciting several gasps (one of which was from me).
Again, since this fact was established a long time ago, I don't really see why it should elicit any number of gasps, least of all from Littlepoop, who (apparently) administered maintenance to his armor at one point and should have at least a cursory familiarity with how it works.

>“Oh!” Calamity took a few steps back. “Yer that kinda ghoul!”
>Wait… there are types of ghouls now? Other than ghoul-pony and zombie-pony?
*sigh* God damn it, kkat; one of these days I swear to God I'm going to punch through my computer screen, stretch my hand across the vast gulf of space and time, and slap you so hard your fake tits will go flying off your chest and land in Equestria. The difference between "ghouls" and "zombies" was already convoluted enough, and it took you long enough to actually explain even that much. Now, you're going to complicate the matter even further by saying that there are different types of ghouls, and that the classification somehow involves some level of cyborgery? Just...fuck. Don't get too attached to your fake tits, is all I have to say about that.

>“He’s a Canterlot Ghoul.”
>SteelHooves nodded. Velvet Remedy and I were still in the dark.
>“Would somepony care to explain?”
>No more secrets.
The scene abruptly ends here.

Page break. The next microscene begins with an infodump about Canterlot ghouls. Apparently, different types of zebra bombs produced different types of radiation that caused different kinds of effects. Canterlot was protected by Luna's magical shield, but apparently the zebras had somehow snuck a different kind of bomb inside the city, that caused an event called "the pink cloud."

Before we go much further, I want to call attention to this:

>“Applejack was with me. But when strikes started, she fled back to Ponyville, leaving us to do our work while she tried to ensure all her family got safely into Stable Two.”
>I suddenly wondered if Applejack herself had made it. Had she been in Stable Two when it closed? I saw Velvet Remedy glancing at me and suspected she was wondering the same thing.
Did this happen before or after she fell down the fucking elevator shaft? There has been no coherent timeline given of these past events, so it's impossible to tell in what order all of the flashback scenes occurred, but I've been assuming that the megaspells were pretty much the event that ended the war. At the point in time currently being discussed, Manehattan and Fillydelphia are toast, Canterlot is under siege, and ponies are now retreating to the stables for survival. The earlier scene, where AJ learns that Ironshod Firearms has developed some type of weapon that can beat her armor or whatever, seems to take place well before this. In fact, it would have to, because a later flashback showing subsequent events reveals that the building they were in was located in Manehattan, which if I'm following this correctly ought to be vaporized by now. And in any case, if AJ went to hide out in Stable 2, she would have been sealed in with the rest of them, thus ensuring the elevator scene could not have happened afterward. Unless the author has something planned that will explain this discrepancy, this is a gigantic, glowing, red-hot flashing neon continuity error.

Anyway, the gist of it is that the "pink cloud" was some kind of super-taint that destroyed Canterlot. The shield ensured that it didn't spread beyond Canterlot until its potency had degraded considerably, but eventually both Celestia and Luna were killed by it and the shield dissolved, allowing it to escape. The gas is described thusly:

>Nothing protected against it. Everything it touched, it seeped into and rotted. I’ve heard horror stories of bodies found partially melded into sidewalks, or with their saddles fused to their bones. Canterlot is still toxic today. The streets and buildings soaked it up like sponges and are slowly releasing it as they decay.
So I guess, if I'm following this correctly, the implication is that the super-taint somehow fused SteelHooves' body to the armor he was wearing, and now he's some kind of man-machine. Pony-machine, whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQe9eK_4U0U

Page break. Velvet and Littlepoop are apparently in shock due to the revelation that the "goddesses" were actually just a couple of ponies who kept a shield intact to keep a noxious radioactive fart-cloud from escaping until everyone could make it down to the stables. The scene begins with the two of them "holding each other in silence," and LP resolves that she is going to keep praying to Celestia and Luna anyway, because why the hell not.

Idiotically, after no more than a paragraph of heavy drama, the conversation returns to its previous topic, which was basically the rest of the group trying to convince Littlepoop not to go to Fillydelphia alone.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305351
305361 305373
>>305331
All this "soul stuff is inherently evil black magic" junk seems daft.
Sure, if the afterlife is confirmed to exist and you want your immortal soul to ascend to heaven by the light of The LORD Jesus Christ it makes sense to stay away from magic where you sacrifice a portion of your soul to get stronger or trade your soul to a demon for power or create a respawn point by splitting a chunk of your soul into some random object.
But if there is no afterlife and when you die your soul rots away just like your liver and spleen so you can't become a ghost, what's the harm in fucking with it? If a soul is necessary to process emotions and let you feel and make you a good person, what does the brain do? Does it have the neural pathways for thought and morality in the name of redundancy in the event that you lose your soul? Is a soul necessary to keep you from going comatose/turning to stone/becoming evil or is it more redundant than an appendix? Does a soul amplify your body and magic? Is it the source of your magic or willpower or hope or rage or something else?
Look, telekinesis is one thing but if you confirm souls exist in your setting this raises questions like "how do you know?" and "Where do they come from?" and "where do they go?" and "what happens if you take them away doctor Cotton-Eye Joe?"

>invisibility spell fetishes
I've heard about people with mind control spell fetishes, but this is ridiculous!
Sorry, that joke was too good to pass up. I know it means the kind of nigger fetishes pornhub users don't have. A fetish is some weird african voodoo doll or dreamcatcher thingy, right?

>the pipbuck can't be removed
What does Kkat think this is, the motherfucking Omnitrix? Nigger, you ain't no fucking Tennison.
Does Kkat even remember it was Littlepip's job at the start of the story to repair and maintain these fucking things once removed from pony limbs and that's how she got wrapped up in Velvet's bullshit in the first place?
Surely it's not unreasonable to assume that if methods to unlock and maintain/repair it exist without killing its wearer, a massive slave empire like this would have obtained at least one method by now. The bombs fell 200 years ago. That's plenty of time for the ruins of the company branches of the company that made PipBucks to be picked clean by scavengers who sell their weird inedible important-looking tech loot to travelling merchants who form companies and alliances and guilds to increase their collective bargaining power and economic might, only for a new territory with its own economy and army to end up in a position to spend a lot of money buying the high-end shit the biggest and best trader companies have to offer.

I don't remember if I've said this already or not but I hate how LP's motivation for entering the Wasteland is Velvet but Velvet's motivation is "I want to be a doctor and I'm not allowed to do medic shit at home". Velvet is the party's obligatory moral one who whines when the party kills kids or does other icky things while Littlepip is a murderhobo whose moral standards are mere suggestions when there's a chance she can be rewarded for doing the wrong thing but the whole party sucks Littlepoop off as if she's the most moral pony around.

>LP alone must go into the lands alone because reasons
What a stupid way to adapt the "In DLC areas your Companions usually can't come with you" rule. It exists because insert excuse here like technical limitations or balancing concerns or they want places to feel different and that's why you're traipsing around new areas with Dean Domino or Follows Chalk while your normal friends like Boone and Lily are playing Strip Poker and Caravan back at the Lucky 38.
Maybe it would make sense for your companions to be left behind when dragged to the Sierra Madre or maybe Jed Bitcherson would refuse to let your small army travel with you in his caravan trail and maybe it's better that the Think Tank never get their hands on Veronica/EDE/Rex but if I was adapting Lonesome Road into a story I'd make the protagonist take all the important Companions with him. Mostly because I think Arcade calling Ulysseys the biggest faggot to ever faggot it up would be comedy gold and without a scene like that any adaption of the gameplay would have little to offer that a recording of the gameplay wouldn't.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305352
305361
>>305345
>So...she can't take her PipBuck off? Is that what I'm supposed to take away from this? Is that why the slavers who captured her way back at the beginning of the story didn't take it away from her? I'm getting a little tired of saying this all the time, but the author has really done a piss-poor job of explaining this.
In Fallout, PipBoys are difficult to remove because they use biometric locks that only the user can disengage. Like unlocking a phone, I guess. The problem here isn't so much that Pip can't take her pipbuck off (she can), but that she expects Red Eye's slavers to let her keep this incredibly powerful and dangerous tool because she wrapped it in rags.

>>305350
>Did this happen before or after she fell down the fucking elevator shaft?
My understanding is that the elevator shaft thing was a mid-war assassination attempt that Applejack happened to survive. I don't recall where or if it's clarified, maybe later on, but I think it's a matter of an unclear timeline rather than a continuity error.

>pink cloud
Another Fallout reference, natch. In New Vegas' Dead Money DLC, the Sierra Madre region is blanketed in a cloud of corrosive red gas produced by a malfunctioning chemical plant. Here it's a magical/chemical weapon that straight up melts people, because apparently it wasn't edgy enough. Canterlot ghouls are most likely based on the 'ghost people' who occupy the cloud.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305357
305400
9IkK.gif
>>305350

Anyway, they keep talking for awhile, and eventually decide on a plan in which LP goes in with the broadcaster attachment on her PipBuck, which apparently can't be removed from her leg because reasons. When she's ready to leave, she will broadcast a message to Calamity, who will then swoop down and rescue her. Ah, but how could Calamity receive such a message, I hear you asking. Well, that clever, clever fox kkat has already thought of that:

>I grinned as I next floated out Velvet Remedy’s custom PipBuck, still in my saddlebags after all these weeks of travel. Velvet Remedy gave me a pained expression.
Wait a minute. Wait just a God damned chicken-raping minute. PipBucks can't be removed from the owner's arm? Leg? Whatever? Then how the hell did Velvet get hers off?!? And if there is a way to take it off, why doesn't Littlepoop, whose literal job is performing maintenance on PipBucks and who performed the maintenance on Velvet's, not know how to get hers off? Unless someone can point to a specific section of text where this discrepancy is explained, I'm calling shenanigans. That's two flashing neon continuity errors in the space of a single microscene.

Anyway, it looks like she doesn't expect her friends to just sit around playing with each others' genitals until she gets back; she has a job for them. She gives some kind of "override device" that she apparently got from Homage (I don't remember her ever receiving such a device nor do I have any idea what the fuck this thing is or what it's for, but at this point I don't have the patience to comb through the text to confirm) along with some instructions:

>I need you to take this to the Fillydelphia Tower and attach it to the maneframe in the base station. Once you do, it will give DJ Pon3 both eyes and voice in Fillydelphia, kicking Red Eye out.
I don't really see how this would automatically "kick Red Eye out," and in any case, if she's going to assassinate him anyway, who gives a fuck whether or not he can use the radio? And if it's that much of a game changer, why not just forget about sneaking into Fillydelphia and focus on putting this dumb thingamabob on the tower herself? None of this makes any goddamn sense.

Anyway, they all agree to this idiotic plan and the scene ends.

Page break. For absolutely no reason beyond that there's one left that she hasn't seen yet, Littlepoop decides to take a plunge into another one of SteelHooves' memory orbs.

Once again, she is seeing things through SteelHooves' eyes, though he has his Ranger armor on this time. He is witnessing a conversation between AJ and Rainbow Dash. The gist of the scene is that AJ is selling Sweet Apple Acres to Apple Bloom in order to finance the Steel Ranger product. AB enters the room, and explains that StableTec plans to build a stable underneath the barn. Apart from revealing one minor detail (the mysterious transmitter towers were apparently built by RD's Ministry of Awesome), we don't learn anything from this scene that we didn't already know.

The chapter ends when the memory does.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Generous Souls

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>“We stand at the dawn of a new golden age. Where others merely survive, we thrive! And while I have led your efforts, it has been by your own strength... Because, yes, freedom is what we all work towards.”
This quote sounds like something Red Eye might say, and it probably has at least some relevance to the text. The last chapter's epitaph was about muffins, which had fuck-all to do with anything and was completely retarded.

Anyway, Littlepoop had to turn over her massive collection of random junk to Calamity, including her barding and weapons and so forth. She was then dressed in smelly slave rags and locked in the back of a wagon.

The moronic plan that the group came up with is even dumber in its actual implementation. Basically, the Rangers just leave her in the goddamn wagon, where she is to wait until a group of slavers that the Rangers apparently bribed and/or cajoled come to pick her up. I fail to see how the end result of this is any different than if they just let her wander around until actual slavers found her. But at this point who cares; this chapter is 18,000 goddamn words long and we've still got another twenty chapters or so left after that. Let's just grit our teeth and get through this.

This entire microscene plays like a recap episode of the story so far. Littlepoop blathers on in her usual stream-of-consciousness style, recounting how she felt alone and isolated growing up in the stable, and developed a pseudo-relationship with a fictional image of Velvet Remedy from her songs on the radio. Then, after escaping from the stable, she met Calamity, and so forth and so on.

There's quite a bit in here that I could probably greentext and go over, but I'd have roughly the same comment for each selection: it all rings completely false. Littlepoop basically sums up her experiences with her various traveling companions and blathers out a lot of schmaltz about how much she's learned about friendship, and frankly that would be a fine theme for a story like this; however, none of this has been conveyed in the actual text. This long, incoherent text has been nothing but a bunch of disconnected dungeon crawls. The protagonist and these side characters she travels with cooperate well enough, but they haven't really bonded with each other in any meaningful way; certainly nothing has happened to make them feel like a group of close friends. Velvet and LP barely know anything more about each other than they did when they lived in the stable, and nearly everything about Calamity is still a mystery. In fact, at this point we know more about SteelHooves' past than we do about Calamity's. If you want to make "friendship" a major theme in your story, you need to do more than just throw a group of characters together and have them fight a few monsters.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305361
305363
>>305351
>Sure, if the afterlife is confirmed to exist and you want your immortal soul to ascend to heaven by the light of The LORD Jesus Christ it makes sense to stay away from magic where you sacrifice a portion of your soul to get stronger or trade your soul to a demon for power or create a respawn point by splitting a chunk of your soul into some random object.
>But if there is no afterlife and when you die your soul rots away just like your liver and spleen so you can't become a ghost, what's the harm in fucking with it?
This is actually a pretty good point. Part of the reason that LP's religiousness feels so phony is that it's never really been established what, if anything, any of these ponies really believe in. It's clear that LP was taught to revere Celestia and Luna as goddesses, but what are the tenets of the religion exactly? What differentiates LP's view of life (and the afterlife, if it applies) from that of an "atheist" like Calamity? How do these beliefs affect the choices these characters make? I don't think the author could answer these questions or has even bothered to think about them, which is why this whole aspect of the story doesn't resonate.

>>305352
>My understanding is that the elevator shaft thing was a mid-war assassination attempt that Applejack happened to survive. I don't recall where or if it's clarified, maybe later on, but I think it's a matter of an unclear timeline rather than a continuity error.
That would clear up the continuity issue, although the author should have made it much clearer that she survived if he wanted to avoid this sort of confusion. When a scene ends with a character falling hundreds of stories down an elevator shaft, and then in the next scene you have their lover seeking bloody revenge on the person who cut the cable, it sort of gives you the impression that the character probably died.

Actually, if AJ wasn't killed in the elevator accident, it actually transforms SteelHooves' revenge into a much more heinous act. He doesn't just kill the chariot-driver pony, he tears off his wing and murders him in a pretty bloodthirsty and sadistic manner. If AJ had died in the crash, it's understandable that her lover might be angry and heartbroken enough to go a little overboard when avenging her. However, if all he did was try to kill her, that's a whole different situation. Someone should probably sit kkat down and explain to him the difference between crimes and attempted crimes; he seems to struggle with this distinction.
Anonymous
727b684
?
No.305363
f05.jpg
>>305361
GG, I think you're really great and if I was a cute little pony mare, I'd let you... Well, you know cuddle me.
But I'm not so that will never be the case.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.305373
>>305351
Kkat is following PURELY on Fallout 3 logic where the only reference of taking a Pip-Boy off is a character whose arm was sawn off by the Brotherhood of Steel in order to steal his device because it wouldn't come off.

However, as you mentioned, this is dumb because Pip's whole JOB, in fact, the REASON THIS STORY EXISTS, is because someone took their Pip-Buck off.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305377
Isn't it ironic that in Kkat's attempt to rip off and one-up the excessively bleak and grim and tragic story of Dead Money's Sierra Madre, he focuses on the idea of "a city with poison cloud" and rips that off for Canterlot while losing the deeper context like who made that cloud (Think Tank) and how so many death traps and hazards in the Sierra Madre (that weren't thanks to the Think Tank experiments) were the result of the owner's good intentions or incompetence while the best thing that owner ever did for you besides gather his gold in one place was design a deathtrap you can use on Elijah even though that trap was meant for someone else?

Sierra Madre was a monument to the inability to let go and the folly of trying to hold on to what's out of your control, yet you can learn its lesson and prove it wrong at the same time by holding on to your new friends and helping them, and getting helped by them in turn at the end. Motherfucking deep!

Deeper than "Zebras nuked this town and Celly and Luna died holding in this fart cloud so it wouldn't spread outside Canterlot and they wanted to give Equestrians time to get to their bomb shelters, that's why it's still in a fart cloud 200 in this town years later".

I love a good heroic sacrifice as much as the next guy but the war never would have gotten this far if Celly did her job better or if Luna felt like pulling a heroic sacrifice earlier. Not that Luna should have to do so, the Zebras are at fault for their fucktarded niggereligion. Still, while giving the most OP characters (or what we thought were OP at the time) heroic sacrifices early on so they don't invalidate weaker heroes or stop them from suffering as underdogs in tense exciting scenes is a basic smart writing technique for shooing out the gods among the cast so the mortals can be challenged, the author sucks gay asshole and fails at life so it turns out gay.

Yet as ironic as copying the Sierra Madre's fate onto a city that did nothing wrong is, it might be more ironic that in Kkat's attempt to one-up The Cloud's corrosive yet stuff-preserving effect, his mind immediately leaps to edgy cliche body horror in the form of fusing things together that were never meant to be fused. Like a pony fusing with the sidewalk. Or a soldier fusing with his armour. Or Fallout fusing with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305400
305401
9417e3d8f1bb9b70750e8dc841f51ca2edcf13b6fcd42dba294e2a4b55e382fe_1.jpg
>>305357

>I am quite sure he [SteelHooves] did not reveal to Applejack the murder he committed.
This seems to confirm that AJ did not die in the elevator crash. The author should have been a lot more clear about this in order to avoid confusion.

Anyway, LP blathers on for awhile, drawing some rather weak parallels between herself and SteelHooves.

>Thinking on these things, I suddenly found the parallel downright creepy.
The "parallel" basically amounts to: "SteelHooves kept secrets from his lover and LP has done the same." Since thus far the only "secret" between LP and Homage is a lie of omission (she kept mum about SteelHooves' murder of what's-his-name from Tenpony Tower), whereas SH seems to have sadistically and brutally killed the pony responsible for AJ's (attempted) murder (and again, it would have been nice of the author to clarify that the murder was not successful), it's a pretty weak parallel.

>And while I can only guess at what befell their relationship, I do know that he and Applejack were together the day the bombs fell.
>And I also know that, ultimately, she left him. She chose her family over him, and she left him behind.
Where is she getting this information from? I'm honestly not following her here. Up until literally a paragraph ago I've been assuming that AJ was killed in the elevator crash that her chariot driver engineered. I don't recall hearing anything about she and SteelHooves being together when the bombs fell, or that she left him for her family or whatever the hell.

There have been so many damned flashbacks and memory orbs and journal recordings and so forth and so on that it is virtually impossible to keep accurate track of all the shit that has happened in this story. As ever, I fully acknowledge the possibility that AJ being with SH when the bombs fell, and their subsequent breakup, was covered at some point and I've just forgotten about it. However, the fact that it's this hard to keep track of just buttresses one of my most frequently voiced complaints: that this story is too long, too convoluted, and consists of too many random pieces of information with too little emphasis on any of its significance. If either of these facts were stated at some point, it was probably several chapters ago, and they were likely hidden in tiny paragraphs floating in a vast sea of word-vomit about safecracking and ammunition specs.

This story is a meandering, disorganized clusterfuck made up of all sorts of random tidbits of information on all manner of subjects: objects, weapons, ammunition types, contents of safes, types of enemies, where particular objects were found, and on top of that there are multiple story threads involving multiple characters, most of whom don't even actually appear in the story except in flashbacks. This information is just tossed into the text at random whenever the author feels like mentioning a particular factoid, without any coherent plot structure or any apparent meaningful connection between most of these subjects; the author just expects us all to have photographic memory and be able to instantly recall anything he wrote at any given point in time, regardless of how minor or insignificant it may have seemed. You would literally need to have Rainman-tier autism powers to keep track of even a fifth of the nonsense that this author has shat into this rancid bowl of literary diarrhea.

Anyway, I guess Littlepoop feels guilty about not telling Homage the truth about what SteelHooves did, because she resolves to tell her as soon as she gets the chance, even though she acknowledges that this may damage her relationship with SteelHooves. Nothing else happens in this microscene; she rambles incoherently about friendship or something for several more paragraphs and then the scene ends.

Page break. The slaver that the Rangers paid off or threatened or whatever shows up, and pulls her wagon into town as planned. Several ponies comment on there being only one slave inside the wagon, so already she is drawing unwanted attention to herself. The whole thing goes even more awry when one of them tears off her bandage and reveals her PipBuck. However, in the time-honored tradition of inept guards in adventure stories, they do nothing about it; LP is waved through, with only a note added that she should be sent to a "Doc Slaughter" to have her "leg-terminal" removed.

>For a pony who had been so sorely disappointed that she had a PipBuck for a cutie mark, I was remarkably terrified at the thought I might lose it. As best I could parse the buck’s attitude, these slavers had seen PipBuck’s before. And had ways to remove them.
PipBucks, not PipBuck's. Also, the literal best turn this story could possibly take right now would be to have the guards strip LP of her last piece of plot armor and condemn her to a life of hard manual labor without hope of escape. I would have no problem slogging through another 400,000 words of this if it meant getting to see LP being beaten and humiliated over and over again, constantly reminded of how powerless she is without her magical Mary-Sue-device to rely on, until eventually she dies of exhaustion.

Anyway, Fillydelphia looks about the way you'd expect it to: smoking workpits full of laboring ponies, guards everywere, grimdark as far as the eye can see. LP notes that Pyrelight, Velvet's pet phoenix, has followed her.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305401
305410 305414 305434
steve_jobs___portrait_by_rware_d3af4rz-fullview.jpg
>>305400

Page break. The next scene begins with another of Red Eye's rants:

>“Behold!” called out the voice of Red Eye. “We stand on the threshold of a new dawn. With every factory we recover, every mill we rebuild, we move one big step forward towards an Equestria where our children can live in the safety and comfort of modern cities, not grovel in the dilapidated ruins of the past. With the stone and glass and steel forged by these, we can rebuild the homes and towers and lanes of mass transportation that will bestow freedom and prosperity upon generations to come! This, my children, is the very last generation that needs to cringe in caves and scramble for two-hundred-year-old scraps of food.”
It's a testament to this race's ineptitude that it's taken them 200 years to figure out that you can just rebuild stuff and grow more food, instead of just decorating old ruins with entrails and relying on long-expired cans of green beans for sustenance. Simultaneously, it's a testament to their fortitude that there are even any of them left alive, if this is the extent of their survival skills.

>My PipBuck was not shy about informing me that the gas pouring out of the workpit smokestacks was poisonous. The guards had gas masks, but they apparently couldn’t spare any for the slaves. I trembled with anger. The rate of attrition here must be unconscionable.
As ever, this is both stupid and implausible. What is the point in killing your slaves? Every time one of these ponies dies it means that one of these guards has to go out and find somepony else to take their place. It's a criminally inefficient system. Being callous or indifferent to the slaves' overall well being is one thing, but deliberately forcing them to breathe poisonous smoke, thus ensuring that they die and need replacement even more quickly than they would normally, is just idiotic. Here's a thought: if you have to vent poisonous smoke, and you don't have enough gas masks to go around, why not just run a pipe away from the work area and vent the smoke someplace where nopony will have to breathe it? Or would that make too much sense for a kkat story?

>A large, black griffin in dark-grey Talon barding landed on the roof adjacent to the chariot lot and turned her white-feathered head to scowl at us. Above her head rose a banner that fluttered in the wind: the Red Eye flag.
To my recollection there has been no description given of this flag at any point in the story; in fact, this is the first time I can remember even hearing mention of a flag. However, since the author seems uninterested in providing us with even the most cursory description, I'm going to assume that Red Eye's flag consists of a rainbow-colored field, emblazoned with an image of a fat, pimple-faced man with fake bosoms and mutilated genitalia, being facefucked by a big nigger who is commenting in a talk balloon about how kkat's chin stubble keeps tickling his balls.

Anyway, for absolutely no reason, a griffon suddenly appears and guns down one of the slavers. So, in addition to all the dead slaves they have to endlessly replace, they also seem to have to endlessly replace the slavers who round them all up. Someone needs to sit Red Eye down and run him down on the basics of human resources management. Pony resources; whatever.

ANYWAY, the griffon introduces herself as Stern, and she assures them that this is her town, and they will not interrupt Red Eye when he is speaking. Even though he is speaking via loudspeaker and can't really be interrupted.

Page break. Littlepoop now draws a parallel to herself and Red Eye, which mostly amounts to acknowledging that they are both bloodthirsty killers willing to go to whatever extremes they deem necessary in order to accomplish their goals. The main difference between them that I can see is that Red Eye actually has goals; or at least that his goals amount to more than just looting every safe in Equestria and collecting a bunch of action figures of the Mane 6. But, I'm willing to give LP a point or two here; the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem.

Anyway, Stern gives a long speech explaining how things work in Fillydelphia. The quick rundown is basically this: Red Eye gives his captives the option of either doing hard labor until they die of exhaustion and/or gas poisoning, or they can volunteer for more dangerous jobs. The dangerous jobs vary; the first (and probably most appealing) job involves joining a paramilitary outfit that goes around recovering old technology from stables. This task, obviously, involves a great deal of personal risk and requires combat skills, since the Steel Rangers have the same goal. Stern also mentions that the Rangers are willing to kill not only whoever attempts to interfere with them, but also kills the survivors they find in the stables. Needless to say, Littlepoop is horrified by this revelation about her new friends. This job lasts two years, and if you're still alive at the end of it, you earn your freedom.

The second option she is given is to join the group that harvests radioactive materials. This involves exposing oneself to near-lethal doses of radiation. Though Stern assures them that anypony who joins this squad will be granted treatment for radiation sickness as well as their freedom, Littlepoop is suspicious of the survival rate.

I was perfectly fine with all of this, until Stern got to option number three:

>“Your third option,” Stern informed us, holding up the remaining talon, “Is to fight in The Pit. The Pit is arena combat, pony against pony. Each Event has six rounds, and there is usually an Event once every week.
That's right, you heard right. Option number three is to fight in the God damned Thunderdome. Because what cheesy apocalyptic nightmare tale would be complete without a pointless gladiator-style battle scene in which hapless captives duke it out for the amusement of some deranged tyrannical ruler.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
846340c
?
No.305410
305414 305416 305419 305434
b4b.jpeg
>>305401

There are technically two more options to choose from, though I don't get the impression LP will choose either of them. One of them involves joining the Unity, a concept which I'm going to tentatively assume the author intends to explain eventually. The last option is basically death; try to escape and you won't survive, that sort of thing.

Anyway, after the griffon gives them her little pep-talk, LP and the other slaves are taken to their quarters, which for some reason is located in an old abandoned bumper-car ride at what was formerly an amusement park. I'm assuming this location was chosen for no reason beyond that an abandoned, run-down amusement park makes for a stereotypically creepy setting. And what I mean by that is that I assume that the developers of Fallout 3 made an abandoned amusement park level for basically that reason, and that kkat is just ripping it off. There are, naturally, plenty of over-the-top descriptions of the treatment of slaves in Fillydelphia:

>On the path up to the gateway, I had spotted slaves harnessed to actual plow wagons, pushing mounds of rubble as they pulled a chariot behind them, carrying the slave master pony who whipped them if they weren’t going fast enough. Or if the slave master liked the sounds the poor pony made when struck brutally with the lash. Or if she was just bored.
This whole thing is just comedy at this point. If they really wanted to torture these ponies, they would make them read and review this story.

Also, for some reason the Fillydelphia hub of the Ministry of Morale is located in the amusement park. It is described thusly:

>It was clearly stylized as a barn, looking like nothing so much as a colossal version of the old building on Sweet Apple Acres. The first floors were covered in gaily-colored murals and fairytale characters, most of which had slid from the Precipice of Childlike Frivolity into the Valley of Disturbing Imagery. The roller coaster that looped all about the amusement park actually passed through the building on the sixth floor. A huge radio tower jutted up from the top, modified to look like a comically oversized weathervane.
Literally nothing about this description indicates that this would be a Ministry hub, let alone gives any clue as to which specific Ministry it would be a hub of. However, Littlepoop's Mary Sue perception powers once again allow her to just pluck this information out of the aether.

Anyway, this just goes on and on in a fairly predictable fashion. Littlepoop goes to the slave quarters and the guards leave her with the other slaves, who for some reason are not currently being whipped or made to do any work. Maybe it's their day off or something. A couple of generic bully-type slaves, who we can assume are meant to be some former raiders that Red Eye's goons rounded up, approach Littlepoop and engage in some generic bullying. Littlepoop responds to their generic taunts with a generic snappy comeback, which rouses their generic anger. Blood and Daff are their names.

Littlepoop decides not to fight them, preferring to be a magnet for their abuse in order to save the other ponies from it, or something. I guess. She lets Blood punch her a few times and then Daff tries to rape her. However, before he can do this, she grabs his dick with her unicorn powers and whispers to him that he would be well advised to rethink this course of action, unless he wants to end up having something in common with kkat. Daff wisely takes her advice and backs off, though he does kick her in the pussy as he is walking away.

Page break. Littlepoop's exciting foray into the life of a slave continues. She complains about the quality of the oatmeal being served, and then receives some information from one of her fellow slaves. Apparently the death-pits with the toxic gas she saw earlier are designed to incinerate radioactive parasprites, or something. Only ponies who try to escape get assigned that particular garbage detail. We also get a sort-of clue about what the "Unity" that has been mentioned might refer to. Apparently, ponies are brought before something called the "Goddess," and it is rumored that they are then transformed into alicorns. The only thing that is known for certain is that no one who volunteers for that particular job comes back.

Page break. It's night now, and LP is trying to sleep. Despite having been a slave for probably about 8 or 9 hours now, she does not seem to have had to do any actual work yet. It's also worth noting that although she was supposed to be sent to someone named "Doc Slaughter" to have her PipBuck removed, this has not yet happened. Nice to see that security here is as tight as it has been in every other place she's visited.

Speaking of her PipBuck, she sees a glow of green flame, and realizes that it's probably that faggot ass bird again. So, she uses her Eyes Forward Sparkle on the goddamned PipBuck that they let her keep, even though they clearly know what this thing is and what it's capable of, to locate the bird and wave to it. She takes no other action. Nothing else happens.

Page break. As usual, we are dropped into the middle of a scene with absolutely no indication of where and when it's taking place. We can probably assume that it's now the next morning, however. She is speaking to someone named Mister Shiny, whose job is to assign her a job.

Shiny notices that she still has her PipBuck, and also notices that she was supposed to be sent to the Doc to have it taken off. However, he decides to chuck common sense completely out the window and not do that at all. He instead decides to give her a gun and send her on her first job: go into some building and use her PipBuck's targeting powers to kill some parasprites. Nice to see these guys run such a tight ship. To be fair, though, they don't supply her with ammo; she gets that passed to her through a slot once she's in the building.
Anonymous
a827459
?
No.305414
>>305401
>>305410
>"As a slave, you can choose between different lines of work..."
>Well, at least this being-a-slave arch changes things up from the typical LP loots shit routine that we're so tired of-
>"You're first job will be to loot this house. Do you know what looting it?"
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305416
>>305410
They had a job ready for LP that required someone with a pipbuck's aiming system this entire time
nopony planned on sending a firing squad in with poison gas bombs and Heavy Flamer flamethrowers not even parasprites could dodge.
Not even slave-using empires ruled by mad emperors can wipe their own asses without Littlepip around to be the hero for them.
Mother of fuck.
Littlepip is a unicorn with mighty telekinesis. She lifted boxcars and giant pieces of rubble and used them as weapons. There are places she could be useful to the slave empire and a game of "shoot the parasprites" is not her place.
She is also a genetically healthy (well physically but not mentally) pony from a vault.
You'd think this slave empire could trade her away to a very rich pervert who wants to own and rape littlepip daily because he's sick of dirty irradiated Wastelander pussy and wants fresh untainted (heh heh) Stable Pony taint. With money gained from that, surely many more work-ready slaves could be bought. After all it makes sense that pleasure slaves would cost more than work slaves since damn near any slave can be forced to do work or killed but only some ponies are suitable for pleasure.
Remember that part in the Dragon Quest game where you wear purple and have a yellow cat friend, where Pancreaz is killed when you're a child and you grow up a slave forced to make a temple for the baddies who killed him? That's better writing than this.
For fuck's sake, Littlepoop was stripped of everything except her PipBuck.
She lost her guns. She lost her armour.
She hasn't lost her overpowered magic because Kkunt never read a single story where horn rings or locked cock cages or crystalline growths are used to lock a unicorn's magic.
She lost her overpowered friends designed to be individual charaxters second and first the most useful things possible in the wasteland short of a giant robot friend or an immortal unkillable magically regenerating Designated Tank or an invincible ghost friend that can kill anything with ghost powers or a magical Healer or an obligatory good Alicorn able to pull triple duty as Tank and Healer and DPS.
But LP still has her mary sue aura and plot armour.
The author could force LP into hell to make people on the fence about her pity her and fall in love with her. But instead it's just another questline in her stupid and boring murderhobo spree. Nothing out of the ordinary. Business as usual. Kill ten dudes because some NPC says so. It's like a World of Warcraft queat except she wasn't sent to gather 20 lion paws, wolf teeth, and zebra hooves each from an area full of monsters that suddenly only have one or none of those after you kill them.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305419
305420 305425 305426 305434
1604853154190.jpg
>>305410

Page break. Turns out that Littlepoop's new life as a slave is an awful lot like her old life as not-a-slave. We are unceremoniously dumped into the middle of a scene in which she is doing battle with a bunch of robotic turrets in some mysterious room. She hides behind a desk that just so happens to have a terminal that can shut down the turrets, and it just so happens that she can hack it. One of the turrets gets in one last blast that causes the terminal to explode and blow shattered glass into her face, but of course she is wearing special armor that the slavers gave her to ward off parasprites or some retarded shit like that, so as usual she is completely unharmed.

>Until now, the bug hunt was more frustrating than dangerous. The barding had made me effectively immune to the parasprites, and I had become so practiced in the art of stealth that I could sneak up right behind one before the half-blind things spotted me. Which was good, since I had almost no skill with magical energy weapons. Even at close range, even with S.A.T.S., I missed as often as I hit.
I know this is probably an idiotic question at this point, but what the fuck is the difference between firing a magical energy gun and firing a regular gun? You point it, you pull the trigger, and it fires a projectile. It seems like this should matter even less when a computer is doing the aiming for her anyway. Disclaimer: my assumption here is that "magical energy" weapons are a different "skill" than regular-ass guns, and since she doesn't have any "skill points" in magical energy weapons just yet, she can't use these weapons as effectively. So, my question here is basically rhetorical. I know the answer; I am simply pointing out, for the umpteen-billionth time, that video game rules often do not translate well into written fiction.

Anyway, it looks like the terminal exploded before she was able to finish hacking it or whatever, because the turrets are still shooting at her. Meanwhile, the parasprites are hard to hit because reasons, and she is running out of ammo, or batteries, or whatever these "magic energy weapons" use exactly. Oh, also: she finds a locked door marked "maintenance," but she can't get in because she doesn't have her stupid screwdriver to pick locks; poor her. Presumably, this is kkat's idea of putting his protagonist in a tight spot.

Eventually, she defeats the turret by throwing the desk at it. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop has barricaded herself in an upstairs office. I guess there is still one turret left that's firing at her, or maybe it's a different turret; at this point I'm not even asking questions like this anymore. There are also a bunch of parasprites swarming around down below.

Apparently, the building she is in was some kind of printer's office. Using her Mary Sue powers of deduction, she surmises that the reason Red Eye wanted the parasprites cleared out of here manually instead of just setting the whole dumb building on fire and being done with it is that he wants the printing presses that are in here. Littlepoop seems to be developing a weird love-hate relationship with this guy; on the one hoof, she is appalled by how evil and icky and mean he is, but on the other, she approves of his wanting to print books and build schools.

Anyway, she sees another goddamn terminal so she sits down to hack it, in hopes that it will turn the turrets off; we all know how this shit works by now.

>The password, interestingly, was “Generous Souls”.
This is actually not that interesting. I think I know where the author is going with this, but from LP's perspective there's nothing significant about this phrase. Also, unless this password has some significance in and of itself, I see no reason for it to be used as the chapter title.

Anyways, herp derp it turns out that this print shop is another Ministry hub, this time the Ministry of Image. Littlepoop seems surprised by this, which is in itself surprising. Naturally, there is no reason why anyone would expect this building to be a hub, but there was no reason to think the roller coaster funhouse building was a hub either, and the same goes for the train station and all the other places she's been that turned out to be hubs. However, in those cases, her Mary Sue powers somehow revealed the information to her, so I'm not quite sure why that trick isn't working here.

However, she is still able to put her Sue powers to use: using her usual convoluted logic, she is able to somehow deduce that the Ministry of Image was basically responsible for printing up most of the posters and propaganda and so forth that we've seen plastered all over the place, and so it would logically follow that they would use a print shop as their headquarters. This seems a little strange since it was established earlier that they also invented that weird Pegasus armor. Come to think of it, even though AJ's Ministry was supposed to be about wartime technology, it seems like all of the Ministries we've seen so far have been involved in weapons design to some extent. Everything about this story's design is sloppy; even sloppier than kkat's face after "ladies" night at Club Manhole.

Page break. Despite having no obvious reason to do so, LP downloads all of the messages on the terminal to her PipBuck for later reading. Also, it turns out the terminal conveniently contains an app that can reprogram the turrets to shoot the parasprites, so that takes care of the closest thing LP had to a challenge in here. Both of these things are par for the course at this point.

Oh, one last thing:

>Welcome to the Ministry of Image, Fillydelphia Hub, Miss Periwinkle!
>It has been 202 Years, 37 Days, 1 Hour and 13 Minutes since your last log-in.
I actually thought this was kind of cute. I'll give kkat a point or two for it.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305420
305425 305434 305460
1604944119941.png
>>305419

Continuing to receive manna from heaven on account of being the author's chosen, LP now wanders into a bathroom where she finds a new screwdriver. Oh goody, now she can pick locks again. With those pesky parasprites gone, we can finally get back to what this story is really about: LP accumulating worthless junk that for some reason ponies 200 years ago considered valuable enough to lock inside safes. Oh yeah, there's also a skeleton in here; blah blah, somepony died, how tragic.

>There wasn’t much left of her maintenance uniform, but it was enough to patch the hole in my environmental suit with the aid of wonderglue.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it, but at one point one of the turrets blew a hole in her special armor, or suit, or whatever they gave her to wear in here. I think it was a problem at one point.

>And there had been several bottles of the latter in the pony’s toolbox. Along with a wrench and (squee!) a screwdriver!
God damn it kkat, I warned you about using the word "squee."
*shoves anti-machine gun up kkat's ass sideways*
*kkat enjoys it, so the purpose is defeated*

Anyway, blah blah blah. She also finds a tin of crack mints, but her new clean and sober self refuses to go down that crazy road again, so she leaves them be. She also manages to remove her shackles, which I'd honestly forgotten she was even wearing since they've hardly affected anything she's been able to do so far.

The turrets have meanwhile killed all but five of the fifty-some-odd parasprites she was sent in here to kill. However, she is out of ammo or energy pellets or whatever her retarded magic gun runs on, so that should provide us with some tension for all of about ten seconds. I'll start the clock now.

Exactly ten seconds later, she picks the lock to the maintenance room door, but unfortunately there are no energy croutons inside. Damn, this story is getting intense. I'm literally gnawing my fingernails into bloody nubs wondering if she's ever going to be able to kill those last five parasprites. However, she does find yet another skeleton, along with some more posters and a newspaper clipping about the Wonderbolts rescuing some fucking prisoners from Zebra pirates. Yarr, matey!

>The article clearly pre-dated the beginning of the war. One more thing to think about later, when I wasn’t trying to find a way to disintegrate parasprites without a magical energy weapon, or incinerate them without fire.
Holy jeez, kkat is a master of suspense. Littlepoop has to think about newspaper articles and figure out how to kill five parasprites? At the same time?!? Someone better get me a seat extension, because I'm already at the edge of mine. In all seriousness, though, what is there to think about here exactly? "The article clearly pre-dated the beginning of the war." This statement is completely self-explanatory and requires no additional contemplation.

Anyway, it turns out MacGyver has nothing on Littlepoop. Using a bag of pornographic magazines and the remnants of some unknown pony's lunch from 200 years ago, she somehow manages to cobble together a homemade landmine according to some instructions she read in Derpy's wasteland survival manual. As it this weren't preposterous enough on its own, she ultimately decides that she doesn't even need the landmine; she just...wait a minute. I'm actually not sure what she does. Here, I'll just dump this entire section of text in verbatim; maybe one of the more Fallout-savvy people can make sense of whatever the hell is being referenced:

>Inspiration struck. I dumped out the magazines and set the sack aside. Then I emptied the lunchbox of the muck that the food inside had rotted into. I brought up the schematic that Ditzy Doo had given me as a gift. I didn’t really expect a homemade mine would be any good against parasprites, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t find a use for one later.

>I was about to put my new mine into the sack when I had another idea. I couldn’t set the damn pony-eating bugs on fire inside the building, but…

>Half an hour later, I trotted out of the printing house, a sack full of angry parasprites floating next to me.

>“Oh, Pyrelight!” I sing-songed with a smile.

Seriously; what the fuck? Can anyone explain to me what's going on here? As far as I can tell, she uses the moldy remains of a sandwich to somehow create a landmine, and then somehow ends up trapping all of the parasprites in a bag, which she then...feeds to the phoenix? I guess? Or maybe gives them to her to set on fire?

How exactly did she manage to capture the parasprites, anyway? Is the implication that she somehow used the old sandwich as bait? Was this before or after she turned it into a landmine? And why did she even make the landmine if she wasn't going to use it? How did she even make the landmine? Is there some Fallout gag where moldy bologna sandwiches are explosive or something? I'm not even shitposting anymore; I literally have no idea what to make of this. This is quite possibly the most autistic, nonsensical thing in the entire text so far, and that's saying a lot.

Page break.

>Mister Shiny was most impressed, and I felt myself flush with pride. Only for the pride to be swiftly followed by shame and anger that I was letting myself feel happy about slave work. And worse, thankful to one of the slavers for praising me.
Don't feel too bad, LP; there is literally zero difference between "slave work" and the nonsense you've been doing up until now.

By now, I of course have absolutely zero respect for kkat as a writer, and I expect basically nothing from him; but, I thought that this "LP becomes a slave" arc would at least involve her doing, you know...actual slave stuff. Toiling away in a salt mine, pulling gigantic stone blocks up the side of a pyramid, that sort of thing. If this is all slavery is, I don't know what on earth the nogs have been bitching about for all these years.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305425
305434
bottlecaps.png
>>305419
your assumption is correct
even though Energy Weapons are designed to look and function exactly like guns except with batteries like Energy Cells and MicroFusion Cells, and they've got traditional triggers and anyone familiar with a gun should find firing and aiming these easier than normal firearms with recoil...
they arbitrarily require a separate Energy Weapons skill that's arbitrarily different from the old Big Guns (miniguns) and Explosives (grenades and missile launchers) and Unarmed(bare fists+boxing gloves) and Melee Weapons(knives/swords/etc) and Small Guns (everything else including pistols and shotguns) skills.
to make things dumber, if you want to Recharge batteries your guns use you need a high Science skill which is also used for terminal-hacking, making the Energy Weapons skill even more redundant.
A cut "Flammable Bug Spray and lighter" weapon can be found in Fallout NV's data for the Honest Hearts DLC. This would be an Energy Weapon because the game's flamethrowers are arbitrarily coded to be Energy Weapons for no reason.
Laser energy weapons fire beams and Plasma ones fire green blobs while flamethrowers spit fire and rare Energy Weapons like the Alien Blaster fire sparkly blue instakill balls but they're usually inferior to guns since ammo's more plentiful even though it would make more sense for a post-apocalyptic society to prefer the reuseable batteries of laser weapons to the supposedly-scarce ammunition of traditional metal guns.
except for Euclid's C-Finder, that brings solar laser death on its foes and that's awesome.
You'd think energy weapons would have a "low-recoil, literal laser pinpoint accuracy, low strength requirement, perfectly silenced because light-beams don't make noise" niche as the perfect stealthy sniper weapons for fast-talkers and agile weaklings who could never keep shotguns and rifles on-target but nah, energy weapons are a gimmicky bonus flavour to make this boring shooty game look and feel more different from the norm than it actually is. Ain't like laser weapons have recharging periods and high damage outputs balanced around them. Or a distinct niche like piercing heavily armoured foes and overloading their energy shields or dealing nonlethal damage at range. Or infinite ammo and a Heat Meter to manage instead of the normal ammo count. It took until FNV before the series finally got three interesting energy weapons: The Pulse Gun that fucks robots+power armour up, slowly-recharging guns like the MF Hyperbreeder Alpha, and Euclid's C-Finder which is the gun that aims the solar satellite death-laser.

A competent writer who wants to make a gun-user inept with Energy Weapons would write something that makes more sense like "She's used to reloading rifle clips and putting bullets in revolvers, not feeding batteries into a pistol's battery port one at a time under pressure while getting some upside-down on purpose" and "It's hard to sneak around when your energy pistol's coated in electrical noisy sparky coil bits and glowy LED rainbow gamer lightstrips that don't turn off" and "the retards who designed energy weapons put fashion and form miles before function by making them gaudy overly-bulky post-retrofuturist art-dicko toys that take up 85% of your vision when held in front of your face, made them unholsterable in traditional holsters, made them awkwardly-heavy in stupid wrong areas thanks to their weird shapes, and forgot to give them Iron Sights which them difficult to aim" right?

Kkat actually has (and misses) a chance to make LP's annoying snark right for once here. Littlepip could say "These laser pistols don't have iron sights! What kind of retard forgets to give their guns iron sights?!" because Fallout 3's art designiggers actually forgot to give most energy weapons iron sights and keep them from blocking most of your screen when aiming down sights.

>>305420
It's retarded that she uses a literal lunchbox to make a landmine.
What a bizarrely literal interpretation of the lunchbox landmine.
Surely there should be an explosive and shrapnel and some kind of sensor module in there, right?
I'd say we're reaching videogame crafting system levels of "By combining one wood and one apple you gain a sword" here but didn't the story already reach that level at least once beforehand?
Kkat's constant "Make this game easier for Littlepip aka me" moments destroy the audience's ability to take this story seriously. You can't make a fully functioning bomb with only 25% of the necessary ingredients!

I have no idea how she got all those parasprites into one sack but I guess she just remembered she has telekinesis and decided to swing the open sack around the room like a predatory bird gobbling up every bug while using centrifugal force to keep the bugs inside the sack. Then decided to walk outside with the sack and have Pyrelight The Phoenix burn the bugs instead of taking the Phoenix inside to burn the bugs or slamming the sack full of bugs against the ground like a pool ball in a long sock until everything inside was squished.

You'd think Kkat would love the opportunity to write about a "girl" smashing and abusing her own sack. heh heh, tranny bdsm cock and ball torture joke.

also gee it's a good thing for LP the PARASPRITES inside her sack aren't breeding so hard they'll burst out of the sack like Tribbles and flood the whole slave empire now that they're freed from that building
and gee it was nice for Red Eye's lot that the PARASPRITES didn't breed to overwhelm anypony who ventured into that building or breed enough to escape the building
seriously fucking hell if you're going to replace Fallout's mutated giant flies named Bloatflies with FIM's Parasprites, why throw away the reproductive ability that made the Parasprites an unusual yet extreme threat able to threaten your food source or destroy all non-food items in minutes?
In his quest to give fallout elements pony names, he forgot to copy a pony element that could actually help make his world sadder.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.305426
305427
>>305419
Well bucko, the "welcome back after 200~ years" message i'm almost CERTAIN is a gag found once or twice in the 3d fallout games, so Kkat is referencing that as well. I distinctly remember something like that, but I could be misremembering.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.305427
>>305426
Well shit I actually combed through every terminal on the wiki and didn't find any that the etnry was referencing, so huh. Guess it is a Kkat original. The only VAGUELY-related entries were cheeky references to the years being tracked by some automatic system.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305434
305464
fatfuckpip.jpg
>>305401
>Because what cheesy apocalyptic nightmare tale would be complete without a pointless gladiator-style battle scene in which hapless captives duke it out for the amusement of some deranged tyrannical ruler.
This is lifted directly from the part of Fallout 3 that this is area based on. In the game, winning in the arena is part of the plan - proving yourself allows you to move around the city more freely and get closer to the big bad.

>>305410
>And what I mean by that is that I assume that the developers of Fallout 3 made an abandoned amusement park level for basically that reason, and that kkat is just ripping it off.
I'll give him some very small credit here - the amusement park setting isn't ripped from any of the games. Fallout 3's Pitt DLC mostly takes place around an old steelworks. The whole amusement park thing is part 'haha pinkie funny', part setup for some daft acton scenes, and part setup for some other incredibly contrived nonsense that's coming up pretty soon.

>We also get a sort-of clue about what the "Unity" that has been mentioned might refer to. Apparently, ponies are brought before something called the "Goddess," and it is rumored that they are then transformed into alicorns. The only thing that is known for certain is that no one who volunteers for that particular job comes back.
Anyone that's played the original Fallout will know pretty much where this is going. The super mutants and their leader the Master forcibly convert normal humans into more of themselves. They also have a cult surrounding them called the Unity, which views the mutants as the next step in evolution. FoE's alicorns have the Goddess and their own Unity, though we've only seen faint hints of the religious aspect through that one preacher guy.

Basically, what we can take away from this is that Red Eye (based on the arguable villain of Fo3's Pitt DLC) seems to have some sort of partnership with the Goddess (based on the villain of Fo1). Once again, this would be neat to explore if Kkat could write worth a damn.

>>305410
>Daff wisely takes her advice and backs off, though he does kick her in the pussy as he is walking away.
Would now be a good time to point out that before writing FoE, Kkat specialized in writing and drawing furry sexual humiliation and genital torture? I'd put coin toss odds, minimum, on him getting a boner as he wrote this.

>>305419
>Turns out that Littlepoop's new life as a slave is an awful lot like her old life as not-a-slave.
It sure is convenient that Littlepip keeps on wandering into situations which coincidentally fit her ever-expanding skillset. Wouldn't want our protagonist to be in any danger of failing or being forced to compromise, would we?

>>305420
>Seriously; what the fuck? Can anyone explain to me what's going on here?
As I read it, she trapped all the sprites in the bag (how? who knows!) so that Pyrelight could burn them and held onto the mine for future use. Maybe? It's not very clear. As >>305425 pointed out, Fallout 3 lets you use lunchboxes as the casing for makeshift landmines.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
f271db1
?
No.305460
305461 305521
EWa0Z0uXgAUmOKM.png
>>305420

>Working swiftly did not lead to rest but to more work. I was assigned to the scrap yard for the rest of the day. I spent all of ten minutes getting instructions on the use of a gruesome-looking auto axe before the yard foreman, a slave himself, decided he just didn’t want such a dangerous tool in the hooves of such as small and weak-looking mare. I pointed out that, as a unicorn, I was more than capable of wielding the metal-cutting saw regardless of my physical size or strength. In response, he put me to work gathering the bits of scrap that the other workers (slaves, dammit!) were slicing off of old passenger wagons and other sizable metal artifacts of the past.
Everything about how this place works is idiotic. This pony literally just arrived here a day ago. She was brought in alone, in a wagon normally used to bring probably 15-20 slaves into the compound. She has a PipBuck attached to her leg, which she was trying to conceal with a bandage. She is able to use the machine's auto-targeting system and clearly has some past weapons experience. She may as well have just walked up to the front gate, rang the doorbell and said "excuse me, I'm a mercenary who is trying to infiltrate your society so I can overthrow it."

Does any of this raise even a single eyebrow? No, of course not. Not only do they let her keep her stupid PipBuck despite having the knowhow to remove it, they actually give her a gun on her first day as a slave and send her, alone, into some building, completely unsupervised, to snipe some parasprites. While she is in there, she manages to construct a homemade landmine out of a lunchbox and some apparently explosive sandwich remnants, which presumably they don't confiscate from her when she leaves. On top of that, she completes this task in what I would imagine is a remarkably short period of time, strolls out of the building (how did she even get out? I thought the text said they locked her inside) carrying a bag full of parasprites, which she then proceeds to incinerate by summoning a balefire phoenix and instructing it to set the bag ablaze. I'll hand it to Red Eye; he's definitely a unique villain. He's probably the first totalitarian dictator in history to create a brutal, oppressive regime that operates entirely on the honor system.

Now here's the kicker: after all of this, what is LP's next job? Rounding up excess scrap metal. They trust her with a gun, but apparently they don't trust her with an "auto-axe." Her first task as a slave is a bad-ass combat mission, and her second task is drudge work. There is absolutely no logic to this place at all.

>Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gorgeous yellow and green plumage of Pyrelight as she circled, a Wonderbolts lunchbox clutched in her talons, before soaring out of sight.
At the very least, this answers one of my questions. I was curious how she managed to smuggle her stupid sandwich-mine out of the print shop, since presumably even kkat has enough sense to realize that the guards would most likely search her after she completed her mission. Looks like she gave it to the stupid bird to carry. As ever, the guards remain blind and incompetent; one might think that a bright green, glowing balefire phoenix suddenly hanging around the compound everywhere clutching a Wonderbolts lunchbox in its talons might draw some attention, but nope. The guards are probably far too busy thinking up new ways to pointlessly torture and oppress their slaves, excepting of course the new girl, who for some reason gets automatically trusted with all the cool jobs that don't involve torture or backbreaking drudgery.

>My work was much easier than theirs thanks to my magic. And it afforded me the chance to speak with the other slaves. They were not a chatty bunch, quick to remind me that too much talk made the slavers nervous and was a quick way to get your tongue cut out. But I was still able to glean a few tidbits which convinced me that the only places likely to find either the schematics of the Rad-Engine or Red Eye’s research into Bypass Spells were the Alpha-Omega Hotel or the Ministry of Morale hub.
Any chance you could elaborate on this a little more, kkat? Seems a little odd that a bunch of low-level drones whose job is to walk around picking up pieces of metal would have any pertinent info about the two biggest top-secret operations being conducted in this compound.

This at least partially explains it:

>The Alpha-Omega was being used to for “special housing”.
The Alpha-Omega was being used for "special housing."

For the lower floors, this meant housing for Pit fighters. Being on the fast track to brutal death at the hooves of other slaves didn’t come without compensations: a much nicer place to bed down, shorter work hours, and (if rumors were true) access to a still. Who, or what, was housed in the upper floors was apparently a closely guarded secret.
Presumably, this means that the upper floors of the hotel must be where some kind of top-secret research is going on. I'm sure it's not where Red Eye keeps his porn stash or anything like that.

As to the Ministry hub, there's this:
>From the ponies willing to talk, everything about the comically barn-shaped MoM building was a mystery save that there was always a Pinkie Pie Balloon anchored there, that Stern roosted in the upper tower and that Red Eye himself had private chambers somewhere within.

I'll grant that both of these locations are suspicious, and if I were in LP's horseshoes I'd probably begin my search here as well. However, it's still a bit of a logical stretch to assume that these two places are being used for these two specific projects. They could be secret for any number of reasons. However, I'm assuming that as usual, LP's magical Mary Sue powers of omniscience are once again filling in the gaps.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
f271db1
?
No.305461
305463 305464 305466
1617695252268.jpg
>>305460

Anyway, while LP is talking to the slaves, she looks up and sees a big black chariot being pulled by griffons flying past, which appears to signal the arrival of Red Eye.

Page break. Everyone is gathered at some kind of assembly place, where I guess Red Eye is about to give a speech or something. He walks up to the podium and LP observes that he is just an earth pony stallion, powerfully built but otherwise unremarkable.

>Flanked by an escort of Alicorns, the pony whom I had come to blame for a great deal of the Equestrian Wasteland’s wrongness walked up from a ramp on the right side of the building where Stern was perched.
Why has she come to blame him for a great deal of the Equestrian Wasteland's wrongness? When did she come to this decision? We barely heard anything about Red Eye for the first half of what I will generously call the story; most of the fucked up shit that LP saw was just random violence that had nothing to do with him. Either that or the remnants of some ancient tragedy that she blamed on StableTec or whoever. I'll grant that Red Eye seems like a pretty obvious bad guy, but I don't get the impression that he has much influence beyond Fillydelphia. He's hardly arch-nemesis material.

Anyway, LP is contemplating using her preposterous telekinesis powers to just drop something big on his head and end it all here and now, but she then notices an alicorn. The alicorn spots her, and begins circling protectively overhead. LP realizes that the alicorn has recognized her; however, for some completely unknown reason, it chooses to take no action against her.

>I realized with a chill that the alicorns knew I was here. And so did their Goddess. Which, I suspected, meant Red Eye did too.
>This was a stupid plan.
Of course it's a stupid plan; it's an extremely stupid plan. Just like it was stupid of the author to make the alicorns a collective hivemind who know who Littlepoop is, yet fail to take that into consideration when planning a major story arc that involves her infiltrating their home while incognito. Once again, the author seems to realize that he has created a very egregious logic error, but instead of correcting it, he just papers over it and moves on. Even though there is literally no reason on earth why this alicorn shouldn't just fly down and zap Littlepoop into oblivion while she's alone and unarmed and surrounded by hostiles, instead it simply acknowledges her presence but takes no other action.

Anyway, we'll set all of this aside for now. Red Eye goes up to the podium, and it is at this point that LP notices that he has a glowing robotic eye, and is apparently a cyborg. He also is wearing a PipBuck, which LP assumes to mean that he is a stable dweller, even though he could have just as easily taken a PipBuck off of some random captive, since it's been established that Doc Slaughter, an employee of Red Eye with whom LP was supposed to have an appointment but never did for some reason, is able to remove them.

>The crimson cyber-augmented stallion even wore his PipBuck on his right foreleg, which was uncommon. Just like me.
The author seems to be trying pretty hard to build a parallel between LP and Red Eye; presumably, this is one of those Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader situations, where the villain is presented as a dark mirror of the hero. It would have worked better if kkat had built his story this way from the beginning, introducing the villain early on and building the parallel from the beginning, instead of just word-vomiting a mountain of bullshit and dumping the villain in halfway through.

Anyway, Red Eye confirms in his speech that he was, indeed, raised in a stable. Along the same lines of the other stables we've seen, his was run as an experiment, intended to see what would happen if an entire society developed under earth pony rule. Since earth ponies appear to have been responsible for most of the technological side of the pre-war industrial revolution, their 200 year isolation resulted in that particular stable developing technology that surpassed that of the pre-war era, while the rest of the world simply atrophied. Thus, Red Eye received various cybernetic enhancements to his body, and probably has access to other technological marvels that have doubtless proven invaluable to the construction of his empire. I'll go ahead and give kkat several points here; this is probably the first idea he's managed to come up with that is both interesting and plausible in the context of his setting. Now, let's see how badly he manages to fuck it up from here.

>I realized I had lost track of Red Eye’s speech, and chided myself for not paying closer attention now that he was actually right in front of me. But I couldn’t help the oozing sense that I was looking into a dark and supremely fucked-up mirror.
Called it.

Anyway, Red Eye claims that "The Goddess" speaks to him, and has been giving him instruction on how to build a perfect Equestria.

>I found myself resisting a facehoof.
God damn it, kkat, I warned you about that word too.
*punches through computer screen*
*slaps kkat hard enough to dislodge his fake tits and launch them into orbit*
*Princess Celestia is eating breakfast*
*pair of disembodied fake tits lands in the middle of her cereal bowl*
*"What in the name of me is this?" she is heard to exclaim*


>The Goddess communicated telepathically with the alicorns. Was she communicating with him too? Or was he just picking up stray signals?
>Preacher had suggested to Velvet Remedy that Red Eye was getting garbled messages.
The idea of the villain being some messianic lunatic who attempts world-domination because he thought he heard the word of God is also not a bad one. However, again, the author hasn't built it up properly. Preacher was a very minor character who hasn't appeared since Ch. 11; I had to google him because I forgot who he even is. The foreshadowing is unfortunately lost in the maze of autism that is the rest of this story.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
75d5612
?
No.305463
305465 305473 305499
81XUWvXbqPL._AC_SY879_.jpg
>>305461

Anyway, the rest of Red Eye's biography is fairly predictable. He grew up in a privileged stable with access to superior technology, somehow learned that life outside his stable pretty much sucked balls for everyone else, and vowed to go on a mission to impose his vision of absolute equality on the world at gunpoint. Basically, if Siddhartha and Che Guevara had fucked and made a retarded love child who was a horse and also a cyborg, its name would probably have been Red Eye. He took over his home stable, enslaved all of his fellow residents and/or turned them into alicorns, and turned the place into some kind of temple to his weird religion. Boilerplate stuff, really.

Conveniently, he announces that the following day will be a day of rest, in which the slaves are free to indulge in leisure activities, which will no doubt give LP ample time to skulk around Fillydelphia.

>Furthermore, the bounty of the Roamer Bar stills will be made freely available to you, for those who wish to taste the finest horse whisky Fillydelphia has to offer!
inb4 "horse whisky" turns out to be a euphemism for his cum.

He also announces that there will be a fight to the death in the Thunderdome for their amusement, and asks if anyone would like to participate. Blood and Daff, the two bullies from yesterday, for some reason volunteer.

Page break.

>I was making my way back towards the Bumper-Plow structure when a mare’s scream jolted me into a run. The scream was coming from inside a building whose decaying paint job proclaimed “Fillydelphia FunFarm Mirror Maze and House of Wacky Reflections!” The mare screamed again, and I charged inside.
So...these slaves are just completely unsupervised, then? No guards, no structure; slaves are just assigned work at random intervals, and whenever they're not doing anything they're free to just wander around as they please? Red Eye's approach to running a forced labor camp is certainly...unique.

Anyway, she runs inside this ruined house of mirrors, and finds Blood and Daff inside. Blood is being raped at gunpoint by a couple of slavers, while Daff is being beaten. Naturally, Littlepoop instantly gets a raging murderboner, but realizes that if she goes into blood-frenzy mode she's going to blow her cover. Plus, these two were kind of mean to her earlier, so maybe they have it coming.

What happens next is a little unclear. I'm just going to paste it verbatim:

>And absolutely none of that mattered, as the slavers learned when the glare from my horn was matched by the light that flooded over hundreds of deadly-sharp shards of mirrored glass.
>The slaver pony with the sawed-off shotgun managed to get a shot off before the room became a cuisinart. He missed.
I think the implication here is that she uses her unicorn magic to levitate a preposterous number of glass shards and cut the slavers to ribbons. However, the text does not make it 100% clear that this is what happens. Her horn glowing obviously implies that she's about to do something, but her horn glowing and the room becoming "a cuisinart" are treated as if they were separate events. Since she is not the only unicorn present, we have no guarantee that she is the one responsible.

Part of the problem is that the author never actually established what sort of ponies Blood and Daff are. Blood is simply described as a "blood red mare" with some kind of edgelord-tier eyeball thing as a cutie mark. Daff is described as a "hulking, piss-colored male pony with an ugly scar and the cutie mark of a very angry yellow flower." I'm assuming the two of them are earth ponies, but the text doesn't explicitly state this. If either of them is a unicorn, they could have pulled the trick with the glass shards in self defense before LP had a chance to act. It's also possible that an additional third party is watching this scene like LP is, and acted before she had a chance to.

Again, the most likely scenario here is that LP used her stupid Mary Sue levitation powers to turn the room into "a cuisinart" using a bunch of glass shards, because that's consistent with the level of silliness I've come to expect from kkat. The point I'd like to drive home here, though, is that the way it's described is ambiguous, and ambiguity is usually bad. Sometimes you want to be ambiguous; for example, if a car goes sailing off of a cliff with a main character inside, and we're not supposed to know if the character survived the crash or not, then by all means you should word this as ambiguously as you want. However, most of the time, you want the reader to know exactly what's going on.

It's the same issue we had with AJ's elevator scene. The fact that AJ didn't die in the crash becomes a piece of critical information in a future scene, but the way the author describes that crash not only leaves it unclear whether she survived or not, it also heavily implies that she died. This made things confusing later on. Unless you want the reader to be wondering about something, you should always make a point to word your text as clearly as you possibly can.

Another minor quibble I have here is the use of the term "cuisinart." First off, Cuisinart™ is a brand name and therefore a proper noun, so it ought to be capitalized. Second, and far more important, is that kkat is referencing a brand that doesn't exist in his setting. What makes this even worse is that the story is being narrated first-person by a character who lives in this world. A third-person omniscient narrator could get away with this, though it would still be a bit tacky; imagine if Tolkien had described Shelob as "a spider the size of a Volkswagen." Littlepoop, though, has no reasonable way to be familiar with the Cuisinart line of home appliances; therefore, it would be better to just say "blender" or "food processor" or something generic. Better yet, don't use derpy analogies like this in the first place, and just describe the action in your scenes concisely and clearly.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305464
>>305461
>most of the fucked up shit that LP saw was just random violence that had nothing to do with him
Kkat could have fized this by making Red Eye rule an empire that starts conquering and enslaving raiders, moving into their territory and taking up good spots while forcing existing raiders into areas with less Red Eye control in greater numbers and forcing those raiders to compete in brutality and violence and rape contests for their prey.
>>305434
Kkunt wrote WHAT?
I knew one of the Frontier guys wrote Ghoul porn but this is ridiculous. Do you have a link to that?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305465
>>305463
Ponies in a room full of glass that gets turned into a Cuisinart(TM) blender?

I guess you could say they're

>*puts sunglasses on*

Furries In A Blender.

>*yeah scream*
Anonymous
a827459
?
No.305466
>>305461
>The idea of the villain being some messianic lunatic who attempts world-domination because he thought he heard the word of God is also not a bad one.
Well, I have a story idea that is quite similar but in mine that's the protagonist.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305473
305484
>>305463
>I think the implication here is that she uses her unicorn magic to levitate a preposterous number of glass shards and cut the slavers to ribbons.
What does this horse even need guns for, again?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305484
>>305473
The author really wants to one-up Fallout's elements and characters. As if the Fallout fanbase is expected to say "Damn, Littlepip has more guns than my custom player character and better stats than him a bigger squad of Companions with her and they each have better weaponry and stats than my companions! Team LP has gone through more dungeons than me and completed more quests than me and defeated bigger and badder versions of the monsters I struggle to deal with every time I play! Littlepip is just sooo cool!"

Maybe a pony fan with a shallow understanding of Fallout who views the franchise as just another dumb shooty game open world would say "wow being stronger than The Vault Dweller and The Courier and The Chosen One and The Lone Wanderer combined makes her so awesome /)^3^(\ uwu"
But fallout has deep lore and adult mature storytelling that flew over Kkunt's head. Littlepip might find skeletons and notes that spell out pieces of environmental storytelling but there is no depth to it. No witty creative irony. Ain't like prisons became the safest place for innocents in the post apocalypse. Ain't like a prison intended to house anti-govt dissenters ended up protecting them better than its guards. That rock breaking prison facility just exists and it happens to be where a random unimportant canon pony tied to give it a sense of importance. There's more to Fallout than the experience of dicking around in its playable area like a fluffy pony in a playpen. My character arc is complete so now I know there's more to deep storytelling than this.
And even though LP's goal was to one-up both he didn't do a good job. LP might have overpowered telekinesis but I've seen stronger and weaker psychics do more impressive things. LP might have infinity charisma plot armour sue aura but I've seen better written charismatic characters make far more convincing arguments. I've seen better underdog stories that make you feel things about the underdog and better fantasies where the underdog gets bigger. LP gets her dick sucked by the world before she's earned it and then never earns it because that's what happens when your primary writing inspiration is "I aspire to be as great as Bethesda, genius masters of writing engaging power fantasies".
One Alicorn could outfight one Super Mutant but that does not make this story's Alicorns better monsters. The original Super Mutant army was a liberal's take on fascism and racialism: The Master creates his Master Race but they're infertile even though they are stronger and tougher than a man and radiation immune. You can have the fantasy of a super race but the inability to breed is arbitrarily slapped on. You can turn others into Super Mutants or kill them trying. Subsequent games make Super Mutants more interesting. Lily, an old grandma Nightkin who misses her kids and takes anti-rage anti-crazy pills that make her forget her grandkids, is more interesting than Strong the meme joke guy from F4 and Fawkes the one-note bodyguard Super Mutant guy who follows you around in Fallout 3 because you lucked out and found him.
But this story's take on Alicorns? So far they're just edgy cunts. Just slightly stronger videogame enemies. Nopony reaches out to Littlepip to try and reason with her or bribe her or even point her in the direction of giga-rapist raiders that are conveniently miles in the opposite direction from Alicorn lands. They are just videogame enemies and that's boring. An OC Alicorn, an artificial Alicorn, how an artificial Alicorn functions in the post apocalypse, how an Alicorn lives and tries to live even though Celestia and Luna died long ago, how an artificial alicorn feels about her old not-alicorn body and old life and who she was before the psychic hive mind got control of her... hell, could combine "i became an alicorn" with "I was born in a weird vault designed to experiment on its people" for bonus fun. How would an alicorn feel about her corrupt stable getting invaded by alicorns who "saved" her from her weak old body and agonizing experiment? I'm tempted to write that but I'm busy with my indie game. Can't tell anyone about it till it's done.

These ideas the story is uniquely able to explore... these are ideas the fandom is reluctant to explore elsewhere because all the underaged and greatly overaged fandom-policers arbitrarily decreed the colours red and black, Alicorn OCs, whatever is called edgey, and anything else a sufficiently large herd of bronies doesn't like to be the greatest sins a cloutless and therefore bullyable writer can commit. If he writes trash and their community likes it and makes it popular enough for the algorithms to recommend it, they'll call it good executions of overused ideas they'd rather see less of, but they'll never take it upon themselves to try new things or give new authors helpful advice instead of instructions on how to pander well. It's funny how so many amateur reviewers will read 50 fanfics a week, get tired of seeing the same ideas over and over, and demand the community change to suit his lack of interest in seeing other authors explore those same ideas differently. Suddenly it's wrong for an author to give his Pokemon Trainer OC an Eevee or Lucario just because you don't feel like reading about another one today and would rather read about a rarer mon like a Vulpix or Tropius or Crabominable. Suddenly it's on every kid writer to suit your whims and stop writing Draco In Leather Pants fics aka redemption arcs for Draco Malfoy or reimaginings of him as a cool rival chad instead of a soycuck, and not on you to get out of the metaphorical Soup Store's DILP aisle and read another fucking real book for once. God, can normies even see paintings or do they jusr rate art based on whether it contains their favourite or least favourite colours? Fanfic fandom's weird.
also
If anyone's got a list of LP's achievements so far and a minimalistically-written outline of the story so far hold on to it, I won't spoil why.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
75d5612
?
No.305499
305508 305521 305524
1602214988833m.jpg
>>305463

Page break. The opening of the next scene clarifies that LP was, in fact, responsible for the little culinary mishap back there. And, as it turns out, another guard heard the shotgun being fired, so now she is running through the hall of mirrors trying to evade them. She also stole the two shotguns that the formerly unshredded guards had been carrying.

>I wished I’d chosen to bring the StealthBuck after all.
Why didn't you?

Anyway, what follows is a relatively straightforward chase scene. To the author's credit, he does a reasonably good job with it; the action is clear and well described, and the scene itself is exciting. Naturally, there's also plenty of ridiculous Mary Sue bullshit from Littlepoop; for instance, at one point she surprises a guard armed with a shield and a chain gun (for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_gun ), and manages to telekinetically spin the gun around on her and open fire. At another, she is pushed into a corner by some aerial snipers (she has left the funhouse at this point), but manages to escape by levitating some old pie tins into a flight of stairs and hopping over the fence. Long story short, she ends up in the Alpha-Omega Hotel, which conveniently enough is one of the places she wanted to explore anyway. I'm sure this was just a coincidence.

Page break. Despite the fact that the entire compound is on high alert after one of their slaves murdered two guards in the Hall of Mirrors and then made a very public and very noisy escape, nopony in the hotel even raises an eyebrow when a unicorn in blood-spattered slave rags carrying a fucking chain gun (for reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:971121-N-1434K-003_Chain_Gun.jpg ) suddenly kicks open the door and breathlessly darts inside. Incidentally, she also used up the last of her shotgun shells murdering the two guards who were standing right outside the door, and stole one of their pistols. For the benefit of people who weren't aware of this (read: for the benefit of kkat), loud noises can travel through walls.

For some insane reason, the aerial sniper who was chasing her and would have doubtless seen her run in here does not follow, and her EFS does not pick up any hostiles in the hotel. The lobby is basically a bar, and a bunch of morose ponies who I guess are scheduled to fight to the death in the Thunderdome tomorrow are just sitting there drinking beer like absolutely nothing unusual is going on. Nice to see that the Intelligence stats of the enemies LP is pitted against haven't even marginally improved since the beginning of the game. Maybe they need some fucking party-time mint-als.

>“Goddesses, this is a depressing place,” I muttered, almost wishing for more guards to come charging up behind me, if only so the adrenaline would shield me from the blanket of despair that was beginning to smother me.
Imagine someone older than 13 typing this with a straight face.

>Why weren’t they? I should have all of Stern’s armies on my tail by now. It’s not like that sniper didn’t see where I went.
If it's this obvious to you, imagine how the rest of us feel.

Anyway, still wondering why nobody seems to give a fuck that this blood-covered, well-armed slave pony is just wandering around in a hotel that is supposed to house one of Red Eye's top secret laboratories, LP climbs a flight of stairs and observes that a bunch of hostiles suddenly appear on her radar. The door opens (the text mentions that it was opened by a unicorn on the other side, but this mystery poner is not mentioned further once the door actually opens), and LP is about to charge in guns blazing, when she notices that the room is full of well-armed foals. Following in the footsteps of tyrannical dictator stereotypes everywhere, it seems that Red Eye has been raising and training an army of child soldiers. They appear to be the most well-treated and well-looked-after group of slaves in the entire compound, but frankly this whole place is so screwy it's hard to gage the significance of this.

ANYWAY, blah blah blah, Littlepoop can't shoot the child soldiers because they're too cutesy-wootsy, so she lowers her weapon. Meanwhile, it turns out that there was an invisible alicorn following her around or something, and it suddenly appears on the steps behind her. The alicorn comes at her with what she thinks is a grenade, but is actually a memory orb that the alicorn tricks her into grabbing and opening. Oh my, it seems that Littlepoop has been hoisted by her own petard.

Page break. Littlepoop of course plunges into the memory orb, and we of course get to witness another scene from the past involving the Mane 6. This one is fairly trite and silly, and is viewed from the perspective of Pinkie Pie (presently high on crack mints). Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash (who is not actually present) are playing a prank on Applejack, in which Fluttershy pretends to hit on her. It's all being done in good fun, with the intention of convincing AJ that she needs to find a boyfriend (or "buckfriend" as they put it). Basically, AJ has been in a funk since her brother died, and they are trying to snap her out of it.

The scene itself is cute but trivial; nothing particularly huge is revealed. However, the author sneaks something potentially significant in at the end:

>“Burning hoof means Littlepip’s watching me,” Pinkie Pie blurted out impossibly. “Or will be watching me. I’m not sure yet.” She bounced after her friends. “Who’s Littlepip?”
Despite the ambiguity of the "Who's Littlepip" line (it's not clear who is saying this, and it should be on a new line in any case), this seems to suggest that Pinkie's crack-amplified "Pinkie sense" really does give her some kind of clairvoyance, and that she may have some spiritual connection to Littlepoop. Depending on what the author does with this, it could prove interesting. Congratulations, kkat; you have my attention.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
75d5612
?
No.305508
305518 305521 305526 305546
say-his-name-you-wont-be-laughing-when-he-kills-9800803.png
>>305499

Page break. When Littlepoop comes to, she is in the custody of Stern, standing before Red Eye. Stern asks Red Eye if he would like her to send the prisoner to the furnace pits, but Red Eye refuses, much to the chagrin of his underling.

If you're curious why the big man himself would bother to take an interest in this case, let alone want to interrogate her personally, you would be fully justified. A single slave assaulting two guards and causing a disturbance of this sort would be a relatively big deal, but not such a big deal that the boss would need to have his dinner interrupted. The reasonable response to this is clear enough: a slave murdered two guards and tried to escape, so the penalty is death. Send her off to die in the fart mines or whatever and call it done. Stern could easily handle this herself.

However, in order to understand what's happening here, you have to stop thinking like a rational human and start thinking like kkat. You have to remember that, to kkat, his protagonist is basically Jesus Christ meets The Dalai Lama meets Rambo. Littlepoop isn't just some annoying murderous klepto; she is !1!1!THE STABLE DWELLER!!1!. She is known far and wide as the heroic murderhobo who wanders around the wasteland, cracking uncrackable safes and brutally slaughtering anyone whose behavior violates her vaguely-defined pedestrian moral code. Naturally Red Eye knows exactly who she is, and naturally he views her as an arch-nemesis, so it just stands to reason that he would want her brought before him in chains so he can cackle villainously and deliver a big bad-guy speech about how the two of them are really the same.

So, that's exactly what he does:

>Addressing me directly, Red Eye asked, “Do you think I’m a monster?”
>Bluntly, I answered, “Yes.”
>He shrugged. “Because, of course, I am. And you, Stable Dweller, can probably see it more clearly than most. Because you and I are a lot alike, are we not.”
This last line is a question and should end in a question mark.

Anyway, the rest of this is just straight-up boilerplate villain dialogue; there's nothing worth going over in detail here. He basically tells her that she is young and naive, like a babe in the woods, and if she had been through the hardships he had been through and seen what he had seen she would not judge him a monster. Littlepoop sputters and protests and tells him he's wrong, and at the end he orders her sent to do battle in the Thunderdome from the very moment it was first brought up, I somehow knew that all roads in this story would lead to the goddamned Thunderdome. If you took every cheesy villain confrontation scene from every cheesy comic book, cartoon, and B-movie and threw them into a Cuisinart™ with a cup of diarrhea, the result would be this scene. Plagiarism in fiction is an established tradition and I don't necessarily discourage it, but if you're going to rip something off, at least rip off something good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSfTXaqo18o

Oh, also, as a minor aside, she gets a glimpse of the number 101 on his barding, which probably refers to the stable he was raised in.

Page break. Despite everything that's happened in the last 24 hours, the goddamned idiots running this slave camp STILL have not confiscated Littlepoop's goddamned PipBuck. She sits in the dark with the other prisoners, playing Tetris and listening to those messages she downloaded from what's-her-name's terminal earlier. Among them is a message from Twilight Sparkle, in which she mentions an enchanted mirror that Rarity found. It enables you to see your "inner" self. I don't think I mentioned this in my recap, but when LP was in the funhouse, she at one point encountered a similar mirror:

>I bumped into the mirror behind me, a splash of cold washing over my body from the touch. I turned, looking into the only fully intact mirror in the House of Wacky Reflections and froze.
>Staring back at me was me… but not me. The Littlepip staring back at me was wearing cobbled-together raider armor. She was shot to hell, dying, her body giving out as she glared at me in a swiftly deteriorating battle stance, her gaze daring me to make another move.
OoOoOooOoooh, how angsty. Anyway, there may be some future significance to this, so it's worth noting, but nothing else happens in this microscene.

Page break. We rejoin our intrepid hero at some undefined point in the future. She is in the staging area at the Thunderdome, getting ready to be thrown into a situation that will probably go something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tcp1mWZ9fw

The guard getting her ready was apparently a friend of one of the guards she cut to ribbons with mirror shards the other night, so in retaliation she puts some kind of itching powder on her flank and says that she hopes she dies. She also puts numbers over everyone's cutie marks. Littlepoop is assigned number three.

>“Used to be an ice skating rink,” the blue-colored buck with number four on his flank said conversationally. “Apparently, the owner of the FunFarm had a thing for ice skating. Just be thankful that Red Eye removed the water talisman and put it to better use. These fights are brutal enough without having to do them on ice.”
How does he know this?

Anyway, there is some brief explanation of how the rules of the Thunderdome work, which I won't go into since it's pretty straightforward. We sit through a couple of fights first. Blood, the pony who was picking on Littlepoop earlier, goes first, and is killed in rather short order. She is then avenged by her friend Daff, who takes down her murderer using some exploding barrels that are in the arena.

>“From the Black Gate, we still have Daffodil, after a surprising and entertaining first performance. I don’t think any of you ponies are snickering at his name now, are you?”
Pic related.

Next up is a pony named Xenith, who seems likely to be LP's opponent.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305518
305521 305531
2xw8l5n8d0y21.jpg
93bc291b9b3f236691f39d1250ad4d35.jpg
49726f68a5f17bf86be0bec62b7f83d9.jpg
9bc7558f679f8ab0d767a59822c8bc8f.jpg
>>305508
This mirror bugs me.
Rarity found a mirror that "shows you your inner self".
Gee, what a creative and original idea that's never been done before- WHY THE FUCK IS IT HIDDEN IN A HOUSE OF MIRRORS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC IN THE MIDDLE OF A MOTHERFUCKING PINKIE PIE THEME PARK THAT'S ALSO A GOVERNMENT FACILITY
HOW FUCKING MANY INNOCENT PONIES SAW THIS AND GOT SCARED BY THE SIGHT OF UGLY EVIL PONERS?

This is really dumb but it COULD be good writing if it was intentional, something to say "pre-war ponies were dumb and never expected anypony who's a monster on the inside to see it".

It would barely take any text for a Mane Six poner to say "It's fun and harmless when foals and civilians look at it but when an ex-soldier forced to kill saw it, he saw a monster and mentally broke. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to put this in a public place. I've sent a letter telling that theme park to remove it and hide it away, they should get the letter tomorrow." and then the date shows the letter was sent one day before the nuking or something.
of course this raises questions like "why did nobody move that mirror in 200 years" but this is a Kkat story.

Also, this is a major source of wasted potential!
Littlepip looked into a mirror that reveals her true self, and...
That's her true self? That's her Shadow? Just some dying angry murderhobo in Raider armour who "glares defiantly" while going down like a little bitch?
That's such a lame Shadow design!
Why is it dying? Why does it wear Raider armour when she constantly tells herself she's a hero and is constantly called a hero by the audience and world?
It's just mean dying Littlepip! Where's the creative monster designs and environment designs full of symbolism, where at the highest room of the tallest tower with a princess begging people to save her there's an angry fire bird resting within an open-doored birdcage to symbolize how she isn't trapped really but feels trapped anyway, or peak faggotry personified in a gay bathhouse to symbolize a man's fear of looking soft and being considered gay and his desperation to be accepted by others, or a hollow and shattered living mascot suit with cracked skin that lets you see the hollow darkness within and disturbing features clawing its way out of a black hole?
Why does the story take the idea of the hero seeing her true self and waste it here for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment of fake depth when she could get pulled inside that mirror by her Shadow and forced to fight it in a cool trippy mental world that forces her to undergo character growth?
Or, what if this Shadow Littlepip continued to exist within LP's mind for the rest of the story, taunting her and mocking her for the entirety of the story and calling her friends a bunch of faggots? She could argue with it internally during scenes where she has to make important decisions, and this could make her decision-making more interesting. Adding a Designated Asshole character to the party also lets at least one character notice and point out shit about the heroes without having to fear the audience hating her. If Littlepip's imaginary evil enemy called her friends retards for perfectly valid reasons it would improve the story without offending its pathetic target audience and their delicate sensibilities.
This fucking "true self"... If it's supposed to be what she is on the inside, why is it dying and why is its battle stance deteriorating? If it's what she's supposed to fear becoming, why is it so pitiable and unlike the invincible real deal? If this pathetic creature is really what lies at the core of Littlepip's heart, what is she going to do about it? Is she going to go inside her own mind to beat the shit out of it with bullshit animoo imagination dream powers, or resolve to be a more moral and less reckless person outside her mind to disprove it and grow? Is she going to confront and admit to her flaws and work on them, or simply keep denying them so hard it'll keep Imaginary Evil Littlepip from existing and mattering again? You know, even though that's the opposite of how this inner-darkness shit is supposed to work?
Give me a fucking break! Has this fucking author ever even seen Persona 4?! Probably, since he's ripping off its idea of seeing "your dark self reflected" for a quick and lazy gimmick. But why did its depth and positive "Grow as a person and confront your faults" message sail right over his head like a warning shot from an automatic nuclear grenade launcher?

>she puts some kind of itching powder on her flank
what if this was the weakness of all Unicorns: Annoying distracting things that ruin their mental focus and stop them from focusing on spells/telekinesis? It could force Littlepip to get creative and win a fight without the OP telekinesis that could easily let her lift and toss her foes 3700 feet into the air and then let gravity take care of the rest.
It would also give the author, a faggoted furry into genital torture, an excuse to right about homemade pain powder with chili dust and assorted other ingredients hurting his heroine's ass and cunt.
Scenes where you take away a hero's most overpowered things (Iron Man's armour or Thor's hammer for example) are supposed to force the hero to get creative to win in scenarios where they'd normally just rely on their OP things until all fights blur together. But LP still has OP TK trivializing all fights so she can grab guns easily. Lame!

>exploding red barrels
these fucking idiots are not wearing bulletproof apparel
WHY ARE THESE IDIOTS FIGHTING NEXT TO THOSE FLAMMABLE BARRELS

RED CONTAINERS OF DEATH, THEY MAKE FOR EASY KILLS
THEY MUST SPEND A FORTUNE ON THE FUEL BILLS

LP'S THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
LAWS OF PHYSICS AND LOGIC NEED NOT APPLY

SHE IS THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
AS LONG AS SHE'S GOT THE PIPBUCK SHE WILL NEVER DIE

SHE'S THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
SHE'S A WALKING TALKING CLICHE, THIS YOU CAN'T DENY

SHE'S THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
SHE'S THE MAIN FUCKING CHARACTER SO SHE CANNOT DIE-HI-HIIIIII!
Anonymous
6cd9a6c
?
No.305521
305525 305531
FalloutBrotherhoodAreWeTheBaddies.jpg
>>305460
>He's probably the first totalitarian dictator in history to create a brutal, oppressive regime that operates entirely on the honor system.
Honestly a harsh society that values honor above all and ranks its inhabitants by their martial prowess, like the Klingon Empire, would be cool and not unfitting for this setting. Then it would make sense for some slaves to want Thunderdome to prove they're better than the "dishonorable and cowardly" laborer slaves which would give them the chance to become a proper soldier. Maybe, if too much empty verbiage hadn't been vomited already, Littlepip could be put in her place and begrudgingly pick up this society's virtues while secretly challenging its flaws. She doesn't have a time limit so she could train and learn discipline (if she wasn't stupidly OP already) to steadily rise up through the ranks until she can challenge Red Eye himself to single combat. Unfortunately this is something Kkat's estrogen-addled brain wouldn't know how to handle. Also it would take a rework of the alicorns so their hive mind wouldn't detect and stop her immediately (which by all accounts SHOULD HAVE happened) already.

It's sad because this "woe is me, 12 years a slave!" perspective could have been an interesting change of pace and involved character development (HUH?! Waht's dat?) on the part of Littlepip. We could meet actually interesting characters from different backrounds and with different motivations. But this gets glossed over in favor of mindless prolefeed.

There's no subtlety to any of this. I'm not reading along with you (Ain't nobody got time for that) but it seems like a miserable story that doesn't even rise to mediocrity and has no right to be the fandom's favorite. I'm glad /mlpol/ distances itself from bronies because >pic related a normie and reddit-tier meme, but it's the first think I thought of but substituted with "Are we the faggots?" is an appropriate reaction to being part of the fandom.

>And absolutely none of that mattered, as the slavers learned when the glare from my horn was matched by the light that flooded over hundreds of deadly-sharp shards of mirrored glass.
This "surprise reversal" annoys me. It's been done before, where the protagonist goes over the practical reasons for not lashing out at injustice but does it anyway out of principle. However this is because the protagonist says "consequences be damned!" and accepts what may come. Yet Littlepip, as always, faces no consequences.

I really dislike The Kite Runner and its overrated status but it really is a far better novel than this tripe. The protagonist is a beta cuck (a highly accurate self-insert of the author) but at least he has regrets. He's an anti-stu in a sense because of how pathetic and helpless he is (though it doesn't make him any more likeable), but after seeing his best friend anally raped while he's standing around munching on popcorn it does have an effect on him. He doesn't do anything cool like learn to fight or become an effective infiltrator his friend's son saves his life again because he's that much of a helpless beta male but at least he does something to remedy a past mistake. Littlepip doesn't even accomplish this.

>>305499
>For the benefit of people who weren't aware of this (read: for the benefit of kkat), loud noises can travel through walls.
This is video game logic once again rearing its ugly head. In Fallout separate areas (with a loading screen) obviously don't have sound pass-through, so you can blow up a mini-nuke right outside a building and people just inside by the door won't realize anything anything's amiss. That this is due to technical limitations should be obvious, but carrying it over to a story is idiotic. This has already been mentioned but it's the worst of both worlds: dumb video game mechanics carry over but not limitations preventing Littlepip from using telekinesis to do anything.

>Depending on what the author does with this, it could prove interesting. Congratulations, kkat; you have my attention.
You're setting yourself up for the football to be pulled away. Guaranteed this is a reference to "wacky Pinkie Pie can transcend time and space because she's goofy!" I'm not reading this but I know this will never be brought up again to be significant.

>>305508
>Still has Pipbuck.
This annoys me as much as it does you. If a Pipbuck was merely a glorified cell phone giving contextual information about the world (as it should be imo) there's a slim chance they'd let her keep it, but if it magically turns you into a 1337 murderhobo there's absolutely no way. The only reason she still has it is because it's her defining accessory. However, a scene where she's stripped naked and robbed of her trinkets would be a chance to empathize with the character and offer a test, like that TNG episode where Picard is interrogated by Cardassians (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS1DOHn_YX0). This actually is a spoof of that episode but I included it for the lulz

>Xenith
"Zenith" would make sense as a pony name because it's actually a word. This, like other word combinations starting with X, is better for an alien.

>>305518
>Shooter guy song
Never has a more apt synopsis of this story been written
Anonymous
8e749ac
?
No.305524
>>305499
>For the benefit of people who weren't aware of this (read: for the benefit of kkat), loud noises can travel through walls.
Incidentally, so can bullets.
>Despite the ambiguity of the "Who's Littlepip" line (it's not clear who is saying this, and it should be on a new line in any case)
I assumed it was Pinkie saying it to herself.
>WHY ARE THESE IDIOTS FIGHTING NEXT TO THOSE FLAMMABLE BARRELS
https://youtu.be/1UrmKXkWyBc?t=86
>I will stand next that bomb! This is a good idea!
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305525
305529
>>305521
Xenith/Zenith isn't even a creative name, it's the name of Azimuth's ex-wife from Ben 10. The one who dumped him for making The Infinity Sword Of Infinite Nonsensical Power, convincing him to try and win her back by making an even stronger Omnitrix that can turn you into the peak chad genetically perfected version of any race including literal gods like the Celestialsapiens. And the Ultimatrix, which evolves creatures further but only ever makes like 8 ultimates.
And speaking of Shooter Guy by Miracle of Sound, earlier in this story there are tons of scenes where Littlepip kills and loots baddies mid-firefight, scavenging ammo instantaneously from them before moving on even while she's being shot at by enemies. I hope I remembered to reference the "Got a secret vacuum cleaner from my shirt to my pants, sucks up ammo off the floor straight into my hands" line at the time.

It's a missed opportunity that nobody loves Red Eye or the Alicorns and tries to convince the party "red eye is/the alicorns are awesome" right?
Raul Tejada from FNV didn't love the Legion itself, but considering how many bandits he fought over his 200ish Ghoul Cowboy Mechanic years and how hard bandits fucked his life over he can see the value in the way the Legion keeps its lands safe compared to the lazy shitty NCR.
If the Alicorns weren't treated like a hive mind of negative feminine character traits they might have something positive to offer the world and think conquering the world is the best way to offer those things. Or if the Alicorns were intentionally assorted negative feminine stereotypes and types of toxic femininity personified that could make them better monsters.

Also since the "translating video game shit to a story" topic comes up so much, how should Pokemon be translated?
Trainers each carry 6 pokemon and take turns telling pokemon which of their 4 moves to perform. Pokemon have RPG stats like Attack and Defense and Speed.
The anime adds "trainers need to tell their pokemon when to dodge incoming attacks" but the result is silly. It makes pokemon look dumb for needing a child to tell them when to dodge. And raises questions like "why ever take hits when you can dodge?".
Pokemon Moves can be mundane things a pokemon should know how to do naturally like a punch or kick or claw slash or a growl that reduces the enemy Defense stat or inexplicable magical bullshit like Sketch which copies the move your foe just used and Swords Dance which raises your Attack stat by 2 stages.
In the Pokemon anime, pokemon don't get injured or bleed. Same goes for people.
But in a world where Pokemon and people can get injured and bleed and die, how much sense does it make for a Pokemon Trainer to risk death travelling around his country just to catch strong Pokemon and fight the best Pokemon Trainer in every major town for a handful of badges just so he can eventually say he beat all 8 of the best dudes and the superior Elite Four and their superior, The Champion? What the hell kind of world would create this scenario? A world obsessed with celebrities and celebrity athletes and being number one no matter the cost to the horse you rode in on and the attack dogs you raised? A world obsessed with strength because pokemon are naturally evil in the wild and preying on dwindling human populations?
How can any of this videogamey bullshit be translated into a good book that makes sense?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305526
305527 305546
1602215022353.jpg
>>305508

>Next up is a pony named Xenith, who seems likely to be LP's opponent.
Correction: Xenith is actually a zebra.

Anyway, the chapter ends here.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Xenith

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“The fate of Equestria does not rest on me making friends.”
Well then, this whole adventure has just been a big ol' waste of everypony's time, hasn't it?

>I had been stripped of everything that I could use as a weapon. Even the screwdriver I had fought so hard for and felt I had earned had been taken. I had my horn, my hooves, my single spell, and S.A.T.S.
"Oi m8, you got a loisense for that screwdriver?" On the other hand, the fetlock-mounted supercomputer that has been responsible for every single victory she's achieved thus far is perfectly fine; no reason she can't just hang onto that. Heaven forbid LP ever be forced to face a challenge without the aid of her most valuable piece of plot armor.

Anyway, I'd be inclined to dismiss the rest of this microscene as just more of kkat's verbal diarrhea, except I notice that LP touches on some subjects that merit closer examination:

>That was Red Eye’s intention: that either I should die, or that I should be forced to kill other slaves, this zebra being only one of many, compromising the parts of me I held sacred just so that I might live long enough to kill him.

>Either way would be a victory for him. Although the latter, if I did manage to kill him, would be a pyrrhic victory at best.

Here is basically what the author is trying to say:

Red Eye had reasons for sending her into the Thunderdome that extend beyond mere cruelty. He could have simply killed her outright, or sent her to work herself to death in the fart mines, or whatever else he usually does with his captives. However, he wants to place her in a situation where she will be forced to make a decision: either she betrays her own principles and fights her way through whatever goons she is pitted against in order to escape and kill him, or else she gives up and chooses death, which means her mission is never completed.

The idea here is that Red Eye wants to show Littlepoop the path he took. He wants her to learn that the only way to truly save the Wasteland is to abandon compassion and adopt the tyrant's path.

Anyone who has been following my commentary so far can probably spot several things wrong with all of this. First and most obvious is that Littlepoop really doesn't have any clearly defined principles that she is being asked to violate here. What exactly is the difference between what she's being asked to do in the Thunderdome and what she's spent the entire story so far doing? She's killed any number of nameless goons already, so what the hell is a few more? It's the same problem we encountered earlier, when the author tried to manufacture a "moral crisis" for Littlepoop by having Gawd offer her a contract. The issue was basically that she was being asked to commit murder for hire, which might have had some punch if she hadn't spent the entire story up to that point committing murder for free.

The problem, again, is that kkat divides his characters into distinct camps. In the first camp, you have the "raiders" and "slavers" and so forth; basically the nameless, faceless goons who are just indefinably evil and can therefore be slaughtered guilt-free. In the second camp, you have the "named" characters: the characters who actually have identities and dialogue, which means that, although they may not necessarily be "good," they have the status of sentient beings. Thus, if Littlepoop kills one of the "real" characters it's a sin that needs to be reckoned with, but on the other hand she can cut down raiders and slavers left and right for any frivolous reason she chooses and bear no guilt whatsoever.

We find ourselves once again face to face with the familiar specter of kkat's video game logic. The "real" characters, ie the Monterrey Jacks, the Silver Bells, the Derpys, the Chief Grim Stars, and so forth, are the characters whose names appear in the script and are part of the actual story. The raiders and slavers and so forth are just the generic baddies that spawn in random locations and attack you; they aren't really characters, they just give you something to shoot at occasionally in order to break up the monotony of wandering around a sandbox world. In a game, this makes sense. However, in a story, it becomes this weird system where certain characters are given an "unperson" status for apparently arbitrary reasons.

Consider, for instance, the characters of Blood and Daff. The text establishes that these two are Raiders, or at least they were until they were captured by Red Eye. Even though their "job" in this world would place them naturally in the "unperson" camp, the author has chosen to give them names and identities. So, they can be part of a moral crisis: should Littlepoop save Daff's life even though he tried to rape her? On the other hand, the two guards who have them cornered in the house of mirrors don't enjoy the same status; they are just "slavers," which means they are generic nameless goons. LP can slash them to pieces as brutally she likes.

The author occasionally tries to cobble together some weak moral reasoning for why certain characters deserve to die but not others, but the problem is that their fate is actually being determined by their NPC status, not their behavior. In the mirror house, Slavers A and B have Blood and Daff cornered and are going to rape them. The author wants us to view this problem as "Slavers A and B are rapists and murderers, therefore they deserve to die horribly." However, this doesn't really fly; Blood and Daff are also rapists and murderers. What's really happening is that Blood and Daff are Persons, and Slavers A and B are Unpersons; therefore, the only "moral" issue LP really has to consider here is whether or not to help Blood and Daff.

Running out of space, will continue.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
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No.305527
305546 305794
Vash-vs-knives400x285.jpg
>>305526

I'm trying not to repeat myself too much here since I know I've gone over a lot of this before, but this whole thing is a big part of why Littlepoop's moral motivations don't feel in any way sincere. The author wants this moment in the story to be a pivotal choice for Littlepoop: she has to decide if she wants to kill this Xenith character and violate everything she believes in, or let Xenith kill her and thus fail in her mission to kill Red Eye and save the wasteland. Kkat likely does not realize the problem here, because for him this character-sorting process is automatic and subconscious: he's already designated "Xenith" as a "real" character, so the act of killing her would automatically have moral weight. However, from the reader's point of view, "Xenith" is just the name of another enemy LP is being pitted against; we don't know this character and have no reason to view her any differently than we would some random raider that Littlepoop bumped into on the road and gunned down without a second thought.

So how does it make sense that killing Xenith is a moral problem but killing Raider X is not? To kkat, it makes perfect sense: "Xenith" is an actual character, who appears in cut scenes and has scripted lines and a designated voice actor. "Raider X" is just one of three generic raider models that spawns at random locations and charges at you while yelling pre-recorded profanity. However, to anyone who chooses to put a modicum of thought into the things they read and write, it makes no sense at all; thus, Littlepoop's "moral dilemma" here seems ridiculous.

It's really a shame that kkat doesn't understand this, because the problem cascades and ruins everything else he's trying to do here. He's clearly trying very hard to do the "dark mirror" angle with Littlepoop and Red Eye. This basically means that the villain is a character very similar to the hero, either due to a similar background, similar abilities, having had to face similar moral choices, etc, with the prime difference being that the villain chose the "dark" path. The villain underscores the "goodness" of the hero by showing what the opposite of the hero's values represents. Some notable examples of this dichotomy include:

>Batman/The Joker
>Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader
>Frodo/Gollum
>Gandalf/Saruman
>Richard Rahl/Emperor Jagang
>Inuyasha/Naraku
>Vash/Knives
>Arthur/Mordred
and probably a million others.

Kkat's problem is that he knows what he wants to do, he just has no clue how to properly execute it. If he really wanted to do something like this, Red Eye should have been an established presence in this story much, much earlier. Even if we don't actually meet him until now, we should have been seeing signs of his presence all over the place. And by "signs of his presence," I don't just mean the derpy little radio broadcasts LP hears on the sprite bots every now and then, or the name being casually dropped by a couple of bar patrons here and there. Every major story arc in this text so far ought to be in some way directly connected to Red Eye. All of the carnage and destruction we've seen should somehow have his stamp on it.

Again, the author clearly tries to do this, but doesn't really succeed. I'm sure some fedora-tipper out there would point out that the slaver colony LP busts up early in the story is (I think) part of Red Eye's overall operation, and (I think) there was an implication that Deadeyes and "Mr. Topaz" were underlings of his or something. But, the connection was not made apparent nor was it reinforced. We hear the name Red Eye mentioned every now and then between dungeon crawls, and I guess LP has always had this vague goal of going to Fillydelphia (eventually) to thwart him or something for some reason, but for the most part he's not much of a sinister presence and thus not much of a villain.

For instance, imagine an omnipresent evil like the Galactic Empire or the Eye of Sauron. Does Red Eye evoke the same feeling in FoE? Is he the dark, mysterious entity whose influence is felt all over the wasteland; the villain who is always somewhere in the back of the reader's mind, even when the characters are on an adventure that has nothing to do with him? Or is he just one more random faggot-ass villain in a long chain of faggot-ass villains that LP feels compelled to take on for no reason beyond that her murder boner must be endlessly moistened with the blood of bad guys? I'm guessing that only kkat's most dedicated groupies would say the former.

>I realized that I was Monterey Jack, forced between destroying what allowed me to live with myself, or just dying.
This connection, too, is weak. Again, we've got a situation where a fundamental flaw in the author's basic idea cascades and ruins other parts of the story. It's absurd that Littlepoop gets a pass to murder as many NPCs as she wants, but is expected to have a moral crisis every time she has to kill someone the author considers important. This means that her values are insincere, which in turn means that her reasons for being able to live or not live with herself are also insincere. Thus, her whole crisis here is absurd. For reasons I've already gone over, Monterrey Jack's moral crisis was also absurd. So, in a sense I guess she's right: Monterrey Jack was a ridiculous character with insincerely-held moral convictions that did not hold up under even the mildest scrutiny, and so is Littlepoop, so this comparison could be seen as valid.

>I needed another option.
And, lastly, this is the part where Littlepoop has her "Aha!" moment and solves the puzzle. Instead of falling for Red Eye's trap and choosing one of the two equally unpalatable options he's presented her, she chooses Option C, which probably involves making friends with Xenith and taking on Red Eye together. Again, this would be fine if the author had done the rest of his work correctly.

Anyway, the harder this cauldron of diarrhea tries to be tragic, the funnier it gets.
Anonymous
5e54f27
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No.305529
305534
anigif_enhanced-24613-1396314830-1.gif
>>305525
>How can any of this videogamey bullshit be translated into a good book that makes sense?
By spending time working on it or just ignoring the video game rules. No, I'm not gonna write that book for you. Seriously, though. This pokemon rant has a tenuous connect to this review at best. It seems more to me that you wanted to run your mouth on pokemon than anything. I know that you are smart enough to realize the answer yourself.

I mean what I wrote outside of this spoiler is obviously the answer. What else could it be?

In the past, I had thoughts on writing a pokemon fanfic myself but do you see me talking about that here?


Also, there's nothing wrong with spitballing and stealing ideas or whatever for fanfics isn't really what I would call help-vampirism but there still is something to it though. Like, especially when it comes to something this concrete and precise.
>"What the hell kind of world would create this scenario?"
A world you should create on your own if you want a story about it. I guess it is fine line and it is always what people are comfortable to give and recieve in terms of advice but I think there is a difference (well some anyway but help like this is still still worth a so much) between someone saying, "The execution of your idea here doesn't work because of this and this," to, "Oh, you want to explain why your trainers can only carry at max six balls. Well, here's and perfect explaination that I made, why don't you use it."

Again, this is all fanfiction and our people might not survive so who really cares if someone stole your glory and ideas but still I think it is at least good to think about. Because what do I get from you if I where to think about each one of these question and give you a great answer?
I suppose, you were being rhetorical and meant that these questions could possibly be answered in a satisfying way in a book. This is something I also just disbelive in and besides, again, why must everything be the same as it was in the video game. To me that sounds stupid and obsessive, not implying you're these things just stating that it seems pointless to force the story to go through the video game's logic loops for no reason.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305531
305542
>>305518
I agree, it makes little sense for that mirror to be in the place where LP found it. It's more video game logic: random goofball item that's actually a semi-significant thing from the past is randomly found in some out of the way location where it has no logical reason to be. An easter egg, basically.

>That's her true self? That's her Shadow? Just some dying angry murderhobo in Raider armour who "glares defiantly" while going down like a little bitch?
Kkat has demonstrated very little genuine creativity. Almost nothing in this story comes from his own imagination; he just draws on his encyclopedic fanboy knowledge of Fallout and MLP. Thus, anything that would require actual imagination, such as visualizing his character's true inner nature, is going to be shallow and obvious.

>>305521
>Honestly a harsh society that values honor above all and ranks its inhabitants by their martial prowess, like the Klingon Empire, would be cool and not unfitting for this setting.
This might have actually been a more interesting direction to take the pegasi than what the author ultimately went with. He still hasn't really explained just what the fuck being a "Dashite" entails.

> She doesn't have a time limit so she could train and learn discipline (if she wasn't stupidly OP already) to steadily rise up through the ranks until she can challenge Red Eye himself to single combat.
Tbh this is what I was more or less expecting her to do when she entered this place. Considering the amount of text we still have to slog through, I assumed this Fillydelphia arc was going to be a long, drawn-out chronicle of LP gradually working her way up from slave to like Red Eye's right-hand lieutenant or something.

>In Fallout separate areas (with a loading screen) obviously don't have sound pass-through, so you can blow up a mini-nuke right outside a building and people just inside by the door won't realize anything anything's amiss.
I rather suspected this was how kkat was thinking about it. Like in GTA you can go into a Cluckin' Bell and throw grenades all over the place, then if you leave and reenter the restaurant, everyone is just sitting at tables eating their food as if the carnage you just unleashed never even happened. It makes video games fun, but it would be absolutely ridiculous to include something like that if you were trying to novelize the game. Though to be fair, I've thought more than once about writing a parodic San Andreas fic that mashed up the ridiculous gameplay with the semi-serious "hood film" story.

>I'm glad /mlpol/ distances itself from bronies
I have rather ambivalent feelings about the bronies myself. I tend to have this issue with most fandoms, actually. Even if I enjoy the thing that the fandom revolves around, I generally detest fanboy-types on principle. They tend to be obnoxious midwits who obsess over data for the sake of data, but have absolutely no imagination or creativity and can't analyze a story on even the most basic level.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305534
305535
>>305529
I meant them as rhetorical questions that seem relevant since Fallout and Pokemon are both RPGs and this story's full of bullshit RPG game mechanics that harm the story. I'm not going to write a pokemon fanfic but I'm wondering how an author could pull off what Kkat wants to do here since I normally find figuring that out easy.
An arbitrary difference between named plot-relevant people with faces and legions of categorized disposable nobodies(Fallout has Raiders and Slavers and Alicorns, Pokemon has Bug Catchers and Hikers and Campers), methods of boosting videogame stats (Littlepip's party time mintals and Pokemon's Swords Dance), being able to carry shitloads of everything(Pokemon heroes can carry 999x of every item while at most an enemy trainer will only use four healing items/Fallout has weight limits that are far more generous than they realistically should be and someone able to lift 200lbs can comfortably carry this weight in guns food and ammo and armour across the country over the course of a few days), a hero with a silly reason for going around from place to place with large stretches of dangerous wild monsters (raiders/wild pokemon) and a world-changing main plot they stumbled into while on a personal goal like getting the water chip/geck/beating pokemon gym leaders, defeating baddies and their evil plans along the way(team rocket and the rest/Red Eye) when life at home is still an option and much safer(nothing's stopping every Pokemon game's protag from leaving home besides a single mom who says "All kids leave home some day"/LP was hated back home for taking Velvet's pipbuck off so she can escape without being tracked but they'd get over their butthurt at losing their favourite celebrity eventually)...
Hell, this story even literally translates a videogame mechanic that exists to make things easier on children (wild pokemon and enemy trainers and legendary godlike monsters and criminals all obeying the official rules about taking turns in 1 on 1 battles unless your opponent consents to a 2v2 or 3v3/VATS aka SATS freezing time and instantly locking your crosshairs onto enemies in range and letting you spend some of your limited Action Points on making the game shoot an enemy for you in your body part of choice in slow motion)
The only thing Pokemon doesn't have is a skill system where the player needs at least 75 lockpicking skill to pick this lock or at least 80 science to pass this skill check but consumable items can buff you to make this easier.
Then again, eating Party Time Mintats to get smarter so you can pick a lock better and using Swords Dance while your foe wastes a turn to get stronger so your Fire Punch does more damage is kind of similar. Rpg number bullshit that makes everything feel artificial.

Usually when stories and games want to have their violent cake and nut on it too they make the hero a violent bastard with a heart of gold on a redemption arc who learns the problem isn't that he has a dark tragic past full of violence and murder, it's that he was murdering the wrong people all along. Nathan Drake and Kratos and the hero from Saints Row have killed fucktons of people by the end of the game. Saints Row's attempt to fix Ludonarrative Dissonance made the world a silly fun place where you unleash sceptic tank hell during story missions and random rampages during non-story playtime sessions. GTA's attempt gave us Trevor, an angry guy who canonically would kill anyone and go on rampages. Fighting games with over-the-top finishing moves tend to make the good guys display supreme power and the silly characters display supreme silliness while the 100% definitely lethal moves are reserved for villains who canonically would disintegrate/mutilate/bloodsuck/impale/eat/necksnap anyone. Which makes Mortal Kombat weird since Johnny can cut someone open and stick his head through their ribcage yelling "Here's johnny!" to anyone even strangers and his own wife/daughter.

I've seen stories do clever things with videogame mechanics before. Frisk from Undertale's ability to save and load the game is a canon superpower that drove Flowey to experiment with every possible ending to see what might happen if he said this or killed her or made that choice. Frisk only says her name if you do what she would do: the nicest possible option every time. Chara represents cruelty and making wrong choices for stat gains, and you summon her by acting like her: level grinding aka killing every last enemy you can possibly find before moving on. Choosing to make the game easier gets Flowey to solve puzzles for you which makes travel as boringly easy as combat becomes and- sorry if I'm rambling but Undertale's smart. Shame the fandom's so cringe I'm embarassed to say I liked it.

If Kkat wanted LP and the audience to give a shit about Xenith, Xenith should have been a named character who does important stuff earlier on in this slave adventure. Maybe a friend who looks out for LP and defends her from bullies, teaches her how to work in the slave jobs, tells her about life in the slave land and its rules and history at night after a hard day's labour, maybe Xenith could get the slaves to start singing a song while working to create a noisy distraction that lets them talk and makes the work feel less soul crushing. Maybe Xenith sticking up for LP could create the house of rapey nirror scene for both of them, forcing LP to save both while either letting the rapists get raped or saving them because they promised to change their ways. It would be a clever way to say "if you are in a bad situation, try to make it better instead of worse. You'll make more friends that way". Kkat should have given Xenith chances to become this story's coolest character and someone we root for before she is introduced as just another enemy for LP to face. Introducing her in this role taints who she is from now on and fails to give her the chance to be someone other than a character who fills this role.
Anonymous
5e54f27
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No.305535
305537
>>305533
>>305534
>I'm not going to write a pokemon fanfic but I'm wondering how an author could pull off what Kkat wants to do here since I normally find figuring that out easy.
>I'm wondering how an author could pull off what Kkat wants to do here since I normally find figuring that out easy.
>I wonder how to do this thing because I normally find it easy.
I... What?
If you find comming up with explanations for how a video game world would translate into a novel-format easy, then why are you asking for advice on how to make it?
Also, jesus. I didn't ask for more examples about how rpgs are unrealistic. I know they aren't realistic. But again. You as the writer will have to make a decision: Either you find explanations for why your world is this way or you ignore the video game rules while writing in that universe.
I suppose if that was your original question from the get go than, there you go.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305537
305546
>>305535
No I meant normally I find answering "how would I make this particular aspect of FOE suck less" easy.
Like with Xenith. Xenith sucks here but if I wanted to make a "LP does not want to fight and kill this named slave" moment tragic I would give this character screentime and make Xenith and LP bond. Come to think of it, I could establish Xenith as the "just keep your head down and do as you're told and don't rock the boat and everything will be fine" type so when Xenith ends up in the slave arena just because Red Eye felt like being a prick, or just because Xenith killed one or more guards by stopping them from raping LP, it would make Red Eye look bad and say "he treats his underlings like trash so do not work for tyrants. Overthrow them like LP".

But small problems are easy to solve. This story...
A ton of its issues stem from "Kkat doesn't know how to translate videogame mechanics into a setting without X buttons and pause menus" and I'm not sure how to fix that either.
A good author should choose where to put his story on the scale of realistic survival simulator to power fantasy videogame and stick to it, right?
I don't know where the perfect place on that sliding scale is. But I do know Kkat's choice is wrong. He keeps going for maudlin bullshit and over the top tradedgey bullshit in a world where a small horse with 20 guns can solve all of life's problems with sufficient murderhoboery. Reason and charismatically talking things out is an optional way to bypass some combat but nobody's actively engaging LP in debates of morality that challenge all she knows and believes. Villains don't get to have convincing arguments for their beliefs.
Red Eye won't ask LP about ponies and places fucked over by raiders and say "I want to create a world without raiders. So do you. So what if we both have to get our hooves dirty to get there? Do the lives you've taken weigh on you? The lives I've taken and lost weigh on me. Those guards you killed... They had names, and families. They were rapists, but that's what happens when you recruit from Thunderdome winners. Some of them will rape when I'm not looking. But when I can afford to purge rapists from my guards and send them to the mines, I will."
you'll never see an Alicorn say "Alicorns are obviously the superior species. Would you trust a dumb fallible pony or superpowered hyper-intelligent mutant hive mind to rule you? Our telepathy lets us spot bad apples before they commit crimes. Why shouldn't we protect ponies from them? Honestly, I don't know why Red Eye told us not to read the minds of his slaves. Telepathy makes a race more honest, and brings them together for the Greater Good".
You'll never see a fucking Raider engage Littlepip in generic basic "why shouldn't the biggest baddest asshole be in charge? Put a weakling in charge and he gets conquered. A strong guy in charge keeps you slaves safe. And why shouldn't that strong guy get to do whatever he wants to you weaklings? It's your own fault for being small! A world of chaos will eventually put the biggest baddest dude in charge of everything and then the chaos ends. Killing us raiders just makes a power vacuum and makes everypony's suffering last longer. But hey, I like to make ponies suffer, too! We're the same, you and I! I'm like, your dark reflection and stuff! *gets shot*"

Kkat compensates for his unwillingness to ask the audience deep uncomfortable queations and inability to write stories that earn their emotional moments by cranking everything up to such ridiculous degrees that any kind of depth is lost in the process. Is anyone going to shed a tear for the ponies of a vault slaughtered in a single night by its AI all because of one prick? You'd have to be a virtue-signalling crybaby of a fanboy to claim that did make you cry. This is a setting where every tragedy that happens to ponies couldn't happen to LP because she's protected by the author and that's lame. So the author compensates by making life suck for other characters sometimes.
Anonymous
5e54f27
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No.305542
305543 305550
1573965488024.png
>>305531
Is this true?
Anonymous
3694f92
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No.305543
305550
55555.png
>>305542
I would say the opposite.
Anonymous
548c81c
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No.305546
>>305508
>mong them is a message from Twilight Sparkle, in which she mentions an enchanted mirror that Rarity found. It enables you to see your "inner" self. I don't think I mentioned this in my recap, but when LP was in the funhouse, she at one point encountered a similar mirror:
This is the daft contrivance I mentioned in >>305434. Rarity happens to come across a magic mirror, which happens to end up in a specific hall of mirrors, which Littlepip happens to stumble across intact, and she just happens to have time to recognise and contemplate it in the middle of a running battle. This would be silly enough on its own, but the reason I pointed it out is that it's setting up for an epiphany moment that's even dumber later. You may recall that Littlepip's been shot up while wearing raider gear before, all the way back when she met Calamity.

>>305526
>>305527
I don't have anything new or interesting to say here, just that I appreciate this depth of analysis. It's excellent stuff.

>>305537
>Villains don't get to have convincing arguments for their beliefs.
This is also a great point. Villains don't need to be right, but it does help enormously if they have at least the skeleton of an argument for their position. Especially in a setting where moral greys are a major feature.

One of the core themes of Fallout is exploring the many different ways that people try to live after the apocalypse. Some regress to tribals or bandits, others make a point of turning away from the values of the pre-war world, others try to recreate the pre-war world hoping they'll 'get it right this time'. Some try to move past the hardships of the wasteland by transforming themselves, others just muddle along as best they can. These different approaches are weighed against one another and their circumstances with varying levels of success and player involvement. This is the sort of thing that FoE should do - if Red Eye and the alicorns had a modicum of competence and at least a handful of positive traits, they'd be far more interesting to read about, even if they're still flawed and defeated in the end. As it stands they're just bland villains who exist to twirl their moustaches and cackle until it's their turn to be shot in the face.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
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No.305550
305552
F00DA3E4AB593E51D72C6F2A0831C6AB-769191.png
>>305542
>>305543
I would argue this is the most accurate version.
Anonymous
6639de1
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No.305552
305791
FOEmeme.png
>>305550
Good meme, I went ahead and made a more consistent version, hope you like.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.305642
How many characters has the story introduced who live a fairly ordinary life according to their hometown's definition of ordinary?
Yet the author still hasn't put the time in to establish how the average non-badass lives their life.
We know nothing of what Monterry Jack's daily life looked like. We don't know why this cheesemaker scavenged for supplies, something anyone can do, in such a dangerous place. We don't know where he gets milk or cheese from because the only hint at how these poners eat in this tower is that we're told thekr restaurant turns 200 year old creamed corn and cram into small fancy-looking portions of fancy food.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.305737
Come to think of it, this story isn't really that dark.

It talks a big talk with all the gore and death and foul language and and genitalia but it would be entirely possible to sanitize this for a TV-7 rating. Replace the shit smeared on walls with graffiti that says shit like "Celestia stinks!", turn all weapons into Magical Dark Energy weapons that damage the foe's soul without dealing physical damage(think 4kids Yugioh "Those are not razor discs that saw off your legs, they are dark energy discs that will send you to the Shadow Realm" censorship), and make up some ponese swears like Shtaco for Shit.

It's still fundamentally a childish premise: a small and weak little nobody goes out into a dangerous world only to never face significant challenges or difficulties. She instantly finds the friend that dragged her into this scenario and bears no ill will towards her. Not even when the bitch continues to manipulate her and her feelings without considering how it would make LP feel. The most questionable thing the heroes did so far besides taking the statuette - killing Grim Star - was done without LP's knowledge or consent while she had an excuse to be busy. LP might claim to think bad things sometimes but she bears no icky unheroic feelings towards any of her friends. She was supposedly addicted to drugs for a while but that didn't make her kill hookers or get friends killed or cause her to fail to save important people. It just compromised her effectiveness as a murderhobo for a while until one trip to the doctor instantly cured her addictions. She was willing to go to war with Tenpony Tower if she couldn't talk them into letting a bastard go, a bastard who nonsensically killed himself and left his own children homeless hoping LP would be forced to break the bad news to them. That's how far the world aka the author has to go before this hero can seem even slightly impure in his eyes. She can't knowingly make bad decisions. Everything has to be forced upon her or a good decision in the author's eyes. Even though she's a graverobbing hypocritical sack of shit the author considers this morally justified because she is the main character. She's 100% morally pure in the eyes of the author because he doesn't have the balls INSERT TRANNY JOKE HERE OH WAIT THE MYTH OF TRANSGENDERISM IS THE JOKE to write a genuinely morally questionable hero. Any problem can be solved with enough gun and the heroes never lack enough gun. Their plot armour is almighty. Their foes are... well, to call them cartoonish caricatures would insult well-written cartoon villains. The author wouldn't know darkness or moral complexity if it fucked him in the ass, and not just because he normally never gets to know who fucks him in the ass before showing them his gaping goatsehole. This doesn't feel like a perilous adventure through a hellish world that doesn't want her here. This feels like a dull RPG with the difficulty turned down too low. Hell, this apocalypse can literally be magicked away with the power of friendship. This isn't just maudlin. This is also Limestonelin, Marblelin, and Pinkielin!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305791
>>305552
Yeah, that actually is better. Saved.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305794
305796 305833
gladiator.jpg
>>305527

Anyway, page break. This next microscene deals with the fight between Daff and the zebra, Xenith. It's a pretty typical Thunderdome scene, but the action is generally well described. The main deficiency is that the pony next to LP, referred to in the text as Number Four, makes fairly annoying commentary through the whole thing. However, it is somewhat informative; we learn from Littlepoop's talkative companion that Xenith has been in the slave pits for years, is one of the few (if any) zebras living in Equestria, and that she is rumored to have had her tongue cut out I guess that saves kkat the trouble of writing dialogue for her. Plus, if he kept quiet, we'd have missed out on this hilarious little gem:

>“Hell, I remember one time a unicorn slave messed up with the recycling and set herself on fire. The slavers shot her so she didn’t run around setting the whole place ablaze. Then, after the flames had gone out, just for fun, they chopped off the unicorn’s head and raped the zebra with it.”
Lmao. Never change, kkat. Never change.

The zebra, naturally, is an expert fighter, and makes generally short work of Daff despite his willingness to fight dirty. It goes back and forth for awhile, but ultimately the fight ends the way you'd expect it to, and kkat doesn't skimp on the cornball cliches. At one point, Daff attempts to splash her with radioactive goo or something from one of the barrels, but she jumps over him and paralyzes him using some kind of Vulcan nerve pinch attack. With her opponent thus incapacitated, she snaps his neck and the scene closes with her waiting for her next opponent, Littlepoop, to step into the Thunderdome.

Page break. Littlepoop plods out into the arena. Her ribs are still aching from being kicked earlier, and that itching powder or whatever the slaver put on her flank seems to be taking effect.

>And I could see the mob of ponies staring down into the arena with gleeful anticipation. I noticed a few were eating snacks. I felt a flare of anger. A pony wouldn’t want to see me brutally murdered on an empty stomach after all.
The author's purpose here is, of course, to highlight the brutality of the spectacle, but once again his inability to think logically about his own setting does him in. Who are these ponies in the audience? Are these the other slaves? That's the only thing that would make sense; as far as I can tell the inhabitants of Fillydelphia consist of slaver guards and slaves, without any middle class in between. So, these slaves do...what exactly? Spend 6 days a week laboring in the fart caverns, and then come out to the Thunderdome on Sunday SUNDAY SUUUUNNNNDAYYY to watch their fellow slaves disembowel each other? Why? What is the point of this spectacle exactly? Who is it for? Kkat hasn't thought any of this through; he just wanted a Thunderdome scene so he wrote one in. In fact, since I feel like I've pretty much got his M.O. down at this point, I'm not even going to give him that much credit. My guess is that there is some kind of Thunderdome mission in one of the Fallout games that involves fighting in some kind of gladiator arena, and this is just a direct ripoff of that. The only difference is that the writers of Fallout were probably aware of what they were plagiarizing.

Anyway, Littlepoop reacts to this absurdity in about the way you'd expect:

>“I’m trying to save all of you WHY?” I screamed out at them. For just a moment, I could understand how Red Eye morally justified putting these ponies through such suffering to build a better world. I didn’t agree, but I could comprehend it.
There's a bit more of this, but you get the idea.

After an appropriate amount of philosophizing about the moral failings of her race, Littlepoop's fight begins. The zebra, who I guess didn't have her tongue cut out after all, whispers "I'm sorry" to her before kicking her in her injured rib. The rib breaks and punctures her lung, which I'm assuming means she will be just fine as soon as she downs another of those magical healing potions in a scene or two.

As Xenith proceeds to further kick the crap out of her, she tries to explain that she has a plan, and says the two of them should team up and try to escape together. There is some more inner-monologuing from Littlepoop, which makes it sound like she may have learned a valuable lesson, but actually it's just more of her trademark false humility:

>In truth, I had been arrogant -- so prideful of my ability to improvise, so full of myself from past victories, that I actually thought I could walk into the enemy camp with nothing but my wits… and win. I let the Elder convince me this was the only way because it conveniently allowed me to protect my friends. Instead, I had become a slave, and now I was desperately attempting to float beyond the reach of a zebra’s devastating hoofstrikes.
This would be more convincing if I didn't have every reason to believe she will just pull some ridiculous trick out of her ass to get herself out of this jam, same as always.

>My horn glowed again. In desperation, I wrapped the telekinetic field around her throat and began to tighten.
The problem with Littlepoop's Mary Sue powers is that they ruin moments like this. What happened to LP's ridiculously overpowered telekinesis? Considering what we've seen her do up until now, she ought to have no problem simply levitating Xenith and flinging her against a wall until her neck breaks, or tossing her out of the Thunderdome, or doing nearly anything she wants.

The author established earlier that LP is trying to keep a low profile in here and doesn't want to show how ludicrously OP she is, but he also established that at this point she considers her plan to infiltrate the camp a failure, and is now simply trying to escape. If she doesn't want to kill Xenith, why not just levitate the two of them to safety? This is why you have to be careful about giving your character too many superpowers.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
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No.305796
305814 305815 305833
1600376175844.png
>>305794

>I looked up at the barrels. My horn flared again, wrapping one of them in a magical field. But the barrel was securely fastened to the cage ceiling, and my telekinesis was not strong enough to tear it free.
Case in point: she's strong enough to pick up a boxcar, or to levitate their entire airship when it runs out of batteries or whatever, yet she can't break a barrel free? What is it, stuck on there with glue or something? This is just silly.

Anyway, this fight goes as predictably as the last fight. Xenith kicks the crap out of Littlepoop until Littlepoop uses her magic to strangle her. She does not kill her, she simply chokes the wind out of her until she goes semi-unconscious. The crowd of generically evil cliche Thunderdome spectators is once again howling for blood, and the direction of Caesar's thumb indicates he expects her to kill Xenith.

>Stern seemed to glean that I was up to something because she unslung her anti-machine rifle. “Finish it!” the griffin demanded. Couldn’t Stern at least call Xenith ‘her’?
In this context, "it" refers most logically to the fight, not to Xenith, so LP's remark here is dumb. However, it's not surprising that kkat would be sensitive about pronoun use.

At this point, LP apparently remembers that her telekinesis can do ridiculously powerful shit. I'll hand it to kkat here; this next bit reaches levels of preposterousness and incoherence I didn't even think were possible. Bear with me here, I'm going to do the best I can at summarizing this:

LP breaks open all of the barrels at once, and dumps their contents into the arena. The text never really explains what the deal with these barrels is, but apparently they are all filled with weapons packed in some kind of toxic goo. LP levitates the toxic goo into some kind of shield that wraps around herself and Xenith. I don't understand why she does this, but it seems to somehow protect her from Stern's anti-tank gun, which immediately begins firing as soon as Stern realizes that LP is up to something. I guess the goo is bulletproof or something? Who the fuck knows; for now I'm just going to assume it's another Fallout reference that I don't get.

While maintaining the apparently bulletproof goo curtain, she simultaneously levitates herself and the unconscious Xenith up to some kind of trapdoor in the ceiling (this part I'm not clear on, because the author never properly described the interior of this arena). It is, of course, padlocked, and LP, of course, does not have any of her lockpicking tools, but she does not let that deter her. She pulls the pins out of some grenades that she found...somewhere, I guess; probably they were in one of the barrels...and then...um...actually, I'm not quite sure what she does here. Here is what the text actually says:

>Manipulating multiple objects that were out of sight was tricky, but I had pulled pins from grenades hidden in a sack. And I knew locks. I knew tumblers and internal mechanisms. I should be able to pick a lock with my magic alone.
The implication here is either that she pulled the pins out of some hitherto-unmentioned grenades and used the pins to pick the locks, or else she just used her magic alone to pick the locks. I'm not sure which one it is because kkat's wording here is as vague as ever, but either option is ludicrous even by the standards of FoE.

Anyway, she floats the bulletproof goo cocoon containing herself and the zebra up to some trapdoor in the ceiling I guess, picks the lock with magic or something I think, and then she is out of the arena. I think. At this point, she is described as "running along the top of the cage" what cage? was she in a cage? I'm so fucking confused right now. I guess she isn't levitating the two of them anymore. Is the zebra running too, or is she still carrying her? What about the bulletproof goo cocoon? Is that still intact? I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to be visualizing here; I can't make hide nor hair out of kkat's description of the action. If anyone wants to read this part and take a whack at a better summary, be my guest. All I know is that she's doing a lot of physically and magically demanding stuff here, and bear in mind that she is doing all of it with a broken rib and a punctured lung.

ANYWAY, she eventually gets to the end of the cage I guess, and jumps off and lands back in that fun farm amusement park area, which I guess was next door to the Thunderdome. Also, a bullet grazes her leg, and she sustains some mild injury from this.

Page break. When LP comes to, she is being carried by the zebra, who is running on the roller coaster track of the amusement park for some reason or other. LP is in tremendous pain from her injuries, and that last gunshot destroyed the broadcaster attachment on her PipBuck, so she can't call for help. She apparently also took quite a few "rads" (I'm assuming this means radiation damage) from that toxic goo she surrounded the two of them with for whatever reason.

>Looking down, I saw slaver ponies shooting at us from the ground. By experience these mares and bucks were not the best shots even at close range. If they hit us at this distance with the cover of the tracks, it would be by sheer dumb luck.
Naturally. Why should any challenge this character faces present an actual challenge? Now all she needs to do is find some magical panacea potions to treat the multiple fatal injuries she's sustained, and she will no doubt be back to her old, murderhoboing self in another scene or two.

However, it seems she is not quite out of the metaphorical woods just yet. At the apex of the roller coaster track they find the actual roller coaster, which I guess has just been sitting here for 200 years, and when she tries to levitate them over it, she runs out of magic, or something, and suddenly her Mary Sue powers stop working. Ah, good ol' Mary: equal parts powerful and powerless, whichever and whenever the author needs her to be.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305814
305922
>>305796
Levitating radioactive goo to form a shield isn't a Fallout thing, it's something Kkat came up with probably after watching too much Avatar.
Also LP telekinetically unlocks the lock here even though she cannot see the lock. Her excuse is "well I have pulled pins from grenades I couldn't see before" but this is retarded. Why would anypony carry grenades in a world where any psychic could easily pull their pins from 2000m away or further?
Furthermore giving LP the power to just unlock any lock telekinetically without having to pick it with a "traditional" screwdriver and bobby pin raises questions like "why did you ever bother picking these locks like a magicless faggot in the first place if psychically unlocking them was always an option" and "If all unicorns can open locks with their horns without needing specialized unlocking spells or lockpicking tools why the hell have any locks remained unopened in the 200 years since ponyland got nuked?" and "Why even bother giving Littlepip that preposterous "pipbuck repair guy and generalized stuff-fixer" background to justify her knowledge of Lockpicking and Repair(fixing things) and Science(terminal hacking) if her species makes lockpicking irrelevant and her most frequently used actions are Sneak Around, Talk Sometimes, Use Overpowered Telekinesis, and Shoot Gun?

Is it bad writing that even though Velvet is the designated face and smart charismatic one of Littlepip's Littleshits, moments where a NPC or Villain needs convincing via a DND Skill Check are typically passed by Littlepip?
Between this and how easy it is to make and drink healing potions it makes what Velvet the pacifistic murderhobo medic contributes to the team feel irrelevant.
It's also bad writing that the literal "one speech skill fits all" approach of Fallout is translated so literally, right? I can't see the charms Velvet Remedy would use to get what she wants from a rich mare work on someone she'd call less classy aka someone from a completely different background with completely different priorities and values.
Games with more in-depth dialogue system split up their dialogue skills so there's one skill like Deception or Street Smarts for lying convincingly and getting what you want from one class of NPCs(thieves usually), a Negotiation or Ettiquite skill for convincing rich fancy guys, maybe a separate Intimidation skill for intimidation rolls that work on anyone if it's high enough, and so on. It helps stop the "if your character has a high Speech stat he's a god who can make anyone do anything and can only be challenged by combat, the thing he made a high speech character to avoid" problem. More importantly it lets people besides the main character/party face contribute outside of combat. Suddenly the party's cleric can appeal to the foe's better nature if he has one and the party's tough guy can make threats and talk tough during negotiations, playing bad cop to the party negotiator's good cop, instead of just waiting around for their next chance to deal 1d12 axe damage during a fight.
It's impossible to stop thinking of LP's team as anything other than one-note NPCs that follow LP around and fight for her. I've read Pokemon fics that give their hero's attack animals more personality and agency than this!
They don't even have Companion Quests! Or Loyalty Missions or whatever you want to call them. These characters don't have dreams of their own and missions they want to complete while helping LP achieve her dream. Or missions they spring on LP relevant to their characters once they trust and like her enough. LP doesn't have much of a goal right now besides murderhoboery and helping her new DJ friend. Ain't like she wants to visit every Stable to see what lessons can be learned from them.
Imagine if Velvet wanted to see all the tourist destinations in Equestria she read about as a foal in a big book, but every single one was fucked up by ziggers or slavers in some way.
Imagine if Calamity wanted to travel the world looking for the only remaining Dashitss to get the band back together like Arcade and the Enclave Remnants from FNV.
Imagine if the party got somepony who wanted to find one mythical place where legends say there is still unirradiated nature untouched by the bombs where grass can be eaten safely and the sun still shines brightly but it turns out this town is constantly repeating the same day over and over thanks to a glitching megaspell the town used to protect itself from the apocalypse and automatically reverse time in the area to redo the day whenever it detects somepony dying.
Imagine if Steelhooves wanted to find something relevant to AJ like a statuette of her. Preferably one with magic. It wouldn't be as silly as trying to find a twinkie in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. It would actually be kind of weirdly hilarious. Trying to find an Applejack minifigure in the bombed out ruins of the setting this character was from... something about that feels wrong. But over 200 years at least one poner should have found one and spread stories about how these MLP Blind Bag Minifigures make you faster/stronger/whatever.
Steelhooves doesn't count, his mission is to be one of LP's party members for the good of an organization he has no reason not to take over. This 200 year old faggot allowed his organization to decline into technoelitist pseudofeudalism and if he gave a fuck about honouring AJ's memory and making sure others do the same he'd grab this organization by the pussy and make it his bitch.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305815
305823 305853
c290bb638bcb7f928ad63f62afdfc33c.gif
>>305796

Littlepoop summons whatever remains of her powers and squeezes out one last kamehameha that gives them enough levitation to climb over the roller coaster cars without falling through them, or whatever they're worried about exactly. They're about halfway across, when suddenly a shot rings out and a bullet punctures the nose of the car they're on.

>I had been wrong. It wasn’t the griffins I had to worry about. It was the snipers in the damn Pinkie Pie Balloons. Once we crested the top, we had put ourselves right in their crosshairs. And the carriages slowed us to a crawl, giving them easy shots.
Considering the very public ruckus they just caused, realistically the entire compound should be on alert and chasing after them. Their escape from the arena was implausible enough; the idea that they could slow-crawl their way over this dilapidated 200 year old roller coaster when it's already been established that this place has air support up the wazoo is beyond idiotic. The snipers and the griffins should have made Swiss cheese out of them several times over by now. Oh wait, I forgot; all the enemies in this story are even dumber than the heroes.

Anyway, it doesn't get much better from here. Even though the two of them are sitting ducks for the balloon snipers, we don't hear any more about them. Instead, some dive-bombing griffons are flying overhead dropping grenades on them, which all miss and do no damage. One of them apparently has a rocket launcher. Meanwhile, LP, who I would like to remind everyone has a broken rib, a punctured lung and a sprained foreleg with hairline fractures in the bone, is able to buck one of the roller coaster cars hard enough to knock it loose. It barrels backwards and knocks some raiders who were chasing them off the track. Meanwhile, the momentum causes the car they are sitting in to fall forward, and they begin to roll forward. I would just like to remind everyone that these roller coaster cars have apparently been sitting here, at the peak of this unmaintained, rickety wooden track, completely unattended and exposed to the elements, for the last 200 years.

The car goes careening down the track, and meanwhile there are griffons and Pinkie Pie balloon snipers and God only knows what else firing grenades and rocket launchers and whatnot at them, but somehow nothing hits them except for a single bullet that grazes the back of Xenith's neck. Meanwhile, LP is at one point able to use her telekinesis whatever happened to her powers deserting her, anyway? to wrench a griffon's rifle away from him in midair, spin it around, and use it to blow his head off. I would just like to remind everyone again that Littlepoop now has a punctured lung, a broken rib, a sprained and fractured leg, and is careening down a rickety roller coaster track at probably 40 or 50 miles an hour in a car that by all logic should have wheels that are rusted solid by now.

The griffon with the rocket launcher fires a missile at them, but naturally it doesn't hit. Another griffon flies alongside and aims a shotgun at them point blank, but naturally Littlepoop is able to shoot her in the wing with her last remaining shot in the other griffon's rifle, which causes her to fall into a tailspin. Meanwhile, the rocket that was just fired has apparently blown a hole in the track ahead, but naturally, LP is able to use her magic to float them over the gap to relative safety on the other side.

Page break. The roller coaster track conveniently leads into the barn-like structure, which thanks to her Mary Sue powers of perception LP has divined to be both a former Ministry hub as well as Red Eye's living quarters. Despite this, there are absolutely no guards inside this tunnel, which is obviously an entrance to the building. LP now explains her "plan" to Xenith:

>“We make it to the roof. There’s always a Pinkie Pie Balloon anchored up there. We’re going to take it. That’s how we get past the moat and The Wall.”
How does she know this?

Anyway, they venture further into the completely unguarded tunnel, looking for a door into the building proper. Meanwhile, the griffon with the rocket launcher follows them inside the tunnel. It's odd that none of the other guards who were chasing them would do this, since they all saw where she went, and in any case even if they didn't they should know where the track ends up. Seems like this would have been a fine place to set an ambush, but again; everyone in this story is a goddamn moron.

Littlepoop attempts to use her telekinesis to unlatch the griffon's extra missile bag, presumably so she can blow her up in some preposterous, horrible way, but discovers that, once again, her magic has conveniently burned out. However, as luck would have it, Xenith is some kind of super-bad-ass ninja mercenary or something, and is able to stealth-kill the one griffon who bothered to chase them in here. Have I mentioned recently that kkat is a dickless tranny and I hate his guts?

Page break. Apparently, they managed to find a way inside the building, because we rejoin them in a hallway. Again, despite the fact that these two should logically have the entire compound looking for them, and despite the fact that an entire goddamned sniper platoon and multiple griffons saw them ride the fucking roller coaster into this building, for some reason the only opposition they encounter are two inept guards who are just placidly standing there waiting for some random zebra to walk up and snap their necks.

Littlepoop has one of her random pangs of conscience which occasionally cause her to regret killing certain enemies for some reason, but it seems that Xenith suffers from no such handicap. She walks up, intending to snap both of their necks, but they finally notice the two of them and attack. A brief scuffle ensues, which ends predictably. At this point, LP observes that the two guards had been guarding the door to a vault.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305823
305898
narutoissmart.jpg
>>305815
Moments like "Snipers in hot air balloons guarding the air around a static location" and "Griffons flying over foes, then dropping grenades/firing missiles" annoy me because they're incredibly rare instances of the author actually thinking "Wait, how would a nation that loves hot air balloons utilize sniper rifles?" and "How would Griffons fight if they didn't want to stop flying around over their foe?"
Both times, his answer is dull. "Flying guy throws bombs" is incredibly basic (taking one look at any plane able to fire/drop missiles/bombs can give you the idea) and "hot air balloon sniper" is stupid.
Plus because "bomb-throwing fliers" is a decent idea, Kkat has to make it shit. All LP's foes have to miss with all their attacks. Every single attack aimed at the heroes needs to miss unless it would cause inconsequential damage like a minor bullet graze to the back of the neck or a fractured and sprained hoof or a cracked rib that pierces a lung. You know, injuries Kkat considers inconsequential because he's never experienced them and has never seen competent writers describe them.
Also, if Red-Eye has functional hot air balloons and bombs and an alliance with the Alicorns why hasn't he already taken over this Wasteland and everypony within it? Doesn't matter how "badass" some Zigger is in close quarters combat, it's not surviving if the building it's in gets blown to pieces.
If Littlepip has the telekinetic power to steal a gun from its owner and turn it on him, why not steal a balloonist sniper's gun and use it to shoot down other sniper balloons? There's a reason why we don't use hot air balloons in military engagements. They're fragile. And slow. Shooting a hot air balloon or its pilot is easier than shooting down a F69 Raptor or whatever it's called at maximum speed. LP has SATS, she can cheat to win any sniper contest by popping out of cover and headshotting or balloon-shotting any enemy in the air in dilated time (HEH HEH KKAT WOULD KNOW A LOT ABOUT DILATING THINGS BECAUSE HE'S A TRANNY) before popping back into cover.
You'd think Zebras, with their do-anything alchemy, would have some sort of explosive fire-bomb molotov cocktail weapon and a method to launch these firebombs at hot air balloons. This would encourage ponyland to not rely on sniper balloons since the ziggers love sabotage and cheap tricks in this story's canon. Then again, Kkat doesn't think much.
So LP doesn't think much.
LP will never do anything as smart as the clever tricks Naruto pulled off. If she was placed into his story, the nonsensically OP telekinesis she had from day one would carry her through every fight ever, so she'd never have to learn or grow.

I checked TvTropes's Fallout Equestria page, it's full of sycophantic dicksucking and inordinate amounts of praise for "Chekovs Gun moments(TM)" where shit hidden amongst raw sewage is fished out chapters later with the author's insistence that it was solid gold hidden in plain sight all along. Its "List of heartwarming moments" is as maudlin as you'd expect and its "List of awesome moments" is annoying. Apparently they think LP dropping a boxcar on an Alicorn, Littlepip killing Mr Topaz the dragon by shoving explosives down its mouth, that time in chapter 18 when Calamity blew up a parking lot full of inexplicably-explosive delivery carts so they could escape from Alicorns, and LP flushing her Party-Time Mint-Als down the shitter after deciding to never use them again were some of the story's coolest moments.
I'm surprised LP's dungeon-crawl through that Chimera Stable while Calamity was poisoned, you know the time she looted as much as she could from the place before blowing it up even though her friend was dying, even though her mission was to simply seal off the source of these monsters and she didn't have to blow the place up or prioritize that over the life of her friend, wasn't on the list. Her dedication to overkill and peak murderhoboery superseded her desire to cure her friend as quickly as possible, not that this really bothered Calamity since he's a NPC who doesn't care if he's mistreated.
Hell, I'm surprised that time Steelhooves murdered Grim Star with the monsters he tried to protect his hometown from, or some stupid unfunny quip we've all forgotten about from 10 or so chapters ago aimed at some character we're not supposed to like, isn't on the list.
I can't mention the other stuff on the list because it's all spoilers.
The site's page for "Tear Jerker moments" is more than twice as long as the "awesome moments" page despite how hard this story relies on spectacle and accidental campy over-the-top bullshit, turns out these crybabies cried at pretty much everything even remotely sad. Same with their page for "Nightmare Fuel", turns out they found everything spooky in this story absolutely terrifying. The thought of a grown-ass man unironically describing a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction as "nightmare fuel" just because it inflicted some torturous death upon his favourite poner is bizarre.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305833
PcIdQ6H.png
lolpep.png
>>305794
>What is the point of this spectacle exactly? Who is it for? Kkat hasn't thought any of this through; he just wanted a Thunderdome scene so he wrote one in. In fact, since I feel like I've pretty much got his M.O. down at this point, I'm not even going to give him that much credit. My guess is that there is some kind of Thunderdome mission in one of the Fallout games that involves fighting in some kind of gladiator arena, and this is just a direct ripoff of that.
Yup. As I alluded to in >>305349 , the entire Fillydelphia scenario is based on Fallout 3's Pitt DLC.

In the game's lore, Pittsburgh was populated by the "hurr durr rape and murder" variety of raiders up until Ashur, an ex-brotherhood warlord, rose up and united them. Under Ashur's rule the motley scum of Pittsburgh are gradually beginning to make progress in reviving the local industry, with plans to create a proper society sometime far in the future. Both the slavers and the majority of the slaves are former raiders, which would go some way to explaining why pit fighting is the local sport of choice. Part of the DLC revolves around a potential cure for the unique strain of radiation sickness plaguing the city: Ashur's baby daughter appears to be immune to mutation. Do you side with Ashur and allow him to slowly, ethically develop a cure from his daughter's DNA over the course of years while his brutal regime continues to rule the city? Or do you side with the slaves, kidnap Ashur's infant daughter and pass her over to the slaves who are inclined to be more expedient and far less kind?

Not exactly Shakespeare, obviously, but even this limited nuance is lost in FoE. The slaves are generic "helpless victim" NPCs. The slavers are generic "evil baddie" NPCs. Red Eye's claims to progress ring hollow in light of this.

>>305796
Here's how I understand the escape:
>The fight is taking place inside a pit with a cage roof over it
>Littlepip floats the radioactive goo to obscure the slavers' vision of her.
>She simultaneously levitates herself and Xenith up to the trapdoor
>She uses her telekinesis to open it by manually moving the tumblers inside without being able to see them (the grenade thing is a reference to when she killed Mr.Topaz earlier, presumably intended to make this look like less of an ass pull).
>she gets the hatch open, climbs out and runs
>she takes a glancing hit from an anti-machine rifle (ie. a .50 cal), and finally falls unconscious.

In short, she performs three near-unprecedented feats of magic simultaneously and shrugs off a bullet desinged to kill tanks, while carrying somebody bigger than her and suffering from a punctured lung. As you do.

I have absolutely no idea how or why the pit seems to be located many stories above the theme park - in the game it's in the basement of a steel mill.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305839
Was thinking about Red Eye's lack of presence in the tale and how a better game story solved the problem.

During the 2nd act of Ratchet and Clank 1, you get distracted.
Your goal is "stop chairman drek from destroying dozens of inhabited planets to get parts to build a new home for his people, the Blarg" but Ratchet's obsessed with getting revenge on his lackey Qwark and you get caught up in a chain of mandatory sidequests that lasts 30% of the story.
Get the two infobots on Batallia that tell you about Orxon and Gaspar, get to Orxon (as Clank since the atmosphere's too poisonous for Ratchet), get the Magnetboots and the Infobot that tells you about Pokitaru, go to Gaspar to get the Pilot's Helmet, go to Pokitaru to take down Blarg ships polluting the resort and get rewarded with the O2 mask, and finally return to Orxon with the O2 mask that lets ratchet breathe on that planet so he can hunt down an Infobot that tells him where to go next, FIMALLY letting him get on with the story.
However things still feel important and connected to the main plot and villain. And the environments are varied and interesting.
Batallia is a rainy world at war with Drek's race, the Blarg.
Orxon is the sickly green gabandoned homeworld of the Blarg. Only monsters and your robotic friend can survive here, any organic life needs an O2 mask designed to let people survive underwater indefinitely.
Gaspar is a volcanic red planet with the Blarg Depot, a military base and testing facility for the Pilot's Helmet.
Pokitaru is a sunny tropical resort planet under attack by local wildlife mutated by the toxic waste the Blarg is dumping here, and using the Pilot's Helmet to take the Blarg dropships out gets you the O2 mask.
Even when you're just running around killing Blarg or navigating a doomed world it feels like you're fighting the enemy and foiling his plans and taking necessary steps in the war against him. Everything comes back to Drek to make the final confrontation on Ratchet's homeworld of Veldin (which he wants to destroy) extra-epic.
The worldbuilding was also great in 2 and Deadlocked, everything came back to Megacorp or Dreadzone.
But what presence has Red-Eye had in the story so far if you don't count his radio broadcasts which were likely added in later?
And what world does LP explore?

What do we get in this story? Wasteland. And sometimes, more Wasteland broken up by the occasional destroyed urban environment with generic slavers/raiders or occasional towns built from scrap. Rarely there's a pre-war building or Stable to explore. When LP isn't fighting random mutated wildlife from Equestria or Fallout 1's California desert, she's fighting dull uninteresting evil Alicorns in a hive mind that stops them from being unique memorable charactsrs in their own right.
Right now, LP is balls deep into Red Eye territory and she's still seeing the same wasteland shit albeit with random amusement park shit here and there.
But it's not like there are booby trapped monster houses or modified lethal obstacle courses or a bumper car racetrack modified into a lethal game of Mario Kart or a shooting gallery where the squirt gun is enchanted to drain the blood of whoever fires it and the open-mouthed things you have to fill with water leak or a slide but some cunt put spiked caltrops at the bottom or any of the creative wacky evil shit some evil overlord could make from an amusement park if he wanted to put on a show for his supporters and make an example out of rebels. Rigged ladder-climbing carnival games get hardcore when every contestant except the last one to fall gets sacrificed to the crushing jaws of the enchanted animatronic robo-dragon with a broken-down rollercoaster built around him.
LP has lost her guns but her absurd telekinesis and absurd luck means this isn't the issue Kkat thinks it is.
I expected her to switch from fighting wasteland monsters to Red Eye guards until she moved on to the next area but for some reason there was a monster-infested building to loot and she was given a laser gun so she could do her usual looty shooty shit without any difficulty.
LP didn't even get handcuffed to the Zigger or the guy who tried to rape her during the gladiator fight! "the hero must be handcuffed to some cunt at some point" is prison escape story 101 for a reason!
Why the hell didn't Littlepip just slap on a StealthBuck to turn invisible and sneak into a high vantage point in Red Eye's land before telekinetically slamming Red Eye into a wall with the amount of force it takes to lift a boxcar? Why did she bother with this slaver plotline if she's going to blow her "cover" and become a known enemy of this place the second she feels like adding a Zigger to her party?
Why does so much of this story feel like pointless filler that could be skipped or cut for a movie adaption without skipping anything important?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305853
305858
546.gif
>>305815

Page break. Littlepoop apparently hacks the terminal without difficulty and opens the door to the vault. Even Xenith finds this action to be absurd, but Littlepoop offers a rambling, flimsy explanation for why it was necessary for them to go in here:

>I explained that I needed to catch my breath. A statement my shallow, harsh breathing had proven altogether true. The worst part of my injuries was the fact that I couldn’t risk healing them -- not with a broken rib and punctured lung. Any poultice would cause those to heal wrong. I needed Velvet Remedy before I could dare use anything more than a healing bandage. And in our situation, I didn’t even dare use painkillers. I needed to be thinking straight.
She literally has a piece of broken rib jutting into her lung, it's amazing she can even breathe at all, or that she's not choking on her own blood. Part of the problem here is that, again, the way medicine works in this story is beyond screwy. A "poultice", however magical, couldn't really be applied to an internal injury, so this is pretty much irrelevant. Also, I don't recall any previous mention of poultices being a healing technique in this world anyway. The difference between Velvet Remedy's healing magic and the magic healing potions that seem to cure just about everything has never been clarified; seems to me the two are basically interchangeable. And finally, to my knowledge Littlepoop doesn't even have access to any of these medical supplies in the first place; this includes the painkillers she "doesn't dare" use, so none of this matters anyway.

Given the current situation, I guess I don't see that she has too many options beyond simply pressing forward, since she obviously needs medical attention that she can't currently get, and if she stays in the slaver compound she dies one way or the other. However, I don't see how any of this justifies hacking the terminal and exploring the vault; this is just another excuse to go looting.

>“What is this?” Xenith asked, staring into the room that had been sealed behind the vault door.
>“The Wasteland, taunting me,” I answered as I stepped into the vault, looking around at the mostly-empty shelves with their scattering of memory orbs -- none of which I could look into without my magic -- and the line of passkey-coded wall safes along the back -- none of which I could open. The Equestrian Wasteland loved rubbing my face in my every moment of weakness.
1. Who gives a shit about the memory orbs? You don't need to pry into every single one of these things that you find.
2. Who gives a shit about the wall safes? You don't need to pry into every single one of these that you find.
3. Your moments of "weakness" are few and far between, and in any case, the only effect of your present weakness is that you are unable to pry into a bunch of safes and memory orbs that have nothing to do with your current objective and are none of your business in the first place. Nobody sympathizes with you here.

Anyway, completely ignoring her injuries and the fact that realistically the entire fucking compound should still be looking for her even though they don't seem to be for some reason, Littlepoop gathers up all of the stupid orbs and stuffs them into her saddlebags. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but at one point she took a new pair of saddlebags off of one of the guards she killed.

At this point, she spies another terminal, so she figures she might as well hack it. I mean, it's not like she has anything more important to be worrying about right now.

>Reaching it, I hooked my PipBuck into the terminal and began my hack.
The method she uses to "hack" these terminals has never been properly explained. At one point, the text explicitly mentions that she has some kind of separate "device" to do this, but here she appears to be using her PipBuck. Add this to the long, long list of vague things in this story that the author should have put some thought into but didn't.

Anyway, the hack goes the way it usually goes: the terminal is tough, and she can't break the encryption, and then suddenly she does. The author makes passing note of how illogical this situation is, but as usual chooses to simply dismiss it rather than deal with it:

>I was increasingly aware of how long this was taking. Stern had ponies scouring the building and surrounding grounds for us. They were spread out, but eventually one or more of them would stumble across us.
Reminder that she currently has a broken rib, a punctured lung, a sprained and hairline-fractured foreleg, and that she only came in here to "catch her breath."

Anyway, blah blah blah she gets the safes open. All of them. Inside, she finds the usual assortment of useless bric-a-brac: an audio recording, a StealthBuck, some memory orbs, and an old cloak which Xenith reacts strangely to:

>I caught Xenith’s reaction as I pulled out the cloak, even though she recovered quickly.
>“What?” I asked.
>“Nothing,” she lied.
I'm not sure what the significance of this is. At any rate, Xenith tries to wear the cloak, but the clasp is broken so she can't.

She also finds an old PipBuck:

>The only thing I could get from it was an automapped floor plan for Stable Three. The Stable looked identical to Stable Two, except that the apple orchard was only two-thirds the size and there were two interlocking Overmare’s Offices. I shuddered inexplicably.
Most of this story makes me laugh, but I'm never quite sure when I'm supposed to be laughing. Is LP's terror of slight variants in Stable designs meant to be a humorous jab at her OCD, or is this a sign of something actually insidious going on? I'm not sure.

In any case, the last safe contains Red Eye's plans for the something-whatever engine, which she was supposed to grab for the Steel Rangers I think, so I guess there was kind of a point to coming in here. LP seems to be having her usual luck with stumbling across the exact things she needs at exactly the right times.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305858
305861 305866
bndWRM.png
>>305853

Page break. The scene opens an indeterminate period of time later, at an indeterminate location. Xenith and Littlepoop are at the top of a staircase, when Xenith notices one of the Fluttershy posters on the wall. She reacts fearfully to it, and makes a remark about "Doombunny." A fairly bizarre exchange follows, in which Xenith explains that Fluttershy's pet rabbit was apparently some kind of mutant terror that unleashed horrors on the zebra population...or something. The text makes a somewhat clever reference to the Monty Python killer bunny (at least I'm assuming that's the reference), and I get the impression the whole thing is meant to be a joke. However, again, it's a little hard to tell which funny parts in this story are intentional.

Anyway, they keep exploring. Once again, it strikes me as passing strange that this building is supposed to be Red Eye's keep, and that an entire platoon of griffons and several balloon snipers saw them come in here, and yet they have encountered no opposition other than the pair of guards they stumbled across that were guarding the vault door.

As they enter some kind of research laboratory, they do come across one guy. However, he turns out to be nothing but a lone scientist; Xenith dispatches him with her stealth kill maneuver, and Littlepoop steals her coat for some idiotic reason:

>“It’s not much protection,” I admitted. “But anything is better than nothing…”
It's not protection against anything; this is moronic. What the hell is a labcoat going to protect you against? About the only reason this would be useful is as a disguise, and I think at this point LP is recognizable enough and has caused enough noticeable trouble that her chances of sneaking around this place disguised as a scientist are near zero.

Anyway, she pokes around in the science lab, and comes across a recipe for Party Time Mint-als. She has an obligatory moment of temptation, which ends in obligatory resistance. She summons up a memory of Homage's sweet lovin' to help fend off the craving.

(author's italics are preserved here)
>I remembered Homage’s sweet voice. And something she said floated back to me:
>…Oh, a mixture of Rage and painkillers. A friend and I found the recipe in the ruins of a M.O.P. clinic when we were younger…
>I blinked. Then called out to Xenith.
>“Wait… you mean to tell me that Fluttershy’s pet rabbit invented Stampede?”
Once again, Littlepoop is making weird connections that don't logically follow each other, and forming conclusions that she wouldn't necessarily form from the information she has available to her. "Stampede" has been mentioned in passing once or twice, and I think I do remember Homage saying something about using it back when she was hanging with another friend. I don't remember the friend's name (I'm actually not sure if it was given), but it seems improbable that Fluttershy's rabbit would have survived long enough to fill the role. I don't think that's what the author is implying here, either.

As to Flutterbutter's rabbit, this is what the author gives us:

>Xenith lowered her face to mine, speaking in that odd accent. “Oh yes. Doombunny was a master in the laboratory. I also hear it could cook and toss a mean salad.”
I hear the fellas down at Club Manhole say the same thing about kkat, except for the part about the laboratory and the cooking. However, point is, there's nothing here about Stampede; all this tells us is that Fluttershy's rabbit I'm assuming the rabbit is meant to be Angel Bunny, but the text does not explicitly give us a name was apparently an expert chemist and yes, this autism is actually in the text.

So, all we have here is that Flutters' bunny was a chemist, and that a drug called Stampede exists. I see no reason why these two facts should automatically be connected, and the author has not provided us with any additional information that might connect them. It's possible that this is also drawing on some of the other obscure facts that this text is peppered with that I've simply forgotten, but frankly the topic is just too idiotic to be worth researching. It's easier to just call kkat a faggot and move on.

Page break. At this point I'm just going to assume that both LP and the author have completely forgotten about the fact that her damn lung is punctured and that there is literally an entire army chasing them, because Littlepoop suddenly decides it would be a good idea to put her earbuds in and listen to some recording she found in one of the terminals she hacked earlier. It appears to be a recording of only one side of a telephone conversation. The speaker is Rarity. Though we are not able to hear what is spoken by the second party, she is revealed to be Princess Luna when Rarity addresses her by name.

The recording itself is not particularly exciting; the conversation appears to have taken place during the early part of the war, when the m6 were first forming their respective Ministries. Rarity mostly talks about how they are all busy now, and they are subsequently beginning to drift apart. We get an early reference to Ponk's budding crack mint addiction. Beyond this, the only other interesting tidbit is that Zecora was apparently murdered at some point; Pinkie's ministry is tasked with tracking down those responsible.

Page break. Instead of searching the lab for something that could heal the jagged rib poking into her lung, Littlepoop instead begins poking around in the various terminals. She finds some information about "bypass spells," which I think is the other thing the Rangers wanted her to look into while she's here. The magic involves casting spells that selectively target certain things but leave others alone, and is presumably used as part of something like a balefire bomb designed to cause mass destruction. That could be helpful, I guess. Anyway, the long and short of it is that Red Eye is getting close but he's not quite there yet.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.305861
>>305858
>A fairly bizarre exchange follows, in which Xenith explains that Fluttershy's pet rabbit was apparently some kind of mutant terror that unleashed horrors on the zebra population...or something. The text makes a somewhat clever reference to the Monty Python killer bunny (at least I'm assuming that's the reference), and I get the impression the whole thing is meant to be a joke. However, again, it's a little hard to tell which funny parts in this story are intentional.
As far as I'm aware, this is unironic. It gets referenced again later, multiple times if memory serves. Angel Bunny was supposedly responsible for inventing high end combat drugs and singlehandedly terrifying the zebras with how deadly he was in a fight. Presumably this is all intended as a Monty Python reference initially, combined with the old S1 memes about how Angel is a dick, except Kkat has absolutely no clue how jokes work or when to stop.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305866
305874 305909 305926
BMnjNm.png
>>305858

Anyway, while LP is poking around in various terminals and whatnot, one of the many enemies who are supposed to be looking for these two finally decides to attack. LP looks out the window and sees something large and terrifying flying towards her:

>I abandoned the terminal and moved to her side as quickly as my legs and breath would allow. I stared out the window as something huge came out of the red glow of the Fillydelphia Crater.
>It was an armored black alicorn, easily three times the size of a normal one, the air about her rippling with power. She flew towards us, leaving swaths of energy in her wake.
It actually took me a minute to figure out the geography here because, as usual, kkat has not bothered to give us even a barebones description of this room, so it's not clear which window he's referencing. I initially thought he meant a window to the hallway they just came from, but from what happens next it's clearly an exterior window. Whenever you're writing a scene where important things are happening in physical space, you need to keep the layout of your setting in mind, and make sure that you're giving the reader enough information to visualize what you're visualizing. Remember, we can't see inside your head.

Anyway, there's a big-ass alicorn barreling towards them. Every guard in Fillydelphia logically ought to know by now that the two of them came into this building, and since it's a limited area that should logically be heavily guarded anyway, the sane thing to do would be to first close off all the exits and then send in every free guard they can muster to search the building's interior. However, despite this, these two have pretty much been strolling around in here unopposed until now. These alicorns are supposed to be able to read each other's minds and should therefore be able to coordinate quite easily, and logically they should have heard the same alarm that everyone else did when LP staged her escape. Really, they should have been the first ones attacking them while they were on the roller coaster, and at any rate it seems logical that they should have run into at least one of them by now. However, because reasons, they haven't, and because other reasons, one of them is suddenly attacking now.

Xenith informs LP that the reason this particular alicorn is all big and beefy and shit is because it's been "basking" in the radiation of the crater. Apparently, "creatures of radiation" are not only healed by radiation, but will grow stronger and larger if exposed for long periods of time. This seems to be very similar to what taint does to certain creatures, but at the same time, other creatures are killed by taint. Actually, I think the same is true of radiation, so...

I'll be honest, I'm finding the difference between "radiation" and "taint" to be minor and mostly confusing so far, sort of like the ghoul/zombie distinction. Some people like to create a lot of intricate terminology in their worlds, but I'm not one of them. My general rule is that it's usually best not to overcomplicate things, so when you have two very similar concepts that serve essentially the same purpose in the story, it makes more sense to combine them or to get rid of one; otherwise you're just confusing the reader to no purpose.

One of the problems that FoE has to begin with is that it's basically a mashup of of a science fiction universe with a fantasy universe, and it doesn't do a particularly good job of blending them. I spent most of the early part of the story being confused about what "radiation" even is; it's a purely physical, non-supernatural phenomenon in our world, but the author's version is this weird pseudo-magical aura whose origin and properties are never fully explained. What complicates things further is he also has "taint," which does basically the same thing that radiation does (with only a few minor variations), but is also supposed to be different somehow.

What I would probably do is get rid of the "radiation" concept entirely, and just have "taint," which I would describe as kind of dark magical aura that's floating around in the air as a result of the magic weapons and so forth that they used in the war. There could be different types of taint maybe, but it would all derive from the same basic substance. It would make things much easier to follow in the early part of the story, since "radiation" already has a scientific context in our world, and it's not clear what the author means by it, whereas a word like "taint" or "corruption" or something could easily communicate an evil mystery substance without any additional explanation.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah; a big alicorn comes crashing through the window, and it's all strong and super-sized and terrifying.

>I looked up towards the sky, cursing Celestia and Luna in turn. Wasn’t it enough that they were magically far more adept than I? That they were smart? Crafty? Fucking telepathic? With shields that only a small number of things could apparently get through? And they could fly?!
I don't know, isn't it enough that you have a magical wristwatch that tells you who is around you and whether or not they're hostile, and enables you to just stroll out into the wasteland one day with zero combat experience and become an instant badass because it automatically aims your gun for you? Isn't it enough that you are the only pony in Edgequestria that has one of these things, despite their being supposedly quite commonplace? Isn't it enough that your dumb horn can levitate nearly anything? Isn't it enough that you're both a master lockpicker and a master hacker, despite having no obvious in-story reason to have any proficiency in either of those disciplines? Isn't it enough that you can have a broken leg, as well as a jagged portion of your own rib jammed into your lung, but suffer no obvious handicap as a result?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305874
305898
>>305866
I still find LP's "Alicorns are OP devs plz nerf" rant hilarious because that boxcar-chucking bitchnigger just finished flying and using an impenetrable shield made from radioactive barrel goop and opening a lock from the outside telekinetically without her lockpicking tools... all at the same goddamn time.
It reminds me of that friend of mine whose first experience with Mugen was losing a fight to Applejack despite cloning sonic and giving him 9999 atk/defence and turning him yellow. He lost to a balanced character just because he sucks so hard at fighting games his instakill cheat character means nothing. And he said "applejack is overpowered, you need to nerf her" with a straight face. No.
Alicorns are already nerfed. Despite all their OP abilities, they are low tier trash because they are inferior to Littlesue. Despite all their OP abilities, they are nerfed in the intelligence department because Kkat can't write characters smarter than him.
Suck dick, Littlepip. Even without your ammo and guns and armour you are more overpowered than this hive mind of 200+ super-strong super-fast reproduction-capable race of cartoonishly cruel and shallow bitches who regenerate health and are strengthened by radiation and can fly and turn invisible and make magic shields.
I wish hive minds were something only competent writers tried to write. Each body is a piece on a board commanded by the main brain. Instantaneous information sharing gives perfect intelligence to the hive mind, and each eye and nose and ear is another sensory aspect of the ultimate information-gathering apparatus. Ever seen a professional korean Starcraft play like every single unit is part of the same body he's mastered? Give him an Ender's Game style army and he would lose to a realistic sentient AI because its many brains can think many times faster than any single human can. A true hive mind would be an eldritch, unknowable, unfathomable mind able to understand more than any single being ever could. It would have faster reactions and information analysis ability than any computer or AI programmed to play one game well and learn from its mistakes faster than any AI or human could learn. It could make predictions based on your previous behavior and the behaviour of your species to guess your next military move. It would share information with its hive mind members more efficiently than any radio network or military general ever could. Any individual in the hive mind would happily die to gain a slight advantage for its cause or gain slightly more intel for its hive mind. Any individual would know exactly what your capabilities and supplies and weapons are. It would be impossible to fuck up the chain of command to create chaos because there is no chain, there is a net that doesn't care how many atoms that make up its net get killed. And this is a hive mind made of super strong super fast super healthy flying magical Alicorn bitches aged 200 or more. They can fly. And these fuckers have magical abilities like telekinesis and invisibility and shield creation. They should be great at making shield shells around foes and shrinking them to crush enemies unable to break out of those shields or teleport. They should be great at invisibly sniping you with massive rifles even the telekinesis of alicorns would struggle to lift and aim. One alicorn invisibly stalking you and getting your exact location with a Pipbuck can transmit this data to an artillery squadron that could fire at any foe from anywhere. If anyone should have mines and factories and the ability to produce weapons and armour that are military-grade or better it should be these bitches. And these fuckers can reproduce by mutating more bitches or by fucking so hard they destroy male pelvises, yet only reproduce females because Kkat has a violent horny amazoness fetish. It would be difficult and possibly impossible for our entire planet's military forces to defeat these Alicorns if they were real and not written by Kkat. This is Kkat's bullshit female-only mary sue species and yet to let Littlepoop win he has to write each one like it's a retarded videogame AI with this generically cruel evil sadistic smug bitch personality. He has to make them not know what a Memory Orb is despite what a massive plot hole this turns out to be later on once we learn more about the Alicorns. Kkat has to make them retarded so they can lose despite their superior resources and forces and numbers and everything else. He has to write these alicorns like he writes Raiders who suddenly go from mining areas and covering each other's advances to screaming and charging to their deaths and Slavers who are terminally unable to handle one flying cunt and one easily-distracted murderhobo running around their town slaughtering everypony even with an Alicorn backing them up. Littlepip is never allowed to face real danger or serious consequences for her actions. Murderhoboing is never wrong because her victims are always Evil(tm) and her fights are always fundamentally easy and any solution the Mane Six already attempted will only succeed if LP or her friends try it. Kkat will never be a woman. Kkat will never be a writer. LP is playing life on easy mode and considering how often Kkat misses what made a Fallout element unique and interesting when trying to make things darker and edgier for his joyless take on the wasteland, that makes this hilarious.
Almost as hilarious as trying to play "doom bunny" straight.
Then again, Gaykat doesn't know what straight is.
Anonymous
a29d59e
?
No.305898
305922 305924
StonetossBlackStreets.jpg
>>305823
>I checked TvTropes's Fallout Equestria page, it's full of sycophantic dicksucking and inordinate amounts of praise
Honestly, what do you expect? Any sort of semi-obscure media (that isn't liked only "ironically" or is notorious for some reason) will be evaluated by the people who know about it: the fans. And if the fans are a bunch of faggots who wouldn't know good literature if [insert novel here] hit them in the head, that's how it's going to be. It's the downside of having a crowdsourced encyclopedia: it will cover everything that's ever been published, but on the other hand nearly everything is written by normies/plebs. A team of dedicated reviewers like Glim could do a much better job of picking apart tropes, but the vast body of works of literature is simply too much to cover, let alone bad fanfiction.

>Alicorns are OP devs plz nerf
The complete lack of balance in this story, and LP unreasonably complaining about enemies that should be able to squish her with a thought, reminds me of War Thunder.

Glim, I'm sorry I can't make any additional observation regarding the stupidity of the story. There's simply too much of it and I'd be restating what you've said or implied. Thank you for taking one for the team, though.

>>305874
>It reminds me of that friend of mine whose first experience with Mugen was losing a fight to Applejack despite cloning sonic and giving him 9999 atk/defence and turning him yellow. He lost to a balanced character just because he sucks so hard at fighting games his instakill cheat character means nothing. And he said "applejack is overpowered, you need to nerf her" with a straight face. No.
Is your friend ChrisChan?

>hiveminds
Such an antagonist would be nigh-impossible to defeat unless if despite the sum of its parts it cannot use technology, such as the Tyranids or something, and even then it would be extremely tough to deal with. It's a very formidable foe in an asymmetric conflict, whereby the protagonist will be running constantly and may or may not find a macguffin as a last hope. On a civilizational-scale conflict the society fighting the hivemind would have a policy of containment rather than destruction, as any attempt at an offensive operation would fare poorly against a rapidly adapting foe. Both of these types of conflicts applied to the Borg in Star Trek: TNG, whereby the Federation threw everything it had at this hivemind and the Enterprise relied on unpredictability. "Best of Both Worlds" constituted two of the best episodes in the entire franchise and the Borg was a threat everyone took seriously, at least before Voyager made them a "villain of the week" almost as badly as Kkat did with the alicorns.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305909
305914 305917 305926
AFgE41.png
>>305866

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, a big ass alicorn comes crashing through the window and wrecks up the science lab. Littlepoop and Xenith run away, back down the hall.

Page break. They keep running and the alicorn keeps chasing them, blasting through walls and generally being a big pain in the ass.

>I followed her up another flight of stairs, screaming out in agony and hating the building for making us climb when the damn monster behind us didn’t have to.
Yeah, stairs kind of suck when you've got a rib protruding into your lung. On a related note, you probably shouldn't have spent all of that time cracking into safes and reading people's 200 year old emails. Just think: you could be floating lazily away into the sunset on a Pinkie Pie balloon right now if you weren't such an arrogant, nosy klepto.

They make it to the top of the stairs, but the alicorn somehow gets there ahead of them, and blocks their path. Apparently its shield is so powerful that it has to create a hole in it in order to cast a spell through it. Littlepoop is presently having one of her convenient "woe is me I can't do anything" moments, so it falls to Xenith to take command. However, the alicorn casts a "heart attack spell" on her which causes her to seize up and keel over. I'm assuming heart attacks are no more fatal in this world than anything else we've encountered so far, but I guess we'll see how it goes.

>I screamed! At the super-alicorn for being so ridiculously powerful and evil and totally unfair!
These words! Are actually all one sentence! Don't just! Use exclamation marks! To break single sentences! Into multiple sentences! For no reason! It makes you look! Like a retard!

Anyway, Littlepoop tries to jump through the hole the alicorn created in its own shield so it could cast the spell, and manages to dump all of the memory orbs she found in the vault in there. She also cuts herself on the edge of the shield or something and it seems to hurt her pretty badly, though I'm assuming that like most of her other injuries, this one will only affect her when the author wants it to. This distraction causes the alicorn to lose its grip on Xenith.

I didn't mention this earlier since it didn't seem important at the time, but there were also four "balefire eggs" inside one of the safes along with all of the other random junk she found in there. Balefire eggs are apparently the base destruction spells that were amplified into WMDs by Fluttershy's hoodoo magic...or something. I guess.

The text actually doesn't specify that LP took the eggs with her, in fact it actually made it sound like she noticed them but decided to leave them there on account of how they would be dangerous to carry around. However, it seems she did in fact take them, because she manages to slip a few into the alicorn's shield along with the memory orbs. The hole in the shield closes, and Littlepoop loses consciousness. Naturally, the balefire eggs then explode (somehow), and naturally, the super-powerful shield ensures that the explosion only harms the alicorn inside. Oh, that Littlepoop; so clever. Her ass is a pocket dimension containing the solution to every ridiculous problem ever conceived.

>I never heard the explosion. But Xenith later told me it was… loud, only louder.
Kkat has a way with words. It's not a good way, mind you, but it's definitely a way. I'm at least willing to give him that.

Page break. Littlepoop awakens in a bathroom at an indeterminate point in the future. Xenith has bandaged her wounds, and the bandages are also magical somehow and seem to have basically cured all of her other injuries, which presumably includes her broken rib and punctured lung. According to Littlepoop, her foreleg now only feels "mildly sprained." Oh well, it's not like her injuries actually had any effect on her, so it's probably better that they are at least eliminated as a topic of discussion.

However, she still can't move I guess, so Xenith puts her on her back and carries her. Xenith seems worried about pursuers, which seems like it ought to be a valid concern, were it not for the fact that they've only encountered one serious enemy in here so far. Oh, also, Red Eye has something called a "cyberdog." Its name is Winter, and according to Xenith it is currently tracking them. How she would know this is another question entirely.

Littlepoop recalls that one of Red Eye's broadcasts mentioned his having a dog named Winter as a child:
>If he was but a colt at that time, the dog should have passed away naturally from old age. But now I imagined that instead of letting that happen, he’d cybernetically enhanced it, replacing part after part as each failed. It was macabre.
Red Eye cybernetically enhanced his childhood pet, and now it's chasing them. Sure, why not? Can't be any stupider of an idea than giant mutated Angel Bunny who is also Walter White.

Anyway, they climb some more stairs (as usual, we are given literally zero reference points for where they are in this building, how many floors it has, how far they have to go, etc). Apparently there are a few guards here and there, but we are assured that Xenith can simply sneak past them. However, at one point, RoboPupper™ appears and begins to chase them. They manage to escape to the roof, where the balloon they intended to steal is indeed waiting, but unfortunately so are the snipers:

>The anchored Pinkie Pie Balloon was still there. But so were two others, with a third closing in. Half a dozen anti-machine rifles were trained in our direction.
Only three? Literally anyone could have predicted that this is where they would be headed; by all rights the compound's entire air support sqaud should be up here waiting for them. For that matter, literally anyone could have predicted that trying to escape in a hot air balloon from a city that is crawling with hot-air-balloon-snipers and griffons would be a dumb idea to begin with. On the other hand, it's kkat.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
1a88b8b
?
No.305914
305917 305926 306174
fkv38h.jpg
>>305909

Page break. The guards in the Pinkie balloons have them surrounded, and T-1000 the Wonder Dog is guarding the door behind them, so it would appear they are trapped. Instead of just gunning them down like they easily could, the guards appear to be simply holding them down until Red Eye gets there, because he seems hell-bent on doing everything according to the Cliche Villain's Handbook.

Then, suddenly, Velvet Remedy's pet balefire phoenix, Pyrelight, shows up out of nowhere. It is all huge now, because it has apparently been bathing in the same radioactive crater as the mutant alicorn. It blows up all of the balloons, but unfortunately also blows up the balloon they had hoped to escape in. The scene ends with the two of them still marooned on the roof. How utterly pointless.

Page break. We rejoin our intrepid heroes at an indeterminate point in the future. They have presumably been captured, and are under guard in some kind of weird room filled with red steam. Probably one of Red Eye's toxic fart caverns or something. We are told that their capture was as "ignominious as it was inevitable." There are a pair of griffon guards and the robotic dog watching them. Suddenly, Red Eye himself enters the room.

>“Littlepip,” he said graciously. “Sit, relax. I mean you no harm.”
>Obviously, the same couldn’t be said for us. I was still processing the mere notion that Red Eye would lock himself in a room with us when Xenith charged at him, murder in her eyes.
Obviously, Red Eye's statement was intended explicitly for the two of them, so this remark of Littlepoop's makes no sense. What the author appears to be trying to say is that Red Eye asked Littlepoop and Xenith to sit and relax, but Xenith does the exact opposite of that and attacks him instead. However, in a misguided attempt at wit, he chose a particularly awkward wording. My best advice for kkat here is that he should get a better grasp on how to use language before attempting to be clever with it, particularly if he wants to get away with tossing words like "ignominious" around.

Anyway, Xenith's attack naturally backfires, because Red Eye has them in some kind of magical force field or something. Littlepoop figures out that this is the significance of the red mist: it is hiding an alicorn shield. Why Red Eye would need to hide such a shield from them, or why he would use red mist to do it, or how Littlepoop was able to ascertain all of this from the information she has available...are all questions for another day.

>Red Eye beamed at me. (Literally -- in the mist, the line of red light shooting from his cybernetic eye was clearly visible.)
This pun demeans us all.

ANYWAY, it turns out that the reason Red Eye hasn't killed them yet is that he wants Littlepoop to do something for him:

>“All I want you to do is something you were going to do anyway,” Red Eye said in a tone both casual and infuriatingly confident. “I just want you to do it on my timescale.”
>“I want you to kill the Goddess.”
I mean...yeah, when you think about it, I guess it makes sense that Littlepoop was going to kill the Goddess eventually. I mean, sure, we haven't heard anything about an actual Goddess even existing, and so far Littlepoop hasn't said anything about wanting to kill her. However, Littlepoop's only goal in this story seems to be to run around randomly killing whatever giant evil things she happens to encounter, so I guess it stands to reason that she would get around to killing the Goddess eventually, assuming such a creature existed.

>Okay, I did not see that coming. “B… but you serve the Goddess! You… you’re Her high-fucking-priest!”
Is he? I don't think that was ever clearly established. All we know about this guy is that he believes he has been hearing messages from a Goddess, who supposedly ordered him to do all the crazy shit he's been doing. Again, we don't even know that there actually is a Goddess at this point. Just a short time ago it was established that both Celestia and Luna perished when some kind of pink cloud descended on Canterlot, and as far as I'm aware the two of them are the only ponies in this story who could qualify for godhead.

Anyway, Red Eye goes on to explain that he and the "Goddess" are partners, but that they no longer see eye to eye on things, and he's chosen to break their partnership in the manner usually chosen by cartoon villains. He was impressed by Littlepoop's handling of the gigacorn a few scenes ago and wants to give her the task of killing whichever not-really-dead Princess the "Goddess" turns out to be. At present, my money is on it turning out to be Luna, who went mad during the war and reverted back to her Nightmare Moon persona. But, I suppose we shall have to wait and see.

>“As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the Goddess controls Her children. Telepathically. They are not so much individuals as they are extensions of Her will. And they will remain so until She is finally put to rest.”
None of this has been established. Like a lot of this author's ideas, this one isn't necessarily bad, but his execution is terrible. Something like this needs to be built up to in small degrees; by the time it's finally revealed, the reader should have mostly figured it out from the breadcrumbs that have been dropped. As I said, we don't even know that this Goddess even exists as an actual character; up until now, it's been sounding as if Red Eye is the final boss and the princesses are both dead.

Anyway, blah blah blah. Red Eye keeps yammering for awhile, and the gist of it is that he plans to kill the Goddess, and then once the alicorn hivemind is dead, he will join the "Unity" himself and become the new Celestia, assuming the tasks of raising the sun and moon and manipulating the weather. Even sillier still is that he intends for Littlepoop to take his place as head of...whatever the hell he's currently the head of. "Red Eye's Emporium of Slavery and Generic Bad Guy Stuff" I suppose.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.305917
305925
nodick.png
SWORDS.png
>>305914
I hope nobody spoils anything involving the Goddess. Not even with any vague comments like "Oh man, you're going to fucking LOVE what Kkat did there" or "You're right and how Kkat pulled that off is actually pretty smart" or "No, your guess is incorrect and it is actually someone dumber" or "It's literally the most retarded thing possible". To avoid spoiling it I won't say anything about this until after the story reveals everything. I'm really looking forward to your reaction to this.
>>305909
>>305914
That reminds me, Fallout has CyberDogs. If Kkat wants to set up LP and Red-Eye to be dark mirrors of each other, surely he should have given Littlepip a Dog or CyberDog at some point, right?
That way, they would both have dogs. This could be something they would have in common.
If LP has a mortal dog while Red-Eye has a superior CyberChad dog, it would reference Red-Eye's Cyborgitude and hint at how different they are, because LP isn't currently a cyborg and neither is her dog. Red-Eye and his Cyberdog are stronger because of their cyber-parts.
But if LP had a CyberDog, it would show LP's willing to use cybernetic enhancements when it suits her, hinting that they are not so different deep down.
It could also cleverly reference Mad Max, because Mad Max had a dog.
And it could reference the times Fallout referenced Mad Max by giving the player the exact same dog.
And where LP commands her dog through verbal instructions and the bond between pony and dog, Red-Eye is evil so he commands his dog with mental signals between their cyber brain implants.
LP's dog is a kind soul while Red-Eye's cyberdog is a soulless husk that's had its bodily fluids and internal organs replaced with machinery until it's more of a clockwork taxidermy accomplishment than a living being.
It would be super deep and symbolic.

Although, all this cyber-shit is kind of stupid. What good is a slightly stronger metal left foreleg, a cybernetic red right eye that sees in heat vision and sees through walls, or a superior set of synthetic lungs with poison immunity and water-breathing capability when Unicorns can be so absurdly OP without any cyber-parts?
You'd think by now Red-Eye's cyber-stable would have a cybernetic horn that lets him use magic that's even stronger than Littlepip's.
Or to make him look extra-evil it could be a spiky curved serrated thing that looks like some edgy evil fantasy sword designed by an edgy teenager, and it exclusively fires lethal laserbeams and makes shields and tosses stuff but can't do more advanced magic.
That way, Red-Eye would be an imposing physical threat to LP able to magically harm her just as well as she can harm him. And LP's "Strong telekinesis only, no shields or lasers or other spells" shit would be matched and outmatched by Red-Eye's stronger telekinesis, shields, and lasers.
Speaking of which, why isn't she trying to telekinetically harm him? He's behind a shield but shields have never stopped telekinesis before. If Red-Eye dies his empire crumbles and she can take on the Goddess on her own time. Like he said, this Sue would eventually get around to her anyway.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305922
>>305814
>Is it bad writing that even though Velvet is the designated face and smart charismatic one of Littlepip's Littleshits, moments where a NPC or Villain needs convincing via a DND Skill Check are typically passed by Littlepip?
The supporting characters in this story are underutilized in general. FoE presents itself as a story about a group of characters similar to an average RPG party, but for the most part it's just the Littlepoop Show.

The main thing to remember when writing anything is that every regular character who appears in the story needs to do something or have a reason to be in there. If you want to write a story about a single protagonist who solves every challenge on her own, then it's better to just have her be the main focus of the story and not have too many supporting characters. If you want the focus to be on a group, then everyone in the group needs to do something and be important somehow. The problem with this story is that it tries to be an ensemble story about what is essentially an RPG party, with a heavy emphasis on friendship and togetherness, but the author is so obsessed with making his main character look like a badass that he mostly ignores his other characters.

In an ensemble RPG type story like this one, each character should have a technical role in the party (healer, mage, meatshield warrior, etc), as well as a role in the actual story that compliments this (protag's love interest, funny guy, moody mysterious guy with the dark past, etc). Kkat clearly attempts to do this, but he doesn't put much effort into it. Velvet is supposed to be the group's healer and smooth-talking negotiator, so he tries to make her into a compassionate pony who also has a manipulative selfish side. I think I've spent more than enough text going over how she actually turned out. Calamity helps out during battles and whenever they need to fly, but story-wise he's barely a presence. He has a country accent and a barely-developed backstory about running away from pegasus camp for reasons that have yet to be explained; apart from that you could almost forget he even exists. Same deal with SteelHooves; he mostly just stands there and fires missiles out of his butt when the situation calls for it, but beyond that who is he? He apparently used to be AJ's boyfriend or something, plus he's a ghoul. Is that enough to make a character compelling or interesting? Not really.

The author is entirely too focused on making LP the hero in every situation, so the other characters in the party are mostly half-formed personalities whose talents are badly-defined and seldom utilized. They could all potentially be much more interesting if they were more involved in each other's lives, and if each had an appropriate moment to shine.

Imagine MLP, except instead of being a show about six friends, it's a show about Twilight Sparkle doing a lot of ridiculous stuff that she shouldn't realistically be able to do. Twilight has five friends, who have names and are visually distinct from each other, but who aren't really interesting on their own and don't really strike you as characters who could carry the show if Twilight suddenly left the cast. They will occasionally say "yay" or "yee-haw" or "darling" or "awesome" or something random and silly, but apart from that none of them make any interesting contributions to Twilight's adventures; they just stand in the background most of the time while Twilight does stuff.

Even though they ostensibly each have their own talents, they very seldom get to use them; Twilight handles most of the group's problems, whatever they are. If an animal needs to be tamed, Twilight just handles it. If a fancy dress needs to be sewn or a herd of cattle needs rustling or a party needs planning, then Twilight suddenly acquires those skills and takes care of it. If an aerial race needs to be won and only an extremely fast pegasus could possibly be up to the task, then Twilight suddenly grows wings and discovers she is extremely fast. Her five friends, to the extent that they speak at all, mostly just praise her for being effortlessly good at everything they are already good at, though in rare moments they may occasionally admonish her for not being quite as awesome as they feel she truly could be.

Twilight herself pays very little attention to these five ponies, and spends more time talking to herself than she does to any of them. However, she will occasionally mutter something to herself about how much she values her friends; because of this, we are meant to assume that these six ponies are actually very close and depend heavily on each other. This is basically how FoE's group dynamic works.

>>305898
>Glim, I'm sorry I can't make any additional observation regarding the stupidity of the story. There's simply too much of it and I'd be restating what you've said or implied. Thank you for taking one for the team, though.
Thanks for reading, fren.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.305924
305934
>>305898
>are you friends with Chris Chan?
Lol no, but that's not the first time he has been compared to CWC
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.305925
305926 305934
>>305917
>If Kkat wants to set up LP and Red-Eye to be dark mirrors of each other, surely he should have given Littlepip a Dog or CyberDog at some point, right?
Not necessarily. The "mirror" is more about their personalities, their backgrounds, the challenges they faced and how they handled them, and so forth. They don't necessarily need to "mirror" each other literally; in fact, it will usually come across as corny if you try to do it that way.

>If LP has a mortal dog while Red-Eye has a superior CyberChad dog, it would reference Red-Eye's Cyborgitude and hint at how different they are, because LP isn't currently a cyborg and neither is her dog.
You're thinking way too literally here.

>But if LP had a CyberDog, it would show LP's willing to use cybernetic enhancements when it suits her, hinting that they are not so different deep down.
Better, but you're still just thinking about these attributes in a purely literal sense. Go deeper. What do cybernetic enhancements represent? A character who augments his body using technology essentially gains superhuman powers, but at the expense of a part of his own humanity. A character who stays 100% human even if he has the option to do otherwise is refusing this temptation; he chooses to retain his humanity even if it means accepting limitations that might make him the inferior of the cyborg.

This is where the "mirror" concept comes into play. The two characters are in the same situation and are faced with a similar problem, and they each make a different choice which defines their path. One character chooses to gain god powers but it comes at the expense of his human soul; the other chooses to retain his soul but the price is that he turns down the opportunity to become a demigod. The first character gains external strength but in doing so reveals that he is inwardly weak. The second, by choosing to turn down unearned god powers and rely entirely on his own abilities reveals natural, spiritual strength; thus of the two, he is the one who shows the true heroic quality.

In this scenario, does giving either of these characters a dog really add anything to the metaphor? How about a cyborg dog?
Anonymous
548c81c
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No.305926
biglad.jpg
doggo.jpg
volvodog.jpg
>>305866
>Anyway, there's a big-ass alicorn
Another play on something from Fallout 3. If nothing else, you have to admire Kkat's ability to take things from the games and glom them into his story everywhere, even if it happens with no rhyme or reason and comes at the expense of actually writing worth a damn. In 3, there are giant "behemoth" super mutants here and there that serve as bosses. 3's strain of super mutants never stop growing, so behemoths are the eldest and meanest of the lot. And since alicorns are our super mutant stand-in in FoE, there's naturally a giant one of those too.

You'd think that the alicorns - being an allegedly intelligent hive mind - would exploit the ability to get bigger and stronger from radiation more cleverly. If this scene's giga nigga alicorn had simply driven Littlepip and Xenith into a couple of regular alicorns waiting in ambush (and we know there are plenty around), they'd be dead. Instead it's just a big dumb miniboss that only exists to add to Pip's kill count of oversized monsters. This is probably the fourth or fifth time that the alicorns have lost against Littlepip despite having the advantage at the beginning of a fight. Pip's whining about how unfair the giant alicorn is might carry at least an iota of weight if the damn thing wasn't dead a minute later. A giant, flying, magical juggernaut with previously unknown powers... and it loses catastrophically against an exhausted cripple. Talk about anticlimax.

>>305909
>Littlepoop recalls that one of Red Eye's broadcasts mentioned his having a dog named Winter as a child
Another Fo3 thing. One of President Eden's broadcasts has him waxing nostalgic about his younger life and his dog, so as Red Eye draws in part from Eden's MO, he naturally also has a dog. If I recall correctly, Winter is forgotten and never shows up again after this scene.

>>305914
>Red Eye keeps yammering for awhile, and the gist of it is that he plans to kill the Goddess, and then once the alicorn hivemind is dead, he will join the "Unity" himself and become the new Celestia, assuming the tasks of raising the sun and moon and manipulating the weather.
And here's the transition point between Ashur Red Eye and herp derp Kkat Red Eye. An argument could be made, however flimsy, for the idea of rebuilding foundational industry on the backs of slaves. However, now he's just a generic megalomaniac. The idea of villain infighting is has potential, but in practice it's just a matter of Littlepip adjusting her kill priority.

>>305925
>You're thinking way too literally here.
Incidentally, a recurring element of the Fallout games is that the player character can get a dog - Dogmeat is a recurring character between the games, even if he's not strictly the same dog each time. He's not very bright and has a habit of running into lasers, but he's completely loyal to you no matter your character's moral standing. Presumably, Pyrelight is supposed to be the stand-in for him. Because why give your lowborn everyman protagonist a boring, relatable dog when they can have a giant bird that's on fire?

>This is where the "mirror" concept comes into play. The two characters are in the same situation and are faced with a similar problem, and they each make a different choice which defines their path. One character chooses to gain god powers but it comes at the expense of his human soul; the other chooses to retain his soul but the price is that he turns down the opportunity to become a demigod. The first character gains external strength but in doing so reveals that he is inwardly weak. The second, by choosing to turn down unearned god powers and rely entirely on his own abilities reveals natural, spiritual strength; thus of the two, he is the one who shows the true heroic quality.
Put a pin in this for later. It'll come up again.

On the subject of cybernetics, Red Eye and Winter's augmentations don't really seem to do anything. It makes sense that Red Eye's augmentation might symbolize his abndonment of his (figurative) humanity, but... why? Fallout cybernetics tend to be of the invasive and gruesome variety, generally with some form of tradeoff. What advantage do his own modifications give him? Making him a cyborg seems to be a purely aesthetic choice. Cyberdogs show up in Fallout 2 and New Vegas - a wartime project designed to increase the toughness and longevity of military and police animals - but they have novel features like sonic-amplified barks that can knock you down. Again, what makes Winter special aside from ooh, creepy? For a character that's supposed to be a dark mirror of the protagonist, there's shockingly little depth being given to Red Eye or his closest allies.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.305934
305937 305943 305947 305964
>>305924
Unless people have been talking about that friend of mine behind my back that's the first time he was compared to Chris-Chan. But no, Chris would have put shitty Microsoft Paint art in the mugen character like John Geary or Josh Geary or whatever he's called.
>>305925
I've got it!
LP should have already gained a human dog while exploring the wastes before she met Calamity.
Perhaps the Raiders back in Ponyville had a starved beaten dying dog in one of their cages with the pony slaves.
She would have to decide whether to use her last remaining stimpak on herself during the upcoming firefights or heal this dog.
She chooses to heal the dog and gets its friendship.
This makes her a kind pony who puts the needs of others above her own even if it fucks her over.

Also, at the start of the Red Eye Arc LP had to give up everything. Her guns. Her friends. Her armour. She basically became a slave for Red Eye and hoped things would go her way.
She was able to let go of her sick guns and the feelings of invincibility they gave her.
She was able to say goodbye to her friends to get this mission done.

Red Eye?
He was given his dog. In a Stable that loved him and had sick cyborg tech. LP was miserable because she grew up in a boring stable full of shallow celebrity-obsessed cunts so she massacres Raiders and Slavers for fun, but he was shaped by his desire to improve everything for himself and others with or without their consent. He once almost got in trouble for cybernetically enhancing his girlfriend, the overmare's daughter, without her permission. But to save his life she insisted she wanted it all along.
This guy, if he could put a bomb around the planet to make it do what he wants he would.
He views the world as a puzzle to solve, which creeps out Littlepip, who also views challenges and obstacles that way. She also views literal puzzles like hacking challenges and lockpicking that way. But because he's stronger he has an automatic lockpicking and wireless hacking attachment concealed inside a robotic foreleg. It lets him hack shit better than Littlepoop and deny her the use of her Pipbuck whenever he wants. To make him seem dangerous he has the ability to take away the hero's safety net.
He needs to feel invincible. He built cybernetic enhancements into his body and he can't negotiate without more than adequate protection. His need to feel tough is as clear as the steel coating half his flesh like mud on a slave.
In conbat he loves using drones and a telekinesis-enabling fake horn to outmaneuver and trap his enemies, denying areas and cutting off escape routes with sadistic glee. Everything is a slave to him under his control. Hell, let's give him an armoured vest enchanted to give him Earthbending. So even dirt is his bitch on the battlefield.
LP tends to win using brute force while pretending it's clever. Using 20 grenades on a dragon? Pretend this brute force usage is clever. Charging into a town and murderhoboing everyone, then dropping a boxcar at an Alicorn? Pretend it's clever. But this guy? He's got more experience than her and uses precise tactical applications of overwhelming force for fun.
LP was able to say goodbye to all her friends, even her dog. LP can let go and stop when she needs to, just like she stopped using drugs. But there are no brakes on Red Eye's slave trains because he never learned how to stop. This guy replaced parts of his old dying dog every so often until nothing of the original dog remained.
LP's dog is a good dog. A living breathing being that misbehaves sometimes.
But Red-Eye's dog is a robotic hollow shell without any personality, because he designed his robodog that way. He is a control freak in my theoretical rewrite to the point where he thought nothing of taxidermifying his childhood pet into an attack drone with a gun for a dick. Why a gun for a dick? He thought it was funny at the time. After revealing this, LP laughs even though she hates it because they both love cock jokes.

In total: LP is good to her dog and Red Eye is a control freak about everything even his dog and combat style. Plus his cyberparts do shit now.

How's that?

Personally I'd want to take it further and rewrite Littlepip into a well-written hero who embodies "Rebellion" against as many things as possible including the idea that a post-apocalyptic young adult novel's hero should fit the stereotype for who that kind of story's hero usually is. Like how Dante rebels against the idea that in a gothic horror setting a demon-hunter should be a scared human or grim angry dude, and he pisses off his enemies by refusing to take them seriously. That way LP would represent "good rebellion" while this villain represents "bad order". Then the alicorns would also represent "bad order" because they are a hive mind of evil beings. Then I would add a third even bigger villainous faction that steals the show at the last second and also represents "bad order" just for the hell of it. Okay I'm kidding about that last part with the third evil faction, that would be stupid.

If you've got different villains they should represent different things and have different evil plans for the world, right? So there should be at least one "bad rebellion" faction that says "this kind of rebellion is bad and LP doesn't want to turn out like this". Maybe some selfish lazy evil assholes, causeless rebels who rape and burn for fun without any plan for the future. Maybe a faction of wannabe heroes who insist anyone they kill is pure evil despite accepting bribes from all major evil factions to look elsewhere for prey. Maybe a tribe of drugged-up raider bastards like the Fiends from Fallout NV. Or maybe remnants of a pre-war anti-war organization that did evil things for stupid reasons. Maybe a lolbertarian micronation that got weird 200 years after the bombs fell.

What LP really needs is an evil rival. A proper dark mirror. Someone with her methods and darker motives or vice reversa. Her own personal Kevin Levin pre-redemption arc.
Anonymous
59569f2
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No.305937
305963
>>305934
Pretty good ideas, I like how you redid Red Eye.

>"good/bad rebellion," "good/bad order"
Sounds like political compass quadrants, making it possible to insert a clever, albeit biased, political lesson. Or maybe incorporate the idea of "good times create weak men, etc."
It's not really hard at all to write a better story than kkat. Time to try for myself.
Anonymous
a0f37c2
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No.305943
305945 305963
>>305934
Man, this type of speculating. We're actually back to this again. This is why you aren't a good writer.

In a sense, you are my dark mirror and what I'll become if I remain trash.

Yes, this whole thing is hypothetically intresting. How about you write it? But that won't happen because that requires actual work.

In a sense, kkat also presents a bunch of ideas that he doesn't follow through with or execute well.

I'm not saying one can't critic a story without having written anything before. However, I am saying that this sort of thing just reminds me of... Well, a lot actually. It is just so depressing. It isn't just you who rationalize their own inability for agency like this. Like, "If I wrote this I would have done this and this a instead, at least." But like, why haven't you? What's stopping anyone from writing anything?

I don't mean to be mean. I don't really feel up to throw anykind of rock since I live in a glass house but wanted to emphasize this. I mean, one thing positive about Kkat is that he sticks with his offspring even if it's frontal lobe could be used as a fairy skateboard ramp.
Anonymous
a0f37c2
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No.305945
>>305943
Perhaps this was uncalled for. I'm not certain.
Anonymous
a0f37c2
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No.305947
305963
>>305934
>This makes her a kind pony who puts the needs of others above her own even if it fucks her over.
Also, this is not what being good is about. If we even agree on valuing people equally, then why does the good person, according to that definition, have to sacrifice themselves for someone else? This is anime protag think.
sage
a0f37c2
?
No.305956
Eh, forget about it. I guess there is nothing wrong with speculating about potential stories. Perhaps, I'm just lashing out because of my own bitterness that I have yet to reach the consistency in production that I seek.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.305963
>>305943
It's fine, you're being a bit of a twat but "If it's so easy why don't you do better?" is a valid question.
The answer? I am already doing better. I try not to talk like this much but I spend six to ten or more hours a day working on a personal project indie game I was told not to tell anyone about since bragging about how awesome your ideas WILL be once they're done gives an addicting psychological reward that gets in the way of accomplishing those goals. I've turned down chances to talk to friends to spend more time drawing bouncy rabbit buns and code the hitboxes of her giant fucking sword and all the wacky magical bullshit she can do with it. I am not flying too close to the sun, I am the sun. It would be easy to make Fallout Equestria suck less but for significant improvements that could make this story actually good, larger changes to its structure, tone, and message would be needed. Littlepip would need overhauling into less of a sue and more of an interesting character. Steelhooves and Calamity would need to bicker like a buddy cop duo to reveal as much of their respective lore and backstory ahead of schedule as possible before they gradually bond over time. Velvet needs some kind of horrible death at the hooves of a major villain because it was her and Fluttershy's idea of "universal kindness" that created this wasteland so if Velvet got inappropriately rewarded for showing absurd levels of kindness and mercy and generousity now it would just be immensely hypocritical. It would also neatly divide LP's adventure between two "try to find Velvet" and "avenge Velvet" arcs. All level-grinding dungeon-crawling filler bullshit needs overhauling. The reasons Equestria fell would need to be something the ponies of today can consciously reject and fight against like showing mercy to ziggers/raiders or an unwillingness to repair and improve what you have instead of trying to take from others and start wars or an unwillingness to name the Griffons secretly responsible for everything that ever went wrong. If the Zigger empire got back on its hooves and is warring on Equestria once more to be the final boss, even better. Equestria's downfall deserves better writing. The pacing needs to be tightened up until it's tighter than a centaur girl. It would be easy to make a few changes to RWBY to make certain terrible ideas less terrible but to make it truly good it would require an overhaul so complete that what you're left with would be almost completely original. Probably more original than Fallout Equestria and RWBY ever were, since they're amalgamations of copied ideas that never put any thought into how those stolen ideas interact and change one another. It is fascinating to analyze these stories deeper than their fanboys ever would and speculate on small and large changes that could improve these shows since they are constructed out of common cliches, and any writer who wants to use some of these cliches can use our posts to figure out what to avoid and why these cliches worked better in other stories. Why am I not animating my own BetteRWBY in SFM/Blender/Gmod or rewriting Fallout Equestria's 600k words? Because there are bouncy bunny boobies and Short Hop Fast Fall Just Frame Reverse Edge Landing Lag Cancels to code in the greatest indie video game I've ever made so far.
I'm still making the silver rewrite too. But rewriting FE would take too much time away from my main project. The world needs this game. It's going to take stylish action to a whole new level.
>>305937
Good luck! Personally I'm surprised at how many stories with rebellious protagonists are written by authoritarian authors who strictly follow all guidelines and cliches while insisting the only good authority comes from the hero after conquering the evil empire through overwhelming force in the form of deus ex machina bullshit. It would be a nice change of pace to see a rebellious protagonist who wants to rebel against the idea of being the stereotypical chosen one who defeats the obligatory evil empire just to let the obligatory good republic take over. Perhaps a self-interested bastard or a former empire supporter screwed by the system and out for revenge who try to act the part of a true hero while really out for number one. Or perhaps a hero who, halfway through the whole hero thing, realizes the rebellion he works with is shit for whatever reason and forms his own rebellion or accepts the "work for us" offer from the evil empire and works to reform it peacefully.
>>305947
I know healing a dog doesn't magically make people heroes but this story could use a good "Pet The Dog" moment considering how many times LP is an unrepentant graverobbing murderhobo.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
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No.305964
305968
>>305934
>comparing is the same as equating
Lol no, you've been compared to CEC dozens of times, whether you care to admit it or not
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.305968
305972
>>305964
You misread the post. Yellow Sonic Friend was being compared to CWC.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
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No.305972
306074
>>305968
To the contrary, I read it as it was written
>Chris would have put shitty Microsoft Paint art in the mugen character like John Geary or Josh Geary or whatever he's called
Is an attempt at deflection, designed to dismiss the idea that any comparison to Chris Chan is inaccurate because 'chris chan woulda done something slightly different', while completely glossing over the multitude of ways that Chis chan is similar
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.306074
306076 306089 306091 306098
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>>305972
This probably isn't the right place to shit-talk what you think of me as a person or that friend of mine, Mr "3 posts by this ID". You like coming at me with these tiresome insults in random threads, so I hope you've gotten it out of your system for this thread and I hope it'll be a while before you yell the same shit at me in another thread. Bruh, this is not constructive. It's not a constructive use of your time or mine. You are not expressing yourself constructively or contributing constructively to the threads you pull this shit in. There is no way that I can constructively respond to your bile, as usual. You're so used to seeing idiots baselessly dismiss criticism that you've failed to notice how baseless your criticism of me is. When you call me a faggot, I can either overlook your spitefulness as I am the bigger person between us, or respond with "No you". I think this time, I'll take the third option and ask you what you think you're going to gain out of behaving like this. Don't you have anything better you could be doing? Haven't you ever wanted something better you could be doing? Your grudge against me doesn't make us bitter rivals. It's not just that you're acting like a twat and making me not want to listen to you. Well, that is true. But also, it's that what you have to say isn't as important, witty, entertaining, worthwhile, or constructive as you think it is. You're enjoying your grudge against me more than me, but that doesn't make you a "Winner". I feel like a winner when I accomplish big goals and small goals. You pull this shit and it's tiresome. I would gain nothing from taking what you say to heart because there are no lessons to be learned. There is no wisdom to gain here. Instead of telling me how you think I could improve and letting me think for myself whether that's a good idea or not, you're just bitching and moaning at me and making yourself a nuisance for not being exactly what you want. When you pull this shit in threads, it distracts from the central topic of discussion. You want to make another thread all about you and your anger at me, but I want no part in that. Who are you to demand that I change how I behave when you behave worse than me? I am at my best when I politely ignore your hostility instead of responding to you at all. You don't know how I could improve, but maybe you'd know more on the subject if you improved yourself.

To get things back on-topic, I've been thinking about Littlepip's major fights so far.

When she can't kill her enemies with ordinary guns and explosives(which she never seems to run out of, even when deep within enemy territory), she uses telekinesis to drop heavy shit on them or saws their heads off with conveniently sharp debris. Or she does bullshit with memory orbs.

Also, has there ever been a time in this fic when a villain suffered a karmic and ironic death due to their own hubris/folly/villainy? Moments of sheer stupidity making the hive mind of 200+ year old alicorns literally unable to tell a Memory Orb from a Grenade or unable to keep their shield 100% up and hole-free just so LP can kill them for being retards don't count.

There's this bit in Treasure Planet where the hero's dangling from his pirate ship by a rope and in danger
and the baddie sadistically saws through slowly, even though he could get it over with and kill the hero quickly. The villain previously killed another heroic character (Mr Arrow) with this rope-sawing shit.
The villain gloats that he did the bad thing and this gives the hero a heroic second wind. It's some Lion King "I killed Mufasa!" shit right here and it's great. The baddie says "Do say hello to Mr. Arrow" and Jim says "TELL HIM YOURSELF!".
The hero gets back on the ship and the baddie ends up where the hero was on that rope, only for the frayed partially-cut rope to snap under the strain. The villain mostly sealed his own fate, and it's brilliant writing.
Not only does it keep the hero's hands mostly clean (Would have been a bit much for a family film if Jim grabbed a rock and smashed the baddie's face in, and regardless of the age rating it would have raised questions like "should he have killed or simply incapacitated"?) but it adds to the sense that the baddie deserves this fate.

Btw, memory orbs... I'm getting sick of those fucking things. This story already had terminal entries on computers and 200+ year old letters/holotapes/tape records in impossibly good condition lying conveniently on the ground or randomly in safes or nailed to a door yet still functional. Why add a third method to "Spell things out to the audience and show shit you don't trust people to piece together on their own through environmental clues" and try to justify it with these moments where they're the most convenient bullshit ever? What is there a Memory Orb can show that a cleverly-written letter or terminal entry cannot imply? Well, besides physical sensations, visual imagery, and a first-hand unquestionably-reliable account of events. Feels somewhat lazy to shove those into Fallout just so we can see "heart-wrenching" scenes of Steelhooves watching AJ reveal the suit he'd be trapped within forever. Even though that's hardly the best memory he could choose to preserve. Why not record something more personal to him like their first date, or the day he proposed to her, or their first fuck, something that could humanize AJ in LP's eyes since up until she sees a scene like that through the eyes of one who loves AJ she has no reason to think of AJ as anything other than "That famous pre-war pony who was friends with Twilight and pals, and is responsible for about 34% of everything that sucks about the Wasteland today". These memory orbs are almost exclusively used to reveal shit to the audience barely anyone asked instead. Surely it would be better if these Orbs were used as a tool to characterize their creators, like old somewhat-tragic keepsake photographs taken to the next level.

And where's Twi's Learning Orb?
Anonymous
0681d3b
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No.306076
306098 306158
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>>306074
STOP FUCKING TYPING, NIGGEL YOU HALF-JEW TRAITOR SACK OF PIGSHIT. You haven't changed, at all. No matter how many times you (((swear to be better in the future))), you still call up your fucking retardation and gaslight EVERYONE else when you get called out for being a shitter, going on gigantic rants about animu or other shit that doesn't matter. Your poor comparisons and ham-fisted segues are nothing more than asinine self-important screeching arrogance. Go kill yourself for being the pathetic britcuck you've always been, and always will be.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
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No.306089
306098
>>306074
Listen and listen well.
Cry moar. You're not entitled to any more consideration than you show. I wont hesitate to stick it to you any more than you will hesitate to go on autistic rants about irrelevant series', genres, pokemon, yugioh, more pokemon, sonic, ben 10, etc ad nauseum. No amount of 'wow is me, I are gud persen, ur a bad bad' pathetic bleating will avail you of this.
Anonymous
88d416d
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No.306091
306098 306100
BritishVocabulary.jpg
>>306074
There's no appealing to some people. Even if you make a good point about the story's failure in comparison to other works, others will harp on about how "irrelevant" they are. First of all, you used Treasure Planet which is an underrated movie and developed a decently cogent comparison. Secondly, there's very little overlap between the things you've watched and what I've watched, so whenever you go off on a rant I learn a lot about something I've never seen before. You're our resident Naruto expert here and that's actually quite handy. Also you're still a long ways away from being a fully competent media critic, but I've noticed a definite progress away from your stereotypical ramblings. Participating in this thread is definitely doing you good so keep it up.
Fuck it
Anonymous
4e25c7a
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No.306098
306100 306105 306140
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>>306089
>>306076
I'm tired.

First fundamental 'rule' of positive social interactions: when you're around, people genuinly smile. The world opens up.
Carefully and sleep deprived its about your damned ignorant needling reasoning.
>Is an attempt at deflection, designed to dismiss the idea that any comparison to Chris Chan is inaccurate because 'chris chan woulda done something slightly different', while completely glossing over the multitude of ways that Chis chan is similar
Yes, but no. Ribbing and poking at flaws (perceived or not) works if one understands what is going on.
Back to the beginning for a play-by-play.
>>It reminds me of that friend of mine whose first experience with Mugen was losing a fight to Applejack despite cloning sonic and giving him 9999 atk/defence and turning him yellow. He lost to a balanced character just because he sucks so hard at fighting games his instakill cheat character means nothing. And he said "applejack is overpowered, you need to nerf her" with a straight face. No.
>Is your friend ChrisChan?
This is a tasteful jab realistically harmless has some deeper implications.
>>are you friends with Chris Chan?
>Lol no, but that's not the first time he has been compared to CWC
Add fuel and changing the direction of the joke.
>Unless people have been talking about that friend of mine behind my back that's the first time he was compared to Chris-Chan. But no, Chris would have put shitty Microsoft Paint art in the mugen character like John Geary or Josh Geary or whatever he's called.
As a straight man skit that would have been self deprecation.
That's not the case here (subtle intonations on the internet is nigh impossible, can not be relied upon). Rule 1 of unsaid socialization has been missed.
The guide for this game is to be more succinct, condensed, and a feat of wit and intelligence for others to enjoy the exchange. Exemplifying good grace as barbs are launched.
>>Is an attempt at deflection, designed to dismiss the idea that any comparison to Chris Chan is inaccurate because 'chris chan woulda done something slightly different', while completely glossing over the multitude of ways that Chis chan is similar
Here we are again. Explaining the joke (hello I'm kettle). Explaining ruins the joke something something throw them out of a window.
At which point the accusation has seemingly come out of nowhere if Positive Social Interaction: Thick Skin, Plateface, Lunchbucket, Reliable Test a Hardknocks curriculum is not there in the right place. As such insanity sets in only in the game court because different realities are being present. Which brings us back to the whole history which has been forgoten multiple times, and shot to hell because communication can't occur due to fundamental differences that require a sledge hammer and a scalpel.
>Words here because I may need to save on character space and want to keep the repetition going.
As a piece to air out the grounds it suffices. Actually addressing the issue is not accomplished.
By doing so increases the original fires and fury, in other aspects where your life has been wrangled it makes sense. In this case it is oil on an electrical fire.

>>306074
>When you call me a faggot, I can either overlook your spitefulness as I am the bigger person between us, or respond with "No you".
There is a fourth option, and the one that is recommended using wit and creativity to recieve the charged jab and turn the joke to heated heights. Those jabs are there for a reason you don't have to change, but the reason is still there.
Also there is one you've mentioned is to—not comment at all. At all. At all. At all.

>>306091
Yes.
I still think his message in the lengthy posts can be generalized, specialized, or condensed to a fine point.

>>306089
>>306076
Not sure how the random pic(s) related are related but whatever.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
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No.306100
306105 306121
>>306098
Henlo fren. You post in a manner that suggests you're unfamiliar with the dynamic you're witnessing.
This has been an ongoing issue with our friend here ever since just after the site was founded.
The cycle goes something like this.
Nigel spergs unnecessarily about something, with sufficient cringe-aptitude to get people who dont ordinarily respond to him to take pot shots, because one can witness only so much ill-intentioned autism before taking the piss.
And take the piss they (I) do.
In response to this shitposting (cuz that's all it really amounts to, cuz without going into detail I'll just offer the conclusion that "Nigel will never change, in fact he will forget any conducive conversation he has had about his behavior, because he needs him dopamine"), rather than take his licks like a man and maybe engage in self-reflection about how his behavior induces this response he opts to wail and gnash his teeth about how unfairly he is being treated, as well as increasingly hy hyperbolic allegations of conspiracies against him. If you press him hard, he'll accuse you of being a particular redditor. Hoo boy, there are stories.
Inevitably his victim complex makes him look sad and pathetic, which he is, but fails to diminish the salt directed against him, until after several rounds of making him look foolish (which, he's either a genius at assisting or a complete idiot at not doing, because the defense would like to recall that witness) his detractors feel satisfied that he has ruined any ability for rationally minded people to either take him seriously or give any credibility to what he says, and fuck off for a while.
>>306091
>resident Naruto expert
Odd, cuz he knows all of dick about Naruto. His conclusions are laughably dismissible as that of a petulant child who didnt like what the author did there, with no more qualification than 'he didnt like it'. If that's your definition of expertise, I'll be happy to fix the plumbing in your house and reinvigorate your stock portfolio for a reasonable premium.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306105
306108 306121 306140
>>306100
>>306098
Actually, it works like this.
Bitter children best ignored baselessly bitch at Nigel and expect him to be perfect, even though they behave worse than him. They think criticising others means they don't have to work on themselves. It might bother me emotionally if I was 10, but what I'm tired of is the negative effect their behaviour has on threads until they get tired and leave.
After bitching at me and trying once again to turn public opinion against me they gaslight anyone who's paying attention, and didn't take their side and join in their childish bullying. Anyone who didn't take their side is suddenly "new" and "doesn't know how things work around here". Suddenly anyone who's "new" should either stay quiet or join their side. "Oh, don't listen to that guy trying to defend himself from our accusations, he's just a racist- I mean a sexist- I mean Nigel". This has been the new normal for years on this site. The Anti-Nigel Squad aren't here to contribute to the thread or website, sadly. They've just got petty grudges against me and a desire to make themselves into problems I put up with. I don't know how old they are but it would be quite depressing if they were over 20.
This isn't the first thread they've pulled this old routine in. I could show you some of the times they've randomly attacked me or someone with a british flag who they think sounds like me, like Antifa attacking random Asians who vaguely resemble Andy Ngo. Recently there was this rather funny moment on /ub/ where I said "Maybe I'm too quick to judge others" and a member of the Internet Nigel Offense Squad ran in to yell "No, you're projecting! That's a thing narcissists do!".
Yeah, in a place like that. In a thread like that. Their response to seeing me self-reflect? Some of their usual baseless accusations. It's kind of hilarious. Like something you'd see in a cartoon where a smart guy is so loathed by an idiot that the idiot can't think straight. Then again, that fits because the Anti-Nigel squad is gay.
I wish there was a clever dialogue option I could choose that would make them put their pitchforks and torches down and open up for some honest discussion about what they think they hate about me and why they feel the way they do without them trying to "win points" and turn everything into the kind of shouting match you'd expect to see on pseudointellectual forums where namefags engage in bullshit drama for years like Reddit and Sufficient Velocity. But they're too set in their ways to think about whether their ways should change or not. I see every day as an opportunity for growth. But for them? Every day's just another day in their war on me and every thread's another opportunity to try antifa tactics in front of people who maybe haven't already figured out for themselves how this works yet. They're too convinced that I am the "nigel" that exists inside their heads rent-free and recently got a pool table in there, and too convinced bullying me makes them morally superior to me. Even though I've contributed more to this thread than them, hence why they have a problem with my presence. It doesn't matter how much I shorten explanations of examples I bring up because they aren't paying attention to what I say, they're only mad that I'm saying it. They're too convinced that if their lies aren't helping me or the world, it means they haven't repeated themselves enough yet. Usually they fuck off if they think they've failed to get newfags who want to blend in to dogpile on me in time, or if enough people besides myself call them out on their cancerous behaviour and tell them to go fuck themselves.

Maybe if I just went back to ignoring the anti-nigel posters and the baseless accusations of racism/sexism/anti-semetism- I mean the baseless accusations of egotism/narcissism/whatever they'd get bored with the lack of a reaction and fuck off like the schoolyard bullies they fundamentally are. Or maybe they behave this way because nobody's ever told them no.
Ninjas
a2ebdaa
?
No.306108
306110 306121
>>306105
>Bitter children best ignored
True
>baselessly bitch
False
at Nigel
3rd person?
>and expect him to be perfect
False
>even though they behave worse than him
Debatable
>They think criticising others means they don't have to work on themselves
Lol so very false
>It might bother me emotionally if I was 10, but what I'm tired of is the negative effect their behaviour has on threads until they get tired and leave.
Rationalization, and deflection. Nigel has been told ad infinitum to stop being such a sperg. For years. Two of his threads are in /go/ because he tried this same tactic to excuse his behavior. They're hilarious.
>After bitching at me and trying once again to turn public opinion against me they gaslight anyone who's paying attention,
Quote the gaslighter, who willfully revises history any time his behavior is brought up
>and didn't take their side and join in their childish bullying.
And so begins the voluminous hyperbole
>Anyone who didn't take their side is suddenly "new" and "doesn't know how things work around here".
Suddenly anyone who's "new" should either stay quiet or join their side. "Oh, don't listen to that guy trying to defend himself from our accusations, he's just a racist- I mean a sexist- I mean Nigel". This has been the new normal for years on this site. The Anti-Nigel Squad aren't here to contribute to the thread or website, sadly. They've just got petty grudges against me and a desire to make themselves into problems I put up with. I don't know how old they are but it would be quite depressing if they were over 20.
>This isn't the first thread they've pulled this old routine in. I could show you some of the times they've randomly attacked me or someone with a british flag who they think sounds like me, like Antifa attacking random Asians who vaguely resemble Andy Ngo.
Yes, please present your evidence
>Recently there was this rather funny moment on /ub/ where I said "Maybe I'm too quick to judge others" and a member of the Internet Nigel Offense Squad ran in to yell "No, you're projecting! That's a thing narcissists do!".
Completely glossing over the fact that Nigel's abysmal communication skills and inability to focus on anything not in his list of 'good things' (read: Naruto, DBZ, Yugioh, Ben 10, Animorphs, Futa, etc.) makes him unavoidingly distinguishable on an otherwise anonymous board where certain expectations (like, objective arguments and posts, rather than subjective) are maintained by everyone BUT him
>Yeah, in a place like that. In a thread like that. Their response to seeing me self-reflect? Some of their usual baseless accusations. It's kind of hilarious. Like something you'd see in a cartoon where a smart guy is so loathed by an idiot that the idiot can't think straight. Then again, that fits because the Anti-Nigel squad is gay.
>I wish there was a clever dialogue option I could choose that would make them put their pitchforks and torches down and open up for some honest discussion about what they think they hate about me and why they feel the way they do without them trying to "win points" and turn everything into the kind of shouting match you'd expect to see on pseudointellectual forums where namefags engage in bullshit drama for years like Reddit and Sufficient Velocity
I cant speak to that one, I've never been to reddit and,... what now? But Nigel sure has, he comes from reddit.
>But they're too set in their ways to think about whether their ways should change or not.
So says the pot
>I see every day as an opportunity for growth.
Portrayal. This is true in his mind, but if you observed him and were asked if his behavior warrants that description?
>But for them? Every day's just another day in their war on me and every thread's another opportunity to try antifa tactics in front of people who maybe haven't already figured out for themselves how this works yet. They're too convinced that I am the "nigel" that exists inside their heads rent-free and recently got a pool table in there, and too convinced bullying me makes them morally superior to me.
Who's living rent free?
>Even though I've contributed more to this thread than them, hence why they have a problem with my presence.
You nailed it. All the salt you've been getting for years?
It's totally because you're 'contributing'. There definitely isnt another explanation you've been painfully spoonfed countless times, and then - like the guy in Memento - lose any recollection of, and assume your usual shit. Yep, definitely because of your participation.
>It doesn't matter how much I shorten explanations of examples I bring up
Have you tried?
>because they aren't paying attention to what I say, they're only mad that I'm saying it.
So very false
>They're too convinced that if their lies aren't helping me or the world, it means they haven't repeated themselves enough yet.
Actually, I quite dislike repeating myself. But I like seeing you sperg even less, so the lesser of two evils.
>Usually they fuck off if they think they've failed to get newfags who want to blend in to dogpile on me in time, or if enough people besides myself call them out on their cancerous behaviour and tell them to go fuck themselves.
Lol no. It's never been about people agreeing or 'joining a side's or whatever nonsense you've cooked up this time.
It's about being the same level of thorn in your ass that you have ALWAYS been since day 1. I have no issue stopping to a level, and if you had learned a thing in the years we have been doing this I'd have relented long ago.
>Maybe if I just went back to ignoring the anti-nigel posters and the baseless accusations of racism/sexism/anti-semetism- I mean the baseless accusations of egotism/narcissism/whatever they'd get bored with the lack of a reaction and fuck off like the schoolyard bullies they fundamentally are. Or maybe they behave this way because nobody's ever told them no.
Or, maybe, 'they're want you to stop sperging all over the place. Occam's razor is a bitch.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306110
306111 306121 306140
>>306108
If the horde told me to stop contributing, nobody would take their side.
But if they tried their hardest to paint my contributions as "sperging", it might distract people from their solely negative contributions to the thread.
Please don't be fooled. No matter how short my posts get they will always cry "sperging" because they hate me more than they love reason.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.306111
306112
>>306110
Is it your position that you DONT sperg?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306112
306114 306121 306140
>>306111
My position is that the small number of obsessed whiners currently saying I'm not good enough do so out of spite and have no leg to stand on. Their problem isn't with what I say, it's that I'm saying it. Maybe if they tried to contribute to the thread constructively instead of insulting me I'd have more reason to respect their opinions on who I am as a person and something more constructive to reply to. But it isn't really a matter of respect, even though they feel entitled to my respect no matter how poorly they behave. These people aren't rivals or learning opportunities, they are detractors. And that sucks, because I've met people I can learn things from before and liked them. It sucks when these clowns shit up the threads of others. Glim doesn't deserve this, he's a good man. Sometimes I think about requesting a unique British flag just so no other brit will have to deal with their bullshit war on me. Maybe a flag that's like the UK flag but the red X is replaced with a lightning bolt as purple as Twilight Sparkle's eyes from the top left to bottom right and a red colt revolver as red as the red X on the british flag pointing from the top right to bottom left. The revolver has to point at the bottom left because it's a pun, top right aka auth right is shooting lib left. The lightning is just there because lightning is cool. Then again I don't like standing out or attracting attention. But my dedicated harassers have been at this for years on and off so maybe the best thing I can do is to request that flag so I will be the magnet that attracts their inane faggotry and keeps it away from the rest of the site.

It would be great if this thread can get back on track again and it would be great if the derailers fucked off and got better hobbies. So instead of responding to any more kafkatrap "you're racist and autistic, do you deny that?" bullshit I'll just ignore it from now on in this thread.
Ninjas
3ec6f7a
?
No.306114
>>306112
So that's a 'yes', your position is that you dont sperg.
Cuz somehow I dont see anyone else getting shit on for sperging. And I dont see anyone else in any other threads being (accurately) called out for both sperging and being (you). Odd, it might be that there's a correlation.
>Glim
Dont hide behind him, he's a big boy who can handle his shit. You might recall, he got in this position by first demolishing your previous work no matter how hard you tried to derail it (again, those threads are in /go/ if anyone wants a laugh).
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.306121
306122
4CE5F31E2CB47AA37262BD6996D69086-235799.jpg
048E51A83244A9EE66E7CC8432D23E3D-65517.jpg
>>306112
>>306105
Hunh where did I get a (You) from? >306098
Going to be honest you need to follow
>First fundamental 'rule' of positive social interactions: when you're around, people genuinly smile. The world opens up.
And
>The guide for this game is to be more succinct, condensed, and a feat of wit and intelligence for others to enjoy the exchange. Exemplifying good grace as barbs are launched.
Because every attack has a hint of truth in it.
Also some psychological work, you got the physical down now it's psyche time.
Oh and writing in different ways. Try to write under 3000 characters using pics (or video) to strengthen the point. That's what it's there for. And shit posting.
>>306105
>Actually, it works like this.
No, you need to see things from the other side in a completely different frame of mind.
What you do here specifically is use less words and maintain a focus to develop your thesis. Your idea.
Read whatever the fuck I wrote at the time carefully please.
Watch these if nothing else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHZjcfgk4CI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXwZtg85zgU

>>306100
No, I know what the fuck is going on because I've looked and spent some time on this. Every single time I get it.
I'm saying this doesn't work because of the inevitable.
>rather than take his licks like a man and maybe engage in self-reflection about how his behavior induces this response he opts to wail and gnash his teeth about how unfairly he is being treated
That a leaned behavior (or lack of one). When I say that it isn't an excuse for him. It is a deep flaw that has to be corrected.
That's why I say your message is useless because everything isn't there yet.
That's why
>he's either a genius at assisting or a complete idiot at not doing, because the defense would like to recall that witness
And
>If you press him hard, he'll accuse you of being a particular redditor.
Are part of one and the same root problem.

>>306108
>Rationalization, and deflection. Nigel has been told ad infinitum to stop being such a sperg. For years. Two of his threads are in /go/ because he tried this same tactic to excuse his behavior. They're hilarious.
Being told to stop being a spreg as you've seen is ineffective.
>>306110
You need to change how you're contributing. Why?
All writing and communications does have the same fundamental parts but the medium changes. Writing a story is different from writing gane dialogue, and talking to people face to face is different from texting. Writing a college (or highschool) paper is different from posting in a thread.
On here thread posting is what is going on, you take blue collar humor and vicious ribbing with eloquent and fluid prose.
Look at refining a thesis statement, examine every post by multitudes of posts write.
This is a style that has to be upheld. Some posts are better than others.
>>306112
>have no leg to stand on
That may be your position on this, but for it to go on for years, YEARS, there is some truth to it. The problem is the posting style.
>These people aren't rivals or learning opportunities,
Everything is a learning opportunity! Especially under vicious prodings.
I get that. The issue is more complex than previous situations because these people are trying to help you.
>I've met people I can learn things from before and liked them
Those are two separate things, I and a few buddies of mine is highschool talked about that. It is more effective, but not a requirement.
>Glim doesn't deserve this, he's a good man.
He doesn't. He also doesn't deserve lengthy stream of consciousness posts either.
>Then again I don't like standing out or attracting attention.
That is what is happening due to writing style. Time and time again it has been noted.
>Sometimes I think about requesting a unique British flag just so no other brit will have to deal with their bullshit war on me. Maybe a flag that's like the UK flag but the red X is replaced with a lightning bolt as purple as Twilight Sparkle's eyes from the top left to bottom right and a red colt revolver as red as the red X on the british flag pointing from the top right to bottom left. The revolver has to point at the bottom left because it's a pun, top right aka auth right is shooting lib left. The lightning is just there because lightning is cool. Then again I don't like standing out or attracting attention. But my dedicated harassers have been at this for years on and off so maybe the best thing I can do is to request that flag so I will be the magnet that attracts their inane faggotry and keeps it away from the rest of the site.
That's not how this works. Also that section can be cut from the post.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306122
306124 306140
>>306121
Tell me what you believe I could change about myself that would make my stalkers stop habitually bitching at me.
Anonymous
af35396
?
No.306123
I don't mean to come off as rude, but it's reeking of codependency ITT. These are very unlikely to be problems that can be helped on an imageboard. If and when anyone needs resources, there are some out there. Otherwise I'm going to try to step aside after having said my piece, assuming that's agreeable to everyone.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.306124
051BB61FBD5F224E4D35C5787B596EFD-522757.png
>>306122
I did it's both my posts
>Also some psychological work, you got the physical down now it's psyche time.
Oh and writing in different ways. Try to write under 3000 characters using pics (or video) to strengthen the point. That's what it's there for. And shit posting.

I mean it, it's in every word and sentence I wrote to everyparty that has what your looking for.
Carefully reading everything, and having a more robust mental and action framework.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.306140
306158
>>306098
2 entirely different people (You) responded to. What in the shit are you trying to state?

>>306105
>>306110
>>306112
>>306122
Take off those colored spectacles and reread everything you type, Niggel. Everything you do is GASLIGHT GASLIGHT GASLIGHT, nonstop.
It's ALWAYS "other people attack me becuz I a gud goy!"
It's ALWAYS "I'm defending muhself cuz I'm being GANGSTALKED!" Yes, Niggel. When WE find you, we're going to YOU KNOW WHAT when you're asleep.
It's ALWAYS "muh opinion better than urs cuz muh know moar!"
It's ALWAYS "Tell me how to improve" AND THEN YOU NEVER PUT FORTH AN IOTA OF CONSTRUCTIVE EFFORT INTO BECOMING A BETTER PERSON THAT DOESN'T ACT LIKE THE STEREOTYPICAL JEWMUTTED HUWHITE!
It's ALWAYS about YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU. Everyone else are peasants compared to your !!InTeLlEcTuAl MiGhT!! You never stop to get a fucking hold of yourself, especially during rants and gaslighting, or more specifically your gaslighting rants.
It's ALWAYS you accusing others of being plebbitors, except for that time you ADMITTED YOU CAME FROM PLEBBIT!
It's ALWAYS your GANGSTALKERS that are obsessed, even when most of the people that post are simply here to watch glimmyboy slowly descending the spiral staircase into Eldritch insanity. Anything that gets posted which COULD be a slight, is always a slight to you.

Best part about all this? I will ALWAYS live rent free in your attic. I'm the FIRST person you accuse whenever Anons take a swing at you. I'm the ONLY person you try to double down on. Every time you FLINCH, I'm the one telling those Anons all your weaknesses, how to hurt you. Every time you fail to present an argument, I'm the one that sits back and laughs snidely, knowing that all you'll do in response is kvetch. I'm the batpony stealing all your snacks, and you can never catch me. You're too lazy to seal off the access points, too self-pitying of a victim to admit your ignorance, but most of all: too arrogant to accept that (You) are the problem.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306158
306159 306160
>>306140
>>306076
You are a sad, strange little man.
Look at you, ranting about how you think you're the one who lives in my head rent-free when you can't let a thread go by without harassing me in it. I'm surprised you haven't called me or anyone else with a british flag "Britmutt" yet in this thread. You certainly say it enough.
The sight of me enrages you and no matter how many times you try to make that my problem, the truth will never change.
It doesn't matter if you call me nigel or britmutt or any other word you can think of.
It doesn't matter how many times you say I am too negative-word and not good-word enough.
You're like an antifa member screaming outside the window of a conservative politician. You only get away with it because nobody feels like stopping you. No matter how much you project your flaws onto me and insist I'm the real redditor here, I was banned from reddit for being too conservative and you were not. I bet if I looked up hclegend on reddit I'd see daily activity from you. But if I spend that much time on debunking your weekly lying session, you'd feel like a winner since you wasted some time I could have spent on something constructive. It's why I haven't gone through some other threads on the site to show everyone here you needlessly aggressive, immature, and ignorant you are whenever you feel slighted no matter what the subject is.
At the end of the day you are a petulant bully with nothing to offer the site. Considering how you behave, I'm genuinely surprised the moderators have enabled you for so long because if someone with authority told you to stop, you would. Your kind usually does. What have you ever contributed to this site? You'd have to be genuinely retarded and no true believer in personal responsibility to think I am to blame for how you and your friends on discord choose to treat me no matter what I say.

Everyone, I'd like to apologize for these clowns. I did not raise them or fuck their mothers, but if I did they would have turned out better.
My childish bullies are not here to discuss ponies or politics, they are simply mad that I am here. Do not blame yourselves for their shit if they turn on you. Just remember that you can grow and they cannot.
I think I'd like to take a three day vacation from this website. I've taken breaks from the site before, only for this childish schoolyard bully to continue his shit when I return. That tends to help newfags who are slow on the uptake realize I'm not the cause of their leftist behaviour, just its current target. But if they stop posting the anti-nigel shit while I'm gone, I hope you enjoy your vacation from him and his discord trap roleplaying friends. Maybe if I choose to take a break from him it will help the tiresome and incredibly obvious leftist among us feel like he's gained some kind of victory over me. Hopefully this will cause him to leave Glim and this thread alone for a while. They are quite a tiresome bunch.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.306159
6125349__safe_imported+from+derpibooru_twilight+sparkle_pony_unicorn_animated_gif_science_seizure+warning_solo_vulgar_whiteboard.gif
>>306158
That's not going to work either. I don't care about vacations I care about lasting solutions.
Anyway watch the videos or not
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.306160
306694 306722
195ff81q.gif
>>306158
Toppest of fucking luls. I'm harassing YOU? GASLIGHT ALERT NUMBER 1! You're here harassing everyone that either reads your bullshit or has to flag you. Tossing a tu quoque AND imposing your OWN PROJECTINO of "b-b-but ur da REEL leplebbidurr!" I've never touched that site. GASLIGHTS NUMBER 2 & 3! You don't know me. You haven't ASKED. All you do is demand special treatment while complaining that you are the victim. GASLIGHT NUMBER 4! I'm a "petulant bully" for calling out your retarded brtitcuck sperging that seems to never end? GASLIGHTS NUMBER 5 AND 6! You also accuse THIS SITE'S MODS, people that I have broken ALL CONTACT WITH except for two, of allowing me to do whatever I want without punishment? GASLIGHTS 7, 8, AND 9! To top this shit off, I hate discuckrd and desire a far better platform. Shit, it makes me wish skype wasn't a steaming mess. That's GASLIGHT NUMBER 10! Now who REALLY lives rent free, Niggel~?

You made a choice to be this site's punching bag. No matter how many times you gaslight everyone, that does not change the truth of how much a truly awful, disgusting waste of rice-paper flesh bag you are. By the way: I'm a fucking eco-fascist. Red is dead and blue is too if they step over the lines.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
30a3f02
?
No.306174
306187 306694
1610875755133.png
If you guys would like to wrap up this week's episode of "Everyone Shits on Nigel for Behaving Like Nigel and Nigel Responds by Dialing the Nigelness up to 11," I'd appreciate it; meanwhile, I'll just get back to critiquing the story.

>>305914

>I really hated this stallion. “And what about all your work,” I argued. Dammit, the one reason I was at all hesitant to take down this monster was because even I could see the good his efforts would eventually bring about. I could… admire what he was building, even if I hated how he was doing it. “What about the schools? The hospitals? Rebuilding an infrastructure that will allow Equestria to pull itself out of this post-apocalyptic pit?!”
This paragraph right here sums up a lot of what is wrong with this whole Red Eye arc. The author clearly had some basic idea in his mind for what he wanted this character to be, but as ever, the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired.

As far as I can tell, we are meant to see Red Eye as a basically well-intentioned pony who wanted to correct the mistakes of the past and create a better world for everyone, but his uncompromising idealism led him to do things that were maybe a smad too extreme for most people looks like we finally found a place where the phrase "literally Hitler" is applicable. However, his actual portrayal in the story doesn't reflect this. It's the same problem as with Velvet Remedy, really: the author has an idea in mind for one kind of character, but ultimately creates a completely different character. However, he doesn't seem to realize it, so he treats the character like the one he wanted to create instead of the one he created.

Case in point: the Thunderdome episode. If this guy's primary concern is building schools and hospitals and whatnot, then what possible purpose could these gladiator battles serve? The whole idea is completely incongruous with his stated mission. He wants to pull Equestria out of the post-apocalypse and return to the previous level of civilization; fine. He is appalled by the lawless, sadistic behavior of the raiders and other generic baddies who populate the wasteland, and enslaves them as a way of forcing them to abandon their self-indulgent and ultimately destructive behavior, and work towards a common good; I'm with you so far, kkat. However, for absolutely no obvious reason beyond the author's desire to include some ridiculous event from the something-something DLC from Fallout something-or-other, he also has some of his slaves fight to the death in huge arena-battles, for the amusement of the other slaves. Not only does this not have anything to do with his stated mission of improving the quality of life in the wasteland, it actually works against it.

Up until very recently, it was common for societies to use prisoners as forced labor to complete public works projects, so what Red Eye is basically doing here makes sense enough on its own. The idea is basically that, if left to their own devices, lawbreakers will continue to engage in destructive behavior; forced labor might have the effect of rehabilitating them, and even if it doesn't, society is at least getting something useful out of them and they are no longer able to cause harm. Red Eye is taking the same approach to dealing with the raiders and whatnot that are presently making life in the wasteland unbearable. However, pitting them in gladiator battles for the amusement of...each other I guess...is going to have the opposite effect; it stimulates their bloodlust, encourages them to hone fighting skills instead of investing that time in more constructive pursuits, and further desensitizes them to pointless violence.

If the slave population was just made up of murderers, rapists and other misanthropes, and there was a caste of normal, law-abiding ponies above them, this sort of thing could make sense. However, as far as I can tell, the social structure here consists of slaves, Red Eye's slavers who police the slaves, and Red Eye himself. The gladiators are slaves, and the audience is made up of other slaves. So...what's the point of this?

Anyway, Red Eye tells Littlepoop that he wants her to kill the Goddess, who apparently lives in someplace called Maripony. He informs her that she is free to go, and she can take Xenith with her if she wants. This is pretty much a no-brainer of a deal; if she accepts she gets to go free, whereas if she refuses he will just kill her. However, Red Eye feels inclined to threaten her further. The whole exchange is typical kkat nonsense:

>“And if I refuse to kill the Goddess?”
>Red Eye frowned. “Well, I would prefer not to resort to threats. But let’s just say that by succeeding, you will save the lives of your friends in the tower.”
This implies that Red Eye has taken LP's friends as hostages and is holding them in the tower.

>“W-what have you done with Calamity, Velvet Remedy and SteelHooves?” I demanded in a frightened voice. “Are they okay?”
>Red Eye’s one real eye blinked. “Oh, you mean your assault team at the Fillydelphia Tower station? I sent Stern on ahead with a full squad of her best to give them a warm greeting. I’m sure at least one of them survived.”
This implies that Red Eye sent Stern to the tower to kill them, completely contradicting the previous implication.

>I swallowed hard, feeling all of Equestria fall out from under me. “I… I want to see them.”
>Red Eye nodded graciously. He trotted to a button on the wall beneath the large screen. “Stern, report. I have somepony here who wants to see the captives.”
Now he's implying that they're captives again. Also, if Stern is on standby with these hostages near some kind of video monitor, it implies that Red Eye anticipated he might need to use them to coerce LP into doing what he wants. This directly contradicts his above statement, which implies that he sent Stern to kill them without realizing that they might make useful hostages.

Almost out of space, I will continue in a new post.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
30a3f02
?
No.306187
306205
Yes_Guy.png
>>306174

>The monitor screen lit up. For a moment, all it showed was ruins and blood.
>Then a hoof rose up, tapping on the screen. “Hey!” Calamity’s smiling face and orange mane came into view. “Ah think this here just turned on!”
>I could hear the low grumble of SteelHooves voice, “Calamity, don’t mess with it.”
>“Oh, hold on,” Calamity said, looking slightly up. “Hey, Ah can see Li’lpip through this thing now. Heya, kid!”
>This was obviously not the response Red Eye had been expecting. I felt a crippling surge of relief and collapsed to the floor.
At this point, we learn that all previous implications are irrelevant anyway, because it seems that Calamity and the others have killed Red Eye's attack party, and were conveniently standing next to the same video monitor that Red Eye intended to contact Stern on. I'm assuming this means Stern is dead now?

>“oh, an’ y’all must be Red Eye. Can’t say it’s ah pleasure t’… whoa! Y’all are a cyberpony! Ah didn’t think those were even real!”
"Is y'all one o'dem cyberponies? Well tarnation! My granpappy back in ol' Kentucky used to tell me bout dem cyberponies, I tell ya whut, but I thought he was just a'spinnin' yarns! YEE-HAWWWW!!"
*spits tobacco juice*
*hoists Confederate flag*
*fires pistols into the air*
*extended banjo solo*


>“We kept yer griffin gal all safe an’ cozy. Trust me, she ain’t hardly hurt, and she ain’t feelin’ a bit o’ pain,” Calamity said with a mock friendliness that didn’t touch the steel glint in his eyes. “Figured things mighta gone a bit south fer our friend Li’lpip, so Ah decided we oughta keep someone fer trade.”
Ah, I see that my assumptions regarding Stern were premature. I forgot that characters with names are basically the blue-shirt guys in this story.

Page break. We rejoin the group at some indeterminate point in the future, at an undisclosed part of Fillydelphia that apparently features a moat and drawbridge. Red Eye, protected by a shield generated by two of his alicorn minions, stands at one end with LP and Xenith. Velvet and SteelHooves stand at the other, with a trussed-up Stern in tow.

Red Eye repeats his offer to Littlepoop, and kkat seems to make an effort to clear up the previous confusion:

>“Remember my offer, Littlepip. Kill the Goddess…”
>“…and you not only get rid of her, but you get rid of me. And save your friends in the tower.”
Uhwhaaaaat??
>“Ah. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I don’t mean these friends in that tower…” he said, nodding towards the rising white needle of the Fillydelphia Tower. “I mean your friends in Tenpony Tower.”
Oh, now I see where he's going with this. Apparently, the hostages were meant to be the Tenpony residents; LP merely assumed he meant Calamity and the others, and the confusion centered around the ambiguous word "tower."

Well, this puts Littlepoop in a regular ol' dilly of a pickle. Red Eye is now threatening Tenpony Tower, which just happens to be where the rug that LP is currently munching resides. Is this some 4D chess move by Red Eye, indicating that he has been watching LP for some time, and knows everything about her, including the identities of those closest to her? Or did he just point to this tower because it's full of ponies and he figured LP would do what he wanted if he threatened to blow it up? I'm guessing the former, but if so it opens up an entire logical can of worms that I just don't feel like going into right now.

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Distress Signals

Today's fortune cookie:
>“When the walls come tumbling down, when you lose everything you have, you always have family. And your family always has tribe.”
This isn't necessarily true, particularly in Edgequestria. The concepts of both family and tribe seem to have mostly vanished in this dog-eat-pony vision of the future. Too bad kkat doesn't bother to attribute these chapter epitaphs, or we could examine the original context to try and figure out what he meant by this.

Anyway, the chapter opens with a completely out of place monologue from Littlepoop about her family. The tl;dr of it is that she never knew her father, her mother was a whore, and until she met the group of thinly-sketched character outlines she currently pals around with (and still knows very little about), she never knew the meaning of the word family.

>Velvet Remedy had slipped into mother-doctor mode almost at the sight of me. Now that I wasn’t mentally sniffing between her hindlegs anymore, I found myself comforted by her fretful ministrations, particularly considering that she did a much better job of mothering me than my actual mother ever had.
No matter how hard kkat tries, I'm never going to like Velvet Remedy.

If he were capable of thinking about character relationships in more than just one dimension, he might be able to spin this into something interesting. Velvet has demonstrated a propensity for manipulating ponies in order to get what she wants, as well as a lack of empathy for whichever pony she's manipulating. We saw this earlier on a few occasions, most notably when she tried to seduce Littlepoop to get back at Calamity, and in the beginning of the story when she conned her into taking her PipBuck so she could escape. Both times she used LP's crush on her to advantage, without considering LP's feelings (and, in the case of the PipBuck, that she might get her into trouble). Conversely, LP seems to have abandonment issues. It sounds like her mother didn't give her much affection, so now she projects affection onto Velvet. If he wanted to, kkat could turn this into an unhealthy codependent type friendship, which could potentially produce some interesting tensions.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.306205
306283 306303
large (3).png
>>306187

Page break. It seems that rather than explore the interesting, subtle tension of an imbalanced relationship between a borderline sociopath and a girl with mommy issues, kkat would rather bludgeon us over the head with the much more obvious and tedious tension between SteelHooves and Xenith, because OMG she's a zebra, and he's some kind of cybernetic soldier designed to fight zebras, or something I guess.

The conversation goes about as you'd expect it to:

SteelHooves: "Reeee you're a zebra and we fought a war with them 200 years ago and blah blah blah"
Xenith: "Reeee I was not involved in the war because it was 200 years ago and I wasn't even born yet and blah blah blah"
Velvet: "Reeee you should not be prejudiced SteelHooves because you are a ghoul and blah blah blah"
Calamity: "Littlepoop trusts you so welcome to the team. Yee haw, tarnation, and blah blah blah"

And, just like that, another character has been added to LP's endlessly-expanding collection of sidekicks. I have no doubt she will prove to be as boring and poorly-developed as the rest of them.

Page break. In the next scene, the group has taken over an abandoned apartment, and they are all resting up. Xenith is cooking them supper.

>I cursed Red Eye. “Why did he have to go after Homage?”
>“Ah don’t figure he did,” Calamity suggested from the other room. “I reckon he’s aimin’ at DJ Pon3. Buck’s been broadcastin’ good things ‘bout ya fer a while now, so’s that prob’ly gets him chalked up as a friend that Red Eye figures you’d want t’ keep from harm.”
So, let me get this straight. Homage, or "DJ Pon3," lives in a gigantic tower with radio equipment sticking out of the roof, and broadcasts a very famous radio show that is heard far and wide across all of Equestria. Nearly everypony in the wasteland, including the maniacal supervillain bent on world domination, knows where she broadcasts from (though he has strangely not chosen to do anything about it until now). However, the ponies in her building, who live on the floors directly underneath her, somehow have no idea who DJ Pon3 is, or where she broadcasts from? Am I understanding this correctly?

>SteelHooves had never suggested or pressured me to go along with the solo mission, merely supported me when I made the decision to. Considering the tones of his previous conversation with Elder Blueberry Sabre, I suspected SteelHooves would have just as swiftly backed me if my decision had involved telling her to sit on my horn and spin.
Reminder that the author has not explained much of anything to us about the Steel Rangers; we still have only the vaguest idea of who these ponies are/were, and what their goals in the present are. We also know virtually nothing about SteelHooves' role in their organization. He is clearly some kind of high-ranking member, but it's clear that this Blueberry Sabre character holds an equal if not higher rank. Is SteelHooves on their side? On their side, but it's complicated? Not on their side? On his own side? The situation here is just like Calamity and the Pegasus Enclave: the author introduced some aspects of his backstory, but never bothered to follow up on any of it with further details, so these characters are sort of a half-baked cake.

>I looked from SteelHooves to Calamity, again struck by the difference between them when it came to support. Calamity was loyal. SteelHooves was… obedient. Not necessarily to me, but to whomever he accepted as in charge. He was a soldier buck even now.
Again, kkat's view of his own characters is quite different from mine. My assessment would be that Calamity is a rootin' tootin' cowboy stereotype with no other defining traits, who is dependable in the sense that he started tagging along with Littlepoop for no obvious reason and continues to follow her for no obvious reason. So, he is unlikely to suddenly abandon her, but I wouldn't exactly call it loyalty. SteelHooves has no personality to speak of, and mostly just stands there; he also tags along with LP for no obvious reason. I don't know if I would characterize him as "obedient;" it's more that he's just kind of a presence, like an unused pool table in the basement.

Anyway, Velvet goes over all of Littlepoop's recent injuries, including the kick in the cootch she got from what's-his-name way back when she first became a slave. Meanwhile, Calamity muses about Red Eye's threat against Tenpony:

>Calamity stood up, shaking his head. “Ah hate t’ be the voice o’ worry, but…” The pegasus paused uncomfortably, brushing a hoof over his orange mane. “Well, Ah figure if he put that megaspell at Tenpony Tower, he musta done so b’fore he hatched his plan t’ use ya. So the only thing keepin’ him from using it is that deal o’ ya.”
This wad of fake country gibberish seems to imply that Red Eye already has a balefire bomb hidden at Tenpony. He never actually said this; all he did was vaguely imply that he had a megaspell and he was contemplating using it against the tower. The method of delivery was in no way specified.

Anyway, Calamity seems to be of the opinion that Red Eye might chose to detonate the bomb anyway once Littlepoop kills the Goddess, on account of how Homage has a massive listener base and seems hostile to his regime. This is probably a reasonable enough concern, assuming he wasn't just bullshitting about having a balefire bomb.

Also, there is some more musing from LP about Red Eye:

>I recalled a conversation with Watcher regarding how, without what he called “the spark”, the virtues he valued could become twisted, lost parodies of themselves. I had found another in Red Eye: Generosity. Even generosity could wander down twisted, dark paths… especially when what you are giving away shouldn’t be yours to give.
I can't say this interpretation of Red Eye would have ever occurred to me. Like everything else in this book, the concept of "virtue" is only vaguely sketched out.

Also, pic related is a little gem someone sent to me.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306283
>>306205
That's kind of depressing. Or inspiring? What I mean to say is this piece of shit, and its enormous fandom, would have never existed if kkat either never clicked on the image one day, or it was never drawn.

It's an interesting thought about how the simplest actions in your life can lead to extraordinary outcomes, and success is a sudden, unknowable thing.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306303
306315 306390 306701
1618672868894.jpg
>>306205

SteelHooves gives voice to a question that had occurred to me right off the bat: how do they know that Red Eye even has a balefire bomb to begin with? The answer, unsurprisingly, is convoluted and stupid:

>The building was silent, save for the crackling of the fire and the bubbling of the cookpot, for several long minutes in the wake of our explanation.
>“You gave a balefire bomb over to New Appleloosa?” SteelHooves exploded, pacing in his heavy armor, his metal-sheathed tail flicking in emphasis with each word. “A town notorious for trading with Red Eye’s slavers?”
Uhwhaaaat? A balefire bomb? In my New Appleoosa? It's more common than you think.

If you're wondering what the fuck is going on here, you would be well within your rights; the author does a piss-poor job explaining any of it, and he's also referencing an event from ages ago that wasn't properly explained at the time, either. This one is a doozie, and we'll need to go back quite a ways in order to sort it out.

You may or may not recall that way the fuck back in Chapter 9, it was revealed that Silver Bell had an undetonated megaspell stored in her family's barn (I don't remember how she came to possess such a thing or if it was ever explained). At the beginning of Chapter 10, there is some debate over what to do about the bomb. Littlepoop, for her part, is more concerned with Silver Bell's well-being and spends quite a bit of page space on a convoluted monologue about sending her to Manehattan for therapy or something. She summons Derpy by way of one of Frank's sprite bots in order to accomplish this. However, when Derpy shows up, she brings Railright (an NPC from New Appleoosa, who is some kind of loading dock foreman or something as I recall). Railright and Calamity go into the barn and inspect the balefire bomb. This is all the text has to say about it:

>“What in tarnation d’ya plan t’ do with that thing?” Calamity was asking Railright as they clopped away from the barn. “Ah’d suggest collapsin’ the barn on it, but that might set it off. Hell, fer all we know, movin’ it might set the gol-darned thing off!”
>Railright neighed. “Ah have no idea.” He held up a hoof to block Calamity. “Y’all mind if Ah have a word w’ Littlepip? Alone-like?”
At this point, Railright pulls LP aside and explains to her that she is no longer allowed in New Appleoosa, and the bomb is not mentioned again.

The fate of the balefire bomb is left completely ambiguous; neither Calamity nor Railright ever conclusively decide what is to be done about it. There seems to be some concern that moving the bomb or attempting to collapse the barn on top of it would detonate it, and up until literally two seconds ago I've been assuming that they decided to just leave it in the barn and hope no one else finds it. However, it seems that once again, kkat had something completely different in mind, which he didn't bother to clarify because he assumes everyone can read his mind.

Back in the present, Chapter 27 has this to say:

>“Which one of you idiots came up with that idea?” SteelHooves demanded.
>Calamity raised his hoof, a chagrinned expression on his face.
Even at this late juncture, the author provides no clarification as to what arrangement was reached between Calamity and Railright regarding this bomb, but the implication here seems to be that Calamity gave control over to Railright, who apparently had it transported back to New Appleoosa somehow. The matter gets even more complicated from here:

>SteelHooves was fuming. “You do realize that Red Eye is the only reason there even is a New Appleloosa, right?” His visor turned towards us and found only blank expressions. “That place was a small town dying in the dust before Red Eye pranced in and gave them a water talisman. You’ve got to figure they owe him!”
Calamity acknowledges that he didn't know any of this, even though he lived just outside New Appleoosa and worked for them.

The author never conclusively explains any of it, but based on what he's given us, here is my best guess about what happened:

>Calamity gave the bomb to Railright
>Railright took it back to New Appleoosa
What happened next is either:
>Red Eye somehow found out that they had it
>he asked for it
>they gave it to him, because they owed him for the water talisman
or:
>they traded it to Old Appleoosa, where the slavers who work for Red Eye still operate
>the slavers brought the bomb to Red Eye

This text has more ambiguities than kkat has gallons of semen in his colon, but this is probably a close enough approximation of the truth.

>I saw the bounty of our Stable shared, the water talisman given to a struggling town which now knows the joy of clean and pure water.
This line appears in italics as a separate paragraph, and appears to be Littlepoop directly recollecting something. The text, as usual, does not give us any clues as to what is being referenced; however, ctrl-F reveals that the line occurred verbatim in Chapter 25, as part of one of Red Eye's long-winded speeches. Specifically, he is talking about the talisman from the Stable that he grew up in and later took over, which he gave to some mystery town.

Littlepoop, who apparently has a photographic memory, recalls this line out of the clear blue sky, and immediately connects it with what SteelHooves has just told her about New Appleoosa. Once again, she seems to be connecting dots that don't necessarily connect; we've seen water talismans all over the place, and while they're valuable, they also seem to be rather common. All we know for certain is that Red Eye gave New Appleoosa the one that they currently have; we don't know that it's the same one he took from his old stable. It would stand to reason that he has come across a number of these things during his gradual conquest of Edgequestria.

Anyway, Littlepoop closes on this note:

>Homage was going to die, and it was my fault.
Technically, it would be Calamity's fault, since he's the one who gave the stupid bomb to Railright.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306315
306322
35081e0416638aed7c263569ac690f7f.jpg
>>306303

Page break. The scene opens with Littlepoop bathing herself in water that her PipBuck tells her is irradiated.

>The clicking of my PipBuck reminded me that my weeks in the Equestrian Wasteland had been, in many ways, blessed. I had avoided some of the more repulsive hardships that many ponies faced every day. I had never been reduced to drinking radioactive water from the bowl of a toilet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M

Meanwhile, Calamity is goofing around with electronics, trying to build a radio. Conveniently enough, he gets it working just as DJ Pon3 is beginning one of her regularly scheduled sucking-off-Littlepoop newscasts:

>“Yea-haw! Welcome, ponies of Fillydelphia! This is DJ Pon3 beaming a light into even the darkest parts of the Equestrian Wasteland! You can’t stop the signal, baby! And thanks to that kid from Stable Two, the message is reaching even the souls trapped in that Celestia-forsaken hellhole. Looks like our plucky Stable-Dweller galloped into the heart of Red Eye’s slavery operation and gave the old bastard a big black eye… in the form of losing nearly half his dirigibles and a small army’s worth of his slavers. Not t’ mention annihilating the Crater Boss. And she even took Red Eye’s right hoof griffin, Stern, down a peg. Aaaaand that’s not all! Our little Wasteland Heroine, our Bringer of Light, bucked right through the wall that Red Eye had built around Fillydelphia’s airwaves, bringing my humble message into the one place I could never reach before! Thank you, Stable Dweller!”
Presumably, what we can infer from this is that Calamity and the others succeeded in setting up the transmitter doohickey on the broadcast tower like they were supposed to, and that for some reason Red Eye hasn't gone out there to remove it yet, though it seems plausible that he could.

>The elation I felt at hearing Homage’s voice (disguised as it was) in this horrible place battled the humiliation and dismay at hearing my royal fuck-up described as a brilliant victory. I did not earn this.
Aaaand the obligatory false modesty from the hero being worshipped, right on time as usual.

Anyway, the rest of this is just more recapping of bullshit we already know, with a liberal amount of praise for Littlepoop sprinkled on.

Page break. Littlepoop finishes her bath and is about to take a nap, when SteelHooves barges in and rudely demands to speak with her about Xenith, because blah blah zebras bad. Littlepoop pretends to be asleep, and Velvet shoos him out the door, telling him to fuck off because blah blah prejudice bad. SteelHooves points out that regardless of LP's feelings about diversity and inclusion, the Steel Rangers will likely shoot Xenith on sight, because blah blah they are still fighting a 200 year old war, or something. This conversation is tedious and goes on for a long while. What they ultimately decide is that the group will split up temporarily when they get back to the Steel Rangers' hideout, because I guess Littlepoop has to give them the reactor plans she stole, or whatever it was they asked for. In retrospect, this decision probably isn't important enough to need its own dedicated scene.

>“…So long as you are with us, you will love and tolerate the shit out of her. Consider that an order.” I stared at him, giving him one chance.
Hurr durr memes.

Anyway, we also learn a couple of minor tidbits. Apparently, Xenith is a vegetarian like Velvet, which I guess is rare in Edgequestria. Also, she can brew healing potions and stuff, because the one zebra character on the MLP TV series can do that, so naturally that means it's something that all zebras can do. She claims to be able to brew potions that can permanently alter a pony's physical makeup, ie making their bones more difficult to break, and so forth. Oh goody; now Littlepoop can be even more invincible and even less susceptible to injuries that never seem to affect her anyway.

>Before either of us could protest, Velvet reminded me, “Littlepip has had some bad experiences with zebra ‘medicine’ before. She is particularly susceptible to their dangers.”
I'm assuming she's talking about the party time mint-als, but I was under the impression that Pinkie Pie had invented those. Was it actually zebras? There is so much autism in this text it's hard to keep track of it all.

The scene closes with Littlepoop deciding to try a cup of the mystery potion Xenith is currently brewing up.

Page break. At this point, Littlepoop decides that now would be a good time to dive into one of the memory orbs she picked up from wherever. I've completely lost track of how many she has or where she got them all from.

In this orb, she appears to be Rainbow Dash. Zecora has been "arrested" for attempting to steal the plans for the anti-machine gun, and a furious Pinkie Pie interrogates her and orders her sent to Shattered Hoof. However, when she and Dash are alone together, it's revealed that the whole thing was a ruse, and that the real plan is to recruit Zecora as a spy. Nothing else happens.

Page break. In the next scene, the group is still in the apartment. They are sitting around shooting the shit, trying to get acquainted with Xenith I guess. Xenith tells them a bit of her past:

>“My great grandparents were amongst the survivors of Stable Three, as were most zebras in the Equestrian Wasteland. As is typical for youth, my grandparents rebelled against their parent’s ways and sought to learn more about the zebras beyond the tales passed down through oral tradition since The Sealing. “
k.

>I didn’t need clarification on what The Sealing was. Nopony who lived in a Stable would.
This is a recurring problem in this text. LP may not need clarification here, but the reader does. We can probably assume that The Sealing refers to the moment when the Stable inhabitants were sealed inside; the problem is that we don't know this for certain. The term has no obvious significance, and we haven't encountered it before.
Anonymous
b4b8dc9
?
No.306318
306321 306323
>Someone is unironically reviewing Fallout: Equestria in The Year of our Lord 2021
I uh
Godspeed, you mad bastard.
For sanity's sake, i hope you don't go beyond it into sidefic hell. The 'original' is bad enough.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.306321
306333
>>306318
Whatever do you mean? FoE is nothing short of a literary masterpiece!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306322
306392 306430 306701
1618809685653.gif
>>306315

>But I did wish to know more about the Stable whose floor plan I had in my PipBuck. “Stable Three?”
And this shit right here is another recurring problem in this text. Instead of clarifying the thing the reader might actually be wondering about, kkat instead decides to clarify this completely irrelevant piece of trivia that no one gives a shit about and that has nothing to do with anything currently going on. Alright, faggot; I'll bite. What's the deal with Stable Three?

Well, for some reason, SteelHooves knows all about it:

>SteelHooves grunted. “The Let’s-Get-Along Stable,” he snorted derisively. I saw Velvet’s ears perk at that.

As usual, kkat goes fairly light on the details and leaves most of it for the reader to surmise. However, the gist seems to be that Stable Three was populated half with zebras and half with ponies, and that all history and propaganda about the war was kept out. They had two Overmares, one of each race. Apparently the stable was one of the more successful ones; everyone got along with each other and lived harmoniously. Unfortunately, it was also located within the city limits of Canterlot, which means it fell victim to that pink cloud thing that did the princesses in. Apparently it lasted about a century before the heavy-duty weatherstripping finally gave way, and then darkness and decay and the Pink Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Page break. In the next scene, they are still in the same goddamned apartment, and they are still sitting around talking. Someone really needs to sit down with kkat and explain to him the concept of scenes.

They sit around and plan what to do next. Xenith asks Littlepoop if they can make a detour, but we don't get to learn what that detour involves, because Littlepoop tells her they need to go back to the Rangers' headquarters first, which you'll remember is in an old StableTec building. Apparently, she wants to get inside the old ST maneframe for some retarded, nosy reason of her own, and she intends to use the reactor plans she stole from Red Eye to barter for this.

>“Red Eye is building a fortress called the Cathedral where Stable 101 used to be. I figure the Stable-Tec maneframe has record of the location of all the Stables, so that’s the fastest way to find out where Red Eye’s main base is located.”
Hm, that's surprising. I assumed she just wanted access to the maneframe so she could read through a bunch of emails and journals from ponies who have been dead for 200 years like she usually does, but it seems she actually has a plot-specific reason for wanting to poke around in there. I guess there's a first time for everything.

Anyway, it's a little unclear what the fuck she's talking about with the Cathedral, but I've discovered that ctrl-F and an epub copy of the book is an essential tool when trying to make sense out of kkat's rambling autism. Here's what I found:

>“And that is why my Stable was the first to be dismantled. Its doors and supports torn out and melted down, its concrete walls and floors cut apart to make the foundation stones of the Cathedral, the fortress we are building on the site of my former home, to be the new capital of our New Equestria, and the new home of our living Goddess.”
This is from Chapter 25; the line is spoken by Red Eye during one of his motivational speeches. Now, I can hear you all asking, how the hell did LP know that his home stable was number 101? Well, here's this, also from Chapter 25:

>“Red Eye turned towards Stern. His cape fell into view, a rough rectangle made from Stable security barding. The number 101 was visible in yellow against the black cloth.”
So there you have it. LP used her Mary Sue powers to connect these two seemingly minor details that most normal people would not have even noticed, let alone retained.

Kkat's autismo thought process is internally logical and mostly consistent; I'll admit to being grudgingly impressed that this story is as large as it is, yet is mostly free of continuity errors. The biggest one I thought I'd found was Applejack's death, but the issue there turned out to be kkat failing to mention that AJ survived the elevator crash. Apart from that, as convoluted as this story is, kkat does a good job of avoiding contradictions.

His problem, however, is that he's a shit storyteller. He has the autist's gift of being able to keep perfect track of massive amounts of information, yet he has no idea how to use this information to weave a story, and no internal filter to tell him which bits of information are important and interesting, and which bits are just trivial bullshit. This most recent bit with Red Eye's old Stable is a fine example. By the rules of mystery writing everything is cricket here: the clues to the conclusion LP draws are present in the text, and an observant reader could have probably figured this out even though it's not obvious. The problem is that this isn't a mystery story, or at least I don't get the impression it's supposed to be. As I said, a normal person would probably not have pieced this together: they would probably not have noticed the number 101 on Red Eye's cape, and if they did they probably wouldn't connect it to this one obscure line of dialogue he spoke.

This strikes me as something that would make a clever video game puzzle; the player is given a couple of clues about an important location they will need to find in order to advance the game. However, as I am fond of repeating, novels are not video games. The deduction LP makes here is the kind of thing you'd expect from a Sherlock Holmes type character, but LP hasn't been presented to us this way. Holmes is specifically written as a character with razor-sharp intellect and powers of deduction; his literal job is figuring stuff like this out, and his stories focus on this attribute. LP being able to solve all these ridiculous puzzles while also having all the other Sue powers she has just makes her seem even more obnoxious.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306323
306333 306392
>>306318
>For sanity's sake, i hope you don't go beyond it into sidefic hell.
Dear God no. A couple of people have requested I do Project Horizons, but I took one look at the length of that thing and I said nope, nope, nope.
Anonymous
b4b8dc9
?
No.306333
>>306321
Oh god no, i'll be the first to admit the damn thing's a shitfest despite my enjoyment of some irradiated magical horses.
General consensus among fans and enjoyers alike is 'disregard hard canon, invent your own wasteland'.
Still nice to see someone actually sit down and dissect the pulsating mass, though. Put everyone's issues into one compiled document like Horizons had for a while before everyone either stopped caring or went full autismo and memorized the majority of flaws.
>>306323
What was it, 3-4x the length of the original?
At least you're not completely insane.
But if you do go completely batshit that's probably where you'll start and end.
Anonymous
9b82771
?
No.306351
306429 306701
1606809017140.jpg
Ah man I can't recall who reccomended it here but finally got around to reading through the thread that started all this and while I'm not done it's been a hoot and a holler so far. Quite fun to see the moment Glim Glam donned the mantle plus some more writing advice.

Do hope Nigel revises the fic like he said he plans to and makes me want to get to writing my own story and someday have Glim Glam and friends tear it a new one.

Been a nice pallet cleanser after Fallout Equestria for so long now. Glad to hear he decided to skip Project Horizons or we may be at it for years. Love all you guys even Nigel. You've all been a big bright spot in my day checking the thread.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.306390
306426
toasty.png
>>306303
The balefire bomb thing is bizarre to me. Not because of Kkat's vague and unfocused writing style, but because it wasn't treated as anything more than a mild curiosity before now. Littlepip and her friends stumbled across a fully functional nuclear weapon (or its closest equivalent) in the possession of an unhinged child, passed it off to a small town, then immediately forgot about its existence. This is cited as an example of a Chekhov's gun, but it strikes me more as an example of absolute foolish ignorance on the characters' part.

Littlepip and her friends aren't very bright, but surely they realize that the balefire bomb they found is one of the devices responsible for everything wrong with the world they live in? For all they know it could go off if someone so much as looked at it wrong, killing everything for miles around. Did that not occur to them? Did they just not care? Did they just pass it off to Railright and the others with a "nah, it'll be fine"?

They found a weapon of mass destruction, gave it to some people they barely knew, then simply forgot about it? WHAT.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.306392
101jumpsuit.jpg
boat.png
>>306322
>Red Eye is building a fortress called the Cathedral where Stable 101 used to be.
Another thing that'll stand out to Fallout players. In the original Fallout, the Unity (the cult that worships the Master) operate out of a fortress called the Cathedral, which is built on top of a vault.

>As I said, a normal person would probably not have pieced this together: they would probably not have noticed the number 101 on Red Eye's cape, and if they did they probably wouldn't connect it to this one obscure line of dialogue he spoke.
I can give Kkat a teeny tiny bit of credit here - the number 101 would immediately stand out as meaningful to anyone that's played Fallout 3, since Vault 101 is where you begin that game. Stable 2 took Vault 101's gimmick of never opening, but I presume the choice of numbering was a deliberate choice to build on the Red Eye/Littlepip parallel that Kkat's trying to establish. Red Eye, at least by implication, is another "player character", and can be assumed to have a similarly important place in the narrative.

It's very clumsy, but I can at least see what Kkat was going for here.

>This strikes me as something that would make a clever video game puzzle; the player is given a couple of clues about an important location they will need to find in order to advance the game. However, as I am fond of repeating, novels are not video games.
This right here is the core of the problem.

>>306323
FoE's spinoffs trend toward extreme length, probably for the same reason that the original does. Project Horizons is the longest at a colon-stretching 1.7 million words. Imagine FoE except written by someone with better technical skills - who also happens to be a clinically depressed pedophile that relies on ripping characters and plot points from anime whenever he hits a wall. It's controversial even within the FoE fandom, which should tell you a lot.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
45f62c6
?
No.306426
306701
>>306390

What makes it even more ridiculous is that the group didn't even have any pressing objectives at the time they discovered the bomb. If they were on some kind of important quest or mission, and couldn't afford the time it would take to see to it that the bomb was secured someplace safe, I could understand leaving it to someone trustworthy to deal with. However, at the time they had absolutely fuck-all going on. Their only real objectives were "go to Fillydelphia because Littlepoop wants to for some reason" and "go see the DJ at Tenpony Tower because Littlepoop wants to for some reason."

The discovery of the bomb ought to have created a mission in and of itself, since keeping something like that from falling into the wrong hands hooves, whatever would by default be a much more pressing task than any of the mundane nonsense they had going on. At the absolute least they could have buried it or something. Hell, even seeking out the Steel Rangers would have been a reasonable goal to take on at that point. LP and Velvet wouldn't have known about them, but Calamity seems to have some general knowledge of the world, so it wouldn't have been implausible for him to say something like: "Hey, I've heard rumors of some pre-war fraternal order that dedicates itself to collecting dangerous weapons in order to keep them from being misused. Let's go see if they want a balefire bomb." It may not have been a perfect solution, but it would have been a fair sight better than just handing it over to a pack of small town yokels they barely know and just assuming that everything would work out.
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306429
>>306351
Just so you know the one >>>/mlpol/go/4045
in golden oaks is not finished. It only has half of the posts from the original. The real one is somewhere in the archives. This happened because GG took a hiatus in the project and the mods put the, what they thought at the time, was the finished version.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306430
306438 306487
1276575 - Banner_Mare Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Strangerdanger Twilight_Sparkle.jpg
>>306322

Anyway, Littlepoop's basic plan is that they should go barter with the Rangers for maneframe access so she can figure out where Red Eye's Cathedral is, and then go to Tenpony and get everyone evacuated. At this point, there is some more collective sucking of LP's metaphorical dick, followed by some more false humility about it from Littlepoop, where she sighs and complains that everyone keeps treating her like a hero when she's totally not. And of course, it wouldn't be complete without some more idiotic brony profanity:

>Luna clop me with Her wings.
This one doesn't even make sense.

After this gets settled, attention returns to Xenith and the detour she asked them to take. She wants to go back to her home village.

>“My parents and husband were slain in the fight. My daughter…” the zebra choked before plowing on. “My daughter was too young for Stern’s slave pits, and not a pony so she had no place in Red Eye’s schools. So Stern left her there, along with the other children.”
This actually contradicts what we already know about Red Eye's slavers. The slave operation at Old Appleoosa was specifically rounding up children because they were more malleable and less accustomed to freedom. There was a whole side-story about it. Also, based on the behavior we've seen from most of the baddies in this story, it seems unlikely that they would have simply left the children alone, even if they didn't want to take them as captives. It seems far more plausible that they would have just killed them.

>Velvet Remedy whimpered, shedding the tears that the zebra seemed unable or unwilling to.
No matter how hard the author tries to make me like Velvet Remedy, I am never going to like Velvet Remedy.

It seems pretty unlikely in any case that Xenith's daughter would still be living in this village after all these years. However, it makes perfect sense that she would want to find her child, and since she has no other clues as to where she might have gone, her old village would be the most reasonable place to begin that search. As character motivations in this story go, this is by far the most believable one we've seen.

Page break. The group has returned to the StableTec building which the Steel Rangers have made into their headquarters. Velvet's stupid flaming bird is back, and Velvet goes up and hugs it. I'm not sure how this would work since as far as I can tell the bird is literally made out of fire, but at this point it's among the least implausible things we've seen in this story.

>Well, at least Velvet Remedy wasn’t spending nearly as much time inside the Fluttershy orb since Pyrelight joined us. I had mixed feelings about the trade.
I'd completely forgotten about Velvet's obsession with the Fluttershy orb. Imagine someone spending all of their time retreating into an escapist virtual world in order to avoid dealing with reality. I wonder where kkat could possibly have gotten this idea from? Anyway, I guess the implication here is that Velvet is now transferring her dependency on the orb onto this bird, or something. Whatever the hell that's supposed to signify.

>“All the ponies in this crowd are crazy,” Xenith muttered as she walked past me.
It's not clear what crowd she's referring to. My best guess is that she means LP's party, but who knows?

Anyway, even though the author already devoted an entire microscene to hashing all of this out, the conversation about Xenith not coming inside the Steel Rangers' building is repeated. Ultimately, what is decided is that LP, SteelHooves, and Calamity will go inside, and Xenith will wait outside with Velvet Underground and her flaming radioactive parakeet.

>The zebra nodded. “As you wish. I will remain here with unicorn Fluttershy and her balefire Doombunny.”
No matter how hard the author tries to make me see a connection between Velvet and Fluttershy, I'm never going to see that connection as genuine.

>Okie dokey lokey.
Also, I find LP's continuous use of this phrase annoying. It's one of Pinkie's catch phrases, and Pinkie has been dead for 200 years we even found her skeleton. I don't see where LP would have picked it up. I suppose it's possible that it's a common expression in Equestria, but that doesn't make its use here any less irritating.

Anyway, she asks Xenith to brew her a potion while she's inside, to give her something to do I guess. I'm not sure how this is going to work; I guess she's just supposed to brew it in the courtyard or something. But whatever, that's the end of the microscene.

Page break. LP sits outside the Head Ranger's office, listening to DJ Rugmunch on the radio while she waits to be announced. We learn that Red Eye has been setting fire to portions of the Everfree Forest for God only knows what reason, and that he is also laying siege to Tenpony Tower. What follows this announcement is ridiculous even by FoE standards:

>“And now for something a bit unusual. I don’t normally read mail on the air, but I have a personal message here from my assistant Homage to the Stable Dweller. Ahem. Dearest Littlepip… aww, now ain’t that sweet? I think somepony has a crush. Dearest Littlepip, I know things sound bad here, and I know it’s your nature to try to rush to our rescue; but we’re okay for now, and you have other more pressing matters closer to home. Do what you need to do, take care of them first. Then, later, we can meet where we met before, and I promise to give you so many orgas…Oh! Well now that’s not something I’m comfortable readin’ on the air. I think I’ll be having a little talk with my assistant.
"Oh no, Dr. Octopus is robbing the First National Bank," exclaimed Peter Parker. "This looks like a job for my best friend Spider Man! Everyone wait here, I'll go call him."

>“Meanwhile, here are the silky-smooth tones of Velvet Remedy singing about what gets her through life in this post-apocalyptic wasteland!”
Apparently Velvet wrote an entire song about being a vapid, insufferable cunt.
Anonymous
182ef3d
?
No.306438
306508
>>306430
>Xenith
One thing that makes a decent story good (not that FoE is close at all to any level of decency) or a bad story enjoyable at least is changing the manner of speaking of characters based on this culture. It doesn't have to necessarily be Mark Twain levels of colloquial knowledge, but something better than Calamity's fake thick country accent would have been nice. Have Xenith use African American slang or something like "jiving" and the like. And no, Zecora doesn't use slang like that in the show, but this fic doesn't care about the world of MLP and something slightly ridiculous in a funny way would ease the pain of reading.

>okie dokey lokey
LP is so devoid of original characterization that she attracts others' catchphrases like a vacuum.

>Homage
What utter cringe.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306487
306497 306501 306701
large (2).gif
>>306430

Page break. Littlepoop is informed by Knight Poppyseed that Elderberry Pie, or whatever the Chief Ranger's name is, is not home at the moment, but she is free to leave the shit she was supposed to bring them in her office. LP tells them that the bypass spell research was destroyed, and that she has the plans for the reactor or whatever, but she will only hand them over in exchange for access to the maneframe. Knight Poppyseed sputters indignantly on cue.

>Calamity stepped up next to me, fixing her with a dangerous stare. “Ah reckon we ain’t exactly askin’. Y’all owe Li’lpip, an’ we’re takin’ payment. Now why don’t we do it all friendly-like?”
"Knight Poppyseed, you shore do got a purdy mouth."
*chaws tobacky*

>The knight mare looked to SteelHooves for support.
>“I’m a Star Paladin,” my armor-encased companion reminded her smoothly. “In the absence of the Elder, I am the ranking Ranger on this base. And I order you to take us to the Stable-Tec maneframe.”
I thought he was an Elder too? Anyway, these ranks still haven't been explained and are thus completely meaningless, but the context provides enough information in this case. SteelHooves has a high enough rank that he can order Knight Poopyseed to do as LP asks, and so she has little choice but to take them to the central computer.

Page break. They go down to the maneframe, which is located inside a big room in the basement. Rather than just do what she came down here to do, LP decides to go exploring first. She finds what appears to be the entrance to a stable on which construction was begun but never finished. And, what exploration of any location in Edgequestria would be complete without Littlepoop finding a fucking skeleton? This one has a memory orb and is wearing an old PipBuck. Despite having absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so, LP jacks into the PipBuck, and finds an audio recording:

>“Ah don’t really know what ta say. Or, for that matter, whom Ah’m sayin’ it to. The good news is that Sweetie Belle’s got muh family safe an’ sound in Stable Two. Ah dunno where Scootaloo’s at, but Ah’m glad she’s not…”
The speaker appears to be Apple Bloom, so presumably this is her skeleton. Either that, or a skeleton stole her PipBuck.

Seriously, though, the schtick with the skeletons is getting old. I can understand there still being skeletons in old, abandoned structures that haven't been opened since the bombs went off, but the Steel Rangers live in this place. It was the same thing at Shattered Hoof: they had an entire room filled with fucking skeletons. Why? It's basically a running joke at this point, but I don't think the author even realizes that it's funny.

Seriously; could the ponies who repurposed this building not think of anything better to do with Apple Bloom's skeleton than just leaving it on the basement floor? Do they not have enough respect for the dead to at least put her in an unmarked grave or something? For that matter, SteelHooves lives here too, or at least he lived here at one time. He was AJ's beau, and probably knew Apple Bloom personally. Is he cool with this? Just leaving his sister in law's mortal remains lying on the floor of the basement where she died, with her silly PipBuck still attached to her foreleg? The basic common-sense things that don't even seem to cross the author's mind are just astonishing.

Also:

>Or, for that matter, whom Ah’m sayin’ it to.
I've noticed that, after a couple of early mistakes, the author pays quite a bit of attention to who/whom. My suspicion is that he may have been called out on this fairly early on, and made a note to keep an eye on it going forward. This is one of the trickier anomalies in the English language, and people tend to overlook it quite frequently because its misuse is so common (I still fuck it up myself from time to time), so on some level I applaud his attention to this detail. However, in this particular instance, he didn't get it quite right.

First of all, if kkat wants to be grammatically correct, AB's line here should read "to whom Ah'm sayin it." Second, it's a little ridiculous to have a character who normally speaks in this exaggerated country patois suddenly start speaking the King's English, especially at a time like this. When writing in your own voice, as in narration, you want to make sure you use proper grammar; however, if your character has bad grammar that's another matter entirely.

Anyway, tl;dr Apple Bloom died of radiation poisoning, and the Steel Rangers left her skeleton unattended in the basement for some reason. F, I guess.

Page break. Littlepoop takes the memory orb, because why wouldn't she, and then goes back to the maneframe and does what she came here to do. She hacks it, because why wouldn't she be able to do that, and then downloads the location of the Cathedral, or at least Stable 101, to her PipBuck. After this, she goes back upstairs, gives the reactor schematics to Knight Poppysneed as promised, and goes back to her friends.

It turns out that Stable 101 was built in the middle of the Everfree Forest, at the site of an "old castle." We can probably assume this is meant to be the Castle of the Two Sisters, though this isn't specified.

>Xenith was the first to make a particular connection. “So Red Eye is building his fortress in the middle of the Everfree Forest… and is burning down the forest around it? Why?”
>“Hard t’ maintain a growin’ army in a space where the wildlife wants t’ disembowel ya an’ suck the juices, Ah imagine,” Calamity theorized.
>“Agriculture,” I answered with my own guess. “You said it yourself, Calamity. The Everfree Forest was never hit by a megaspell. As far as cropland goes, the Everfree Forest is one of the few places that isn’t poisoned with radiation or taint.”
When did Calamity say this? Unless she's referencing something he said ten chapters ago, which I wouldn't rule out, he hasn't said anything of the sort.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306497
306508 306701
b1cf5621727fe633c0b6174ca7fdf94f97a4cd138c4a608a1eb899efe48bc68e_1.jpg
Fallout4-2.png
uhw8hws575s41.jpg
>>306487
So the skeletons thing is Bethesda's fault. Logically when you're rebuilding society you don't want trash around or dead, desiccated corpses and remains. If not for cleanliness reasons, for staying sane instead.

Bethesda is retarded and thinks "it's a post apocalypse so people live in crumbling structures and make no effort to repair them or clean them up and live in trash and amidst rusty sharp metal after 200 years". They've even gone so far to make it a running meme/ joke, by posing skeletons in goofy positions all across the world.

HOWEVER, these are jokes, or environmental storytelling pieces. Some can be pretty ridiculous or comical, to varying degrees. Some are darkly humorous, like someone dying in a compromising position in a way that isn't forced. AND EVEN THEN, i'm pretty sure even BETHESDA knows not to have skeletons strewn around lived-in places, let alone a fortification of the Brotherhood of Steel. You only ever find them in ruins, or out in the open. Here's some references in Fallout 4. At the time only 3 and New Vegas had been released, but it was a thing in 3 as well. As you know, 3 was Kkat's biggest inspiration.

Kkat just got confused again, I think.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306501
306666 306683
1600397846714.png
>>306487

>Xenith agreed with my line of thought. “And after the burning, the soil will be rich with nutrients from the ashes.” She looked grim, slipping unconsciously into the sort of rhyming speech I was used to hearing from Zecora. “I worked for months recycling flamer fuel for Stern. Clearly he was stockpiling plenty for this burn.”
Two things here: first off, it makes no sense for Xenith to suddenly slip into verse here like Zecora, since that has never been established as part of her character. Unless rhyming all the time is supposed to be some kind of cultural thing for zebras, there's no reason for her to start doing it here all of a sudden. Second:
>the sort of rhyming speech I was used to hearing from Zecora
>I was used to hearing from Zecora
The way she phrases this makes it sound like she is personally acquainted with Zecora, which she isn't. The memory orbs are the only reason she even knows who Zecora was. This highlights one of this story's major deficiencies, which I've brought up before: although the story is set in the postwar world and revolves around this annoying Mary Sue and her group of tagalongs, most of the meaty and interesting parts of the plot are events that happened 200 years in the past. At times it almost feels as if Littlepoop's story, which is supposed to be the main plot of the novel, is just a framing device for this considerably more interesting history of the Equestrian war. I've previously compared the effect of this style of writing to a museum; the main characters are not so much characters in their own story as observers watching someone else's story play out by walking around and looking at the various artifacts and exhibits on display.

If the author wanted to focus primarily on these past events, then he should have just gone ahead and made Littlepoop a framing character. In that case, most of the story would be a dramatization of events from the war era, with periodic cutbacks to Littlepoop in the present, wandering around this or that ruined building and speculating about the devastation. Imagine something like The Princess Bride, where the story is primarily about what's-his-name, the dread pirate, and the titular princess bride, but the story sometimes cuts to scenes with the grandfather and the kid that move the story along. Alternatively, if he wanted to tell a story about Littlepoop and her friends, he should have left out a lot of this backstory and saved it for a separate work.

Anyway, page break. Speaking of random flashbacks to the past, LP decides that now would be an ideal time to check out Apple Bloom's memory orb.

The point of view is not AB herself, but her Uncle Orange. Why she would have had her uncle's memory of this fairly mundane event crystallized in an orb, and why this orb would have been with her at her time of death, are questions for another day.

Anyway, the two of them are on their way to present one of AB's architectural designs to the Princesses. The event seems to take place well before any of the tragic events unfolded; AB mentions starting a company with her friend Scootaloo, which implies that StableTec has not actually been formed yet. The design she is presenting appears to be the building for some kind of academy which Princess Luna is to run.

>As my host stood, Princess Celestia (squee! squee! squee!) moved around the table, eyeing the model favorably.
Goddamnit, kkat, I've warned you multiple times about that "squee" crap.
*reaches through screen*
*slaps kkat hard enough that he goes flying to Equestria and lands in Celestia's breakfast cereal with enough force to reattach his fake tits that are still floating in the tepid milk, because she was so revolted by the sight of them she left the room to go throw up instead of finishing her breakfast*
*extends arm even further through screen until it reaches Equestria*
*slaps kkat hard enough that his fake tits again dislodge and go flying, this time landing in Luna's cereal*


Anyway, speaking of Luna, she enters the room, and there is a bit of light banter and joking around. Eventually, it is revealed that Celestia is building Luna some kind of gifted unicorns' school along the lines of the one she runs, and she hired Apple Bloom to design the building.

Page break. After this completely disjointed flashback to events that have even less to do with anything going on in the main story than usual, we rejoin our intrepid heroes at...you guessed it...an indeterminate point in the future. They are now back in their flying school bus thing, en route to Junction R7:

>We were airborne between Fillydelphia and Manehattan. As much as I wanted to go straight to Tenpony Tower, the warning that DJ Pon3 had sent me was at the front of my thoughts, so I had directed Calamity to take us to Junction R-7 first. If something nasty was brewing in Shattered Hoof, something that Homage thought I needed to take care of first, then I wasn’t going to waste any time.
I have literally no idea what the hell she's talking aboot here. The last thing we heard from Homage was the broadcast in which she sent a coded message to Littlepoop from her "messenger." Apart from expressing a desire to give her orgasms, the only other things she mentioned were that Red Eye was burning down the Everfree Forest, and that he is currently laying siege to Tenpony Tower. There was absolutely no mention of anything going on at Shattered Hoof. In the event that this is actually something she said ten chapters ago, I went ahead and did a ctrl-F for Shattered Hoof, and found nothing relevant about it in any spoken line of Homage's between the end of Chapter 12 (which concluded the Shattered Hoof arc as I recall) and the present. So I really have no idea what LP is talking about here; as far as I can tell, this is just another one of her Mary Sue moments, where she simply plucks divine knowledge out of the ether and uses it to save the day.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.306508
Naamloos-2.jpg
>>306438
>One thing that makes a decent story good (not that FoE is close at all to any level of decency) or a bad story enjoyable at least is changing the manner of speaking of characters based on this culture. It doesn't have to necessarily be Mark Twain levels of colloquial knowledge, but something better than Calamity's fake thick country accent would have been nice. Have Xenith use African American slang or something like "jiving" and the like. And no, Zecora doesn't use slang like that in the show, but this fic doesn't care about the world of MLP and something slightly ridiculous in a funny way would ease the pain of reading.
This. I have been saying this for some time now. Most of kkat's characters speak the same generic "normal" dialect, with the exception being a handful that speak in this exaggerated "country" drawl. It's all or nothing; either every character sounds the same, or they speak in this absolutely dreadful approximation of a hillbilly accent.

>>306497
So, you might say that Bethesda pulled a boner.
Anonymous
d2bd323
?
No.306666
306684 306687
>>306501
>There was absolutely no mention of anything going on at Shattered Hoof.
It's right here
>Dearest Littlepip, I know things sound bad here, and I know it’s your nature to try to rush to our rescue; but we’re okay for now, and you have other more pressing matters closer to home. Do what you need to do, take care of them first.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306683
306691 306843
1321835 - Friendship_is_Magic Joakaha My_Little_Pony Princess_Cadence.jpg
>>306501

Anyway, the text spends several paragraphs meandering in kkat's typical stream-of-consciousness style, veering through several topics of no apparent relevance to anything. Eventually, Littlepoop ends up connecting what she just saw in the memory orb to some random comment of Frank's from some earlier point in the book:

>Littlehorn. It was a name I had heard before in several contexts. But Watcher’s words stood out:
>The Massacre at Littlehorn broke Princess Celestia’s heart. After that, nearly midway through the war, Princess Celestia decided She wasn’t the right pony to lead Equestria anymore. So She stepped down, abdicated Her position to Her sister, Princess Luna.
Littlehorn was identified in the previous scene as the location where AB planned to build Luna's Academy. Presumably, whatever the "Massacre of Littlehorn" was, it took place at this school. Maybe one of the students was in love with Applejack and just couldn't take it anymore.

Well, it looks like the matter won't remain a mystery for very long. Once again, for no reason, SteelHooves proves himself a fount of knowledge on all sorts of random topics. He tells us that Littlehorn was a school for gifted unicorn children, as we already more or less knew. He then tells us that one day, a bunch of zebras rolled in and killed everyone in the school with a gas attack.

Xenith has her own version of events. She maintains that the zebras were refugees or something, and that the ponies misinterpreted their intent and attacked first. I guess the school had some kind of built-in defense system. The zebras had some trained ninjas or something among them, so they responded in kind, and killed all the children. Wow. Very tragic. Much sad. Nothing else happens in this microscene.

Page break. Nothing has changed since the end of the last scene; they are still in the bus flying to Junction R7, and they are still talking about the Littlehorn massacre.

Apparently, the massacre was the turning point of the war. Though we still don't know how this war started, when it started, why it started, who exactly was involved and in what capacity, what the stakes were, how long it went on, or anything about it really, it seems that this was when it really started to get nasty. Celestia abdicated due to guilt over what happened, and Luna was probably affected emotionally due to it being her school that was attacked. Apple Bloom I guess also felt guilty, because she was the one who designed the building, and that made her want to design the stables to try and make amends, or to save the world, or something.

SteelHooves gives us a small amount of information about the cause of the war. Apparently, Equestria is rich in gems, whereas the zebra lands are not. However, they do have coal. So, I guess, the ponies and zebras used to trade back and forth, and then somehow shit went bad between them, and then somehow a war.

Wait, wait; there's more. The autism is moving a little too fast, it seems like I missed a couple of things. It actually gets even stranger from here.

Apparently, what SteelHooves has to say is the ponies' view of the situation. The zebras had their own batshit-crazy reasons for doing what they did. It seems that, due to that business about the four stars that came up earlier, the zebras believed that Nightmare Moon was some sort of Kali the Destroyer type figure. They also didn't realize that Nightmare Moon was simply an alter-ego of Luna's that Luna had since abandoned, so they made no distinction between NM and Luna. So, when Celestia abdicated and Luna took command, the zebras interpreted this as the ponies accepting Nightmare Moon as their ruler. Since they had some kind of prophecy in their religion about Nightmare Moon bringing about the apocalypse or something, the war went from being a political squabble over resources to a holy war to save the world. Then, explosions and megaspells and apocalypse. Wow. Very tragic. Much sad.

Alright, I'll admit I wasn't completely blindsided by this due to some of Nigel's earlier spoilers, but this is still pretty much out of left field. Here is basically my take on this:

The author's idea here isn't actually all that bad. This story is trying to be a tragic epic, and the idea of two rival cultures annihilating each other and destroying the world in the process over what ultimately amounts to a miscommunication is a good premise for that sort of story. It's also thematically consistent with the MLP source material: misunderstandings between friends can lead to tragedy if they aren't resolved through proper communication. If this story had been properly developed, this whole idea would have worked just fine.

As I've often said, problems in stories tend to cascade and cause other problems. Even if a story has hundreds of problems, you can usually follow the threads back to one or two basic things that the author did wrong, usually at an early stage of writing, and identify a fairly simple root cause for why a bad story is bad. With Past Sins, for example, the root problem was that the author's basic premise was flawed: he wanted to write a redemption arc for Nightmare Moon, but failed to take into account that Nightmare Moon is an aspect of Princess Luna, whose motivations stem from Luna's. He made the mistake of treating them as separate characters.

FoE's root problem is that the author is trying to tell two separate stories. On the one hand, he has this adventure story about some little dyke klepto who goes on a mass killing spree and ends up saving the world somehow, and on the other you have this sweeping war epic that tells the story of how civilization fell. A talented author can weave multiple stories together, but as we've seen time and time again, kkat is not a talented author, or at the very least he isn't experienced enough to be attempting something on this scale. Running out of space, I will continue in a new post.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c52d74
?
No.306684
>>306666
Nice digits. And maybe I'm retarded, but I still don't see how she gets Shattered Hoof out of that.

>you have other more pressing matters closer to home. Do what you need to do, take care of them first.
This could be a reference to any number of things. "Home" presumably refers to Junction R7, but "near home" is too vague to glean anything meaningful from. For one thing the geography in this story is completely fucked, so it's hard to keep track of where any of these locations are in relation to each other, and in any event the author has given no clues about anything that might be happening around that area. Littlepoop has no more reason to assume that the problems involve Shattered Hoof than they do the Ruins of Cloudsdale, which are also in the general vicinity of R7 as I remember.

My objection here is that this is basically another case of LP using Mary Sue powers to pull divine knowledge from the heavens and make connections that don't logically follow each other. If I randomly received a text message that says "Trouble near home," I wouldn't just automatically assume it meant the Mini Mart by my house was getting robbed. There are a lot of places that qualify as being "near home," and any number of things could be happening at any one of them. If the person sending the message wants me to take some specific action, she's going to need to be more specific.
Anonymous
3694f92
?
No.306687
sceptre.png
>>306666
Well, can those digits lie?
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306691
306828
>>306683
You really think this premise would work? I was always put off by how quickly ponies turned into jingoistic, violent Americans , immediately pulling modern guns out of their ass and fighting a resource war for coal. It felt very contrived to me in order to reach the same setting as Fallout. Or are you just talking about the notion of Zebras being afraid of NMM and the misunderstandings that could lead to more terrible things?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306694
306704 306705 306724
67873-1573946791-690884566.png
That was a nice vacation. I thought about extending it but I like the FE review and I look forward to seeing where the story's gone.
>>306160
Back in 2017, I never thought I'd get this far with my indie game.
I'm glad I was wrong about that.
Now that I'm playing it for myself while making levels, I know the game is fun. Can't fucking wait to polish and finalize this enough for trailers.
Back in 2017, I thought you'd never grow beyond harassing me across multiple sites and throwing every negative word and accusation you can think of at me.
It's nice that when you're bothering me you're not bothering other users on this site. I don't get why you keep trying to gloat like some kind of bond villain. I don't know why you're like this. But I hope you'll grow into someone I can call a friend some day.
I find it ironic how commonly "You can't criticize Fallout Equestria, you never wrote anything as big as it!" is yelled at me by people who also haven't made anything as big as Fallout Equestria. Or even contributed any significant FE criticism to the thread. It's just like when Nintendo fanboys defend Game Freak's decision to cut out half the Pokemon in the new Pokemon Sword And Shield and then ransom a few hundred of them back to you in DLC form with "Shut up, you haven't made a multi-billion-dollar franchise like Game Freak has so what do you know? If you think you know better than Game Freak, why don't you make a better Pokemon game?"
If you think you can criticize this story better than me, why don't you join in? You might be surprised how much fun there is in intellectually picking apart something overhyped and understanding what makes it popular, what makes it terrible, and so on. You'd learn nothing from mocking a cliche fimfiction that makes all the rookie mistakes we already know are bad. But this story? There's more to learn from this. This fic is something historians will argue over.
How is it not okay to criticize overly-popular trash you like, and not okay to criticize your criticism of me? Glim also hasn't written a pony fanfiction as long as Fallout Equestria, so does that stock complaint you're yelling at me also apply to him? Give me a break. Oh wait lol I just had one.
But seriously, the idea that only experienced writers can shit on other experienced writers is an old stale lie of a meme. I don't need the experience of Gordon Ramsay or a TV show like his before I'm allowed to complain when restaurants serve dog turds on plates. What would media discussion be without honest criticism? Nothing but a series of echo chamber bubbles, each containing endless circlejerks over shit the bubbles like. This idea that if you don't like something popular you should keep quiet or get shamed is nonsense. You don't have to defend the fic just because I dislike it. We can all hate FE and have fun dissecting it.
>>306174
Isn't this story's occasional flirtation with the idea of breaking away from game mechanics annoying when it usually relies on them for convenience?

Sometimes LP can only pick locks when she has her tools, to contrast with F3's player's ability to lockpick anything with bobby pins. A screwdriver just appears out of nowhere when lockpicking. But usually LP either always has her tools or telekinetically unlocks locks without needing lockpick skills.
When LP went to New Appleoosa, she met a guy called Crane who taught her how to make her telekinesis even stronger. So you'd expect the story to follow this "LP only improves her skills when it would make sense" idea but then she's spontaneously becoming a better lockpicker/hacker/social manipulator/stealth-user/sniper just by running around murderhoboing. It's the videogame "you shot enough enemies to Level Up, spend your skill points on improving whatever skills you want like lockpicking or smithing, even though it makes no sense that shooting 20 Raiders would improve your lockpicking skills" system all over again.

Also, isn't "Steelhooves, you shouldn't be racist towards this Zebra because you're a Ghoul" stupid? It's the author's "anyone foreign or sufficiently abnormal in an approved way is a minority and victim that must stick together" bias seeping into the story again.
A Zebra is a creature that compensates for its lack of horn by making potions and using inherently-evil dark magic. Necromancy/the black book/soul magic/balefire came from them, somehow.
A Ghoul is a pony mutated by radiation into getting ugly and ageing slower. But fundamentally still a pony. No different from a pony scarred with a magic sword that makes you age slower.
Anyone who'd be "racist" against Steelhooves would either hate his tech-hoarder organization, consider him ugly, fear he'll turn into a radioactivity-spreading Glowing One or worse a mindless Feral Ghoul (or "Zombie" as this fic calls it), or hate him for being 200 years old and failing to save Equestria.
But this isn't just old pony. This is one who was old enough to remember the war that took the life of his lover, her friends and family, and so many more. The organization his wife crafted descended into insanity over at least 200 years of nuclear strife all thanks to fucking Ziggers, who did literally everything wrong. Despite carrying a third of his weight in ammunition and another third in guns and power armour he is a pawn trapped by his own learned helplessness, unwilling to steer his organization onto the right track solely because Kkat thinks it's cooler if his story contains a bootleg Brotherhood Of Steel even though a pony who'd want to transform them from GrimDark hoarders into NobleBright heroes is right fucking there, running around killing Alicorns with LP.

>everyone knows DJ Pon3 operates out of Tenpony Tower but nopony in the tower has figured out Homage is DJ Pon3 even though it makes no sense
I don't recall if Homage's backstory has been revealed yet but that makes this even stupider. Surely, ponies lived in Tenpony when the DJ's voice came out of nowhere around the time she showed up.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306701
306828
>>306351
I did have thirteen chapters of Silver Fic Revision 2 complete but then I thought of something and now I'm revising it from scratch again.
>>306303
Remember how Tenpony Tower wasted a water talisman on some decorative fountain?
You'd think they would have traded it for protection/a megaspell.
Or used it to generate water since that's its purpose(it's not a purifier or dehumidifier, it magically generates water out of nothing, to one-up Fallout's Water Chips which are used in water-purification machines), or invented their own currency and backed their currency with water to give the wasteland a standardized currency backed by something tangible and useful to Wastelanders.
Fallout's bottlecaps were backed by water at one point, I think. Just take some caps to The Hub and water merchants will trade bottlecaps for drinks. Or you can buy guns and ammo for a few hundred bottlecaps.

btw bathing in irradiated water is stupid. Surely dipping a washcloth into irradiated water (or better yet, purified water from a bottle) and washing it every so often would result in less radiation damage taken.
then again when Healing Potions and Radaway are so common and cure everything, who cares about taking damage?

Also why does LP describe her failed assassination mission as a "royal fuck-up"? She dealt incredible damage to his military capability, got away scot-free, "made the seemingly-untouchable god bleed" by proving you can defy Red Eye and live, damaged his invincible reputation, and all she has to show for it is that now she's being blackmailed into taking a mission she likely would have done anyway: kill another Big Bad Evil Guy. As far as failed assassinations go, it went great for her.
It sucks for Homage that she's being blackmailed by a bomb that may or may not exist but probably does, but overall plot armour saved her ass and allowed her to deal incredible damage to Red Eye before walking out of there with a sidequest from him. Sure she wanted to kill Red Eye and didn't, but if she can get that close to him once she can get that close again and try harder to kill him next time. Hell, maybe when the Steel Rangers aren't occupied with Alicorns they'll help LP mount a full military campaign against Red-Eye. "reformed" slavers and Thunderdome winners and occasional snipers in balloons won't help much against motherfuckers in power armour.
If any of this felt earned and wasn't the result of absurd luck and incredible villain stupidity and more "villains phasing in/out of reality when necessary" bullshit I'd call LP pretty cool over how great all of this turned out for her. She shat in Red-Eye's face so hard, he gave her a job to fuck up the next villain. Kkat's "hand of the author" is clearly visible and makes every victory, no matter how small or Pyrrhic, feel unearned.

>the one zebra character on the MLP TV series can do that, so naturally that means it's something that all zebras can do
fan content makes this mistake a lot and I hate it. Is it really necessary to assume something true for one member of a species must be true for all of them? Even in a story that tries so hard to have so many "fuck racism uwu" moments? What's more racist than assuming just because one asian knows kung fu they must all know that?
Hell, considering potions in this story are addictive drugs with temporary good effects except when they're healing items or downside-free permanent videogame powerups, Kkat unintentionally made a hilariously racist depiction of blacks: The inventors of several super-crack cocaine variants only able to compete with civilized ponies and their industrial revolution by using drugged-up savage child-killing soldiers and murderous refugees and magical bullshit while getting supplied with pony-made rifles and anti-tank guns by saboteurs.

>>306322
>multiracial 50/50% diversity stable with two rulers of each side's race goes absurdly well and only fails due to external factors
this is retarded, Kkat's a niggerloving faggot. How do you take ponies from two races at war with one another, put them in a big vault, and somehow convince all of them to let their children forget all about the war outside so everyone grows up happy?
but what happened to Canterlot makes this extra-hilarious in hindsight. the hole-filled timeline makes figuring out exactly when Canterlot got fucked hard to place on the timeline but...
Canterlot was destroyed by one zigger faggot who smuggled a Pink Cloud bomb in there. If The Princesses made a shield around Canterlot before that zigger got in, Canterlot would have been saved, though the bomb probably would have fucked up much of Equestria if detonated outside Canterlot. But if no Ziggers were allowed in Equestria outside of concentration/death camps during the pony zigger war, no free zigger would have been able to bomb Canterlot with Pink Cloud and cause the death of both Princesses and everypony in Canterlot including the multiracial stable fucked over by evil ziggers outside it acting ziggerish.
it also makes no sense that this zebra's family would originate from a destroyed Stable in a town that... well, spoiler.

>>306426
holy shit giving the balefire bomb to the BOS is extra-genius because of extra shit I can't spoil yet but it would solve a lot of problems the author solved wrongly

>LP takes Pinkie's catchphrase and the Twilight Sparkle minifigure
fuck LP

>>306487
>burning a forest for agricultural purposes
I'm no botanist but surely a charred burned-down former-forest won't be a good place to grow mushrooms/carrots/potatoes and erect greenhouses for tomatoes.

>>306497
>i'm pretty sure even BETHESDA knows not to have skeletons strewn around lived-in places
Drumlin Diner produces nothing yet is a trading outpost somehow, and has skeletons seated next to the family of 2's single dirty mattress (lmao)

>"near home" vagueness
a pun only LP could get is required

Would it improve the fic if LP was a genius detective and "WTF happened to equestria" was her Big Driving Question+the main quest?
Anonymous
8e2aeb5
?
No.306704
>>306694
>I find it ironic how commonly "You can't criticize Fallout Equestria, you never wrote anything as big as it!" is yelled at me by people who also haven't made anything as big as Fallout Equestria.
Look, I am the only one who has said (anything even remotely similar of) this kind of criticism towards you in this thread and if you claim otherwise you will have to prove it.
Also, what you say here is something I agree with and it's accounted for in my post here, >>305943.

>Or even contributed any significant FE criticism to the thread.
My absence contributes a lot, honestly. So would yours.
No, but really. This is GG's review thread. I give him a pat on the back and that should be enough. Why must I contribute to the criticism of a story that I'm not even reading?
Anonymous
8e2aeb5
?
No.306705
306706
>>306694
>Or even contributed any significant FE criticism to the thread.
I'm confused. So it's okay for me to criticize other writers even if I have never written anything before but it is not okay for me to criticize your posts if I have not contributed to the thread before?
I might be misunderstanding you here? Is that the correct interpretation. I might just be reading it wrong but it seems to me like your saying that.

>You don't have to defend the fic just because I dislike it.
Like, seriously though. Where do you get this impression? I haven't seen a single Anon so far defending this story in these threads.

>How is it not okay to criticize overly-popular trash you like, and not okay to criticize your criticism of me?
I'm sorry but what are you on about? Are you under the impression that we are Fallout fans here? Or are you refering to other franchises?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306706
306708 306721 306773
>>306705
Not you, that stuff was aimed at the stalker. You're ok.
Anonymous
8e2aeb5
?
No.306708
306752
maxresdefault (8).jpg
>>306706
Is MoonshineAnonyousaidsoyourselfAnon;^P the legend himself, you know, the HCLegend? Or is he VrilAnon? Or are they one and the same person???
>You're ok.
Thank you. I like you too even with all my grievances towards your Nigelness.
Ninjas
3ec6f7a
?
No.306721
306722
>>306706
We've been over this Nigel, I'm not stalking you. We just happen to more or less operate in the same threads, and have since the very beginning when you saw a glimmernigger behind every blade of grass and blending into every tree. It's not 'stalking' you to have been there at the time and have a good memory
Anonymous
8e2aeb5
?
No.306722
306742
>>306721
> have since the very beginning
I actually checked those threads a bit today. I can't help but to think that I can determine which posts are yours. I think you were the Anon who posted the conversation where Spike and Twilight talks about Silver's many achievements, right?

Also, I think he was refering to this Anon >>306160
because that's where that post's paragraph I was quoting was directed.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.306724
>>306694
>across multiple sites
NIGGEL. YOU BRAIN DEAD. INCOMPETENT. BARELY LITERATE. FUCKTARDED. IGNORANT. ARROGANT. MUTT NIGGER. What part of "I HAVE ONLY ENCOUNTERED YOU ON THIS FUCKING SITE" DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?! I have never touched plebshit! It wasn't until your first narutard/bleech/pokemanz rants that I even bothered to tell (((You))) to shut the fuck up. I've BEEN criticizing this story are random points, yet unlike you, I work for my living! Is that such a difficult concept to grasp? It's virtually impossible to spend more than 60 minutes checking those sites I still enjoy each day, so go fuck yourself.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306742
306773
>>306722
>ur the guy
Maybe? I'm all over both threads. Technically speaking, I'm the anon who started these literary review threads (tm) when I posted the time Silver "Moar penis please" Star did an 18x attack combo loop
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.306752
306773
>>306708
Fuck, I completely missed your post. No, MoonshineAnon, Vril, and myself are entirely separate persons. Moonshine is either not interacting much, or doesn't have the time to do so. Vril took a vacation quite some time back. As for HCLegend noonecares.exe. Me? I post.. an average of 4-6 times per week, at best. Currently dealing with slightly extended family troubles that may not subside for the next year.
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306773
306775 306839
>>306742
>“Daga kotowaru!” The Dragon-mare declared, appearing behind Twilight with a mouth full of flames.
>“Nothing personal, kid!” Silver announced, appearing behind the Dragon mare with his Spellblade out.
>“Daga kotowaru!” The Dragon-Mare declared, appearing behind Silver with a mouth full of flames.
>“Nothing personal, kid!” Silver announced, appearing behind the Dragon mare with his Spellblade out.
Man, it's great.
I remember that he (you Nigel) posted a similar scene from his Fallout Equestria story, Sunrise Stardust, or whatever its name was. But that time they were playing some card game and he sent the other into an infinity loop. I think it is sorta like the end of Dr. Strange where he forces a demon to bargin with him because otherwise he will keep them in this loop forever. In the movie they make us understand that a ridculous amounts of loops has happened between the two before the demon yields but in Nigel's he literally thought it would be a good idea to continue for pages on end, just repeatedly copy and pasting for like... Wait, was it like a million words or something? Anyway.

>>306706
Now, I ended up just talking shit about you. Which is not nice and not what friends do to each other but even you have to admit that it was funny.

I guess I'm a hypocrite for posting something like this when it isn't super relevant to what is being discussed but then again does it really matter? No, not really. A drop in the sea isn't going to make it wet.
And honestly, being all nostalgic like this have made me change perspective a bit. This won't change and that's okay because it is kinda fun.
Heh, we are all stuck in a loop.

>>306752
>Currently dealing with slightly extended family troubles that may not subside for the next year.
Hope it works out for you.

And to you too, Nigel, with your game, though I doubt what you have told us about your successes with it. I know all about pretending that things works out better than they actually do so I will continue to doubt but if you succeed than good for you. Though, I don't really care about making games myself. There are already enough distractions in the world and I don't see why there needs to be more. With a novel at least you can change peoples minds and such and therefore has its use as propaganda. But then again leisure activity might be good thing too, what do I know?
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306775
306780
>>306773
Though, come to think of it. This combo loop is probably ironic. It is hard to tell sometimes though because other things aren't ironic in the same story so... It becomes more of a question of a how much faith I have in you, in this case I do actually think the first version is suppose to be ironic but the card game loop is obnoxious either way to be honest.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306780
306782 306783 306839
>>306775
Ah yes, that was a delightful trip down memory lane, though I'll admit I only reread one of the threads. Good times.
I wont Harp, but I do want to point out one particular post its been a while, let's see if I remember how to do this
>>>/go/3807 →
This is a post where Nigel tries to accuse Glimglam of being a pseudo-intellectual bullshit artist who doesnt k ow what he's talking about.
Interesting, when contrasted with the more recent Nigel "Glimglam is a gud boi u guise should stop derailing his threads by shitting on me".
Brings to mind that these threads came together by users collectively deciding to unify around shitting on Nigel, implying that shitting on Nigel is what these threads need to thrive (and what has been largely missing from the Past Sins and FoE reviews)
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.306782
306783
4EAB9EBC9FC26571CBD1464010F75EAA-1731252.gif
16198AF59080DD82152859166115868E-5575.jpg
1567191075840-0.jpg
>>306780
I have come to the realization that I'm boring on here and still a newfag where it matters most...
And still a newfag.
Short posts or long posts nothing ever changes does it?
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306783
306821
>>306780
It is intresting, I don't know if you feel the same but I usually end up agreeing or relating to a lot of what Nigel says, Like this whole entire section he wrote about criticize things you haven't done yourself. But I agree in sentiment not in the assesment that this is the case for us. it is just everything else that comes with Nigel that bothers me. Like his meandering posting style, bringing up irrelevant stuff, delfecting criticism by not answering the points people make in any form of sensible manner. Actually the last one is what bothers me the most. It's like as fast as anyone gives him negative feedback he post some long rambling post that really never answer the question that I ask to being with. Like some sort of politician that avoids answering your questions.

Like, the concept of greentexting quotes and then answering that part by your own paragraph seems foreign to him.

Also, the victimization of being criticized unfairly. It honestly, has diminishing effects. In the begining, I was actually more willing to believe that perhaps someone had an unjustified problem with him but it becomes less and less so.

Well, that's why I said that stuff about dark mirror because we are kinda a lot alike in that we share many opinions on things. Then again, so do I with most people here. And I can admire that he stands up for himself, though, it would be nice if he sometimes listen as well.

>>306782
>I'm boring on here
What do you mean? You don't have to be entertaining.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306821
306828 306848
>>306783
Yes, the frustrating thing (one of) is that when you reduce Nigel's arguments down to the pure sentiment/idea, they're not bad, oftentimes agreeable.
I'm quick to criticize him (especially publicly) b/c I KNOW he has it in him to do so. But I also know that theres lots more dopamine to be had from sperging.
And make no mistake, I wasnt intending to posit that shitting on Nigel SPECIFICALLY is needed in this thread, what I mean is that the first thread(s) were so much fun because the author was PRESENT. He was there to directly address, question, troll, etc. Past sins was a decent thread, and aside from the absence of brevity in some cases (most noticeably Gaykat, but not exclusively) these FoE threads arent bad per say.
But imagine how much fun it would be if we could find some FoE fanboys/apologists to shit on. Theres no one to hold accountable for the shit than to vapidly shake one's fist in the air at some faceless individual who may be associated with the name/work.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.306828
306841 306842 306848
>>306691
>Or are you just talking about the notion of Zebras being afraid of NMM and the misunderstandings that could lead to more terrible things?
This one. I'm dealing purely with the base idea, not the specifics of how the author went about executing the idea. I think it's been effectively established that kkat's execution of his various ideas has been mostly terrible.

>>306701
>I'm no botanist but surely a charred burned-down former-forest won't be a good place to grow mushrooms/carrots/potatoes and erect greenhouses for tomatoes.
This occurred to me as well, though I'm not botanist either so I'm not entirely sure if burning down a forest would make the underlying soil better or worse for growing crops. I feel like I've heard something about ashes being used to fertilize soil, but I don't remember what the deal with it was specifically.

>>306821
I actually rather wish one of these authors would show up here and react to some of what I've written about them. Failing that, having some FoE fanboys wander in could be entertaining. If you guys want to shill this thread around the FoE threads on /mlp/ I wouldn't complain.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306839
306852 306854 306966
>>306780
At first I thought Glim was a faggot calling my story gay to insult me but then I realized he is not a faggot and he brought up good constructive points about my story that got me to improve as an author. Looking back I wish I'd been nicer to him from the start.
>>306773
lol i remember how hard I used to suck at parodying weaboo anime bullshit. Kind of hypocritical for me to mock the "teleports behind you" stuff by just doing it for too long at random points, especially when the action-cartoon-ified take on Equestria regularly had a ton of weaboo animu bullshit. I had a pretty stupid idea of what people wanted from my stories back then.
I still think that infinite loop bit was clever even though the context around it was a bit daft. Sunrise was forced into this yugioh duel except if he wins, something bad happens and if he loses, a different bad thing happens. So he creates an infinite loop that goes on for way too long to artificially inflate the story's word count and get the duel to end in a draw. Back then I thought a big-ass word count would impress Fallout Equestria fans since they praise FE and PH for having such big word counts. But now I don't care what FE fans think of me. Any original ideas from my FE fic worth a damn might be reused later.

Hey, if you're posting crap from my old stories and you find a surviving copy of the FE story can you post the overly-long description of the hero's gun? You know, the gun of the rockstar unicorn chad who hates ziggers and invented hitler youth 2 and fucked the Overmare's daughter while the prose referenced over 20 western songs. I remember giving that thing an anodized titanium coating to look solid gold to contrast with the rainbowish hues of his wife's anodized titanium plated gun. It looked gaudy to fit in with high society (they and the military are the only ones with the right to carry guns so the fancy pricks carry shitty expensive rare status symbols to contrast the old rusty and makeshift or 3d printed black market pieces concealed by the lower classes, and the military bastards carry big edgy black guns with tactical serrated edgy knives to look spooky) while being hardcore to impress his followers and not so gaudy that it turns them off. I think it was an automatic revolver that fires custom shotgun shells full of magical bullshit with a telescoping silenced barrel and a stock brace thingy that telescopes out for when he wants to snipe with slugs from over 2k meters. The anodized titanium also lets him pour magical energy into the gun to make it fire faster and harder or use explosive balls of magic in place of traditional bullets, meaning the bullets he did carry were for dealing with specific scenarios. He had ice bullets and antimagic shield-piercing bullets for example and he could spin the spinny revolver part then fire with perfect timing to fire exactly the bullet he wanted even though each loaded bullet is different. I figured the harder my gun flexed, the harder it marked him as different from the FE protags who steamroll the wasteland with generic overpowered rifles or make do with seemingly-crappy common handguns (with exaggerated lethality and absolute accuracy and infinite ammo to make their underdog persona utterly fake).

Also don't forget that subtle political messages in games can reach people who'd normally never read a book.
Ratchet and Clank redpilled a lot of kids on fake news, the hollowness of consumer culture, celebrities, reality TV, and more.
Spyro 3 taught me the importance of ethnonationalism.
Persona 5 was shit so fans walked away from this game supposedly about rebellion saying "damn I wish the phantom thieves were real and would save us from ourselves" since to make you feel morally ok about magically brainwashing villains into guilty hollow shells who confess to everything bad they ever did the game makes all villains into absurd caricatures and any legal routes to remove or resist or report them do nothing at best and make life harder for victims usually. Villains are obviously evil things like rapists and cat-abusers and child porn creators and mean burger company CEOs and unnecessarily abusive bosses of doctors and painting plagarizers and mean politicians who lack any kind of political message besides "let me steer le ship of society" while your good politician friend says "be good to kids these days" and nothing more political than that. It would ruin the fantasy of being a magic Chris Hansen dealing 999 damage with Mara if you could just talk Kamoshida's rape victims into telling the cops. Instead you see a scene of his latest rape victim embracing the Japanese national sport of olympic concrete diving to motivate you to magic the problem away, even though it doesn't motivate the fellow victims among your shallow brainlet schoolchums into speaking up. Fundamentally P5 is an authoritarian power fantasy where you use your literally-god-given powers to purge society of everyone who personally wrongs you or offends your morality yet it's too cowardly to confront root causes of the social issues it pretends to speak up on. Then it turns out all issues ever were caused by the evil god Yabbadabbado who gave you your powers so you summon Satan to kill him and save Christmas, the end. You give up your powers until the sequel picks up a day later or the trashy 60 dollar 2 hour DLC campaign a week later. I could write a video essay on everything wrong with Maruki and why he's wrong (he's a lazy cunt who can't be trusted with the power to rewrite reality).
But my game? With its big motherfucking guns and big motherfucking tits? All a story has to do to be propaganda for the truth is to embrace enough reality instead of pushing lefty lies. And while the truth doesn't get in the way of a good story, lefty lies do. See Star Trek/Wars and Nu Doctor Who for examples of that shit.
Anonymous
b31034b
?
No.306841
306842
>>306828
Ashes can be effective fertilizer; there are some notable cases of volcanic ash creating exceptional soil, though wood ash can also be effective. However, burning down a forest with no further treatment on the soil would probably make the soil too alkaline to grow anything for a while.
Also not a botanist.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.306842
307766
>>306828
A burned down forest IS the best place to grow... mushrooms, and that's fucking it for a while. Unless that was a pine forest in which case one could harvest the pinecones, then extract the seeds for food. That's a slow process though. About 20-30 years after the forest has burned down it would most likely have begun to (slowly) regenerate.. unless ALL of the seeds were destroyed/radioactive and thus unable to germinate. This even presumes that there is a single pony with extremely basic week 1 gardening knowledge. Given kkuck's disregard for keeping track of anything longer than the number of times he's wished to be some other furfag's bottom bitch, that seems unlikely. OH, they probably just found a 200+ year old library containing dozens of magically intact books on agriculture! Now, that would be an interesting side quest... too bad there's no mention of it.

There's another problem: once said forest does begin to regrow, clearing sections out is a major bitch, including pulling out stumps and removing every. single. fucking. stone. After that takes 2-5 years for soil acidity, alkalinity, or salinity to naturally reduce and become viable for crop farming. Slash and burn to plant that year ONLY works in the rainforests due to being mostly composed of softwoods. If you want to help that along, imagine having to check every square foot of ground with a pH and salinity meter, every week, while sprinkling tiny amounts of alkalines (to neutralize acidity) or acidics (to neutralize alkalinity) at a steady, controlled pace. This also doesn't include maintaining that section by removing unwanted flora.

Certain types of ash can be used to fertilize soil, listed as follows:
#1: softwood ash such as from willows, cottonwoods, poplar, dogwood, etc. contains quite low concentrations of lye. It can be mixed 8-15% in compost and will act as a weak antifungal agent for 2-4 months. However, if the local fungi are not hostile to the plants you are growing, then you want to use far less and at regular intervals, especially during watering.
#2: wood ash from NON-CONIFEROUS medium trees such as lighter maple species, diamond willow, orange wood, some fruiting and nut producing trees, have 200-400% more lye concentration than #1. This can be mixed 3-5% into compost and has a much greater antifungal effect. Use with high caution. One can also extract the lye though this requires vastly more quantity ash than #4.
#3: coniferous medium wood ash contains ridiculous amounts of salt residues which increases the lye concentration by a factor of 10 to 15. Yes, that is 1,000% to 1,500% more than #2. Then add in the creosote compounds from naturally occurring tar in coniferous and you have a highly toxic mixture that can kill nearly all flora. Don't use, ever, unless you want to fertilize a conifer.
#4: hardwood ash from trees such as ironwood, white or black locust, some fruiting trees, most nut trees such as hickory, pecan, or beech, contain from 150% to 400% more lye than #2, and will leave more ash than #1 or #2, making it the best option to extract from. Fairly lethal to most plants so should only be mixed into compost at a 1% rate.

Source: lived on a farm-ranch for quite a few years.

>>306841
Just as I was about to post... volcanic ash is often in the neutral pH balance between acidic or alkaline, thus why farms that are 10+ years past a volcanic eruption do incredibly well.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
94183d6
?
No.306843
306856 306884
princess-molestia_fb_853585.jpg
>>306683

I've said multiple times that kkat has no idea how to set a scene or build dramatic tension, and this problem manifests itself very clearly here. This revelation is one of the most pivotal moments in the war-epic story, yet it's presented without any sort of buildup whatsoever. It feels completely out of place, even. I remember this old headline I saw in The Onion, back when I still read stuff like that: "Man Hits Sexual Peak While Standing in Line at Blockbuster." This moment in the story feels like the same kind of thing: it's probably the most significant revelation we've seen in the war history side of the story so far, yet the author just gracelessly dumps it into the text at a completely random and entirely inappropriate moment, for no apparent reason, as a piece of casual conversation. It doesn't even get a memory orb or anything else that might give it a hint of significance; these faggots are just riding on their airbus, then suddenly Littlepoop asks about the Littlehorn Massacre, which SteelHooves knows the details of for some reason, and then all this information is just dropped on us out of nowhere.

Another root-level problem I think this text has is its use of a first-person narrative. Any kind of large-scale epic is usually made up of multiple small stories featuring characters in various vocations, ranging from kings, generals, and other historically important people, all the way down to peasants, commoners, hobbits and what-have-you. You pretty much have to use third person narration to tell a large-scale story like this, because there is just no possible way to have one character see everything that happens. This is part of why I remarked earlier that kkat would have been better served by breaking this story up into several smaller works, with each smaller work focusing on different events and told from the perspective of different characters. A first-person story that is just one piece of a larger group of stories that form an epic when taken together could work well, but trying to condense the entire epic into a single first-person perspective is just madness.

So, to summarize: FoE's first root problem is that it tries to tell multiple stories at once. Its second root problem it that it tries to tell all of these stories from the perspective of a single character, who wasn't involved in most of the events that make up the war-epic part of the story. From here, the problems just cascade and grow larger.

The only way to tell the entire story from Littlepoop's perspective and still work in all the history is to resort to silly devices like memory orbs and journal fragments, which may work fine in a video game, but do not translate elegantly into written fiction. The author is constantly taking the focus away from his main story to work in all these little random side events and disconnected scenes. The perspective switch is usually jarring; for example, this most recent memory orb scene involving Apple Bloom and her uncle was literally just dropped into the text as a microscene without any sort of setup or preamble, in between a scene where Littlepoop accesses a computer to find out where the main villain's hideout is, and a bus ride back to her home base. What does Apple Bloom talking to her uncle have to do with either of those scenes? For that matter, when did Littlepoop even view this orb? The transitions are completely graceless: first LP is in the Rangers' basement looking up bullshit on the pony internet, then suddenly Applebloom and her uncle 200 years ago, then suddenly we're back with Littlepoop on a bus back to Junction R7, and then out of absolutely nowhere these characters start talking about the Littlehoof Massacre. How are any of these events connected? Why were these scenes written in this order?

This leads us to the next tier of problems. Kkat, in a purely mechanical sense, writes well enough; I've noted before that it's nice reading a text that isn't a minefield of basic spelling and grammatical errors. However, he has absolutely no idea how to properly tell a story, and the fact that he's trying to tell a huge story makes this a huge problem. And the fact that he's trying to tell several huge stories and blend them into one massive story just makes it one massive clusterfuck.

The way kkat tells a story is comparable to the way a little kid tells a story: "first Littlepoop went out of the stable because she had to go look for Velvet Remedy, but she couldn't find her, so she went exploring but got picked up by slavers, and then she escaped from the slavers, and then later she found a memory orb that showed this scene from 200 years ago that will be important later, and then she decided to go to Fillydelphia for no real reason, but along the way she found Velvet Remedy because she was still looking for her, and then she found a journal entry that kind of makes the thing from the memory orb make a little more sense, and then she fought a dragon, and then after that she went to Fillydelphia. Oh, also, remember that thing I said 20 chapters ago? That's suddenly important now." This would be a confusing and haphazard enough narration if kkat was just trying to tell one simple story about one character; when you realize that he's trying to tell a story about everything that happens to this one character, as well as everything that happened in the world to make it the way it currently is, it's not hard to see why this clusterfuck is approximately 600,000 words long.

Anyway, I'm probably starting to ramble a bit myself. The point is, this revelation about the tragic misunderstanding that caused the war should ideally occur at a climactic moment in the war story; however, since neither the war story nor the main story has been told effectively, it's nearly impossible to do this. So, the author just drops it in as another piece of random autism in a long, neverending chain of random autism. Once again, kkat is a faggot.
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306848
306852
>>306821
>And make no mistake, I wasnt intending to posit that shitting on Nigel SPECIFICALLY is needed in this thread, what I mean is that the first thread(s) were so much fun because the author was PRESENT.
No, I agree.
That's why I once suggested one of Placeholder's story as well as my own. Not specifically to be shit on per say, and with Placeholder in mind that was never my intention, but because it feels more relevant to the board at large.

I get that Fallout Equestria is a big deal for the community of mlp and that reviewing it has many merits but personally, I don't care too much about the souce material. I only read GG's posts because what he adds to the source material is what I'm here for and because reading analytical text like this about stories like this is sort of relaxing. It doesn't always have to be that I learn something new more that it is just fun to read. GG is highly competent too.

I haven't even read this story past the first three chapters or whatever. I rolled my eyes back when I first read it for its edge factor and put it down.

>But I also know that theres lots more dopamine to be had from sperging.
Sometimes, I feel the same about my writing. Well, mostly writing threads I have posted. I wish I was more action and less words, a lot of times. I guess things are actually getting better and better on this front. I have had a clear postive progression lately but still it remains something that bothers me. I guess I just like to pity myself for it. It really doesn't matter.
Point is that I too feel like I'm fishing for attention and that I try to get it through easier ways at times. Idk. I just kinda wanna be like King Battlebrit and gain my dopamine like him. He was so fucking cool. Just dumping a whole novel, which barely got any (you)s, I want to be more simply put. I want to produce.

>>306828
You could email Kkat via your fimfiction account. I bet that guy is logs in, if he isn't always online, from time to time. Tell him to check it out. I guess, I could do it to, but then it's a toss up if it actually happens.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306852
306854
>>306839
I appreciate that acknowledgement. I will also recognize you have come a long way, and that my repeated jibes are more for my satisfaction (I never said I DIDNT post for dopamine xp) and not out of growing DIScontent with your posts or ideas. I still love u, I just wish you didnt make me facepalm sometimes.
>>306848
Uh, theres no such thing as posting to a message board that ISNT fishing for attention on some level. Its fine. You have been accepted, and without a rigorous cringe-post intervention. Also, please be specific about which King Battlebrit you're talking about, cuz that's a name Nigel tried to institute at one time. There are others in this thread that have likewise taken up the mantle, but knowing which one you're referencing would help.
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306854
306857 306878
>>306839
>The gun
Well, I remember that you asked for feedback, not me specifically it was KBB who gave you it, about a description on it.
Did you pick your mc to have a special handgun to parallell that fact that Littlepip has one or was that just a coincidence? Genuine question.

>Redpilled games
I feel that those examples were just games with stories and less about the gameplay of these games.

>>306852
>Uh, theres no such thing as posting to a message board that ISNT fishing for attention on some level.
Agreed. I meant that I sometimes take the low road to ge there rather than the high road.
>Its fine. You have been accepted
Glad to hear it.
>which King Battlebrit
You know the guy that wrote all those Silver Star gets raped by Stalight Glimmer trollfics.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.306856
>>306843
>Littlepoop asks about the Littlehorn Massacre, which SteelHooves knows the details of for some reason
In fairness on this one small point, it makes sense that Steelhooves would know all about this event. The Littlehorn Massacre had a group of """refugees""" bringing a chemical weapon into a school and wiping out everyone inside. It was the pivotal event that led to Celestia abdicating the throne and passing the proverbial reins to her sister, turning the war from "pls gib coal" to "COWABUNGA IT IS". As somebody who was alive at the time and an equestrian soldier to boot, Steelhooves not knowing about this event would be strange.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306857
306871
>>306854
Oh that King Battlebrit. I heard he died in a some horrible place and has been forgotten to history. No, he's ITT and it's not me.
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306871
93761eb58cbed863bee1291b3f23c76cjgh.jpg
>>306857
He and GG himself have made impression on me in that they both produce something of high quality and that is long (as in, it takes stamina to do but they commit to it). That last part is something I find impressive in many writers. To be honest, I don't understand how people like kkat does it. I can barely write a few lines before I wonder, 'What's the point?'
You also seem to know your stuff. Do you write as well?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306878
306882 306889 306899 306966
>>306854
Nope, I gave the hero a genuinely unique gun that has never been featured in a Fallout game before to tell the audience early on "This tale will contain more than rehashed FIM iconography stretched over Fallout elements like stretched leggings over an obese niggeress". Same reason why he had those diamond earring studs enchanted to make him faster and regenerate his health.
It's the perfect way to symbolize how he blends into the fake show-offy high society. He flexes the hardest with weapons that are far stronger than the goofy weapons and ceremonial decorative flintlock nonsense wielded by most of the upper floors. And his only piercings are tasteful ear diamonds that let him use short bursts of superspeed once a day.
oh and because it's stupid that SATS never got upgraded in 200 years his Pipbuck runs OATS, the Operator Assisting Targeting System. Or was it Optical? Anyway it includes bullet time, auto aim, a top-down minimap in the corner, a talking AI that alerts you when it detects combat stuff, a searchable database full of spells and useful information, an always-recharging magic battery to reinforce your magic reserves, a bar that marks enemies in front of you and how far away they are in meters, enemy outlines in red and ally outlines in blue to let you see foes through walls, sonar wallmapping that can turn on Wallhacks-inspired vision modes, spell macros that autocast your favourite spells or buffs in a row at a lower cost, local team-based voice chat channels for small squads and faction-based chat channels for communications between separate squads, a canonical Hammerspace Inventory perfect for concealing literally any guns/ammo/armour of your choice and instantaneously swapping them at will(swapping to a loaded gun instantly is faster than reloading and it only takes a thought for Sun to equip his Custom Power Armour), a portal system that could let soldiers in your faction summon other soldiers or exchange ammo/loot for quick resupplys, and a way to mentally put waypoint markers and command messages in the vision of your friends to tell them what to do instantly and wordlessly. It even had a Xcom-style time-stopping Turn Based Strategy mode built from the guts of VATS/SATS which was replaced by a superior open-source variant with all those neat tricks I mentioned.
A better gun, a better Pipbuck with better SATS...

This also contrasts with all the Fallout Equestria fanfics where the hero either uses ordinary Fallout 3 firearms or "unique" variants of those firearms with a silly name and a nice paint job along with maybe a magical enchantment.
Sunrise doesn't just use a 10mm pistol or Light Shining In The Darkness or a shotgun or Big Boomer or a nuke launcher or Esther. He uses a genuinely original gun with features that make it incredibly valuable in a world where ammo is scarce while flexing his ability to manufacture unique ammo types. He's strong as fuck so he also uses a dual 50cal machine gun with dual drum mags once it's built for him, it's sick.
The vault's caste system was initially built on the idea that if Fallout's Vigor Tester machines really existed and could put a number from 1 to 10 on your intelligence and strength and luck it would make sense for a desperate vault struggling under overpopulation to use this to decide who gets culled and suffers under population controls and who can reproduce. But over time the ideal of meritocracy died to make room for nepotism and the ruling class became self-centered lazy selfish bastards who happily fuck over the workers and impoverished homeless until Sunrise starts offering jobs and an army to fix shit. Fucking the overmare's daughter and taking over the vault in a coup is a huge deal but he flexes even harder by making that a side objective on his quest to conquer the fuck out of and rebuild the Equestrian Wasteland while killing all sorts of interesring baddies and unique original factions.

LP murderhobos for fun at random but this main quest would provide structure and a sense of escalation by dividing the world into different kingdoms ruled by different bandit lords with increasingly powerful gimmicks. I took inspiration from the real Fallouts and how they explore how people survive after the end by doing the same for a magical world that ended in nukes. As his army grows and conquers more territory his fame grows and a shitton of Pegasi defect to join him because it makes no sense that Kkat made most of them evil. I planned to cheekily flip off Kkat by saying the Enclave only lost when they did in LP's story because most of their forces either joined Sunrise's Dark Stars or died fighting them. Also The Foundation (The Institute from F4 only not retarded) tries to recruit and manipulate him but he gets their good members working for him while the bad members fuck off and unite a gigantic army of all the world's evil beings to fight the heroes. This is why the world is so much better once Sunrise takes over, a gigantic army of almost all baddies ever marched on Sun's territory but he beat them in a massive war. Then right after he builds a world-purifying stuff-fixing megaspell bomb of his own the ending of FE happens. Some characters are all "does this make what we did pointless in retrospect?" And sun says "no, we did most of the work and built the foundation for a brighter future". Oh and at one point Sunrise finds an unused "teleport poners to an alien planet" facility that was part of a secret Equestrian space program and he gets teleported to a hostile alien world. He Minecrafts and The Martians and generally terraforms the fuck out of that planet until he can get himself home while profiting immensely from that world's radiation-free resources.

God that story was going to be one giant autism orgasm. But everything that tied it to FE or existed to correct FE's mistakes got in the way of the story. Better for me to work on truly original things.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306882
306889 306906
>>306878
Punish yourself, that was the worst
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.306884
306897 307326
tumblr_mdw0ylcasW1rcsx3uo1_400.gif
babcf2c7a63f19bda8c24063d4569e52.gif
efb.gif
>>306843

The discussion continues, getting heated and emotional in a way that is not even remotely convincing. Most likely the author on some level realizes that this moment in the story is not having the emotional punch he would like it to, and decides to pull a Peen Stroke and compensate by having everyone sob and wail and yell at each other.

>“They’re not the same fucking pony!” SteelHooves screamed at Xenith, although more now because he couldn’t scream at the zebras of the past. “We… we weren’t following Nightmare Moon any more than Princess Celestia imprisoned Luna on the fucking moon for a thousand years.” The Steel Ranger was shaking. “They. Are. Not. The. Same!”
The idea of SteelHooves screaming is particularly silly. Part of it is that the author has not developed enough of a personality for him to make any outburst of emotion feel convincing; it's hard to get a bead on what subjects he might be passionate about when all he does is just stand there most of the time. The other part of it is that I can't shake this image in my mind of him talking like the robotic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future.

Anyway, the subject now turns to the completely inappropriate topic of whether Nightmare Moon and Luna were the same pony.

>“They are not the same,” I said firmly. Then took note of the silence beside me. I turned a look towards Velvet Remedy.
Once again, the question of just how much knowledge of the world's past Littlepoop should reasonably have arises. I thought she believed that Luna was a Goddess? How does Nightmare Moon factor into that mythology? Would such an old story have even survived into the present era? How would this mystery religion that Littlepoop was supposedly brought up on treat this story? How did NM factor into these texts? For that matter, what are even the tenets of this religion? Who are its priests? What are its rules? So much of this story is half-baked.

>“Honestly,” she whispered, “I was never really clear on that myself. I always figured it was some kind of psychotic break.”
>“Arrugh!” SteelHooves sounded murderous. Which, considering this was SteelHooves, actually scared me. “Psychotic breaks don’t come with physical transformations!”
At this point, kkat is just having his characters descend into a brony debate; he is basically using them as sockpuppets to reenact conversations that have taken place between fans on the internet. I always find this kind of thing tedious to read. In any case, my above remarks can also be applied here. Velvet comes from the same background as LP, and was presumably raised on the same poorly-defined religious tenets, so it's unclear how much of this story she would even know. SteelHooves was actually a contemporary of the main characters on the show, so he at least would have a passing familiarity with these events.

Anyway, this goes on for awhile longer. It is eventually revealed that there was supposed to be some kind of peace summit at a place called Shattered Hoof Ridge. However, Xenith attests that the ponies "sent the wrong Princess" to the summit, which I assume means that they sent Princess Luna. Presumably the zebras thought she was Nightmare Moon come to savage their buttholes or something, and the peace summit became the Battle of Shattered Hoof that we've heard so much about, where Big Macintosh died protecting Princess Celestia from AIDS-infected bum wounds, and so forth. I'm sure it was an epic battle that would have made for an interesting scene; too bad we're stuck reading this one.

>“Y’all okay back there now?” Calamity called back.
>My answer echoed SteelHooves’ answer to Knight Poppyseed.
>“No.”
Without any clue as to which conversation between SteelHooves and Poopersneed is being referenced here, this comparison is meaningless. The effect of her answer would have been better without this pointless digression.

Page break. When the group's airship nears Junction R7, Littlepoop receives a distress call from Stable 2, letting them know that they are under attack.

>My blood turned to ice. I analyzed the signal.
So apparently she can analyze signals now too. Why does she even need to do this? She knows where Stable 2 is.

Anyway, the chapter concludes with another shocking revelation: apparently, the attack on Stable 2 is being carried out not by Red Eye, but by the Brotherhood of Wang, or whatever the Steel Rangers call themselves. Wait, I think they just call themselves the Steel Rangers.

It turns out that SteelHooves' mission was to get close to Littlepoop and assess how strong Stable 2 is, or something. This part is pretty murky, but my guess is that when Littlepoop appeared in the wasteland and started taking ass and kicking names, it alerted the Rangers to the fact that there was still an occupied Stable out there somewhere. Presumably, they want to invade it and take the advanced technology possessed by its residents, to prevent it from falling into the wrong hooves, or whatever their mission is supposed to be exactly. So, as soon as they knew that Littlepoop was otherwise occupied (ie, off in Fillydelphia pretending to be a slave), they decided that it would be an opportune time to attack.

There are a number of fairly obvious holes here: why is taking Stable 2 a higher priority than fighting the obviously more menacing Red Eye, why would they assume that just because Littlepoop was gone that the stable would be safe to attack, and so forth. Also, if all they needed was to have Littlepoop distracted and absent, they could have easily attacked Stable 2 at any given time, seeing as how she hasn't been anywhere near her home stable since the beginning of the story. However, I'm willing to overlook the logical inconsistencies here and give kkat a couple of points. He spent a fair chunk of the story insinuating that SteelHooves and the Rangers had an insidious agenda of their own, and then he followed through on it. It's executed quite shabbily, but apart from that I'm okay with this.
Anonymous
08c13cd
?
No.306889
306906
>>306878
So I don't get it. Do you mean that this was a bad or good story?
Because I agree with >>306882 this seems like a bad story based on this summary. In fact, it seems to have many of the flaws from the original Silver Star fic.

Like, op protag for one.

>A better gun, a better Pipbuck with better SATS
Haven't we concluded that LP's pipbuck and such is what makes her so op to begin with. How will there be stakes if Sunrise is so powerful from the get go?
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306894
306898 306906 306993
Here's an idea, while we're not-directly criticizing Fallout: why is the 12.7mm pistol not a single-shot?
The only round that has existed historically in the 12.7mm calibur is the 12.7mmx108mm machine gun round from russia circa WW2. Tl;dr it's a. 50 BMG
So the player/reader is supposed to assume that A. In a post apocalyptic scenario people started developing nuevo rounds for proprietary gun platforms OR B. Fallout's dev team didnt know what they were talking about wrt to guns, but REALLY wanted 'muh bigger bullet' than the 10mm.
There is no scenario where one could envision the 12.7x108 as a REVOLVER round. Its absurd in a single-shot, but its conceivable that way. And the lame-ass added clip art 'magazine' that was included along with the pun is the laziest of lazy.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306897
306906
>>306884
>it's hard to get a bead on what subjects he might be passionate about when all he does is just stand there most of the time.

I plan to have a somewhat stoic character in my story. They basically pretend to emote around others since they are meant to be a diplomat/ convincing sort of pony, but are so thoroughly jaded from their long life and experiences that their actual standard state of being is pretty restrained and "distant". They only show this true side around the protagonist, as they're quite good friends and don't need to keep up appearances around them. However, they care a lot about the protagonist, and when issues arise later on they actually break down and crack a little, using the contrast between their true, emotionless state and how the protagonist has actually made them show honest emotion for once to be more effective as a scene. Does this sound like it'd be something sensible, compared to how Steelhooves is handled here? I guess it's more of a buildup thing, if anything.

I just like the idea of a stoic character crumbling down in the proper circumstances, where a tiny sliver of emotion is equivalent to a normal person breaking down and crying (Dr Manhatten in Watchmen, for example).
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306898
306901
>>306894
Allegedly the new vegas devs were gun nuts and that's why there's extra care taken in the animations and gun variety/ alt ammo types and whatnot. However, it's a video game and they probably at some point went "Dang we need an ammo type for the really strong guns" and instead of reusing .308 for everything they slapped 12.7 in there.
King Battle
!Brit.FtQ3o
3dbf819
?
No.306899
306966
>>306878

"Do these diamond-studded earrings make me look gay?"

Sunrise "shove a cucumber up my ass today and tomorrow I'll give you a pickle" Star gazed at his reflection in the murky pool, regarding the earrings in question with suspicion.

"No, they don't," began the talking AI in his souped-up PipBuck. "In fact--"

"Reeee!" cried Sunrise, stomping angrily at the puddle in front of him. His reflection rippled and distorted, the rising dirt obscuring what little clarity there was in the water. "I bought these earrings because I thought they would make me look gay! If I don't wear gay-looking earrings, how will the sailor ponies know that my aft port is open for docking?"

"Please don't splash around in that water, it's irradiated," said his AI. "And you didn't let me finish. As I was about to say, those earrings don't just make you look gay. They make you look SUPER gay. You are the gayest horse that has ever traversed the cosmos, and nopony will ever mistake you for anything but. You have my assurance on that."

"Oh, pish posh," said Sunrise, blushing like a debutante. "You're just saying that."

"No, I mean it," said the AI. "You are literally the gayest horse who has ever walked the wastelands of Nu-Equestria. You are a sperm-gargling, rump-wrangling, pole-scarfing homosexual, and there is not a pony on this planet who would think otherwise after spending more than thirty seconds in the same room with you."

"Well now you're just flattering me," said Silver Sunrise.

"I am programmed to speak only the truth," replied his AI. "And you, sir, are one humongous faggot."

His mood visibly brightened, Sunrise gave his earrings one last appraising glance, then skipped daintily over the puddle and continued trotting across the irradiated hellscape that his homeland had become.

"How are the preparations for my Dark Star army coming along?" he asked.

"Oh, splendidly sir," the AI assured him. "They should be ready by tonight."

"And you made certain my specifications on the uniforms were followed?"

"To the letter sir."

"Good. Because I don't want the stallions to be wearing pants."

"I assure you they will not be wearing pants."

"They had better not be! If I see one stallion wearing pants, I swear upon Celestia's ghost that I will--"

"Your specifications have been followed sir. No pants on the stallions."

"Good." Sunrise sprang gaily into the air, leaping over where a skeleton lay in the middle of the road. He clicked his hooves together in a most homosexual fashion, and came to a graceful landing on the other side.

"I am going to suck soooo many penises tonight" he proclaimed, to nopony in particular.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that."

Sunrise froze suddenly in mid stride. That voice. It couldn't be! He wheeled around, and came face to face with a mystery pony, clad in cybernetic armor.

"You!" he cried. "I thought I banished you to the dimension beyond the stars!"

"Well, as you can see I've returned," the mysterious mare said casually. There was a pneumatic hiss and a burst of steam as the visor of the helmet lifted, and Sunrise gazed upon the face of his arch rival.

"Starlight Glimmer!" he growled.

"The very same!" said Glimmer cheerfully. "Ready for some Glim Glam in your jim jam?"

Sunrise scoffed.

"I think you'll find," he said haughtily, "That my arsenal has improved since the last time we did battle. I now have a dual 50 cal machine gun with dual drum mags, as well as a custom nuclear-powered pansexual auto-targeting plooker rifle. My new and improved PipBuck features an Orgasmic Anal Titillation System, or OATS, which I designed myself, as well as a laser-guided, pressurized Xcom style Time Stopping turn based monkey-navigated cum cannon with auto-erotic--"

The armored pony before him suddenly shimmered and disappeared, and a moment later Sunrise was pushed to the ground. He could feel the weight of a steel-clad pony atop his back. An armored hoof slowly pushed his face into the mud.

"Nothing personal, kid," Starlight Glimmer whispered into his ear, and he heard a whirring of gizmos and servo-motors as her 19 inch robotic Glimdong began to emerge from between her legs. "I think you'll find that I've improved my arsenal as well."

Before Sunrise could object, a pythonic protrusion pushed past the portal of his pony pooper. Starlight Glimmer, now more machine than pony, began to fire up her nuclear powered rocket boosters. There was a low hum as the reactors charged, and then suddenly her hips began to buck at lightning speed. Sunrise felt his insides rent asunder as the mighty robotic Glimdong plunged in and out of the depths of his fart-cave.

The force began to propel them forward. He screamed wordlessly as the force of Starlight Glimmer's nuclear-powered thrusts pushed him through the mud faster and faster. Soon the bleak irradiated countryside around him was just a blur. His colon finally ruptured for good right around the time they broke the sound barrier; he could not even hear his own atonal howls of pain.

Finally, the thrusts subsided, and they slid to a stop on an unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar city. Glimmer retracted her mechanical wang and hopped off of Sunrise's back. There was a soft fwoop as his prolapsed anus fell out onto the pavement.

"Ah, the Manehattan ruins! It's so beautiful here in the spring!" said Glimmer pleasantly. "Well, thanks for the ride, Sunrise! I hope we can do this again sometime."

She trotted merrily away.

Sunrise lay on the cold asphalt, groaning softly to himself, unable to move. Then, the voice of his AI crackled into his earpiece.

"Sir, I regret to inform you that the irradiated water you were splashing around in earlier has given you radiation poisoning."

"Oh shit," groaned Sunrise. "Do we have any RadAway suppositories?"

"Well, we have plenty of RadAway doses, but they aren't suppositories--"

"Fuck it," said Sunrise. "Don't worry about it."

The radiation in Sunrise's system got worse and worse. And then later, he died of AIDS.

The End.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306901
306905 306907 306993
127mm_pistol_blown_up.png
>>306898
Which is fine, I'm not objecting to using the ammo type. I AM objecting to the lazy and incomprehensible manner in which it was implemented.
Look at that magazine. Does that look like it could hold a 4"+ round? Cuz 108mm = 4"+ in length. The entire under-barrel would need to have a magwell to fit a magazine holding that kind of round, and thered be little to no barrel to speak of.
Lazy. "Its biggerur so its r better" is no excuse
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306905
>>306901
Addendum, the 12.7mm was added expressly for F:NV, so so much for them being gun nuts
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306906
306909 306966
9d9ed2039f5f1a83cc6cfa4a69ba0c64.jpg
>>306882
ligma balls :3
>>306889
It might seem OP but it's balanced because I planned on making him fight even deadlier opponents. Plus no matter how big a gun he carries, he's one general leading an army that needs commanding, supplying, and training. He's the head of a big army, not a one-man soldier that makes his army irrelevant. Also he doesn't always win, sometimes he loses and sometimes his mistakes get his soldiers killed. And if he wasn't this strong but always won anyway, it would just be ridiculous like when LP beats a superior foe through deus ex machina BS.
LP might seem less OP since she has lower stats than his min-maxed "Gifted and Early Bird high-INT 9 strength after Intense Training high-AGI Big Guns master race" build but whenever LP's low stats or broken limbs or lack of an important skill should cripple her Kkat ignores this and makes everyone else dumb so LP can outsmart everyone.
Fallout Equestria treats LP like a god and surrounds her with foes weaker than her while supplying her with everything she needs to trivialize looting and shooting.
Sunrise would face bigger problems. He'd do more than loot and shoot. He would fight actually-dangerous monsters and smart enemy tacticians that force him to grow and adapt. Supplies would be incredibly scarce, he wouldn't just find infinite ammo constantly from scavenging. This is more interesting than Littlepoop the fake-underdog who can solve every combat encounter with gunshots, stealthy gunshots, overpowered telekinesis, or talking. Sunrise's army is full of interesting individuals with their own capabilities but LP is an overwhelming combat god whose friends are an afterthought. LP would never consider sending one friend alone into a combat situation she didn't think she could handle solo but Sun would regularly send his stealthy sniper pegasus friend Midnight Shade to sabotage enemy camps and handle shit MGSV style when she's not covering him like a good sniper. LP can do anything the plot needs from her but Sun actually has a reason to delegate tasks to his friends: he sucks at a lot of things since he's min-maxed as fuck and therefore has to rely on his friends. He pretends to be invincible but he's not, and the story breaks him down to make him confront this and learn.
I'm really proud of this one unicorn I designed who figured out how potions REALLY work using science (to contrast with ziggers who throw random shit into pots while chanting and dancing on random dates then assume everything about any successful experiments from the chants and outfits to the lunar position and more must be recreated ritualistically for the potion to work) and uses a custom gun that contains liquified potion ingredients and mixes them on the fly into a magically-crafted shell it can launch at enemies to aerosolize the potion and unleash all sorts of interesting effects on foes. It's like a grenade launcher that does a lot of cool things.

From the start supplies and the lack of those supplies are a significant issue for Sun. The world's fucked so farming is hard at the best of times and impossible in most places. Sunrise leaves the vault with 128 (or was it 99?) of his finest soldiers and 2 months worth of supplies, but the vault was built into a mountain that had once-bountiful now-barren gold mines. Building for the future and farming is always on his mind because despite all his holy-element magic might he can't just magic meals into existence. After descending that mountain and dealing with RadWyvern (gators that mutated to get bat wings and radioactive fire breath) attacks along the way he's in a hazard-filled lethal forest full of zigger tribes, monsters, and evil plants. The Wyverns are hard to kill and inedible while the Ziggers use spears and explosives so after spending bullets on them you don't get much reward out of it besides knowing you've reduced the world's zigger supply. He doesn't get proper supplies and farms going for a while. But eventually he'd get mines, greenhouses, factories for guns and cars and robots and drone-piloted tanks, research facilities, fortifications with sniper towers, and more. And get non-shit factions working for him.

I don't remember the exact numbers of each Fallout stat Sunrise had but he had the Traits EARLY BIRD (temporary +2 to all SPECIAL stats during the day. temporary -1 at night. I represented this by giving him Narcolepsy that kicks in at night) and GIFTED (+1 to all SPECIAL stats. all skills are reduced by -10%. You receive 5 less skill points per level) so making him a strong tough smart guy who sucks at anything that requires a major skill he doesn't hyper-focus on (Magic is his Cutie Mark but skill-wise he sucks at everything except Science, Speech, and Guns since they are his tagged skills). Seemed like a clever way to integrate gamer numbers and literary character stuff.
>>306897
That sounds great, I love stoic characters. Check out Sol Badguy from Guilty Gear, he's one of my favourites.
>>306894
According to the wiki, it sounds like in-game 12.7mms are small. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/12.7mm_round
Does this help make 12.7mm pistols/SMGs less dumb?
Fallout's a Retrofuturist game disguised as an alternate-history post-apocalyptic game (I wish BugthEAsderp understood that instead of thinking it's a 1950s-themed borderlands knockoff featuring super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel and radscorpions fucking everywhere. God, I bet if Fallout 1 took place in Antarctica and bethesda's F3 still took place in DC we'd see the same radioactive polar bears and mutated hyper-intelligent murder penguins from 1 everywhere no matter the climate) so it would make sense if a theoretical or unpopular bullet type was super-popular in this alternate history.
Man, I wish Fallout had Gyrojets. Those things would be awesome if bullshit future technology handwaved away all their flaws! Imagine low-yield nuclear missiles, ice missiles, or poison gas missiles that turn foes against each other! Sick.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306907
>>306901
Oh well yeah, it's implemented atrociously for sure.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306909
306922
>>306906
>using sigma unironically
Punish yourself twice. No, I dont mean fapping, you do plenty (too much) of that already. And stop looking at futa ffs.
>12.7mm is a small round
If you know nothing about firearms, sure. so you're saying "yes, in a post apocalyptic wasteland where precision gunsmithing equipment is RARE AF, you're suggesting that they DID in fact invent a variant munition? And it took off somehow, given the bustling trade markets and supply lines?
No. Fuck no. Lazy.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306911
306922
See? Even my device refuses to say 'ligma' unless forced
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306922
306923
>>306911
>>306909
you're forgetting all about the pre-nuking part of Fallout with the alternate history, the bullshit technology, the Resource Wars, up-to-11 american militarism and prepper culture, and how America became this fantasy "jingoistic" nation of cartoon-nazis so evil they proudly executed helpless dissidents in TV ads that said to buy war bonds?
you don't think unusual bullet calibers would be manufactured in such great quantities pre-war that they could be rare but not uncommon post-war, or manufactured post-war to create more bullets for the 12.7 guns that still existed and/or were manufactured post-war?
ok
to be fair Fallout's designers sometimes forget the pre-war world existed. Don't the Gun Runners sell some freshly-made guns from their factories that still look like shit with duct tape because the game lacks distinct models for different Gun Condition levels/origins? I bet a model-changing system like Saints Row 4 would have been great.

Come to think of it, Fallout already had 14mm guns. Do you think these would have been better than how the series handled 12.77?
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306923
306945
>>306922
>you're forgetting
No, I'm not. Its shit.
>unusual caliburs
So you ARE saying that post war, amidst an ammo scarcity, that enough arms manufacturers decided to premiere a brand new handgun platform and use proprietary ammo? Cuz all those empty guns they had were so last year and weren't part of the fall lineup?
>14mm
One thing at a time please
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306945
306964
>>306923
I'm not saying these bullets became popular post-war. I'm saying it would make sense that these pre-war bullets got so popular pre-war that enough survived the nuking to make their post-war creation profitable.
After all, big bullets are good for hunting big monsters. Like Deathclaws.
Still, anything we come up with to explain why these exist post-nuking instead of something more common in our time would be speculation. The devs needed some kind of ammo for handguns above 10mm and they chose 12.7. What ammo would you prefer to see in the role of "handgun ammo superior to 10mm"?
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306964
306965
>>306945
The underlying point I am making by way of casting doubt on the legitimacy of a proprietary 12.7mm round for a semi-automatic pistol is that makes no sense mechanically or plausibly is to suggest that:
Whoever said the Fallout developers knew what they were doing? Maybe, aside from obvious fails, the problem is that Gaykat is trying to faithfully ponify a universe that was poorly depicted, envisioned, and conceptualized. I mean, one of Gaykat's mistakes was trying to novelization (and ponify) a player's Fallout experience (poorly), I think we can agree on that.

Whoever said Fallout had a good story?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.306965
306967 306968
>>306964
Nobody here is arguing that Fallout is world class literature. On the other hand, Fallout 3 - which is FoE's primary inspiration - is widely regarded as one of the worst written games in the series. "This bullet is the wrong size" is a pretty weak point of criticism to level at an entire franchise that has changed hands over time and was never meant to be taken entirely seriously in the first place.
Anonymous
10a350e
?
No.306966
62b90318209e9704ecb6d8f5d6fed1cb.png
890011_sinofenvy_the-arbiter.png
355848857.jpg
>>306899
>Sunrise "shove a cucumber up my ass today and tomorrow I'll give you a pickle" Star
>Star
>said Silver Sunrise
>My new and improved PipBuck features an Orgasmic Anal Titillation System, or OATS
I laughed.
>"Nothing personal, kid," Starlight Glimmer whispered
I died. I did not see that one comming.
>The radiation in Sunrise's system got worse and worse. And then later, he died of AIDS.
Hehe, is instead of dying of radiation he dies of aids from previous lays, I guess since Glimmer, being best pony, obviously doesn't have aids.

>>306906
I will be honest and say that I don't think this sounds like a good story. While I wouldn't say everything is bad or anything there is a lot to unpack.

I guess one could break it down into a couple of major points.

Sunrise got too many abilties
What do I mean by that? Is it impossible to write stories about two demi-gods fight with each other well? No, not necessary but, to me it seems to require more from both the author and the readers.
I have already forgotten most of this character's abilties and I have still read this post >>306839 twice, maybe even thrice. When you have too many abilites for your characters it makes it harder for you as a writer because two questions will pop up in the readers mind:
>"Why doesn't the character X use his Y to solve problem Z, here?
>"Why doesn't character A predict Z will happened since knows his opponent X has Y?"
For example, the burden will be heavy on you to make sure that Sunrise's enemies doesn't use walls to hide since he can see through them. But the reverse is also true. Sunrise can no longer sneak up on his enemies.
>It might seem OP but it's balanced because I planned on making him fight even deadlier opponents.
So I assume, since they are deadlier, that his opponents also have pipbucks with the OATS system (nicepun), which include:
>>306878
>Anyway it includes...
>...a talking AI that alerts you when it detects combat stuff...
>...a bar that marks enemies in front of you and how far away they are in meters, enemy outlines in red and ally outlines in blue to let you see foes through walls, sonar wallmapping that can turn on Wallhacks-inspired vision modes-
But then how is this possible?
>>306906
>Sun would regularly send his stealthy sniper pegasus friend Midnight Shade to sabotage enemy camps and handle shit MGSV style
>Stealthy
How would she be able to sneak up on anyone if they have computers attached to their limbs with AIs that alerts them because the same system has some sort of wallhack vision?

The second point is that it just harder for readers to engage in the more tactical aspect of your fights since it is harder to remember ever single ability these characters have so it's way compilacted to figure out when anyone is in a position of disadvantage or advantage. It's like trying to watch Tekken 7 without already being into it. How are you suppose to even know one character in this huge rooster of character's move set let alone all of them and how they play against each other? You can't. So even if you do these kinds of fight perfectly, your readers will still have to remember all the abilities of these characters for there to be any setups and payoffs. They can obviously still enjoy the spectacle but they just can't be engaged in the fight's tactical aspects.

And one that note, imagine trying to organically transfer this information into the readers's head in story if your not gonna just dump endless pages of exposition on them.

I guess all of these problems here can be solved. I just think that its one hell of a workload you put on yourself. The more mechanics you introduce into your story, at least if you want them to make sense together, exponentially more work follows.

I guess I should follow up with a positive example on something that already exist. I have two.

In heroes 3, grand elves are range units. They are considered powerful units and they are because they have the ability to shoot twice during their turn, meaning x2 damage and they also have good damage and attack stats. But they also have weaknesses. They do half damage on distance past 10 hexes, still shoot twice so it is more like normal damage, and when enemy units are next to them they do literally half damage due to their melee penalty. They also can't use their range ability when an enemy unit stands adjecent to them. They also have low health.
This means there are ways to handle them. Essentially, two ways in fact. Either use damaging spells and abuse the fact that the unit has low hp or have a fast unit like a dragon fly to move up next to the grand elf stack so it cannot shoot and move the rest of your army up to it.

Second example is this vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EabNk6i-Q2c&list=PLI1zyR8U6_093Z8Gdk-w0B1ugvZdeKt6Z
If you wanna see exactly what I mean go to 12.05 to 12.40.

See how these simple mechanics develop into something much deeper. My suggestion is that you give Sunrise two major strengths and then two major weaknesses or something like that and then circle all battle around him creatively covering his weaknesses and taking advantage of his strengths.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306967
306970
>>306965
The 12.7mm doesnt appear until F:NV, so your Fallout 3 point is DOA.
As far as the bullet/gun is concerned, IDGAF about them. I'll make this really simple so you can follow along.
Fallout is shit. They couldnt even get the guns - around which the whole story/game/experience revolves - right, even though those should require little to no effort to get plausibly implement.
And if the whole thing was never meant to be taken seriously, why do you? How many words have you written in this thread? How many criticisms of Gaykat's scripting have you made compared to the source material?
I dont contest that Gaykat is a shit writer, I'm emphasizing the point that the whole damn thing is shit.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306968
>>306965
But it's retrofuturist so doesn't it make sense that we'd see large pistol calibers people thought were going to be popular calibers in the future long ago? If 12.7mm rounds really are retarded, maybe that's intentional since Fallout's Shitmerica is kind of retarded at times.
then again didn't tests show that 10mms aren't much better than 9mms, maybe even less good than 9mm?
I recall a suit of armour in Fallout 3 supposedly built from chinese stealth armour that would yell when in combat, alerting enemies to your presence, and auto-inject you with morphine, getting you addicted. It was proved upon in FNV by Big MY's Think Tank into a stealth suit with a waifu voice that doesn't alert enemies but still gives you morphine. It was so good you even had to complete sidequests to upgrade it. But the retards who coded this made this stealthy suit Medium armour which sucks instead of Light Armour which is actually for stealth and swift movement. Countless fanmade mods fix this or remove morphine's addictiveness or turn the stealth suit into something you can wear under other outfits to get their bonuses too.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306970
306971
021.jpeg
>>306967
>the guns - around which the whole story/game/experience revolves

This tells me you haven't even played or understand the point of the series. I don't really blame you, due to how Bethesda bastardized things. The intent of the series is expressly stated by the original creators as being about the ethics of a post-war society and exploring the ideas of rebuilding and what sort of groups crop up--not to make a better/ cooler plasma gun. The gameplay is also primarily meant to be an rpg first and foremost, with combat simply being a vehicle for world and other interactions. I don't disagree that it(combat) is garbage in all the games in the series, but your decision-making and roleplaying as well as approaches to situations WAS the core pillar of the series. It is why New Vegas triumphs in the minds of most fans, because it is a closer return to form of what the series is meant to be. Not because it has more guns, but because they reimplemented the care and attention to the world and its roleplaying elements that Bethesda is too lazy or incompetent to handle.

That aside, I couldn't care less about how accurate a developer is when designing guns. It's a minor concern amidst a great many other issues like satisfying feedback, good balance, enemy design, etc. Yeah it would be a flaw absolutely, and in the worst cases shatters immersion, but it's a far fucking cry from being a massive issue that ruins an entire game unless you have turbo autism. The left-handed guns held in your right hand in Fallout 4, though retarded, were the least of its issues.

Regardless Fallout's stories are all simple chosen one hero's journey-type stuff, but they're solely meant to get you out and discovering the world and its ideas.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306971
306972 306989 306993
>>306970
Go ahead, try playing any of 'em without using a gun. See how far you get. The guns arent a story element, but they're an integral part of the foundation on which the story is presented. For them to get guns so horribly wrong (also note the charging handle that would stab you in the wrist any time you take a shot) alludes to my point, which is that the whole damn thing is shit. Pick anything, anything at all for the series, and pick at it. When you're done, take a look at your finger. That brown spot? Its shit.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306972
306973 306989
>>306971
In most cases peaceful solutions can be found, and is the intent of the design to roleplay as you so choose. The speech skill and bartering allow you to circumvent most combat encounters, with stealth to avoid others. You can talk down the final antagonist of Fallout 1 due to this design decision and leave peacefully. For all other cases, Charisma (your stat that influences speech) allows you to have more companions tagging along with you to handle combat for you if you so choose to be a talking character. You don't need to attack at all, as you can scoop up a companion in the first settlement of the first two games. Fallout 2's antagonist you HAVE to fight, but there are several ways to do it without a weapon for non-combat characters, such as hacking the turrets in the room, convincing the nearby guards to help you, etc. New Vegas does this as well, where every antagonist in the base game as well as the DLC can be talked to and talked down. I forget how Fallout 3 and 4 handle this.

The games are made to facilitate, as well as they can with their limitations, various means for you to decide on what sort of character you wish to be. It is the appeal of rpgs. It will be difficult to get started, but you can absolutely finish these games with minimal or no combat investment.

Again, sure, combat is a core mechanic, but designating it as shit for superficial reasons (gun knowledge and design) is insane. You can criticize so fucking much about the combat in these games, but it being bad solely because guns are designed incorrectly is a special kind of lunatic /k/ autism. Criticize the combat for how it functions mechanically in a video game instead of visually.

Here:
>Enemies in Fallout 4, despite its improved gunplay, scale with the player and are horrible bullet sponges
>Little true mechanical variety between enemies across the entire series--all enemies are essentially identical besides slight stat tweaks
>Combat is basically just slapping your stats against eachother. If your points are high enough you will NEVER face any challenge whatsoever
>Ridiculously easy despite this. Things are so skewed toward the player so massively

And so on.

>Pick anything, anything at all for the series, and pick at it. When you're done, take a look at your finger. That brown spot? Its shit.

I hope you don't think of this as serious argumentation.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306973
306974
>>306972
>it being bad solely cuz the guns are bad
Your reading comprehension is the envy of the western world. Thank you for playing, but that's not what I said.
What I said is that Fallout's developers got everything wrong on a conceptual level as evidenced by the fact that what should have been easy to nail down, specifically guns (but which are only the tip of an enormous iceberg), somehow got overlooked in the interest of ???
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306974
306976
>>306973
So because the devs were clueless or too lazy to design their guns correctly, something easy to do, this means the games are fundamentally flawed to the core in many aspects because apparently they also handled everything else in the game with this level of care? How? What did they get wrong besides this? That doesn't make sense to me. Getting gun details right =/= making a good game in any capacity. I'd like for you to explain how Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas fail at the majority of things they do. You don't need to go into detail, or take a page of Glim here, but i'd like an understanding of your knowledge and grasp of these games. Just saying they're shit does nothing.

Look at Glim here, and how he reasons and provides evidence for his claims. "Guns done incorrectly = game is bad because this means they lacked care in every department" is an insane /k/-tier meme argument.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306976
306979 306989
>>306974
If there are some elements that you feel were done well, you're welcome to present them.
The underlying point is to cast doubt (with cause, imo) on how 'great' Fallout was. Gaykat did a shit job trying to turn an already shit story into a shit pony story. I assert (again, reputations are welcome) that the Fallout series only has the reputation, fanbase, and acclaim that it does is not from any quality of the source material, but rather the manner in which the game exploits the player's dopamine reward system with activities and situations. Anyone not actually playing, but merely watching (and therefore not getting the dopamine kick) would say that it's a lousy story/game, and that its celebration is undeserved.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.306979
>>306976
This is absolutely hands down the strangest post that i've ever read. I genuinely dunno what to say.

For one, you're making this claim that the series is shit. Okay, but this requires expansion since you're putting this idea forth. The burden of proof is not on me. If someone makes a first claim, then they should back it up. You don't assert that x is terrible, i question you on it, and you tell me to tell you how it's good.

Two, i'm not sure if you've even played any of the games in the series judging from your posts prior, which makes me question your ability to properly dissect them, or even hold a solid opinion on them at all. How could you "cast doubt" on a series being great without even playing any of them? Correct me if i'm wrong on your experience, however.

> I assert (again, reputations are welcome) that the Fallout series only has the reputation, fanbase, and acclaim that it does is not from any quality of the source material, but rather the manner in which the game exploits the player's dopamine reward system with activities and situations.

How do you know this? Proof? Analysis of the game and its systems? Are you referring to Bethesda or Interplay Fallouts? I'd argue zoomers and modern day folks are not going to get anywhere near a good amount of instant gratification or dopamine from a slow-burn rpg like fallout 1 and 2, so this point seems absurd to me.

>Anyone not actually playing, but merely watching (and therefore not getting the dopamine kick) would say that it's a lousy story/game, and that its celebration is undeserved.

This is some of the most pretentious schlock i've ever seen, good god. It's like /v/ brainrot distilled. Watching a game isn't the same as playing it, the experiences are barely comparable depending. Some games are simply not exciting to watch, either. I'd be excited to watch, say, tf2 gameplay, but be bored out of my skull watching Baldur's gate, because there are so many things fundamental to the core experience that are just not being given across from a spectator standpoint--from the enjoyment one pulls from roleplaying a character, immersion in games like STALKER, and so on. You can also get a poor or inaccurate image, missing out on flaws, or triumphs of the game through this means.

This is such a huge statement too that needs some credible backing. "This entire series is shit through and through". Seriously, I want you to explain how it's shit and your reasoning, without telling me "because I told you so". There's a ton to criticize about these games, but you haven't given me any actual tangible feedback on the series, so I legitimately can't take you seriously.

Regardless, arguing on the internet is a huge waste of time. However you respond, I hope you have a great rest of the day and do some fun things, but I probably won't carry this on further because i'm so absolutely baffled.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.306989
306997
>>306971
I've done Pacifist Runs of FNV where you avoid killing anyone by only using nonlethal weapons
and runs where you avoid hitting anyone with anything
and melee-only runs
even landmine-only runs where you exclusively toss mines to kill foes.
there are mods to expand on pacifist runs by adding more nonlethal weaponry, the option to tie up KO'd NPCs and perform nonlethal stealth takedowns on them, and even a way to talk anyone into joining you.

"Pick anything and pick at it", huh?
If I pick Caesar's Legion, how is that shit?
The only shit thing I can think of about Caesar's Legion is how the main quest of FNV requires you to visit Caesar's camp with the platinum chip and get it taken from you, only for Caesar to give it back to you and say "Destroy what's in the mystery bunker opened by this chip".
You can do that or use the chip to activate and upgrade all the securitrons hidden under Caesar's camp. Do this and Caesar will simply assume the big rumbling noise caused by this was the sound of you destroying something. He won't send anyone down to check or make anyone escort you.
This seems like a major Plot-Induced Stupidity moment since the writers clearly wanted you to visit Caesar here even if you've been his enemy until now, then get a job offer from Caesar so you can turn him down and do as House/Yes Man want or serve him. But surely there's a more elegant way to go about this. Perhaps if this moment was less a result of Caesar trusting you way too much and more the result of House rigging things in his favor. Perhaps Fortification Hill's Securitron Bunker could be further away from the main Caesar camp and near some sort of "malfunctioning robot factory area" that's actually full of securitrons who won't shoot anyone carrying the Platinum Chip but would cause Caesar too many losses to bother with if he attempted to attack the place. Perhaps the securitron bunker's exterior could be irradiated as fuck, forcing House to give you radaway and a radiation suit so that you could get in there alone while skirt-wearing Legionfags watch nervously from far away. Perhaps the House quest could require taking over a certain area for either the NCR or Legion, forcing you to pick a side earlier on, while Legion recruiters get your attention earlier on.

>>306972
Fallout 3 lets you talk Colonel Autumn, boss of the Enclave and your "evil rival" (A shouty asshole who swears and demands things. Sometimes he stuns you with magical NPC-only stun grenades to start cutscenes where he talks at you. Bethesda isn't good at writing characters with distinct personalities, so everyone swears with the same tough-guy act) into fucking off in the end with a single and very stupid speech check. It's RNG but the higher your speech skill is, the better your chances of success are.

Same with the ZAX Supercomputer in charge of the Enclave, you can optionally talk to him. and optionally effortlessly talk him into self-destructing with but a single dialogue choice. It isn't even hard. Ain't like in Fallout 1 where you need to learn the muties are sterile before you can break his confidence. No characters in-universe find it odd that this wacky computer is so easy to turn against everything he ever believed.
Fallout 4? You can effortlessly talk Super Wannabe-Badass Elder Maxson into sparing Synth Paladin Danse but the main quest still forces you to run around blowing shit up in mandatory combat quests, though you can rely on your OP companions and spawned backup to handle this for you. Fallout 4's story is six abortions duct-taped together by a faggot who knew people liked the factions in Fallout NV but didn't understand why and thought he could one-up all of them with his "kewler" (shittier) factions. So what if this new super-BOS or super-Institute could kill the NCR and Caesar's Legion easily? Doesn't change how retarded their writing is.

>>306972
It's funny how Bethesda got the Doom Eternal/2016 lads to try unfucking F4's combat, but it didn't help much.
Human enemies will use cover and cover each other while approaching, ghouls will move strangely and run at you with melee attacks, dogs and many NPCs have grab and leg-sweep attacks but the player's immune to them, Super Mutant Suiciders will run at you with a nuke in their hands to aloha snackbar you, Sentry Bots will fire for a bit and then pause while opening their Weak Point up at their backs...
But all of this can be ignored because the combat is designed around the "Explore, loot, upgrade" cycle. Explore a generic shitty area and kill simple enemies and admire environmental storytelling skeletons, gain loot to upgrade your armour and guns with +1 comfort grips and +69 ballistic weaves, then repeat. You don't have to be smart or fast in combat. You're an unstoppable god who's good at everything after enough grinding and enemy-scaling exists to cover up bad world design.
>>306976
"reputations are welcome"? Your reputation is that of someone who makes /k/-tier arguments. Read a book before you criticize it and play a video game before you call the entire series dogshit.

Fallout 4 fucked over F1/2/NV's good design in the name of the neverending dopamine skinner-box cycle its stupid exploration-combat-loot-upgrade cycle was going for.

Holy fucking shit, it is not hard to shit on the bad writing and gameplay in Fallout 3 and 4. Youtubers have made careers out of this!
It's not hard to find missed opportunities in the rushed FNV or find outdated game design in F1/2. Why are you pulling genetic fallacy "Because this one thing is bad everything else must also be bad" bollocks?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSKFRw5Q2vc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKwtYbx2GBI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th_98uqtalc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm08N1wqKe8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scfv1phAJcw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNSCfF8HQPc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCrEDP-Lsc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbtI9NZY6Wc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geC6eRZwlNE
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.306993
308583
>>306894
>>306901
You seriously didn't even do the basic research. Historically: thousands of blackpowder muzzleloaders and revolvers, whether flintlock or percussion cap later on, were chambered in everything up to .70. That specific example was called the "Horse Killer" since it'd take a giant man to utilize effectively, less than 1,500 were made. There have been several dozen commercially available, albeit often limited production runs of pistols using either shortened rifle cartridges or older 'cowboy' loads, such as the .50-40, .52-45, .54-65, and the .62-60... all of which were brass rimfire or centerfire pistol cartridges.

In slightly more modern times: the .50AE was used in the LAR Grizzly WinMag, a semi-automatic pistol produced in 1986. In 1993, the Freedom Arms Model 555 AND the AMT AutoMagnum were produced, also using the .50 AE. Afterwards comes the .50 Wyoming, .50 JRH, .500 Linebaugh, then the utterly retarded .500 S&W Magnum. Your problem here is simple: that obviously isn't using the fucking .50 BMG. It's more than likely using the .50 Action Express, which were, through those three companies, well known at the time. Use your brain.

Now how about the .45-70 revolver developed in 1986? Yes, the kick is horrendous and requires considerable strength to manage, has piss poor range, lower overall lethality and accuracy. It exists. And it sucks.

>>306971
Easy: melee weapon masterrace. In Fallout 1/2: brass knuckles, spiked knuckles, power fist, and finally mega power fist. Fallout:NV gives an entire vehicle trunk's worth of melee weapons in the base game, including a bunch of unique ones that can be found. The later DLC's add dozens more. It's not impossible, and in fact can be more rewarding: armed combat allows more attacks (from 3-6 per turn, although super specialized glass cannon builds could reach 7-8) which also means using strategy to get close. Trying to figure out how to use cover in an optimal fashion? Think like an RPG with top-down S-RTS, not a fucking FPS. One of the most satisfying takedowns in gaming occurs at the end of Fallout 2: Frank. motherfucking. Horrigan. A walking nightmare to take out with melee weapons, yet doable. Just prepare to reload a few times and learn how to use cover.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.306997
>>306989
First off:
*refutations
Secondly, you're making my point for me with all those vodeos. I'm aware that my position constitutes a logical fallacy, but we're arguing subjective experience of the game, and my point wrt 'why people are convinced the series is 'good' has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with induced brain drugs' tends to refute the validity of the average player's reported experience. Simply put, people are tricked into thinking it's good because it exploits the player's reward centers of the brain.
Now, if you want to argue that it DOESNT exploit the brain's dopamine centers, fucking lol. But the reason that is significant is because the player cant objectively rate their experience. Subjectively, yes, but not objectively. Whle I'm on about it, that's a criticism I could levy against vidya as a whole - that vidya is nothing more than an elaborate brain-drug inducement construct - but that's a whole different discussion.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307002
307016 307028
I don't mean to interrupt, but this discussion about weapons and their use in the Fallout series isn't really relevant to the topic of this thread. Would you guys mind taking it to /vx/ or something? These review threads fill up quickly enough without all the extra tangent discussions.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.307016
307028
>>307002
Sure thing GG, though you can expect me back when - not if - Nigel goes off on another unwarranted/irrelevant tangent. ^_~
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307028
307043 307086
>>307016
nigger you're the one that started this "fuck fallout because the guns are wrong" tangent
but it's fine, I'm used to shit like this.
for the record you're making an even bigger ass of yourself by waffling about subjectivity/objectivity and claiming I'm making your point for you by showing you videos that make your cliche point better than you. Stop making bad arguments for obvious things and bad arguments for untrue things. You aren't the arbiter of what's subjective and objective. You've failed to make a valid argument for what you subjectively believe and that's not on us, that's on you. You're blatantly wrong and far too proud of yourself. Of fucking course Fallout 4 is a shit game that relies on dopamine hits, everybody knows this and you suck at making an argument for what is already known and damn near universally agreed upon. You also fuck at making an argument for blaming the good Fallout games for FE's shitness just because 12.69mm plus 0.1mm bullets are wrong. Not every Fallout game is 1, 2, 3, 4, NV, or 76, or Brotherhood Of Steel: The Game, or Van Buren. It's blatantly wrong for you to dismiss an entire franchise just because one bullet type doesn't seem right in game 4 of a 6 game series made by different developers in different time periods with different priorities and budgets.

>>307002
to try and get things back on-topic...
Steelhooves as a character pisses me off. Despite all the time he spent sucking LP off, he's happily working for the BOS as it distracts LP by throwing her naked and alone into Red-Eye's territory just so it can fuck with her home.
He has no significant objections to this course of action. He doesn't warn her. He doesn't go off-script or betray his faction. He lacks agency because the author didn't feel like giving him any.
Do the BOS expect the stable to be full of poners just as "badass" as LP? Do they expect to find pre-war technology to steal and hoard? How can any of this be worth fucking with the home of a mentally unstable murderhobo with a track record of viewing violence as a question that must be answered with more violence?!
If Steelhooves wasn't wandering around the wastes murderhoboing it up for 200 years, and had spent those years leading his wife's faction instead, the Steel Rangers would be a force for good in the Wasteland instead of a bunch of stupid futureless hoarders who never make friends and exclusively make enemies.
If Kkat wants to character-develop Steelhooves from useless faggot in power armour into someone who takes over his faction to steer it onto the right track, is this the right way to do it?
This fucker knew Applejack. He's been alive for years. He knew Apple Bloom and Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle! He knew the ponies responsible for the Stable his faction is fucking with. He's friends with two ponies from Sweetie Belle's stable, one of whom is descended from Sweetie Belle herself! And he has no objections to any of this! He doesn't mind leading his murderhobo mistress into a big time-wasting publicity stunt of a failed sidequest just to get her out of the way so they can get at her Stable.
How the fuck could any of this possibly be worth it to Steelhooves?
Why does he take stupid orders from a faction he logically should command?
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.307043
307046 307171
>>307028
Strawman arguments, nice.
See, I can point out fallacies too. That you've neglected to acknowledge the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is,... well, consistent. But no one is arbiter of either, though with the slightest effort one can observe the difference, as well as the ramifications. Dont worry, you'll get there some day. And why would I waste time belaboring a point made off-hand when you've done me the service of reinforcing my point in spades? And while Fallout 4 is notorious for dopamine hits, if you think for a moment that the other Fallouts (and again, vista in general) DOESNT,... well that's consistent as well.
Anonymous
920206a
?
No.307046
>>307043
*vidya
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.307086
307171
754219.JPG
>>307028
>gaslighting
>tu quoque
>moving the opposition's goalpost to make a subjective experiential claim
>strawman
>tossing the question by proclaiming your special snowflake opinion is better
(You) are the problem still. I listed information that the other Anon is likely processing and digging up. Stop sperging, goy.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307171
307202
>>307043
Tiresome nigger, why do you want me to explain the difference between subjectivity and objectivity? Surely everyone here already knows this. Why do you want to waste my time? Why pretend it's my responsibility to argue against your goalpost-moving ass when your initial argument was blatantly faulty? Why exaggerate everything I say like a jew? Do you actually believe what you're saying or are you just trying to waste as much time as possible?
Why pretend that an argument you've failed to back up is "made for you" by anyone willing to waste their time criticizing your ass-backwards logic?
Why pretend that I'm saying the other Fallouts never contain dopamine hits, Cathy Newman? You only hear what you want to hear.
Fuck it. I could say "I like apples" and you'd insist I'm actually saying whatever you want to hear again. It's depressing that you might never realize what you are before you can turn your life around for the better. Read books, clean your room, lift, find God.
Humoring you is a waste of time. It's your responsibility to grow up on your own time. Where are the guys who yelled "no off-topic posts!" now? What's further from the topic of why FE is shit than this asinine Baka And Tsukihime routine?
>>307086
You can say all the fancy words you can think of to make yourself sound smarter than you are but at the end of the day, calling all Fallout games shit just because one bullet seems wrong is almost as retarded as trying to turn a discussion about fallout into an insult-tossing match with no semblance of logical argumentation. Make a thread on /vx/ and take this gay side-discussion over there. It's too gay for this thread.
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.307202
6011405__safe_anonymous+artist_oc_oc+only_oc-colon-echo_bat_pony_bait_low+quality+bait_needs+more+jpeg.jpg
>>307171
Standard gaslighting britmutt tactics. You cannot even keep track of whom states what. I was the one that provided a basic presentation format of historical firearm information. I also went on to state that the person in question saw 12.7MM and automagically thought 'well that's gotta be a .50 BMG because there aren't any OTHER .50 calibers!' And yet again, you keep up your constant "i cunt be rong, im SPESHUL' jew-like shitheel badgering and victimhood mentality.

tl;dr: (You) are still the biggest, most inconsequential faggot. It is well past the time you ought have disappeared. FOREVER~
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307218
307220
iwishiwasathome200yearsagobustingfatnutsinapplejack.png
Daft off topic argument aside, I'm looking forward to Glim reaching the return to Stable 2. Even years later, it sticks out in my mind as one of FoE's dumbest arcs.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307220
307221
>>307218
Same here.
Surely stories where the hero is cast out of his home or willingly leaves it to accomplish some great task hamstring themselves by making the hero return when the job is not yet done. Is it possible to do this right?
Whar's the point? Does Kkat want to try and show the difference between LP as she was at the start of this adventure and LP as she is now?
She's completed her primary objective: getting Velvet Remedy back home. She can take Velvet home and go back to her old life a hero of her Stable. Or refuse to do this in a big "look how far this character has come!" moment, but that wouldn't be much of a twist.
LP doesn't care much what her Stable thinks of her after she leaves it. She doesn't grow out of the mindset that sent her into the wastes. She just changes who she is as a character overnight from someone who would risk death to avoid life as a social pariah to someone who happily attempted to genocide the slavers of Old Appleoosa with a smile.
Nobody reading this fic would actually fear LP losing her way and trapping Velvet in the boring life of a singer who would rather be a medic.
Hell, they're only returning home because the BOS is fucking with her home for a stupid reason. But going home highlights how far from LP's initial mission she diverted without a care in the world. Did she ever have any moments of internal struggle where she weighs the pros and cons of focusing on her personal mission VS random murderhobo sessions and looting and shooting and sidequesting? It's like Kkat once saw a movie where a character starts off with a selfish objective and then grows up and sees the bigger picture and does the right thing, but didn't get why the character in question took so long to see what is plainly (in kkat's mind) a higher priority.
Fear of remaining a social outcast blamed for Velvet's loss sent her into the wastes. And she didn't think "fuck velvet for forcing me into this hellish world". She transformed almost immediately into a detatched commando who coldly kills as many nameless enemies as possible even when stealth is an option. And yet retained her girlish crush on Velvet for no reason. Littlepip just isn't a coherent character with consistent personality traits. She is exclusively a vehicle for the author. What motivates her to make a choice in one scene won't motivate her to make similar choices later on if the author wants her to do something else.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307221
307242
>>307220
Oh, there's far more wrong with it than that. Littlepip being a murderous goon with no foundational principles or direction is well established by now and obviously isn't going to change. I'm referring to the cavalcade of badly written combat including the diversion for a pointless kaiju fight beforehand, the continuity errors, the wasted potential with regard to Steelhooves, and the utterly bizarre conclusion.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307242
307245 307246
when Dante sees his pizza bill.jpg
>>307221
I know the worst is yet to come but I'm trying to avoid spoiling stuff by ranting about how much I hate what comes 5 or 10 chapters later.
I don't know if I've already said this, but what really pisses me off is (COLOSSAL SPOILER, GLIM PLEASE DON'T READ THIS) Equestria goes to shit despite the best efforts of ponykind. Occasionally we're told ponies were cunts to Diamond Dogs over "their" homes, but the ponies didn't spontaneously become nazis. The war with ziggers happened because they religiously loathed Princess Luna, who's a sweetheart with self-confidence issues. Ziggers giga-sandy-hooked a unicorn-only school because they wouldn't accept zigger "refugees", don't think too hard about why refugees carried poison gas bombs able to wipe out entire schools on equestrian soil- wait no, it's worse. Zebra soldiers were allowed to walk around with these "refugees" and carry weapons including gas bombs and guard these gibsmedats-obsessed ziggers. While Equestria was trapped in a race war ziggers started. Ponies never became as evil as the zebras. The entire fucking race except Zecora was 100% on board with obliterating ponykind for the dumbest reason possible and when they were given nukes they opened fire.

Hell, remember that point during the war we just read about? That point during the pony-zigger war where Fluttershy fires the first ever Megaspell at a battlefield ponies won, healing ponies and ziggers alike. ziggers react to their newfound BLESSING OF THE GIFT OF LIFE to make a very un-righteous call on judgement night. I'm yearning more to hear the suffer, of FE fanboys as Glim tears this fic's asshole asunder. Killed before a time to kill their dreams, pissed down upon their memes. Roast literature that dwells online. Against literature this fanfic's a fucking crime! Steel your soul for the next chapter's bad fiction, but Kkat will never become a woman.

All memes aside, fuck ziggers. The healing megaspell hits a pony battlefield and the ziggers limping home with their tails between their remaining legs and any zigs bleeding out get better. They all got better. Any ponies who went down fighting stay dead but any fleeing cowardly zigs get better. And they choose to turn on ponies for showing them this kindness, resuming the fighting and extending the war. Even though they supposedly believe ponies are inherently evil for taking orders from Princess Luna who is also inherently Nightmare Moon according to their ziggereligion. Those Ziggers need Jesus. Fluttershy's theory that kindness can be shown to such an absolutely evil savage race to make everything turn out for the better died that day. But she ignores it and gives both sides healing megaspells anyway, still convinced that if both sides have healing nukes neither side can kill each other. She forgot how megaspells work. Peak Plot-Induced Stupidity moment. She is punished for making what seemed like the most moral decision and thinking enemies can be friends if you just try hard enough.

(COLOSSAL SPOILER PLZ DON'T READ THIS GLIM) Later on, Velvet will one-up Fluttershy by accomplishing what she frequently failed to do. Velvet will succeed simply because it is one of Kkat's characters instead of a canon character. Velvet will attempt to show mercy to the Alicorns, and it will work. She will get her ass saved by heroic Alicorns and with their help, found a bastardized impossible hybrid of the New California Republic and explicitly-moral-anarchist "we are charity doctors who hate armies and think any state is too mean" Followers Of The Apocalypse. During the final battle against The Enclave on "The Day of Sunshine And Rainbows" *rolls eyes* she will treat and heal Enclave soldiers during the battle, hoping this kindness shown to them will make them into good guys. It works, because Kkat likes Velvet too much. Fluttershy was unable to convince Ziggers to stop Ziggering but With just a little bit of kindness and mercy, Velvet was able to convert 200-year-old mutated giant ponies who spent at least 200 years killing ponies for fun as puppets of a hive mind dominated by an absurdly evil generic mean spiteful villain arbitrarily named Trixie, and fanatical indoctrinated militaristic Pegasus soldiers convinced only they can bring light to the war-torn wasteland this world became after they abandoned it for 200 years and hid in the clouds just because they could and no psychic unicorns felt like dragging them down to earth and stopping their entire fucking race from betraying their nation. It's not enough that Kkat simply has LP save the day by ascending into weather godhood (by sitting in the control panel of Weather Wizard's coomchamber) to un-Raider Fallout so hard that The Real New Mane Six come out of nowhere to un-nuke Fallout so hard the next generation of foals suspect the nuking never even happened since they can't find much evidence of it ever happening. The story also pisses on Fluttershy and her ideals by only letting them work when acted upon by one of Kkat's lucky OCs with plot armour.
Anonymous
1b5093d
?
No.307245
307246 307247
>>307242
I'm not trying to start anything. It's nice that you offer your perspective on the fic but isn't the stuff about Fluttershy with healing megaspells, spoilers as well? It just seems to me that some of the unspoiled text in your post are actually also spoilers.
I could be wrong of course, cause I might have missed something.
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.307246
307261 307283
>>307242
Shut the fuck up Niggel you faggot assclown. (((You))) are not helping your case in teh slightest. (((You))) keep being the same gaslighting cuck that you've always been. (((Your))) speshul feewings 'OP-inyun' is nigger trash on a stick. Also, don't drop such a huge spoiler like you're some kind of good goi. All you are is a dipshit inbred cuck.

>>307245
Don't even bother with Niggel's soycialism kikery. He can't do anything except to make logical fallacies in his self-righteously pigshit britmutt attempt to preserve retarded crybaby 'feelings'. At best, ignore him. At worst, troll that goycuck into oblivion.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307247
307766
>>307245
Nope, that's from the start of chapter 24 which started back here >>304946

Say, does "You healed all the baddies which means the battle resumes since your enemies aren't in their Dead or Fleeing states any more" count as another "Kkat's a dumb tranny who randomly applies videogame logic to stories where it doesn't belong" moment?
Some of the ponies healed by this megaspell died recently. Some Zigs on the battlefield probably experienced the same fate, tasting death and the nothingness that comes after.
And after being spared from this... They immediately resume doing all they can to harm the "evil" ponies serving "Nightmare Moon" aka Luna?!

Also, I just noticed a plot hole.
In the memory orb, LP experiences the memories of a pony who died for a while, then got better. All is cold and dark until magic brings your body back to life. And magic can bring your body back from the brink of death without fucking up your body or barring you from heaven. Healing magic really is just that powerful.
And yet, at the same time, there's an even bigger plot hole.
LP sees for herself in this memory orb that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. No antechamber to the afterlife. No videogame menu interface that challenges you to go back in time and retry life with another playable character or challenge mode for more bonus points. No overly-long queue full of ghosts while you wait for a giant red faggot who won't shut up about his MAHOGANY desk to get around to sending you on to the afterlife you belong in. There is simply death, nothingness, and the end of nothingness once you get better. We could assume there is a pony afterlife if you stay dead for long enough, but from what this story depicts, Kkat is a faggoted atheist who can't allow himself to believe in heaven or hell because he knows where his tranny bullshit will send him.
Littlepip tasted death in those memories. Felt it, personally. Those memories are inside her now. She remembers the feeling of death as easily as she might remember the feeling of having an erect cock if she ever used a memory orb filled with the memory of a horny stallion getting a boner. She has personally felt death's cold, clammy embrace upon her tongue and seen for herself that Celly doesn't show up when you die in Fallout Equestria to say you did a good job and whisk you off to pony heaven where you drink tea and party with your pony ancestors for the rest of eternity. LP has practically penetrated death's spectral skeletal slit, and while she didn't remain in it long enough to see if a climax is possible in such a situation, this doesn't bother her significantly. She now has a reason to suspect there is no heaven for her or anypony. Her "dark reflection" doesn't pop up within her mind to shit-talk her over this. This doesn't make her question everything. This doesn't shake Littlepip's faith in "The Goddesses Celestia and Luna" or make her question whether ponies even have souls and how all that soul bullshit works with Rarity's fucking pony minifigures. She isn't freaking out and trying to manufacture copium for herself. She isn't telling herself "Maybe Memory Orbs can't capture memories that involve divine stuff like souls and the afterlife and that's why I didn't see a heaven when that pony died! Maybe these dumb physical memory orbs can only copy memories straight from the physical brain and once your soul leaves your body they can't see what your consciousness is experiencing!".
Hearing that Celly and Luna once lived and then died bothered her more than experiencing death temporarily and failing to see any afterlife or deity willing to see her or the good loyal pony who died on that battlefield and then got better. Even though this makes no sense. Hell, I think experiencing the memory orb of a horny stallion once (that's happened at least once so far in this story, right?) bothered her more than directly experiencing death for a while in these fucking stupid orbs.
Once again, Littlepip is not an individual character with consistent views and core or secondary personality traits that change over the course of the story as she is subjected to assorted stimuli, she is simply a cardboard cutout with a gun. Despite Kkat trying to pretend otherwise by making Velvet sometimes addicted to escapism through Fluttershy's memory orb, these memory orbs primarily exist so that Kkat can vomit exposition on the audience when a simple letter or holotape log wouldn't make sense even by his standards. They're a writing tool, not an element of the world that was thought through. There is no black market for memory orbs filled with memories like "Taking pony meth" and "Fucking a supermodel" and "Raping a supermodel" and "Getting buttraped by a male supermodel" and "experincing torturous brutal gory violent unsafe BDSM so severe it requires months of healing and physical therapy and healing potions to recover from" or "Masturbating while being female and staring into a mirror for the benefit of any males watching this memory orb with an autogynephilia and genderbending fetish aka all trannies".
There is no white market for memory orbs filled with memories like "Being Twilight Sparkle and lecturing an empty room on the basics of magic and then the finer points of magic and then the super-advanced shit" or "Being Rainbow Dash as she beats the hell out of training dummies while talking you through martial arts techniques and performing them so you can experience and remember how to do them IRL once the memory's complete".
It's surprisingly common for male authors who feel inadequate about their masculinity to make their protagonists and POV characters female since they want female privilege and subconsciously know men lower their standards for most women, even if they refuse to admit it to themselves since that would damage their delusions of "equality".
Anonymous
1b5093d
?
No.307261
307277
>>307246
I'm kinda worn out on talking about Nigel.
I do have a history of helping him. Like, I was the one suggesting that Sunrise should have friend characters and to make Sunrise more specilized in his abilites in one of Nigel's threads.
As I said before, I like some of his ideas but don't like some other stuff he does and I get a bit exhausted seeing that those stuff don't change (and I also find it kinda funny in wierd way).
I honestly, don't know how I will progress from here. I'm not sure if I want to ignore him yet, but I do wonder if that's just me being stupid. We'll see.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.307277
307283 307627
>>307261
If you keep talking about the kike at all times, defeating the kike at all times, and showing that the kike is subhuman trash at all times, (((it))) will eventually disappear. No, sir, you are not stupid. There are zero positives when dealing with Niggel the goycuck quarter-jew. What you think 'makes sense from his perspective' is merely your brain attempting to rationalize pigshit into being gold. You will progress at your own specifications, whatever those may be. Trust in yourself, Anon, and trust in those that trust (You) as I do.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307283
307296
>>307277
>>307246
"defeating the kike"?
"soycialist kikery"?
Do you think you're "defeating" me by throwing every buzzword you know at me and hoping something sticks? What's "soycialist" about anything I have said?
You're living in your own little world. You should stay there instead of trying desperately to sound mature on this site.
The more insults you use in a post, the less you have to say. You aren't qualified to judge others. The sooner more people realize this and start ignoring your attempts to derail threads and sound like an adult, the better.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307291
I thought of another smart thing to say.
Say, why the hell are Red-Eye and the Alicorns mostly on the same page?

Ideologies primarily exist to give people answers to life's toughest questions, especially in times of crisis. Fallout particularly loves exploring ideologies through its settlements and wannabe-empires. But this tale's factions don't compare to the Enclave's "Peak Globalist Shitmerica" or the NCR's "New Corrupt Shitmerica that usually tries to be good but has corrupt self-interested leaders" or Caesar's Legion and their absolute roman conquest.

But while Fallout is often about people and their ideas, this fic has Good(TM) characters and Evil(TM) characters. And the Evil characters are on the same page when it comes to pretty much everything except who should be in charge.

Red-Eye is a tyrant with occasional nice moments who thinks slavery and conquest is the best way to fill his nation with workers who'll build everything the way it was or better. He says "Slavery is good" on the radio and owns a Thunderdome.

But the Alicorns... What kind of ideology are they supposed to represent? These walking petty demigods have a religious theme sometimes and they've got a hive mind that lets them share information with each other all over the Wasteland, but the author doesn't go all the way and make them represent surrendering everything to a higher power and hoping it all works out.

It's kind of like this story's last "Villains vs Villains" moment back at Shattered Hoof. We're told these baddies want this and those baddies want this. We can memorize the names and what motivation they supposedly have. Mitwit fanboys obsessed with this fic could draw a chart in MS Paint to help keep everyone's name, motivation, and character traits consistent. But we don't have enough information about the characters involved to get invested in the conflict or understand what the consequences are if one side or another wins this match in a way LP doesn't like. LP wanted to sneak into Red-Eye's land as a slave with nothing, work her way up the chain until she can kill Red-Eye, and get out of there. She failed and got a new sidequest: Go kill the Ant Queen- I mean go and kill ten bears and bring back their pelts- I mean go and kill the Alicorn Queen.

Wouldn't it immensely add to Red-Eye's characterization as a stereotypical "villain with good intentions" if he ranted at LP about exactly why he personally wants Alicorns dead ("They don't represent the next stage in pony evolution, cyborg parts do! They're just smug gits convinced they're all invincible. Become an Alicorn and you stop being an individual, you become a chessboard in the hive mind's army, and the hive queen's a dumb bitch who doesn't give a damn about the future or us!") and why he lets them in his camp ("Letting some stand guard, while spying on us for the hive mind, delays the day the Alicorns slaughter most of us for trying to build a better world without them and torture any survivors to death to feel superior") and why it's necessary for his plans for world domination, and so on?
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.307296
307306
497724__safe_solo_meme_exploitable+meme_edit_vulgar_flight+to+the+finish_spoiler-colon-s04e05_ms-dot-+harshwhinny_chalkboard.jpg
>>307283
>M-MUH PROJECTION
>M-MUH GASLIGHT
>M-MUH SELF-RIGHTEOUS SUPERIORITY
>M-MUH PUBLIC APPEARANCE IS BETTER THAN URS
>Y-YOU CAN'T JUDGE ANYONE CUZ I SED SO
Okay Niggel.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307306
307322
retardedmusicstops.png
>>307296
Well, at least you're bitching at what I just said instead of bitching about what you think of me as a person. It's a slight improvement, and a little bit closer to the thread's topic. Baby steps.
Still, it's a shame that you can't think of anything intelligent to say about what I just said.
Yelling "no fuck you" at every point you recognize does not make you an intellectual debater. It makes you a source of predictable and consistent background noise.
Why not analyze the fanfic we're discussing to try and figure out what makes it terrible, what cliches it relies upon, what cliches it attempts to use and fucks up, what could improve it, what writing lessons could be taken away from it, what caused its bizarre popularity despite its lack of quality, and so on?
Perhaps with your background and your... "unique"... perspective on things, you might have something unique to say about this story if you only tried.
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.307322
13422718.jpg
>>307306
Do not act superior when (((you))) are inconsequential. You gaslit for the unknownth time by claiming that I somehow think of myself as an "intellectual debater".. wow. Not even once have I done that. For that little manchild outburst, I now make it a POINT coming here solely to drag you through the mud you bring in, throw around, and blame everyone else for. At every turn I'll be pointing out each flaw and showing it back you for what you are: a failure. In sum, your arrogantly ignorant victimhood complex gives me an exquisitely unique sadistic bliss.

tl;dr: fuck you.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307326
307328 307386
d3ekmg7-a5bdc597-d50f-410b-b1dc-f1687d2cf0e1.gif
>>306884

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Hour of the Wolf

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“This… is Steel Rangers level murder here.”
Good to know. The word "murder" gets bandied about quite a bit, but sometimes it's difficult to judge just what level of murder you're dealing with. It's nice to see someone trying to establish some kind of practical gradation scale.

Ironically, the one time it would have actually made sense for kkat to move time forward between scenes, he elects not to. Instead of simply skipping the rest of the airship ride and beginning the next scene at Stable 2, the chapter begins with another soliloquy from Littlepoop, still on the Sky Bandit and fuming to herself.

>Rage. Burning, explosive rage. In the moment I realized that the Steel Rangers had invaded my home, were killing the ponies inside, I saw red like I never had before.
This seems like it would be the default reaction to this type of development, but it's worth noting that LP has had few positive things to say about the other residents of Stable 2.

To the extent she's mentioned her old home at all, she has mostly complained about how alone and out of place she always felt, how she had no friends or family, and how she felt basically nothing when she left the place behind. Since she was only there for a small part of the story, and had no significant interactions with anyone who lived there, we have even less of a connection to the place than she does; thus, even though this ought to be an emotionally charged scene, it doesn't inspire much actual feeling in the reader.

Even though most of the story of The Lord of the Rings takes place away from the Shire, Tolkien still gives us enough of a sense of the place in the earliest chapters of the story that we can at least appreciate Frodo & Co.'s anxiety at the prospect of its being destroyed, as well as their longing to return there once their quest is complete. Kkat, however, has not made even the slightest effort to endear us to Stable 2 or the ponies who live inside; at most it served as a simple starting point for LP's adventure.

So, we don't feel what he wants us to feel here. We understand that LP used to live there, and that she is angry at the prospect of its being invaded, and intellectually we know that this reaction makes sense. However, the author does not make us feel her anger; he simply tells us about it. It's the same mistake that Peen Stroke made when he had Nyx recalling her various "happy memories" later in the story.

>Xenith watched the argument, for once not being the focus of the shouting. She turned to Velvet Remedy, eyes large. “This… is your home? You and the little one? Why do the Steel Rangers attack it?”
>Velvet Remedy shook her head. Each blink sent fresh tears down her charcoal cheeks. The wind whipped at her color-streaked white mane. “Resources. Nothing more. All they see is a functional Stable. In the very least, the water talisman is priceless. The apple orchard nearly so.” She closed her eyes, shuddering with a soft sob. “At most, they want it as a base.”
This also seems like a good time to note that the Rangers' reasons for attacking Stable 2 are fairly shaky as well. Why do they want Stable 2? Why are they attacking it now? If they just wanted resources or a base as Velvet claims here, they could have just as easily attacked at any point over the last 200 years.

Possibly, they didn't know where the stable was located; however, this seems highly unlikely since it's been established that their headquarters is an old StableTec building, and that the maneframe computer in the basement has the locations of all stables stored in memory. Apart from this, the only plausible explanation is that they have a hidden objective in taking this particular stable, which required certain conditions to be met before they could act. Basically, either the author is planning something and he hasn't revealed it yet, or else this is yet another detail that he didn't bother to think through properly.

>My rage was beginning to ebb, the fire and fury unable to maintain itself without a direction to strike.
Now imagine how the reader feels. This is why it's usually better to skip over the long boring train ride where the protagonist has nothing better to do than think about how angry she is.

>I began to remember each and every pony I had grown up with. My teachers, my peers, each pony at my first and only slumber party… I felt myself being crushed under the weight of this responsibility. I couldn’t breathe.
This is an example of exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. We've never met any of these ponies, and the author hasn't made an effort to make us feel any of these connections. We've never heard anything about LP having a slumber party before, and her dreary monologues about how friendless and unloved she was when she lived at the stable doesn't make it seem plausible that she would have ever been invited to one.

In fact, kkat really hasn't told us very much at all about what day to day life was like in the stables, and once again we see a single problem cascading and causing multiple problems. Not only do we not feel the proper emotion in this scene, we are lacking in practical information that would help us understand the story.

I've said many times that it's never clear just how much knowledge LP is supposed to have about history and the war and what happened to Equestria. Part of this stems from the author's absolute vagueness about what her life has been like up to this point. Did she go to school in the stables? If so, what did they teach her? Did she go to church or have any involvement in this religion she seems to follow off and on? What about clubs, activities, friends? How was society in the stables structured? What were the internal politics like? Do these "overmares" have knowledge of history and the outside world, or are they as clueless as the residents? There's so much going on here that we don't know.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307328
307339 307351 307386
8CF7AF3E7B83405276A7980536DB8AB8-297466.png
>>307326

Anyway, the group is sitting around bickering over whether or not Calamity has any right to charge in and start killing Rangers left and right, and SteelHooves brings up the quite sensible point that they are all significantly outgunned anyway and would get slaughtered if they tried to attack an entire army of Rangers by themselves. This, in turn, leads to a question of SteelHooves' loyalty, and he is suddenly put in a position where he has to decide which is more important: his loyalty to his fruity little techno-fetishist club, or his loyalty to this group of weirdos he randomly started tagging along with one day. He never technically gives an answer.

Out of absolutely nowhere, Velvet Remedy makes this comment:

>“Well, if we’re making promises, maybe Littlepip can promise that, if we win, she won’t adopt any of them?”

She then goes on to elaborate that LP has a habit of befriending ponies who try to kill her, which is true enough. However, she then accuses Littlepoop of doing this to "get back at her" for bringing her out into the wasteland, which makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Not only does LP's making friends with the likes of Calamity and Xenith (who both tried to kill her) and SteelHooves (who didn't actively try to kill her but did indirectly injure her with shrapnel when they first met) not put Velvet at any kind of disadvantage, making friends with ponies instead of killing them is supposed to be Velvet's own schtick. Isn't she the one who is always urging the group to try diplomacy instead of shooting it out? Plus, what does she care who LP makes friends with? None of these ponies did anything directly to harm Velvet, and she hasn't expressed any issues with any of them so far. Besides, isn't she supposed to be dating Calamity or something?

>I could tell this was the return of nasty, bitchy Remedy who dealt with the horrors around her by thinking poorly of her friends. I had really hoped we’d left this Remedy behind. But there she was, buried under the surface, just waiting for enough stress on the fault-lines of Velvet’s personality to set her free.
No matter how many angles I look at it from, I can't quite get a bead on just what kkat is trying to do with this character. My initial impression of her was that she was going to turn out to be some kind of Faye-Valentine-esque femme fatale, with a secret mission and/or destiny that she would inadvertently and/or deliberately rope LP into. As soon as we actually met her, she turned into a wishy-washy hypocrite with no serious ideals, who left a career in music, which she didn't take particularly seriously, to pursue a career in medicine, which she also didn't take particularly seriously.

From there, the author has, at various points in the story, attempted to turn her into a bad Fluttershy knockoff, a manipulative cunt, a compassionate pacifist, a bisexual, a gun-toting warrior, and Calamity's girlfriend, all with little success. Now, she apparently also has a habit of "dealing with the horrors around her" by "thinking poorly of her friends." I'm not sure what the hell this is even supposed to mean, nor can I recall any examples of her past behavior that might buttress this claim. At present, this character is just a mishmash of completely incongruous traits, which she jumps randomly between depending on what the author wants her to do in a given scene, and which he makes no effort to stitch together into anything resembling a convincing personality. Whatever kkat was trying to achieve with her, he failed even harder than usual; Velvet remains by far the least likable of this entire palette of mostly unlikable characters.

Anyway, what I think he's trying to do with all of this is to establish some kind of schism or discord in the group just before what is apparently supposed to be a significant fight. The idea is that the group of friends needs to pull together here, but instead they're squabbling amongst each other and distrusting each other. Littlepoop, as the resident Mary Sue leader, needs to find a way to bring them all together with a rousing speech. She does this presently:

>“Stop it! All of you!” I stomped with all hooves, shaking. “We can’t tear apart now. Our home… my home… they need us! What good are we to them if we’re already bleeding to death when we get there?”
Well, it's not exactly rousing, but it is technically speech. I will at least give her that much.

Anyway, after this the contrived anger and bickering stops, and everyone gets back on task. Littlepoop now needs to think of a plan for how to deal with the seemingly impossible task they have ahead of them. However, she decides to defer the task to Velvet instead:

>My eyes fell to Velvet. “This… can’t be just my decision. Velvet, this was your home too.” My eyes pleaded with her. Silently, I begged her to help me.
>Velvet turned to the others. “SteelHooves is right. I doubt we have the firepower to take on the Steel Rangers. And even if we do, we couldn’t hope to without losses. So we look for an avenue of diplomacy first.”

Page break.

>There was an odd orange glow on the horizon, like an angry dawn was approaching. But the glow was from the wrong direction, and there were many hours before the first hints of daylight. The sun and the moon had gone wild, raising and setting by their own whims, but even those whims seemed to have a clockwork precision.
From context, it's clear that the author did not mean for this statement to be taken literally:
>“What are we looking at?”
>“Fires,” Calamity answered. “That out there’s the Everfree Forest. Looks like Red Eye’s got the whole backside ablaze.”
However, the way it's worded doesn't make it clear that LP is speaking metaphorically here. In particular, the bit about the sun and moon going crazy is confusing. Since the sun and moon are controlled manually in the MLP universe, this is a statement that could easily be interpreted literally. I'd cut that line.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307339
307358 307386
pgWdvd6ULs5BVLEPjVuvBIHBIFF-cDQaQjTcOGezx9Y.jpg
>>307328

Anyway, they talk about the burning Everfree Forest for awhile. Apparently the forest is sort of a magic oasis in the wasteland; not only do the plants still grow on their own without taking any effect from radiation or kkat's taint or whatever, but the cloud cover that blocks out the sun over most of Edgequestria is gone here and the weather functions more or less normally.

>SteelHooves was staring in the other direction, his visor gazing out into the darkness. Finally, he admitted with a low rumble, “I don’t understand why Elder Blueberry Sabre is doing this.”
>I felt Velvet Remedy had covered that question fairly well earlier.
She really didn't; if anything, she just opened the door for further questions.

>SteelHooves let out a breath. “This is far outside her territory. Elder Blueberry Sabre is the Elder for the Fillydelphia contingent of the Steel Rangers. Stable Two technically falls under the purview of my Elder and the Manehattan contingent.”
Even though the Rangers' motives are dubious and a valid topic of inquiry, it seems SteelHooves' objections are more along the lines of arcane internal Ranger politics. Since the author really hasn't bothered to explain how any of this works, everything SH says here is more or less meaningless to us. However, this seems to suggest that there is more than one Steel Rangers faction, and that each one has its own Elder, who is presumably the leader. This might be significant.

Anyway, LP further elaborates upon Velvet's reasoning and suggests that, since the Rangers seem to be losing the fight against Red Eye, their current base of operations might be too dangerous to remain in. So, they have chosen to invade Stable 2 and take it over as a new base. This actually more or less makes sense, though I'm curious why they would go to the trouble of taking an inhabited stable when so far we've seen at least three completely abandoned ones that they could just refurbish or restore or something. If their territory is Fillydelphia, I'm also curious why they would choose such an out of the way location as Ponyville, or near-Ponyville, or wherever the hell Stable 2 is located.

The discussion about internal Ranger protocol drags on for a little bit longer. We learn that the Elder of SteelHooves' Ranger chapter or platoon or whatever they have is named Elder Cottage Cheese (not making this up). There is also some speculation that Blueberry Sabre may be pulling some kind of power play on Cottage Cheese, and that taking this particular stable is part of moving into his turf in order to take over.

Wait a minute; I read that part wrong. Here is what the text actually says:

>“Hey, maybe yer Cottage Cheese Elder is pullin’ the same thing on Blueberry Sabre that she pulled on Li’lpip,” Calamity suggested. “Sendin’ her inta a situation that he feels is a giant deathtrap. After all, don’t he believe a buncha rubbish ‘bout the Ministry o’ Awesome havin’ black ops Stables and nonsense like that?”
This seems to imply that it's Cottage Cheese who is making a move against Blueberry Sabre (it's pretty much all I can do to type these names with a straight face). Calamity thinks Cottage is deliberately sending Blueberry into a death trap, to...get rid of her...or something...I guess.

This point is not further explored or explained; instead, the conversation veers off on a sudden tangent. Calamity's remark about the Ministry of Awesome having black ops stables or whatever the fuck is taken up by Littlepoop:

>“Well, I mean that I saw Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie setting up Zecora to be a double agent for Equestria. Rainbow Dash said Zecora trained under the Ministry of Awesome’s best trainers… which made it sound like MAw did that sort of thing a lot.”
This has literally fuck-all to do with anything that's currently being discussed, and I can't tell why the author would choose to bring this up. Oh wait; yes I can. It's because he's a literal autist who can't keep his brain focused on a single topic for more than a couple of paragraphs at a time. This just more of his usual meandering bullshit.

Anyway, from here the conversation devolves into a bunch of autism about Zecora and whose side she was on. I guess to Xenith Zecora was some kind of hero, so LP feels she may have put her foot hoof, whatever in her mouth by mentioning that she was a spy for the pony side. Meanwhile, SteelHooves asserts that Zecora was actually a double agent, and she brought the zebras that machine-whatever gun that can blow through Ranger armor. Blah blah blah.

Page break. As the next scene opens, they are still on the goddamn airbus and they are still just sitting around talking about random bullshit. There is some cringe-tier banter between LP and Velvet over the earlier memory orb where Fluttershy hits on Rainbow Dash, and then thankfully the group is distracted by some gunfire. They realize they are getting close to Ponyville, and will be at the stable soon. The gunfire seems to be a prelude of what they can expect when they arrive.

Page break. The next scene is mostly the group standing around deciding what guns to use against the Rangers. Littlepoop settles on her zebra rifle and Little Macintosh I think, and Velvet decides to wear that zebra legionnaire armor she found earlier. Calamity then announces that he conveniently has a stash of weapons hidden somewhere nearby, even though he used to live near New Appleoosa and not Ponyville. However, going to get it will add an extra 15 minutes to their trip. There is some discussion about whether or not to make the detour, and ultimately they decide that it will be worth the trouble.

As Calamity changes course, they get a glimpse of Sweet Apple Acres. However, instead of the battle they were expecting, they see that the Rangers are fighting some kind of invisible star-creature. This next bit is a little unclear, so I will have to tackle it in a new post.
Anonymous
516da6f
?
No.307351
>>307328
I still think it was a mistake for Kkat to try and make Velvet "the moral one" of the party when LP's usually the one turning enemies into friends and getting her dick sucked for "making ponies want to be better" while Velvet's bitching at Calamity for headshotting some rapists including a rapey colt to save a random mare or whatever. Velvet fangirls over Fluttershy and can't handle this reality without submersing herself in fantasy or trying to give her friends shit over nothing but Kkat can't handle anyone outshining his shitty OC so she's not allowed to out-moral LP all the time. Calamity doesn't have moments where he thinks "I should betray you all for the Enclave" and Littlepip doesn't have moments where she thinks "I should kill and loot my friends" and the closest she's gotten so far to any INTENTIONAL (LP is a fucking graverobber) moments of moral failure was her drug use, but Velvet has moments where she acts like a bitch and calls her friends cunts for no reason. A grave crime in Kkat's eyes since "true friends never think ill of each other unless it's a coping mechanism for stress uwu". What a bizarre meme of a worldview. These scenes serve to make Velvet look like even more of a cunt and even less of a competitor for LP's "kindest pony in the Wasteland" award. I don't remember if Glim or I said "LP's party doctor should be a jaded cunt who has her heart warmed and spirits lifted by LP's kindness over time" but whoever said that first is a genius. Both Calamity and Steelhooves have histories with Evil(tm) Fallout organizations that really should be morally good considering they're ponies in this setting, so the party's medic should follow this trend. Perhaps a Followers Of The Apocalypse doctor who perfectly embodies their suicidally charitable niceness and needs to learn to toughen up or a bitter doctor who believes in her mission but has lost all faith in their ability to accomplish it the old-fashioned way. Perhaps a travelling doctor who likes charging exorbitant fees or scamming idiots. Perhaps a genuine doctor who's mean because she's seen too many idiots die just because they're convinced a medic with enough healing potion can always get to them in time.

If LP's morality is supposed to make her special in this unrealistic bitch of a Wasteland, giving her a party member that's sometimes more moral than her and sometimes a useless cunt doesn't seem right. If he wanted to create a distinction between LP's practical murderhobo morality where killing fifty raiders before breakfast to save their future victims is normal and Velvet's silly peacetime morality where killing a single rapist is as inconceivable as Kkat's artificial nuvagina (heh get it because trannies cannot concieve children only groom them) he should have tried harder to make LP's violent solutions and occasional deals that make everyone happy superior to Velvet's exaggerated desire to avoid bloodshed and compromise on what matters and betray important friends to avoid betraying her precious selfish principles.

If Kkat wants to make Velvet the party's moral compass, why make her a sanctimonious cunt who sometimes gives party members shit for doing what is necessary to do the most good? If LP is supposed to be the party's moral compass, why not lock Velvet in her occasional role as "what happens when pacifism and idealism is taken further than the optimal practicality of the perfect murderhobo mindset", the designated wrong teammate who gradually grows out of his or her foolishness?

By the way, it's funny how little we know about Littlepip's life in her Stable and how it functioned. Fallout 3 started with an agonizing unskippable overly long sequence where you run around as a baby and get older every so often while interactinff with characters like Butch The Bully and Your Scientist Dad and The Mean Overseer and Amata The Overseer's Daughter, occasionally making choices that affect your character's abilities/karma morality score. There's even a General Occupational Aptitude Test where you're asked 9 theoretical cringey meme-dialogue questions and your answers determine your Tagged Skills (3 skills your character excells in) and what job your character would have if the plot of Fallout 3 didn't happen. Science Dad escapes and Overseer randomly turns evil and wants innocents dead and you could save your bully's drunk mom from RadRoaches or leave her, very basic cliche writing.
But...
A competent writer could elaborate more on Vault Dweller/Stable Dweller life and what LP's stable is like, who she knew, what she did for fun, and so on. We could get a taste of the good life to contrast with shitty wasteland life. Or LP could suffer so much at home the Wasteland feels like a step up since raiders can be shot and aren't bullies protected by the Stable Overmare. What the hell do we really know about LP's stable besides the fact that Velvet is from it, the poners love velvet, LP's disliked, and she had one slumber party?
Imagine how excited we'd all be to see LP return home a changed mare and a hero ready to save all the ponies who doubted or mocked or belittled or bullied her as a foal, if this story was written competently. This could be the turning point in her character arc where she goes from "I must return home with Velvet in tow to reclaim what I lost thanks to that fucker" to "Fuck my home, I need to save the Wasteland with Velvet's help now that we've both grown as ponies!". This could be one of the story's highlights but I expect it to suck gay nigger balls.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
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No.307358
307386 307395 307921
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>>307339

Here is how this thing is initially described:

>I could see sparkling lights in the air, like part of the night sky had descended through the clouds and landed in the middle of the farm. A swarm of evil stars. The pin-point lights of muzzle flashes danced across the ground all around it.
It's a little difficult to visualize, but I think what is being described here is basically an invisible monster that also has glowing lights inside of it. Iirc the Ursa Minors or Majors or whatever from MLP were drawn as translucent bears with stars in their body, so my best guess is that we're dealing with a mutated version of this.

Anyway, it turns out the zebras have their own mythology about whatever the hell this thing is:

>The zebra’s eyes were wide with horror. “Star-spawn!”

Despite the fact that this is all Xenith has to say about this thing, and that "star-spawn" on its own could be interpreted as meaning nearly anything, Littlepoop uses her Mary Sue powers to divine the following:

>What the Steel Rangers fought was a horror out of zebra legends -- a creature from beyond the moon, unleashed upon the world eons ago as a ‘gift’ from the stars.

Her next bit of description is a tad more helpful:

>The creature was massive and completely invisible save for the surging, living constellations of light that seemed to float around and inside of it. I brought up my Eyes-Forward Sparkle, but while the compass burst with lights for the ponies on the ground, most of which were a hostile red, my PipBuck couldn’t lock onto the entity they were fighting at all. As far as it was concerned, nothing was there.
My money is still on this being a radioactive Ursa Minor or some shit, but who even knows? I guess we'll wait and see. In any event, the main takeaway seems to be that, for now, the Rangers are focusing their attention on fighting this thing, and are thus presumably not attacking the stable just yet.

One would logically think that the group would see this as a godsend. Their enemy is currently engaged fighting some kind of superpowered Lovecraftian horror, which means that best case scenario the creature will just obliterate the Rangers without LP & Co. even needing to lift a hoof; worst case scenario this thing should at least buy them enough time for Calamity to run and get his weapons out of storage. However, in complete defiance of even this basic level of common sense, LP decides that they should go down and help the Rangers fight this thing, on the off-chance that they might be more receptive to diplomacy afterward...or something. I guess.

>The Steel Rangers on the ground had been nearly decimated. There were at least a dozen corpses in crushed and mangled armor. Nowhere near the forces that SteelHooves estimated had been sent to take the Stable. I could make out three remaining from the dim light of their E.F.S. visors and the brilliant flashes from their weapons.
Case in point: the problem has all but solved itself; it makes absolutely zero sense for LP & Co. to get involved in this fight. If the monster has killed an entire army of these guys, the likelihood of the last three surviving and successfully butchering the inhabitants of Stable 2 are near-zero. They probably don't even need to run by Calamity's weapons stash at this point; they can just set down at a safe distance, pop some popcorn, and watch the show.

Anyway, they fly in and start shooting at this thing. For awhile it seems nigh invincible, but then they figure out that if Velvet hits it with her anesthetic spell it stuns it for a few seconds. This allows SteelHooves to somehow shove a missile through its forehead and...you know what? Fuck it; the details here don't actually matter. All that matters is, this thing is a gigantic, preposterously strong monster that wiped out an entire platoon of Steel Rangers, yet these four imbeciles manage to use a single dumb trick to kill it in a single move. Pretty much how every other fight has played out in this story. Ridiculous bullshit is par for the course at this point. Moving on.

Page break. We rejoin LP in the aftermath of the "fight" against the "star spawn." We receive confirmation from SteelHooves that this creature was, in fact, an Ursa Minor.

>Calamity had come to with a weary groan. Finding himself hanging upside down in the Sky Bandit’s harness, he waved his forelegs, as if hoping to flip the entire passenger wagon back over. It wasn’t going to work.
>“Here, let me help,” I called out and magically unhooked the harness. Calamity fell onto his back with a thump.
>“Oof!”
I'm not proud of myself, but I'll admit kkat's imagery here made me chuckle.

Anyway, the wagon crash-landed when the Ursa kerploded, but apart from that everyone is basically okay. Velvet is about to initiate her medical-pony subroutine, when they are suddenly reminded that there are still some Rangers left, and that fighting them is what they originally came here to do.

>“Oh wow,” came a sweet mare’s voice from the second suit. “Look, it’s Elder SteelHooves.”
>“Star Paladin SteelHooves,” the other corrected swiftly.
Author's italics preserved. Although the Ranger ranks still haven't been explained by the text, we've gotten a clear enough picture of how their pecking order works at this point to basically follow this. What is still unclear, however, is what exactly the debate is over SteelHooves' rank. His official rank seems to be "Star Paladin," but he's been called "Elder" multiple times now. This latest comment from Soldier A seems to deliberately call attention to the discrepancy. Ordinarily, this would mean that there is some part of his backstory that hasn't been revealed yet, and the author is foreshadowing its eventual significance; in that case I'd just hold my horses and see where it's going. However, with kkat, you really never know.
Anonymous
548c81c
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No.307386
307409
ifyourubanalicornstummydotheyallfeelitatthesametime.jpg
>>307326
>This is an example of exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. We've never met any of these ponies, and the author hasn't made an effort to make us feel any of these connections. We've never heard anything about LP having a slumber party before, and her dreary monologues about how friendless and unloved she was when she lived at the stable doesn't make it seem plausible that she would have ever been invited to one.
>
>In fact, kkat really hasn't told us very much at all about what day to day life was like in the stables, and once again we see a single problem cascading and causing multiple problems. Not only do we not feel the proper emotion in this scene, we are lacking in practical information that would help us understand the story.
This is a very good point, and it ties back to what I mentioned a while back about how the secondary characters in this story are treated. Everyone that isn't named and important fits neatly into one of two boxes - "evil villain who must die" and "nameless innocent who must be saved and then promptly forgotten". Pip's stable seems to be falling directly into the latter box, except it's even more egregious here because she (and us, by extension) is supposed to feel a particularly acute sense of urgency at the news that these characters are in danger.

Fallout 3 does have a "home vault under attack" quest of sorts, except it's a civil war rather than an invasion. 3's writing is ass, but there are at least a handful of named characters that were depicted growing up alongside the player character and can be friends or rivals to the player depending on how the game's intro went down. But here, it's just another gaggle of faceless NPCs needing rescue.

>>307328
>“Stop it! All of you!” I stomped with all hooves, shaking. “We can’t tear apart now. Our home… my home… they need us! What good are we to them if we’re already bleeding to death when we get there?”
It says a lot that Kkat apparently can't tell the difference between a rousing piece of leadership and a temper tantrum.

>>307339
>SteelHooves was staring in the other direction, his visor gazing out into the darkness. Finally, he admitted with a low rumble, “I don’t understand why Elder Blueberry Sabre is doing this.”
Why is Steelhooves quietly going along with Littlepip on a mission which, most likely, will involve killing any number of his comrades? There's obviously an ideological split going on within the rangers and Steelhooves is clearly involved in it, but isn't he even a little conflicted over the possibility of fighting his own order? Or have Littlepip's sue powers already secured his undying (heh) loyalty by mere proximity?

>>307358
The ursa fight exists solely so that Pip and friends can talk to some of the rangers rather than murdering them on sight. Unless I'm deeply mistaken, starspawn never ever come up again and this one's appearance is never explained. It takes a special kind of special to throw in a zero-effort kaiju battle for the sake of prefacing a conversation.

>What is still unclear, however, is what exactly the debate is over SteelHooves' rank. His official rank seems to be "Star Paladin," but he's been called "Elder" multiple times now. This latest comment from Soldier A seems to deliberately call attention to the discrepancy.
In the Fallout games at least, a Brotherhood of Steel elder leads a local chapter while a star paladin is the next rank down, like a senior field commander. Elders tend to be promoted from star paladins. Assuming that FoE copies the ranking scheme directly, the question of Steelhooves' rank is essentially over whether he's a colonel or a general. It sure would help if he made some effort to clarify, and I'm not sure either rank would continue to apply to someone who spends their time living alone in a shack and hunting mutants for no apparent reason, but there you go.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.307389
307921
Wait a fucking second, Steelhooves's excuse for not trying to take over the Steel Rangers was that he didn't want to start a civil war by trying to take over.
But a civil war between who? A few cunty underlings who want to be in charge, a few pricks who like being kleptomaniac tech hoarders, and any loons who are such traitors to AJ's memory they'd rather be Steal Rangers and steal everyone's tech than be good Steel Rangers who help ponies and seek to bring back old-world technological marvels to the Wasteland's populace while protecting said populace from Alicorns? Surely the Steel Rangers can't be more than 50% cunts who'd refuse to help AJ's 200 year old boyfriend honour AJ's memory and actively work against it to the point of taking up arms and trying to kill Steelhooves over it. Any sort of covol war would end pretty fucking quickly if it ever started at all. Maybe if Steelhooves was thirty this would make more sence but he is over 200 and older than this organization. It makes no sense that he wouldn't try to guide it onto a better path from the start. Who the fuck could possibly have a stronger claim to the "throne" than Steelhooves? A descendant of AJ's old janitor? A descendant of AJ's old accountant? A descendant of some inventor who worked for Applejack? A descendant of a regional manager of one of AJ's many factories? A ghoulified 200 year old pool cleaner who cucked Steelhooves once?
And now, during what might be a power play involving different regional sects of the same big organization, Steelhooves is marching with LP to stop his faction from doing what they wouldn't be doing right now if he's just manned up (ponied up, whatever) and taken over this faction.
He didn't want to kill Steel Rangers then but he doesn't seem particularly torn up about the idea of potentially having to kill some now. Knuckles The Echidna had more hesitation than this about fighting the Nocturnus Clan in Sonic Chronicles, and they were just evil members of his race, and he thought he was the last Echidna until now. But Steelhooves over here is fucking ancient and probably more powerful than anypony working for him or above him. He has no reason to spend 200 years living in a cuckshed pissing grenades and bullets away on Alicorns in the middle of fucking nowhere when he could be leading this society into a better era.

A lot of the Equestrian Wasteland's problems can be traced back to canon ponies who did their best and failed horribly before dying horribly. But this OC has Kkat's seal of approval and plot armor privilege even though he's a failure just like the rest. He couldn't stop this organization from becoming shit. Did he even try? What the fuck am I supposed to think of this fucking giga-boomer?

Also, isn't it daft that just like in Fallout 3, the alicorn hunters of the Steel Rangers run around killing alicorns at random without any plan or any trading caravans to guard from alicorn attacks and so on? It's just like in Fallout 3 where you'd sometimes see a few power armoured fags in buttfuck nowhere fighting over resourceless bombed building ruins or underground in ghoul-infested subway tunnels slaying ghouls and super mutants en masse who are nowhere near population centers while doing nothing to protect these population centers and their trade routes from raiders and super mutants and wildlife and other threats.

Except Kkat wants the Steel Rangers to be evil too, so they're soooo obsessed with hoarding technology and possibly gaining ground they want to invade LP's stable violently just to take its shiny trinkets. Funny, I don't recall them ever acting this extreme in a Fallout game before. Fallout 4 and its Kylehood Of Chad Anti-Robot "Racists" wasn't out yet. They've prioritized tech over human life before but never to this extent if I recall correctly. Saving your vault from invaders... Ironically, in Fallout 1 you had to save your vault from invaders by stopping the Super Mutants before they got around to you. But here, right after she is given the "kill alicorns" quest, she is distracted by the dumbest move the Steel Rangers could make if they're supposed to want the Alicorns stopped and Marey Sue on their side.

Hell, if the Steel Rangers are the type to conquer Stables, why haven't they already done this so often that they don't give a shit about LP's Stable? Can't be that hard to slaughter a populace of mainly civilians with mediocre weapons and armour at best unless bizarre experiments made them greater or lesser than they should be. Kkat calls the Water Talisman valuable but DJ Cuntmachine had one for a decorative water feature inside a building.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
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No.307395
307396 307428
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>>307358

>“And keep your weapon locked on him, Knight Strawberry Lemonade.”
There's one other thing I've noticed that I'm willing to pay kkat a small compliment on. Most of the major characters in this story have names like Littlepip, Calamity, Red Eye, SteelHooves, and so forth that sound, if not necessarily tough or bad-ass, at least consistent with the edgy setting. However, I've noticed that so far all of the Steel Rangers (excepting SteelHooves) have been given very silly names (Cottage Cheese, Poppyseed, Strawberry Lemonade), that sound more like traditional pony names, ie the kind of names you'd expect characters in the show to have. I suspect this was done on purpose for the sake of levity; the "Steel Rangers" are the tough, battle-hardened stereotypical Fallout-type characters, yet underneath the armor they're all candy-colored ponies with cutesy names. I approve of this sort of thing, and it's nice to see that kkat is capable of occasionally having a sense of humor about his otherwise edgelord-tier premise.

However, this actually segues into a question that's been on my mind for some time now. I'm curious how exactly the Steel Rangers have managed to survive as an institution for as long as they have. For the most part Equestria seems to have completely collapsed; there is no central government, no law, no police force, no social organization of any kind. However, this pseudo-religious military unit has somehow managed to survive intact for the past 200 years.

Obviously, SteelHooves himself makes sense. He was alive during the war, and has survived due to his being a ghoul. However, what about the others? They all seem mortal enough. How does this organization replenish its ranks? Do they recruit from the surrounding countryside, maybe seek out ponies who are disillusioned by all the rape and pillage and anarchy and are looking for something to believe in? Do they marry each other and raise their children to become Rangers? How does this all work? What makes a pony like Strawberry Lemonade join up with a paramilitary group of fanatics obsessed with collecting and hoarding wartime technology? I'm just mildly curious. There are enough plausible explanations that it's not really a continuity issue, but it's the kind of question the author should ideally put some thought into and have an answer for.

Anyway, there is a bit of a standoff here between SteelHooves and these two. Each side takes a predictable stance: SteelHooves observes that Stable 2 was the home of AJ's family, and she founded their order, and it's morally wrong for them to attack this stable, and so forth. The other Ranger, whose name is not given and who appears to be Strawberry Lemonade's commanding officer, mostly just bleats about following orders. Strawberry Lemonade seems to agree with SteelHooves that the operation is morally wrong. The conversation is abruptly cut short when Calamity murders the commanding Ranger:

>The paladin turned to face the knight, a back-mounted light machine gun swiveling to lock on her now. “You will bring up your Sparkle and lock on target or you will be facing a court marshal for disloyalty before the sun next sets!” the paladin growled. “Do I make my-“
>Blam!
>The paladin fell, twin bullet holes forming black zeroes on his armored helmet.
>Knight Strawberry Lemonade backed up in shock. The rest of us turned to Calamity.
>“What? Ah gave diplomacy a chance. He obviously wasn’t ‘bout t’ join the good guys.”
I should have known this character was marked for death when the author neglected to give him a name. Also, it's "court martial," not "court marshal."

Page break. With the "fight" out of the way, Velvet can now focus on healing everyone's wounds while the party rests up. Meanwhile, the Rangers chatter amongst themselves about goings-on in the Ranger world.

Apparently, this Cottage Cheese fellow we heard about earlier is dying, and he wants to specifically take Stable 29 for some reason. Why he is currently focused on trying to take Stable 2 instead is not explained. Strawberry Lemonade has this to say:

>He’s focused on taking Stable Twenty-Nine before he dies. That’s where he is, with Star Paladin Crossroads. He invited Elder Blueberry Sabre to lead the acquisition of Stable Two, along with Star Paladin Nova Rage.
This seems to imply that he's already taken Stable 29, and is presently there alongside this other Star Paladin named Crossroads. I'm a bit confused here, since Stable 29 was the one that had the AI and the failing water crystal. This stable is uninhabited, so it doesn't seem like "taking" it would pose any serious difficulty. Also, this still doesn't explain how Stable 2 factors into things.

Incidentally, it seems that once again I've jumped the gun on giving kkat praise for something; it seems I was wrong about the naming convention for the Rangers. It's beginning to look like most of these guys have the same kind of edgelord names as the other characters in this story.

Anyway, it gets quite confusing from here:

>“Of course he did,” SteelHooves commented. “Star Paladin Crossroads had pushed for me to become an Elder. She has the same sentiments that I do. Cottage must have known there was no way Cross would agree to the taking of Stable Two.” He stomped. “Star Paladin Nova Rage, on the other hoof, is a M.W.T. traditionalist just like Elder Blueberry Sabre.”
My guess is the author means for SteelHooves to be talking over the reader's head a little here; we don't know who any of these characters are, and we don't know anything about the internal politics of the Ranger organization, so we aren't going to be able to follow most of this. Best I can figure, there is some kind of internal schism within the Rangers. Blueberry Sabre (whom we've met) and this Nova Rage (whom we haven't) seem to be on the "traditionalist" faction, whatever that means exactly, while SteelHooves and this Crossroads seem to be on the opposing side.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307396
307403 307428
1597766365203.jpg
>>307395

>Calamity wiggled his left wing. It had suffered injury in the crash and now Velvet had it mummified in bandages. “Reckon this Cottage feller wants the Crusader in Stable Twenty-Nine? Live forever inside a machine?”
I had to read this a couple of times and double-check the wiki before I could figure out what the hell Calamity is even talking about. "Crusader" in this context appears to refer to the Crusader Maneframe computer, the one that had the AI that was running the Stable until it killed everyone.

What isn't explained here is what the hell this computer would have to do with Cottage Cheese's desire for immortality. Can the Crusader computer grant immortality somehow? I don't remember anything like that coming up when they were exploring that particular stable. It hasn't been mentioned anywhere else in the text that I can recall.

>“But that’s insane,” I asserted. “The Crusader can take an imprint, a copy of a pony’s mind, but it’s not like the pony actually becomes part of the machine. Cottage Cheese would still be just as dead when he died.”
First of all, what the fuck? I restate my original position: we have heard no mention of this computer being able to do any of these things. Second of all, even if it can, there is no reason why either Littlepoop or Calamity should know anything about it. Third, this is all starting to sound like a bad ripoff of Friendship is Optimal.

And it just keeps going:

>“Unless,” Velvet Remedy suggested, “He thought he could really put himself into it, mind and soul.” It took me a moment to realize what she was thinking: a soul jar. Blackwing’s Talon group had been hunting for information on The Black Book for somepony. Now I suspected I knew who. If a soul jar could be made out of anything, why not a Crusader? I suddenly imagined the Elder who ordered the attack on my home living forever in an indestructible computer. There was no way I could let that happen! He didn’t get eternal life as a reward for this murder.
I have literally no idea what the hell they are even talking about anymore.

This whole conversation is classic kkat: it makes absolutely no sense, it makes obscure references to long-forgotten details from several chapters ago, it's a completely inappropriate topic relative to what's going on in the story currently, the characters involved seem to be pulling information they shouldn't know out of thin air, and as ever we have Littlepoop connecting dots that don't even remotely connect. It's one thing for SteelHooves and Lemonade to be talking shop over our heads; they are part of the Ranger organization and should already know quite a bit of what's going on even if we don't. However, neither Littlepoop, Velvet nor Calamity have ever met this Cottage Cheese character. They have no way of knowing what he's trying to achieve, let alone how he plans on achieving it. This business about the computer in Stable 29 granting immortality has never come up in the story to my recollection and makes absolutely no sense.

As far as all the rest of it goes, soul jars being made out of Crusaders or whatever the fuck, and all this stuff about the Talons and the Black Book, it's complete Greek to me. I think I vaguely remember something about the Talons looking for some kind of magic zebra book that had something to do with soul jars, but I can't for the life of me remember what the specifics were, or even what a soul jar is exactly. However, as far as I can tell, the gist of it is that this Cottage Cheese character wants to upload himself into the Crusader maneframe and become King of the Steel Rangers...or something. I still have no idea what any of this has to do with attacking Stable 2. Anyway, Littlepoop apparently reaches the conclusion that Cottage Cheese is evil because reasons, and as such he is now marked for death.

This bizarre conversation concludes with Strawberry Lemonade telling SteelHooves that she can't get involved in...whatever he's trying to do...because she doesn't want to attack other Rangers. Then, this happens:

>He turned to us. “Are we ready?”
>I stood, floating the zebra rifle to my right and Little Macintosh to my left. From what the knight had told us, Elder Blueberry Sabre had left a fifth of their force guarding the way in, a precaution against us as much as the horrors slowly emptying into Ponyville from the Everfree Forest. Truth was, I was not ready. But every moment we spent talking and healing was one more for the four dozen Steel Rangers inside to tear their way into the Security and Overmare’s wing and slaughter everypony they hadn’t killed in their initial strike. They couldn’t wait for me to be ready.
Soooooo....the Steel Rangers actually did invade the stable? They weren't all killed by the Ursa Minor before they could get inside, as the text implied? So...basically...this means that...even though Littlepoop spent the first three microscenes of this chapter ranting and raving about getting inside her home and saving her old stablemates from being slaughtered...she prioritized helping her enemies fight an Ursa Minor that just appeared suddenly out of nowhere...and afterward she sat around chewing the fat with this Strawberry Lemonade about some internal Ranger bullshit that has literally fuck-all to do with her...and all the while, the bulk of the Ranger force has been downstairs slaughtering the very ponies she came all this way to protect? What the actual fuck?!? She didn't want to let Calamity take a 15 minute detour to pick up some weapons, yet realistically they've all been sitting here chatting for probably about that long, and absolutely nothing meaningful has been accomplished here. I'm just...I don't even know what to make of this autism anymore.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307403
307407 307921
Unlucky_14140b_1877122.jpg
>>307396

Page break. They are now inside the foyer of the Stable.

>“This is Velvet Remedy’s home,” he muttered. “Li’lpip’s home.” I’m pretty sure he didn’t know I could hear him. Before the Pinkie Pie statuette, I probably wouldn’t have been able to.
What the fuck does the Pinkie Pie statuette have to do with anything? Why is this being mentioned now? Iirc, those statues all boost a particular attribute, and though I've long since forgotten which attributes were boosted by which statues, I'm assuming Pinkie's had something to do with improved hearing. However, that shit has fuck-all to do with what's going on, and it's distracting to bring up such an obscure detail from such a long time ago, when we are meant to be focusing on something presumably much more important.

>The skeletons which littered the floor had been crushed and broken, trampled by an army of metal hooves. I felt a twisted sickness welling up within the reservoir of rage that was filling my head. Nopony knew who they were, but they deserved better than this. I felt part of my anger turn in on myself. Why had I not returned to bury them? They died at the door to my Stable.
Oh, please. At this point we've probably seen more skeletons in this story than actual characters. Did LP ever give a shit about any of them up until now? She didn't even dig a grave for Pinkie Pie, whose Twilight Sparkle statue she callously stole out of her ribcage; why the fuck would she suddenly spare a thought for the ancient bones of a bunch of long-dead NPCs?

What's funny is that even Littlepoop realizes she's being a hypocrite here:

>But then, the Equestrian Wasteland was filled with skeletons. I hadn’t treated any of the others any better. Not even the skeletons of Apple Bloom or Pinkie Pie. But at least I hadn’t defiled them. I hadn’t smashed them under hoof without even caring.
I think we may be working from different definitions of the word "defiled." As I recall, LP stole a statue from Pinkie Pie and a PipBuck from Apple Bloom. Respect for the dead means leaving them be; if you rob somepony's grave you don't get to climb up on a pedestal just because you chose not to also stomp their skeleton into powder.

Anyway, they go inside the stable, and the scene that greets them is about what you'd expect. Blood, guts, dead ponies all over the place, blah blah blah, edge edge edge.

>The Overmare had sent half a dozen ponies to greet whomever was coming in. Only two of them, Stable security guards, were armed. The others had come bearing only hopes of friendship. Scattered near the open muzzle of a magenta-coated young mare was a bouquet of flowers, a welcoming gift. The white flower petals were stained red. And the Steel Rangers had gunned them down.
Again, this is probably supposed to be a heart-wrenching moment, but somehow whenever kkat attempts tragedy it always turns into comedy.

Part of what makes this absurd is that, again, we really don't know that much about the culture of this stable or how it operated. Did the ponies who lived here know anything about what was going on outside? Presumably they at least knew that there had been a war, so it's fairly ridiculous to imagine they would be naive enough to greet a bunch of armored soldiers who showed up on their doorstep one day with candy and flowers. If the stable guards were poorly trained or inept and they had been simply slaughtered by a superior fighting force it would be one thing, but this is just too much.

Also, many of the other stables we've seen have had automated turrets and whatnot installed; in fact, as I recall Stable 29 had them all over the place. I know the design varied from stable to stable, but it stands to reason that, considering the purpose these places were designed for, each one would have been equipped with a basic defense system.

Anyway, this just keeps getting sillier and sillier. Most of it isn't worth going over, but then again, I can't resist highlighting a few gems:

>The pony in my head stood teetering on the edge of a great, dark spiral. A bath covered with bones that lead forever downward into blackness. The currents of my rage pulled her towards it, a tidal force of crimson pouring into the abyss.
kek

>I pulled her back, and my rage shattered. The horror and sorrow and hurt that had been building just behind flooded in. I collapsed to my knees, sobbing openly.
double kek

>I realized I recognized the yellow-coated mare who lay disembowled in the corner… but I couldn’t’ remember when I had met her. Or what her name was. And that made it so much worse. Why couldn’t I remember her name? She deserved to have her name remembered. She deserved to be alive!
triple kek. Incidentally, "disemboweled" is misspelled here.

Anyway, blah blah blah. Littlepoop is completely overwhelmed with sorrow at seeing all of these dead NPCs she barely interacted with when she lived here, and hasn't once thought about since she left. She feels that she can no longer carry out her duties as chief murderhobo, so Velvet Remedy offers to take the lead.

>“Littlepip has been strong long enough,” I heard her say. “This is my home too. I’ll take it from here.”
all my keks.

Page break. It seems that the sight of so many wittle-bitty pony-wonies all diseboweley-wowlied has sent Littlepoop into yet another of her murderous rages, so all talk of diplomacy is now off the table. However, despite the significance the author is trying like mad to imbue this scene with, and despite the obvious technical superiority of the enemy the group is facing, this mostly just plays out like another tedious dungeon crawl. They poke around, find some bodies, and Littlepoop effortlessly slaughters a single Steel Ranger who is just wandering around by himself for some reason. Otherwise, the group encounters no opposition to their ingress, even though there are supposed to be four dozen of these well-trained, well-disciplined warriors in here, who also expected that LP and her group might be following them.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307407
307408 307409 307429
9759C2D8D25D22F3B721427989D5D01B-1375181.png
>>307403

Anyway, it seems that the Overmare had kind-of a plan here: she sent the welcoming committee to see how the Rangers responded, and then when they slaughtered everyone, she locked down the rest of the stable. Presumably, the survivors are now holed up in some kind of panic room or something. I'm assuming kkat views this as some kind of coldly-calculated but essentially pragmatic approach to the problem. However, my personal way of handling it would be to just, you know, not open the fucking door for the fucking platoon of heavily-armored soldiers that suddenly showed up one day. Seriously; if these stables are built to withstand a nuclear attack, they should be able to fend off a few larpers in cyborg-armor; just lock down the stable, switch on the automated turrets, and wait until the problem sorts itself out. It's not that hard.

>So far, the Maintenance wing had been hit the worst. The Steel Rangers had moved to secure it first, probably to prevent anypony from sabotaging the technology they were most interested in.
Why would the Rangers assume anypony would bother to do this? These ponies have no idea why these guys are here, and even if they did, most of them would be too busy running for their lives to give a shit about sabotaging the stupid PipBucks, or whatever they want exactly.

>I turned the familiar corner and found myself face-to-face with the PipBuck Technician’s stall. A fresh surge of emotion hit me as I saw the black scorchmarks on the walls I had once cleaned. A red trail of blood ran along one wall, dipping at the end until it met the corpse of my mentor. If I ignored the missing leg, I could almost pretend that he was asleep on the job again.
>This was not the mural I had once hoped for.
Fucking kek. Also, kkat, would it have killed you to give this guy a name? This is probably the only pony living in the stable that Littlepoop had any actual interaction with; seems like she should have at least called him something other than "my mentor."

Anyway, the exploration and slow-paced carnage continues. Somehow, despite these Rangers being armored with technology infinitely superior to anything LP & Co. have on them, and despite them being ostensibly some kind of highly-disciplined paramilitary force, and despite LP being in a state of grief and rage that should logically be clouding her judgement at least somewhat, and despite her being kind of an impulsive hothead to begin with, they encounter no serious opposition. The few Rangers they actually meet are just wandering around solo or in pairs like dumb AI video-game guards, and LP is somehow able to just walk right up and blast them point-blank with her fucking revolver. The ones she doesn't manage to kill are taken out equally effortlessly by Calamity and Xenith.

>I turned to walk out and froze as I spotted my mentor’s hammock. There was an empty Sparkle~Cola bottle and a maintenance book (TLC Squared: “Tender Loving Care for Totally Lost Causes”) laying on the floor beneath it. I remembered how my mentor would skim that book while talking in a direction vaguely connected to where I was sitting in rapt attention. Shedding tears of painful nostalgia, I floated the book into one of my saddlebags.
Even now, this little twat can't resist being a grave-robbing klepto.

Page break.

>As we swept further into Maintenance, we started seeing glowing piles of green residue or pink ash -- all that remained of ponies killed with magical energy weapons – scattered amongst the massacred ponies of Stable Two. Calamity found that disturbing.
What specifically does he find disturbing about it, and why? They literally see shit like this every day.

Anyway, the group continues its long, bloody slog through Stable 2. They encounter a couple more Rangers, and SteelHooves tells them that the mission they are on is some kind of violation of their honor code or whatever, and they respond by telling him he's violated his oath or whatever and that he's under arrest. He then fires missiles at them in the enclosed space of the hallway, which as usual obliterates the enemies without damaging the environment or giving anyone hearing damage. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Now they are in the saloon, because apparently Stable 2 had one of those.

>I followed close behind, getting a surprisingly pleasant eyeful of the zebra mare’s hindquarters. I found myself cursing the slavers who had scarred it so.
I'm not sure how many waves this story ever made in progressive brony circles for having a lesbian protagonist, but it's worth pointing out that her "lesbianism" isn't really that believable; this character feels less like a genuine lesbian and more like a horny degenerate cross-dressing, dickless man's idea of what a lesbian is. The author really didn't put any more serious thought into his dyke protagonist's dykiness than he put into any other aspect of her character or the story she appears in. LP basically just acts like a horny cooze-hound most of the time; you could easily swap this character out for a male without changing much of anything. The only effect would be that her constant ass-ogling, particularly at inappropriate times like this, would suddenly come across as sexist to the same people who would have previously lauded it as progressive.

>Mr. and Mrs. Sparkle Cider were dumped in a far corner, their bodies bleeding into each other. Mr. Sparkle Cider had always given me free ice cream when I was younger. (Well, until he caught me lockpicking his wine cabinet.) His wife had been one of my mother’s friends.
So she knows these ponies' names but she doesn't know the name of the guy she worked alongside for a period of actual years?

Anyway, there's some more edgy descriptions of their bodies, and then Velvet Remedy and SteelHooves rig up the stage microphone that is in here so SteelHooves can broadcast a speech over the PA system. I'm almost out of space, so I will deal with his announcement in a new post.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307408
307429
goodending.png
>>307407
>Anyway, it seems that the Overmare had kind-of a plan here: she sent the welcoming committee to see how the Rangers responded, and then when they slaughtered everyone, she locked down the rest of the stable. Presumably, the survivors are now holed up in some kind of panic room or something. I'm assuming kkat views this as some kind of coldly-calculated but essentially pragmatic approach to the problem. However, my personal way of handling it would be to just, you know, not open the fucking door for the fucking platoon of heavily-armored soldiers that suddenly showed up one day. Seriously; if these stables are built to withstand a nuclear attack, they should be able to fend off a few larpers in cyborg-armor; just lock down the stable, switch on the automated turrets, and wait until the problem sorts itself out. It's not that hard.
This part in particular always baffled me. The Overmare seems to have taken the (relatively) savvy option of sending a small welcoming party to greet the rangers at the door while everyone else shelters deeper in the stable in case they turn out to be hostile. Fair enough. We later discover that this was precisely her plan. But if that's the case, then why are the stable's residents lying dead at their workplaces? This seems to be a case of Kkat wanting to have his cake and eat it too - he wanted the bulk of the stable's residents to survive the attack, but at the same time he wanted a gallery of pointless slaughter for Littlepip to mooch her way through and get sad/angry about...

>>I followed close behind, getting a surprisingly pleasant eyeful of the zebra mare’s hindquarters. I found myself cursing the slavers who had scarred it so.
...except he can't even commit to that tone for five fucking seconds without having his protagonist get a(n entirely figurative) boner over the rape victim she met yesterday. Then again, knowing from his past work that Kkat has a fetish for female genital mutilation and torture this was probably to be expected.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307409
307418 307449
1039695 - Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Rarity ponylicking.png
>>307407

SteelHooves now gets on the horn and makes a speech:

>This is SteelHooves, founding member and eldest living of the Steel Rangers.
I find it a little curious that SteelHooves isn't the highest-ranking Steel Ranger. My best guess is that it's something like what >>307386 said: that a Ranger who chooses to live alone in a shack in the middle of nowhere is probably not going to move up the ranks very fast. My guess is the promotions are reserved for the guys who are actually out there earning merit badges.

>I call on you to stop and consider your Oath. Consider where you are and what you are doing. Do your loyalties lie with Applejack, the Mare of the Ministry of Wartime Technology, the creator of the Steel Ranger armor and the mare who by Her own hooves, the sweat of Her brow and the honesty of Her heart forged the Steel Rangers? Or is your oath to the fearful, greedy ponies who abandon all that She stood for, turning us into little more than technology raiders, hoarding toys from the past because they have forgotten that it is virtue, not trinkets, that make a pony great?
The entire ultimatum that SteelHooves delivers here would make a lot more sense and have a much greater impact if the author had bothered to provide some cursory explanation of what all of this shit is even about. Nearly everything I know about the Steel Rangers I've inferred from information given to me by anons in this thread about the Brotherhood of Steel in the Fallout series; the text gives us almost nothing. Even with the outside information I have, it's difficult to tell exactly what parts are lifted directly from Fallout's mythology and what parts are just kkat's deranged headcanon.

Let's start with the basics. We know why the Steel Rangers existed during the war: they were created by Applejack's Ministry of Wartime Technology as some kind of elite fighting force. But what is their current purpose? All we know is that they have some kind of "oath" that they all follow, and that they have a particular fixation with pre-war technology. The "why" behind all of this is completely opaque. Case in point, this current schism. Clearly SteelHooves represents the faction that stands for what Applejack stood for, but what exactly did Applejack stand for? And what about the opposing side, the one with Cottage Cheese and whoever the fuck else? What are they trying to do, exactly? We know they go around collecting technology, but why? Do they want it so they can use it themselves? Do they want to keep others from misusing it? SteelHooves clearly feels that his organization has lost its way, but what exactly is the way? Why are Cottage Cheese's beliefs wrong, and what alternative is SteelHooves offering?

Neither of these groups has any clear objective, and for all their prattle about oaths and loyalty, neither side seems to have any actual beliefs, principles or goals sort of like every other character in this train wreck of a story. There is no obvious reason why this organization should even still exist; they just walk around in battle armor raiding stables and collecting old gadgets because...something something Fallout 3, I guess.

>Ponies who now turn their eyes on Applejack’s own home, commanding that you slaughter Her family for their greed? These orders, this operation, would be an abomination in the eyes of our Ministry’s Mare!
Yet another persistent, nagging question: why the hell are the Rangers attacking this particular stable? Yeah yeah, I know; something something technology, something Fallout 3. Seriously though, why?

Velvet's theory about their wanting supplies or a new base doesn't really hold much water; there are any number of stables out there, most of them abandoned, and the Rangers know the location of all of them, so why not just repurpose one of those for a base? Stable 2 is rather out of the way, as I understand it, so it has no obvious strategic value. Moreover, it's dangerously close to Red Eye's operations in the Everfree Forest (presumably that's where the Ursa Minor came from). Their whole concern is supposed to be that their old hideout is too close to Red Eye's Fillydelphia compound, so why move to a new place that is just as dangerous as the old one? Why attack this stable specifically, at this specific time? Surely the author has an actual reason, and he didn't just wedge this half-assed side-plot into the text just so he could do his own version of some "rescue the home stable" Fallout mission. Right?

Anyway, the rest of this is basically just SteelHooves drawing a line in the sand, and informing the Rangers that they are either with him or against him.

Page break. As it turns out, he gets an answer to his question almost immediately.

>Three Steel Rangers charged into the Saloon, battle saddles filling the room with flames and machinegun fire. SteelHooves fell in the first volley.
>I stared at the Steel Ranger, collapsed in spreading pool of the ichor that ghouls called blood.
Welp, that's that I guess. Even though I doubt he will, I'm really kind of hoping that this faggot stays dead. As a character he's mostly a colossal bore, and his entire arc relies heavily on lore that the author seems uninterested in ever explaining. Incidentally, for all their bad-ass armor and weapons, it seems like these Steel Rangers are surprisingly easy to kill.

Anyway, a fight scene follows. Rather predictable, since SteelHooves basically just gave away their position to the entire Ranger army. The usual hack and slash episode follows; the only noteworthy event is Velvet Remedy suddenly pulling some kind of flash-grenade spell out of her ass, and laying into some rangers with the combat shotgun. The fight, as usual, is eventually ended in one fell swoop: at some point, for some reason, the kitchen of the saloon suddenly explodes, killing all of the Rangers but leaving LP and her party unharmed.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.307418
307479 307921
>>307409
And now we see the madness overtaking you. So, here's a long winded chunk of background information on Fallout 1, 2, and NV power armors:

Over 95% of all ammunition CANNOT penetrate even the shitty T-45 model of power armor. In canon, the T-45 was the most widespread, clunky, least optimized, uncomfortable, but best protective system when it was designed. Only mass volume of large rifle caliber fire COULD chip the armor into nothing, though that took excessive amounts (never stated in canon, though I estimate 400 to 2,000 depending on caliber.) Then comes the T-51 which is an excellent upgrade: does everything about 25% better than the T-45 and increases the user's physical strength by 20-30%. By the time the T-51b is reaching units fighting in China, the X-01 Advanced Power Armor project reaches completion.. then all the bombs drop. During the time gap between worldwide nuking and Fallout 1, the Enclave have nearly all technology, machinery, and technical knowledge of the time owing to the number of researchers, technicians, engineers, scientists, and AI in safe offshore locations. They slowly upgrade the original X-01 to the X-01 Mark 2 model, which becomes standard for all Enclave forces during Fallout 2. At this time the number of weapons that have ammunition capable of defeating power armor has reached an all time low, and are considered essentially invincible. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood of Steel has <5,000 T-45d's and a few hundred T-51b's. While both have the same weapons, the Enclave's standard armor is 40% better in all categories. They cannot win, which is where YOU come in to help save them.

Now, the real issue here occurs in all 3 games when you get into what DT and DR, which all armors have. It is important to note that DT is Damage Threshold: this represents that armor's ability to ignore damage. Since the T-51 power armor has 12 DT it automatically negates 12 damage. Simple, right? If a shell's impact or melee weapon's strike would normally cause, let's just say 20 damage, you would only 'deal' 8. Then comes DR, which stands for Damage Resistance: a percentage reduction on incoming damage. What's 8 minus 40%? 3.2, except damage is rounded down. Now you're only dealing 3 damage. Here's the but: that isn't PENETRATING damage! In most cases you are only causing bruises and minor injuries to the person wearing that armor. Which leads me to the next point:

The vast majority of shotguns are absolutely fucking RETARDED to use against power armor. Why? The only type of shotgun ammunition seen in Fallout 1/2 and that piece of shit Tres is.. buckshot, whether 0, 00, or 000 aught, The damage calculation begins with HOW MANY PELLETS of each shell hit the target. The Combat Shotgun and H&K CAWS do 15-25 damage while the Pancor Jackhammer somehow does 19-29. This directly implies from half to all pellets (9-12 pellets per shell) land on said target. Thus, EACH pellet is being resisted by DT individually. The combat shotgun in Fallout 2 is a mix between several modern versions, and is a smoothbore, not rifled. They can't DO jack shit in canon against power armor, UNLESS you somehow find the tungsten impulse buckshot shells or tungsten flechette shells for the H&K CAWS, which are stated to no longer exist due to being produced in tiny numbers and given only to special combat units whereas the CAWS itself was mass produced. This also ignores finding intact flechette shells, which still wouldn't penetrate power armor unless they were in nearly destroyed condition. Thus, the only way to defeat power armor is with a rifled, long barrel shotgun using heavy slugs, darts, fin-stabilized darts, or explosive slugs. Several of these are present in New Vegas, and they work quite well... except you have to be a good bit closer than most other weapons.

There are some weapons in Fallout 1/2 that can injure a power armor's wearer through large numbers of impacts, or simply penetrate through said armor. Most notably from Fallout 1: the Power Fist, Super Sledge, 14MM pistol (uses AP rounds), AK-117 (also known as the 'Assault Rifle' in game) with AP rounds, the DKS-501 sniper rifle, Plasma Pistol, Laser Rifle, Gatling Laser, Plasma Rifle, dynamite, plastic explosives, and of course a Rocket Launcher.

Fallout 2 adds a few more: Mega Power Fist, Needler Pistol, PPK-12 Gauss Pistol, H&K G11 and G11E, FN FAL with AP ammo, the M72 Gauss Rifle, Vindicator Minigun, Light Support Weapon, the Bozar, YK32 Pulse Pistol, and lastly the YK42B Pulse Rifle.

Most of these rely on volume of fire to quite literally bruise the wearer to death, whether internal organs, bones, and the brain. This is an actual, valid military tactic used in the modern era against Class IV and V armors. In particular, the Rocket Launcher (using AP warheads), DKS-501, Laser Rifle, Gatling Laser, Plasma Rifle, Pulse Pistol/Rifle, and the Gauss Pistol/Rifle are the only ones directly stated to penetrate T-51b. Everything else is death from painful impacts.

Unfortunately, where this begins to fail on a quickly increasing scale is when you start taking Perks that increase critical chance, critical damage, and negating small amounts of DT or DR. There are a few of those in 2 and a wide variety in New Vegas. To be however, most power armor in New Vegas has been significantly improved over the base models in Fallout 2 and are much more difficult to deal with.

In sum: Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas get it right. You need specialized ammunition fired from specialized weapons to penetrate power armor. Or, you need a powerful energy weapon to overcome that protection, which are hard to get ahold of. In New Vegas, you can find, buy, and make overcharged energy cells that have better DT and DR penetration, though they significantly fuck your weapon up much more so than standard.

Who is a faggot? kkuck is.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.307428
this-meme-is-from-the-future.jpg
>>307395
I guess I could tell you how questions like "Where do the Steel Rangers aka the BOS get their members?" were answered in canon Fallouts but that would be good writing from an external source and Kkat shouldn't get credit for that.
BOS used to be part of the US Military but they decided this was the best way to prevent another nuclear hololol: making the Paladins crusade to get tech, making the scribes learn and maintain tech, while not letting ignorant "Outsiders" have nukes. or other potentially-dangerous technologies.
I wish there was a third type of BOS member. Rule Of Threes, and all that. Didn't the NatSocs have 3 different types of members, or something? Then again I guess exclusively having a knightly caste of fighters and priestly caste of smart tech-fixers fits their theme. But maybe a dedicated Nun Caste for female breeders and child-raisers so they aren't wasted in combat or tech-maintaining roles would help their declining birth rates.
Anyway the BOS exclusively recruit from their own offspring. Their "Holy Codex" tells them not to recruit outsiders, but exceptions can be made for incredibly cool individuals who've done multiple good deeds for the Brotherhood. BOS chapters that let too many Wastelanders join are violating the codex and the Circle Of Steel will fuck them up for it by sending assassins.
>>307396
I think Kkat forgot to establish this ahead of time but Maneframe computers (And the ZAX Fallout computers they're ripping off) can scan your brain and simulate an artificial copy of your brain within them.
There is a motherfucking reason why the Think Tank from FNV are brains in jars while House seems like an AI but is really an old man in a pod. If simulated copies of you really were you, nobody would try other life-extension methods in this setting.

Anyone who thinks a screenshot of your brain animated by AI=you must logically also think an office photocopier's snapshot of your bare asscheeks animated by AI=you. Unironically fuck the Fanatical Materialists who deny the existence of a soul and individual consciousness. A photograph of the Grand Canyon isn't the real deal, even if an AI simulates a convincing 3D copy of the real deal from this photograph.

But hey, Kkat could always make the Crusader Maneframe computers magic things that magically store pony souls and simulate them a magical fake paradise.
Though it would raise questions like "why the fuck didn't the AI that killed its poners for running out of water do this to preserve them?" Kkat lacks an answer for.

>soul jar
oh right, I forgot magical soul information contained in The Black Book tells you how to put souls within objects, or split a soul apart and seal fragments of the soul in objects. Both processes turn the soul-containing object indestructible.
Kkat, thanks for reminding me you're a faggot who never considered how OP a soul-containing invincible Power Armour suit or Door or Riot Shield or Gun that never takes damage or needs maintaining would be.
I forget if the origin of the MLP Statuettes has been revealed yet, but RARITY HAD THE BLACK BOOK. ZIGGERS MADE IT. HOW DID THE ZIGGERS GET IT OR LEARN ABOUT ALL THIS SOUL SHIT? LMAO WHO KNOWS. DURING HER EXPERIMENTS, HER OWN SOUL WAS SPLIT MULTIPLE TIMES IN SECRET AND INFUSED INTO THESE STATUETTES. EACH FRAGMENT FOR A NON-RARITY MANE SIX MEMBER WAS THEN GIVEN SOUL INFORMATION OF THOSE PONERS TAKEN FROM "SOUL SCANS". THE RESULT? MANY STATUETTES THAT BOOST YOUR STATS SLIGHTLY WHEN IN YOUR POSSESSION, AND ARE INDESTRUCTIBLE. ALL THIS, SO LITTLESHIT COULD HAVE SOME UNIMPORTANT COLLECTABLES TO GATHER. WHY THE SHITBUGGERING NIGGER-SPAWNING FFFUCK ACCORDING TO HER SHE THOUGHT THESE STATUETTES WOULD CREATE RESPAWN POINTS LIKE HOW THE "HORCRUXES" IN HARRY POTTER FUNCTION, WHICH IS RETARDED. UPON DISCOVERING YOU CAN CREATE INVINCIBLE OBJECTS WHY THE FUCK WOULDN'T YOU EXPERIMENT WITH INVINCIBLE GUNS AND ROBOTS AND RIOT SHIELDS AND BUILDINGS AND BUNKERS AND POWER ARMOUR AND TANKS AND JET FIGHTERS WITH BOMB-DROPPING CAPABILITY, OR BOOKS CONTAINING SOULS/SOUL FRAGMENTS, AND SO ON? IF SOME FAGGOT WANTS HIS SOUL TRAPPED WITHIN A ZAX SUPERCOMPUTER, THEN SURELY A SOUL CAN HAVE SOME MEASURE OF INFLUENCE OVER THE OBJECT. IF A COMPUTER CAN GIVE ORDERS AND SPEAK, WHAT ABOUT A SMALLER COMPUTER LIKE A PIPBOY? WHAT ABOUT A BOOK? IF YOU CAN SPLIT SOUL 1 INTO 10 FRAGMENTS THEN IMPRINT A COPY OF THE SOUL DATA OF 9 DIFFERENT PONIES ON THE OTHER 9 FRAGMENTS, WHY NOT USE THIS FOR INTEL-GATHERING AND TORTURE/INTERROGATION, OR CREATING MAGICAL STAT-BOOSTING ITEMS FOR THE MILITARY? THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THAT COULD BE DONE WITH THIS OVERPOWERED SOUL BULLSHIT BESIDES MAKING SOME FUCKING KONG LETTERS FOR LP TO COLLECT.

When the statuette origin is revealed plz read: I think it might be foreshadowing that right after all that talk of Soul Jars, Pinkie's Statuette and its magical effect is mentioned. Since the Statuettes are soul jars. And Pinkie's is one of them.

>LP enters the stable and dead poners are everywhere
man, imagine if LP had only one friend in the Stable, who told LP to go on this crazy adventure to restore her honour in the first place, and that friend's disemboweled body is plainly visible on the floor amongst countless dead bodies, discarded afterthoughts killed where they stood by the invading steel-clad cunts, discarded and forgotten like their shell casings and the discarded husks of the magazines they emptied into helpless Stable ponies.
Would that be fucked up or what?
Kkat wouldn't need to bullshit us about standing on the edge of a chasm full of bones (hehe my bone could give her a chasm. an or-chasm!) and bone baths or getting pulled towards a tidal force of crimson like it's that fucking anime opening to naruto where he falls into the ocean.
Kkat could end the chapter with LP crying over her friend's body and it'd be super dramatic.

>vulvat takes over
WHY ISNT SHE BREAKING HARDER?!
SHES THE SENSITIVE LITTLE FLUTTERSHY FANGIRL!
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307429
SMARTSPEECH2.jpg
SMARTSPEECH1.jpg
SPEECHFAIL3.JPG
SPEECHFAIL2.JPG
SPEECHFAIL1.JPG
>>307407
It's stupid that the sight of smoldering piles of ash bothers Calamity specifically, right? He just walked past fresh corpses in the stable. And old bones outside the stable. He should be bothered by more than this.
It doesn't even make a good hint for his true identity since that mystery ended ages ago. He's already explained that he's a Dashite ex-Enclave faggot and the Enclave use energy weapons, but after spending all that time as "yeehaw the NPC who rarely speaks" why is Kkat trying to give him what he thinks are character-appropriate reactions to what he sees now? And why is it so under-written? So minor that it just seems like a random out-of-place NPC reaction instead of something more character-appropriate and important?
If I was writing this I'd make him go through a PTSD moment where he talks about a big tragic event where he was with the enclave when they slaughtered innocents and then he decided to quit the Enclave. But he'd explain it briefly, so the heroes can get back to the action.
Maybe LP could yell "Fuck you and your backstory, focus on the fighting!" which could hurt Calamity's feelings so she'll feel bad about it later and apologize later. Such a maudlin scene would make many brainlet bronies on fimfic feel, then type in the comments about how much they "got the feels uwu". Then again little hints like "Calamity is bothered by bad memories when he sees smouldering ash that used to be poners before energy weapons got fired" should have been sprinkled much earlier in this story, before we knew everything there is to know about him. Then again if I was writing this a fuckton of things would be different and different cascading errors would fuck up different scenes.
>>307408
Kkat could have eaten his cake and shat on it too if he said the Overmare said "Get to the emergency shelter immediately!" but a fuckton of ponies around the Stable were stupid and lazy and drunk on centuries of peacetime so they continued to go about their dull normie NPC lives and refused to go to the emergency shelter, which sealed up the second the Steel Rangers opened fire in the vault, meaning many ponies inside got shot for being too dumb to live.

Kkat has such disgusting fetishes. Why can't he be into something normal like tails/wings/animal ears/impregnation?

>Steelhooves gives his position away
Isn't Steelhooves supposed to be smart? I recall him killing the head of security for Tenpony Tower in cold blood by sacrificing him to some of the feral Ghouls for protecting his homeland from Ghouls a while back, and then instantly convincing the whole settlement and its radio host who speaks to the whole wasteland that the security guy Grim Star gave up his life to protect the settlement therefore anyone who questions this story is a faggot who doubts Grim Star's heroism.
Where did his IQ go?
Kkat could have established him as a smart guy here by making this an intentional move on his part and telling his friends (including Littlepip, the gun-toting bitch with overpowered telekinesis and a fire-enchanted zebra rifle and a high-caliber hunting revolver and a PipBuck personal computer strapped to her arm that magically gives her an enemy-detecting radar and a SATS Auto-Aiming Program that lets you queue up actions in stopped time then watch your body perform them perfectly in slow-mo) to get ready to fire on any enemies approaching through the saloon's entrance.
Instead it makes him look like an absolute retard who believed "Talking Is A Free Action" instead of something that summons enemies to your location.
Of course, making a "You're betraying your principles and founder! Stop or I'll shoot!" speech with the expectation that it will summon enemies you want to shoot is peak cynicism. For him to predict this and be right means cynicism about the Steel Rangers is right. For him to not predict this and get shot and almost die over this means he was wrong to be an idealistic optimistic speech-giver who believed words can talk hostiles into becoming friends.
Silly Steelhooves! You aren't allowed to change the minds of others through speech, that's one of Littlepip and Velvet's abilities!
God, what was Kkat thinking when he gave Kkat and Velvet "face of the party" roles? Sure, Velvet has a high Barter skill while LP doesn't but both arbitrarily have their convincing attempts work out for them sometimes.
Then again...
Steelhooves didn't make an announcement to the whole Stable using some dedicated PA System. It had to be McGuyvered together in this saloon. Why the fuck do Steel Rangers, who presumably lack intimate knowledge of this place and where possible McGuyvered PA System Announcer Parts can be located, immediately know exactly where to attack like they're all-seeing all-knowing NPCs spawned in and given orders by some kind of script?

Also, Bethesda's bad writing and gameplay mechanics get copied by Kkat again to harm the writing again.
Fallout 1 and 2, your character's Intelligence and Charisma stats determine what dialogue options appear to you. You have to be the one to choose the right dialogue option. Taking a Perk gives you hints about some good/bad dialogue options.
Fallout 3? Speech is fucked up. All dialogue options are visible and selectable, but occasionally there will be one line clearly labelled as the Speech Line along with your percentage of success. Yes, it was made into a RNG check, with your Speech skill influencing your odds of success. 43 speech? 43% chance of success. 100 speech? 95%. Fallout 4 makes the same mistake while scrapping all skills, making RNG Speech Checks rely on your character's charisma score from 1-10. Anyway in both games this means the same dialogue option can succeed or fail based on luck. So they must be written for this to succeed or fail. Speech lines like "Please, pretty please do this for me!" are hail marys without logic.
FNV is smart. High speech=Smart-sounding dialogue options appear with valid arguments/witty lies. Insufficient speeech=funny dumb bullshit.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307449
307450 307459
1619373110869.png
>>307409

>“Not one word ‘bout muh name,” Calamity panted, looking at Xenith.
Presumably the joke here is that Calamity is named Calamity, and he just caused a Calamity. The text isn't tremendously clear about it, but I think what happened is that Calamity and Xenith went into the saloon kitchen and tampered with the gas line or something, and that was the source of the explosion; thus, Calamity is living up to his name. This joke would work if there was already some kind of running schtick between Calamity and Xenith about his name; as it stands, this is too awkward and out of the blue to make much sense.

>Then he saw SteelHooves and froze. A moment later, “Where’s Velvet?”
>I pointed upwards at the stage. I could see her fallen form. In the eerie silence that followed the battle, I could make out the sound of drops of blood falling from the stage to the floor below.
>Blop. Blop. Blop.
Are SteelHooves and Velvet both dead? It's almost too much to hope for.

Anyway, at this point the author suddenly remembers that Calamity and Velvet are supposed to be in love, even though he hasn't said boo about it since Chapter 18 or so. Calamity rushes up to what he initially believes to be Velvet's dead deceased corpse, but then it turns out she's fine. That was a pretty scary 0.3 seconds there; I'm sure everyone was on the edge of their seat.

>“Shush now, ya silly pony,” Calamity said, holding her. “Ya dun got yerself shot. But ya gonna be right as rain, soon ‘nuff. We got ourselves the best medical pony in alla the Equestrian Wasteland.”
Lol. "You got shot, but don't worry; you can just patch yourself up." Only in Edgequestria, amirite folks?

Anyway, there's a little more schmaltzy banter between them, and then suddenly Calamity kisses Velvet and the romantic music swells. This would be a nice moment if the author had given enough of a fuck about the romance between them to develop it properly, and also if he'd drawn out the "oh no, Velvet is dead" moment for longer than a fraction of a second.

>“Aww,” Xenith whispered in my ear. “I’ve been waiting to see those two do that since I first met them.”
This is dumb. Xenith just met them yesterday and barely knows either of them. Even though they're supposed to be a couple, nothing about their behavior since Xenith's appearance and the present would indicate that they even find each other attractive.

Anyway, after this SteelHooves gets up, because it turns out he's not actually dead either rats, maybe next time. Then, a couple more Steel Rangers take up positions outside and the battle begins anew.

Page break. Once again, the author completely skips over the fight he set up in the previous scene, and dumps us into the middle of an entirely new fight in an entirely new location. They are now in some kind of school bathroom or something; Littlepoop says that they are near the place where she took her "Cutie Aptitude Test."

It seems that the basically incompetent Ranger army that for whatever reason has been leaving them alone up until now suddenly took notice, and is now moving against them in earnest. They are pinned down in this bathroom and nearly out of ammo. It is at this point that a Ranger fires a bunch of grenades or missiles or something at Littlepoop and she loses consciousness.

Page break. LP inexplicably awakens in the Stable 2 infirmary. Velvet informs her that she is now fine, even though she literally had every single bone in her body broken in the last scene and was suffering from multiple fatal injuries. You have to love this universe's wacky rules about medicine.

Anyway, we learn that, even though the situation seemed a little dire there for all of one microscene, it's actually not that bad. Turns out a bunch of Blueberry Sabre's Rangers were in agreement with SteelHooves that attacking this stable was a dumb and pointless undertaking (I am still waiting on a convincing explanation for it myself), and they rebelled. The Rangers now seem to be mostly fighting each other.

Even with all of these developments, we still have absolutely no explanation for how the group managed to go from being pinned down and outgunned in the bathroom to suddenly being safely holed up in this clinic with no enemies in sight. Both LP and Xenith were unconscious, and Velvet, who is basically useless anyway, was severely wounded. This means that SteelHooves and Calamity would have been responsible for killing off the Rangers who were attacking them, shooting their way into this clinic, and bringing the three wounded up here so they could be tended to. However, at this point I'm too tired to even analyze it; we'll just chalk it up to more of Littlepoop's Mary Sue magic and call it good.

The current situation is that Blueberry Sabre has somehow sealed all the rebel Rangers into a classroom or something, behind some kind of impenetrable steel door. How she managed to do this, how Calamity et al would know she had done this, or why she isn't currently moving her forces against them in this clinic since she obviously doesn't have to worry about the rebel Rangers any more...are all perfectly good questions that at this point I don't even remotely expect to hear answers to. Point is, the group's main problem now is cutting through the impenetrable steel door so they can rescue the Rangers. They ultimately decide on sending Pyrelight through the air ducts with a blowtorch.

Page break. At this point I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on. The author has made zero effort to provide any meaningful reference points that could be used to pinpoint everyone's location relative to each other. Presumably, the good Rangers are still trapped in one of the classrooms, while the bad Rangers have created some kind of fortification in the apple orchard. LP tells us that she has constructed some kind of defense wall out of old lockers, but it's not clear where she is. Calamity killed a Ranger and took his armor at some point.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
259f844
?
No.307450
307459 307461 307465 307477 307608
1619028136809.jpg
>>307449

Page break. Littlepoop opens a door to somewhere and goes inside. I guess the lockers she mentioned in the previous scene are being used as some kind of shield or something. Best I can figure, she is trying to attack the apple orchard where all the bad Rangers are holed up. Apparently this flimsy pile of steel lockers is somehow enough to stop most of the grenades and missiles and whatnot that the Rangers are firing at them. This seems ridiculous, but it's not even worth it to ask about things like this anymore.

The group is trapped inside their makeshift locker fort and running out of armor piercing bullets, so LP decides to do the only sensible thing and suddenly throw all of the lockers at the Steel Rangers. Several of them are hit in the head, and this gives the group enough time to run from one side of the orchard to the other. But oh no! There's a locked door at the other end. If only somepony in the group were a trained locksmith...

Unfortunately, the horde of Steel Rangers chasing them doesn't give LP much time to work on the lock. Also, for some reason there is a bomb on the door, but fortunately for them SteelHooves is able to disarm it somehow.

At this point, LP goes to work on the lock, but before she can do her thing, Blueberry Sabre and the Bad Rangers™ surround them. BS tells them to give up and surrender, and LP asks why they haven't killed her yet. BS tells her that they need a skilled lockpicker to get through some door or other, and since LP is presumably the only pony in Edgequestria who put any skill points into lockpicking, she needs her alive.

However, just as the situation seems hopeless, a bunch of friendlies suddenly show up on Littlepoop's EFS and start shooting their way through the Rangers. Then, Blackwing appears; you may remember her as that griffon mercenary who was in one scene like ten chapters ago. Why she is here, how she got in here, and how she knew to come to this specific room...are all perfectly valid questions, which I once again do not expect to get any answers to. Anyway, Blackwing kills Blueberry Sabre, and the scene is over.

Page break. The Steel Rangers and the griffons are now shooting it out in the apple orchard. Meanwhile, LP uses telekinesis or something to finish picking the lock, and eventually gets the door open. Naturally, the room on the other side is filled with the blood and guts and dismembered remains of cute little ponies.

>I saw a yellowish clump of matter sliding down a wall, mixed with blood. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t part of a pony’s brains.
>It was cake.
>I looked up and saw the colorful banner. The Steel Rangers had interrupted a Cutie Mark Party.
>I felt rage. Pure, unadulterated rage.
By now I am physically incapable of taking any of this seriously. I'm not even exaggerating; I really can't stop laughing at this shit. The people around me right now are all looking at me like I'm a mental patient, because I keep cackling like a retard at my computer screen. This is hands down the silliest, most utterly preposterous book I've ever read.

Anyway, she sees some Steel Rangers on an upper balcony, I guess they are trying to cut through one of the doors with "auto axes." I have completely lost track of what the Rangers are ultimately trying to accomplish; I think they are trying to break into the area where all the Stable 2 ponies are holed up. Littlepoop picks the two of them up with her magic levitation powers and turns them on each other, so that each one cuts the other to pieces with the axe they're carrying. After that, she decides to keep the axes.

There is one Ranger left, whom Littlepoop, for some reason, is able to identify as Star Paladin Nova Rage. The scene ends on this ambiguous note:

>“Star Paladin Nova Rage, I presume?” I noted her battle saddle had a grenade machinegun.
>The Star Paladin stared at me. “Yes, and you are?”
>“Run.”

Page break. We never get to find out if Star Paladin Nova Rage ran or not, because we rejoin LP an indeterminate amount of time later. The battle appears to be over, for now.

>The hour was long over -- that blackest hour whose name I couldn’t remember where the darkness of the world is echoed most heavily by the darkness in the soul. But I was still trapped there.
inb4 her wrists cry tears of blood.

Anyway, Blackwing and Calamity and Xenith and all your favorite cartoon pals suddenly show up in this blood-and-cake filled atrium to gaze upon the grim spectacle of this ruined cutecenara party. We learn that Gawd and the griffins apparently heard the same distress signal that LP and her group did, and Blackwing decided, for absolutely no obvious reason, to fly in and get involved.

>Blackwing gave the zebra a tolerant smirk. “Yes, as I was saying, zebra stealth cloak.” She fixed me with a serious look. “You have more friends than I thought, kid. We’d barely made it past New Appleloosa when this pegasus ghoul and her kid flagged us down. Turns out, they’d heard the distress signal too and wanted to pitch in. Practically gave us enough SteathBucks to get in while all you ponies were busy with the Star-spawn and wage a war of our own. Not to mention the cloak. Which, I would note, I insisted on paying her for.”
Presumably, the implication here is that they ran into Derpy, who had heard the distress call and decided to give the griffon mercenary group that just happened to be passing by at that moment a bunch of free stealth bucks, because that completely makes sense.

Also: why is this one distress call drawing so much attention? It makes sense enough that Derpy would want to help Littlepoop I guess, but would she really know enough to connect a random attack on some random stable to LP? So much of this just doesn't add up.

Anyway, now that the danger is apparently over, the security door suddenly opens and the Overmare asks to see LP and Velvet.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307459
>>307449
What a missed opportunity. Imagine if the entirety of Littlepip's Littleshits were bleeding out and dying but they needed advanced medical procedures and Velvet had to walk Calamity through them. Or better yet, Littlepip, since it would make more sense for Calamity to know something about first aid. It could be an exciting tense scene where LP unscrews pens apart to use the glass tubes to fix pony throats by jamming them into airways and uses telekinetic surgery to grasp bullets within organs and pull them out of the bullet holes so they can heal. Steelhooves's heart could give out forcing LP to psychically push blood around the body. It would be sick. And it could be an exciting scene full of creative magic and environment use.
>>307450

>run
Is that a motherfucking Doctor Who reference?
An incredibly out of place reference to every brony's third favourite show if he noticed "time turner" the background pony from FIM with an hourglass cutie mark and passing resemblance to the tenth doctor?
Why?
It ruins a perfectly cliche moment for LP to answer "who are you" with a line like "Your worst nightmare" or "The hero of this story" or "The motherbucking lightbringer".
speaking of motherfucking, how this story treats profanity is cringe. Kid's shows like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can elegantly dance around it with punny lines like "What the shell?" and "Let's raise shell!" and "Great job, shellhead!". Overhyped shit like Percy Jackson tries to use Dam and Shist as a running gag. Teen Titans once had a racist characrer who called Starfire a nigger to her face and she only protested when the black guy Cyborg also used that word, but the censors allowed it because they said the made-up word Troki which "means nothing". Why not do something similar for FIM and make the ponies treat buck, clop, motherbucker, ponut, flanking, and other punny terms as profanities? It could still fit since stallions buck their hips into mares, big pony anuses resemble donuts, there was a clopping sound and a glopping sound as a thousand years of horse semen was unleashed right up Twilight's big flanks straight from Silver Star's oversized dong and cutie mark-stamped balls, and so on. It'd fit better than pastel ponies in leather and metal spikes with cartoonish bloody shot skulls for Cutie Marks shouting "fuck you" at Littlepip while she cries "Luna fuck me with her horn and hooves!".

>The hour was long over -- that blackest hour whose name I couldn’t remember where the darkness of the world is echoed most heavily by the darkness in the soul. But I was still trapped there.
This is turbo cringe and if any quote from this fic deserves to be on the TvTropes page it's this one. This isn't your average everyday darkness, this is advanced darkness. Not even Kingdom Hearts and its monologues on darkness within darkness ever got this bad. It would be one thing if this was a character trait of Littlepoop's and characters regularly called her a whiny prwtwntious faggot who sounds like a teenaged girl of a wannabe poet desperately trying to sound deep, like that guy from Darker Than Black and all the lines of dialogue as overwritten as his during the show. But this isn't a consistent character trait. Littlepoop hasn't talked like this around her friends. She only talks like this now because the author is trying to show off and embarassing himself. It's only right for a character's internal monologue to drastically differ from who they are when it's funny or when character development is the reason, like how Tidus's narration in FFX sounds older and more mature than the current him because of the "let's gather round the campfire and recap our entire adventure" framing device.

>LP gets saved
Well this is shit and underwhelming. Surely a moment where all of the hero's good deeds pay off and that reputation LP kept whining about saved her should have more bombast and drama than this. Now would be a perfect time for the heroes to get worn down and slowly crushed as the situation gets increasingly dire and everyone runs low on ammo and supplies and HP before the big reveal where the heroes are saved by ponies they saved. Kkat's certainly trying to tie previous adventures together here. The griffons from Shattered Hoof were sent here by DJ Cuntpocalypse and they got stealthbucks and invisibility cloaks from Derpy Hooves of New Appleoosa. ...the fic did remember to mention the DJ, right? I'm surprised that Pinkie Knockoff foal isn't among the group so she can show off how much she's grown thanks to the heroes and thank them for everything and throw a grenade at a Steel Ranger or back him into a safe with the power of bullshit, it would be suitably maudlin way to remind everyone this character existed once and was helped by LP. That nameless pony LP saved from Manticores after Calamity saved her from a gang of rapists and the rapist colt could show up too. That was the same character both times, right? It's hard to keep track of all the bullshit that happens in this story because the pacing is so glacial and the prose is so over-written. Important shit is skipped and unimportant shit is written out over too many words.
Anonymous
8233ee6
?
No.307461
307462 307491
>>307450
<I saw a yellowish clump of matter sliding down a wall, mixed with blood. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t part of a pony’s brains.
<It was cake.
<I looked up and saw the colorful banner. The Steel Rangers had interrupted a Cutie Mark Party.
<I felt rage. Pure, unadulterated rage.
>By now I am physically incapable of taking any of this seriously. I'm not even exaggerating; I really can't stop laughing at this shit. The people around me right now are all looking at me like I'm a mental patient, because I keep cackling like a retard at my computer screen. This is hands down the silliest, most utterly preposterous book I've ever read.
>For contrast, consider how kkat's Littlepip might have handled this situation. We'd probably get several paragraphs of inner monologue from her denouncing the skyscraper guards as irredeemable monsters who deserve to die, followed by several paragraphs of her relishing bathing in their blood as she slaughters them in the most gory and inhumane way possible. After that, there would be a lot of angsty, "oh the horror" type whining over all the brutal killing she just did, followed by crying and tenderness at learning that the filly was indeed safe. Kkat tries so hard to make readers like his protagonist, yet he mostly succeeds in making her even more obnoxious and Mary Sue-like.
I'm glad that I don't write like Kkat.

Maybe you have been dehumanized to the horrors of war just like the poners in in the fic. Perhaps this was Kkat's point all along. He tries to prove that everyone, no matter how much horsepussy a man eats each day, is susceptible to evillll. Maybe you just proved Kkat's entire point with this piece of fiction. Perhaps you fell into his well placed meta-trap? Ever thought about that, huh?

"There are characters meant soley for exacting karmic vengance and then there are these assholes."
Anonymous
8233ee6
?
No.307462
>>307461
>spoiler
As in the readers parallells the characters in the fiction. You have also lost touch your your sense of morality!!!
Anonymous
8233ee6
?
No.307465
>>307450
>Littepip is in murderous rage!!!
<“Star Paladin Nova Rage, I presume?” I noted her battle saddle had a grenade machinegun.
This sounds to me like sassy dialogue. Wasn't she just going berserk, or something?
Anonymous
8233ee6
?
No.307471
307491
>inb4 her wrists cry tears of blood.
I get it, cause she is gothic!1!111
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307477
307491
>>307450
Glim, Littlepoop's party contains a Steel Ranger.
And not just any Steel Ranger but THE Steel Ranger, easily the oldest and most experienced among them.
And he's lived 200 years in pneumatically-assisted cybertech-boosted Power Armour.
So if anyone should know enough about power armour to teach others, it should be Steelhooves.
Same with Calamity the ex-Enclave member. He should know how to wear Enclave suits. Spike burned an Enclave member alive, leaving a suit behind, right?

So WHY THE FUCK doesn't Steelhooves or Calamity take some of the power armour suits around him and teach his unarmoured friends like Littlepip/Calamity/Velvet how to use these power armour suits? Surely they could drill holes in the forehead so the unicorns can wear the helmets. I'm surprised there's no tech-assisted horned variant that enhances the user's unicorn magic, except I'm also not surprised because Kkat could never think of something so smart. Fallout lacked a power armour helmet meant for Unicorns/Psykers so this fic also lacks one.

It's not like this stuff's Fire Emblem armour where thick plate mail makes you vulnerable to magical attacks as a trade-off for how it makes you immune to swords.
Power Armour makes you invulnerable to most of the weapons you could reasonably expect to see in the Wasteland wielded by anyone other than members of the biggest best-equipped deadliest factions. It doesn't have "Weaknesses" in the traditional sense. It's not like splashing the suits with water short-circuits the electronics inside it. It's ultra-heavy steel plate that helps you lift it and enhances your strength with the aid of pistons.
There are literally no downsides to wearing power armour. You can even modify it with sound-dampening feet to sneak silently and add a stealth module to turn invisible. Either weapons cannot harm your godlike Power Armour because they're too weak, or they're powerful enough to overcome its defensive might like FUCKING HUGE explosions/artillery blasts/bullets/solar laserbeams from space, or they're rare high-tech EMP pulse guns specifically designed to fuck power armour and robots up. But anything strong enough to fuck power armour up could definitely fuck someone without power armour up. Except pulse guns, I don't remember if they can harm normal people or not.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307479
307487
path.png
Eren-Jaeger-Fuck-Them-Kids-.jpg
Autoaxe.jpg
>>307418
All the daft melodrama aside, I'm still trying to puzzle out the logistics of how the attack went down prior to Littlepip's arrival, and how the rangers could have even crashed this party in the first place. We've established that the overmare sent a welcoming party to meet the rangers at the entrance with the specific goal of gauging whether or not they were hostile. With that in mind, it's not particularly shocking that the welcoming party ended up getting slaughtered.

But if the overmare knew that there was a possible enemy at the gates and was taking pre-emptive measures to keep people safe in case of a worst case scenario, why were Littlepip's nameless mentor or Literally Who and his wife still at their workplaces? Did they not get the 'we might be under attack, come shelter in the section we're locking off' memo? Did they not hear the excessively violent demise of the welcoming party? We saw in the very first chapter that the overmare has access to a PA system.

Pic related (1) is a basic outline of Littlepip's route through the stable. Obviously we can presume that the stable layout is more complex and interconnected than this, but it's no more information than we're given by the story. I think it's safe to presume that the ranger force followed more or less the same route. With that in mind, consider the following: the atrium where the party is taking place is the last place to be reached before the secure area, and (so far as we're informed) the only access to the secure area is through said atrium.

So, let's get this straight - the overmare simultaneously sent the welcoming party to gauge the rangers' hostility and evacuated much of the stable to the secure area in case the worst happened. However, many of the ponies in the civilian areas didn't even attempt to join in the evacuation and the party continued right up until the rangers arrived to kill everyone. Which means that the ponies that did evacuate to the secure zone did so through the ongoing party. The party then continued despite that, and even while the rangers were stomping and blasting their way through the civilian areas and adjoining orchard.

From this we can conclude at least one of the following:
>Stable 2 is occupied by deaf and/or incredibly stupid ponies
>The overmare was highly selective in who to evacuate and left the rest to die in ignorance
>Kkat couldn't decide whether he wanted the stable residents to live or be slaughtered and decided to go with 'both' and hope the reader wouldn't notice
>Kkat has the spatial and temporal awareness of a small toddler

I'm not even going to comment on the absurdity of the actual battle between LP's group and the rangers, except to point out the utter nonsense that is the orchard scene. They build a pillbox out of lockers while under fire from miniguns and rockets, and only abandon it when they ran out of ammo. They then run directly towards said heavy weapons, through an open area, and suffer minimal to no injuries in the process. This with the understanding that the steel rangers are professional soldiers with access to technology that equals or exceeds Littlepip's own handy dandy auto-aim device.

What the fuck.

>We never get to find out if Star Paladin Nova Rage ran or not, because we rejoin LP an indeterminate amount of time later.
The read I get from this is that angerypip sliced Nova Rage to pieces with the two auto axes. I don't recall if the story ever clarified what an auto axe even is. It's another thing lifted from Fallout 3's Pitt DLC - a massive circular-bladed chainsaw designed for cutting through thick metal (3). They take two hands to wield due to their size and bulk, but Pip gets to use two at once just because. I guess it's supposed to be an expression of how angery she is.
Anonymous
516da6f
?
No.307487
>>307479
Littlepoop lifted a boxcar earlier in this story *takes a shot of whiskey except not really* so lifting two two-handed weapons at once isn't that crazy for this absurdly overpowered mary sue. She's lifted and fired numerous guns at once before, even though you can't dual wield in Fallout. Even though fallout perk icons occasionally depict dual wielding and the skyrim engine was built for dual wielding.
Come to think of it... she's severed Alicorn heads with big stones and telekinetically fucked with shit without being able to see it before. Why does she even bother entering rooms and risking gunshots when she could lift something heavy and swing it around in enemy-filled rooms from cover while using her PipBoy's enemy detecting radar thing to tell when she hasn't killed all her enemies yet?

Anyway, I bet most fanboys of this fanfic wouldn't even notice tbe absurdity of the poner party gorefest. They'd be too wrapped up in fake shallow maudlin emotions to think clearly. Hell, they might even accuse us of having insufficient suspension of disbelief, since most fanboys are retards who think "suspend your disbelief" means "lower your standards and cheer and clap when fed".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307491
307493 307523 307921
>>307477
>So WHY THE FUCK doesn't Steelhooves or Calamity take some of the power armour suits around him and teach his unarmoured friends like Littlepip/Calamity/Velvet how to use these power armour suits? Surely they could drill holes in the forehead so the unicorns can wear the helmets.
Logically this might make sense, but it would be an extremely silly and unnecessary direction for the story to take. For one thing, the last thing this group of characters needs is more bullshit to make them even more invincible. For another, even kkat has enough sense to realize that you need at least some surface-level variety between your main characters.

In this kind of hack and slash adventure, the characters' weapons and fighting styles are part of their identities. In fact, if your characters completely lack any serious depth, their fighting roles may be the only thing that actually differentiates them from each other. Each character has their own special "thing" that makes them unique. It's the same thing in RPG parties, actually: you generally have the Warrior, the Magician, the Healer, the Thief, and so forth, and their roles seldom overlap.

For all of his obsessive gamer autism, kkat doesn't seem to understand the concept of a well-balanced party; he mostly strikes me as one of those players who levels the shit out of his main character and ignores everyone else. However, he at least attempts to give each of his characters something distinctive that they alone can contribute to the group. Calamity has his battle saddle and provides air support, Velvet is the healer who occasionally goes completely out of character and starts wasting niggers with a shotgun, Xenith is apparently some kind of zebra stealth-ninja, and Littlepoop is the all-powerful Mary Sue party leader with the magic wristwatch.

That leaves SteelHooves as the power-armor guy. This means that nobody else can have power armor, for the same reason that Velvet can't have a PipBuck and Calamity can't brew magic potions. It might make tactical sense to have everyone in a party wearing power armor, but from a story perspective it's just bad form. Who wants to read a story about five of the same character? Even though in a "real" fantasy setting you'd be more likely to see knights teaming up with other knights, thieves teaming up with other thieves, and so forth and so on, if you're writing a story set in that kind of a world you generally have one knight, one thief, one healer, one wizard, etc, to a party. It lessens repetition and monotony and makes each character more distinctive.

>>307471
Um, I *believe* it's spelled "goffik."

>>307461
>spoiler
I know you're joking, but I've actually had some thoughts along these lines. To be fair I think I actually am kind of a low-empathy person to begin with, so a lot of the violence and whatnot in this story probably affects me less than it would most people. What I've noticed, though, is that a lot of the audience for this kind of fiction, particularly within the pony fandom, is made up of people who have the opposite problem: they have too much empathy, to the point where the mere mention of somebody somewhere suffering somehow is enough to throw them into a fit of hysterics, even if the situation is complete bullshit and the suffering person doesn't deserve their sympathy inb4 I get called out for sounding like an edgelord after spending three whole threads calling the story author an edgelord.

From skimming kkat's fimfiction comments and also slipping covertly into a couple of /mlp/ FoE threads, I notice two consistent things about the audience for this: the idea of "ponies suffering" is so utterly abhorrent to them that reading the story makes them "feel like shit" I'm actually using an anon's exact words here, but at the same time they enjoy watching the characters overcome adversity and whatnot. This is actually a perfectly valid reason to enjoy a tragic story, but the problem is these kinds of people are so susceptible to emotional manipulation that they can't tell the difference between legitimate tragedy and sadness porn. It was one of the things that drove me insane about Peen Stroke: not only did he write some of the most reprehensible sadness porn scenes I've ever read, but he got away with it. He was even praised for it.

A lot of kkat's bullshit is the same way. This most recent scene is a fine example: the reader is supposed to be so shocked and appalled at the idea of these armored maniacs bursting in and shooting up a foal's cutecenara party that they never stop and think about how absurd the whole scenario actually is. The Overmare locked the entire stable down because the Rangers were attacking; even if the ponies inside didn't know what was going on, logically they would at least realize they were in danger when they were ordered to get behind the security doors. Why in the world would they be having a cutecenara party under those conditions? "Well gee whiz, the Overmare just ordered us to go on lockdown because a bunch of lunatics are trying to break down the doors and kill us, but on the other hand we had to book this caterer six months in advance. If those Steel Rangers think we're going to cancel this party just because they want to hack us to pieces for no reason, well, they've got another thing coming!" For that matter, we still don't have a valid explanation for why the Rangers are even attacking Stable 2 in the first place.

If you want to make your readers legitimately empathize with your characters, you need to do two things: flesh out your characters so that the reader has an actual reason to give a shit what happens to them, and make their struggles both plausible and relevant to their overall development. Just throwing horrible things into a story over and over and expecting the reader to respond to it won't work, unless of course your reader is one of these emotional simpletons.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.307493
307498 307623
>>307491
There's definitely a lot of reasons Kkat got away with this.

Probably autism is the biggest one, as the wider majority in a fandom are typically very hypersensitive, surface level appreciation, or hyperfixating types of people who simply take what is told to them without inspecting the nuance of something. They would never stop to think for a moment about this situation, as what is relevant and important to them is the direct presentation of things, emotions they are told to feel, as they are sort of being "directed" by the author, and they cannot comprehend much else at all.

Funny aside--did you know that people unironically waifu Littlepip?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307498
>>307493
There are faggy bronies who waifu background characters without consistent personality traits or speaking lines and several main characters at the same time. Because a pretty face without a consistent personality can be whatever you want in the moment. The ideal imaginary woman to someone who doesn't actually know what he likes and wants it to change completely from moment to moment.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307523
307525
DwHN4cAVYAElK2a.jpg
zh4SmHU.jpg
tumblr_mlo1j5G4KW1r0i38jo1_1280.png
images (2).jpg
0de0c73zjs841.jpg
>>307491
While I agree that many stories use fighting styles as a means of characterization (Toph fights differently from the average earthbender for a reason) this story uses this writing technique shallowly.

Zigger uses Zig-Fu.

How does Littlepip fight? She uses whatever's available, but what's available is typically a fuckton of top-tier handguns plus stealthbucks and plot armour and convenient nearby heavy objects like big rocks and boxcars. It's not like she's Kanji from Persona 4 who specifically uses "Heavy Objects" like folding chairs as his weapon class even though the rest of the party's carrying around collections of differently-elemental knives, fans, swords/golf clubs, or in the martial artist's case, shoes.

Calamity uses shotguns, but what do the shotguns say about his personality? Is he a straightforward shoot-first-ask-questions-later blunt instrument and aggressive overconfident scattershot motherfucker whose surprising moments of shocking violence are represented by how you can conceal a sawn-off shotgun? Only when the author thinks this would make him someone Velvet wouldn't like for a microscene or two. Sometimes she has no problems with his moments of shocking violence. Usually he's an acrobatic flier zipping around at mach fuck, scoring 360 noscope headshots while over a mile off the ground and using fucking shotguns. This bullshit doesn't really suit a "I used to be on team evil but now I want to be a good guy so I joined a hero's party" type.

Velvet also uses shotguns when she isn't using a poison dart gun to poison enemies to death, but she doesn't act like a typical poison-loving sadist or the typical "medic can heal you and poison foes" inversion of it. And there's never a good reason to use lethal poisoned darts when bullets kill foes faster. It's not like her dart gun can fire anti-Dragon serum or anti-Demon serum into foes normally immune to gunfire. Or fire RadAway darts into irradiated creatures to kill them swifter than bullets. Does her occasional use of shotguns imply that Calamity's rubbing off on her and around her? No, it's just something she does sometimes. She's supposed to be a medic who left home because she didn't want to be a musician. Where's the magic guitar or some shit?

Is Steelhooves supposed to be what he is when he's not a bland soulless suit of armour: an unpredictable wildcard with occasional bouts of self-harm-tier retardity that fuck the party over or don't fuck the party over but very easily could have fucked the party over? Is that why he uses big fucking guns and sometimes-high-maintenance power armour automatic grenade launchers that have fucked him up at least once in his lifetime and once forced LP to try and rescue him by repairing his suit only for her to fail and get the author to deus ex machina fix everything offscreen? No, we're just supposed to forget that in the same arc where Monterry Jack died because LP's friends didn't want her dosing up on Party-Time Mintats and freeing him while pissing the local guards off and getting banned for life, Steelhooves murdered the place's chief of security on his own without consulting his team purely for retarded "grrrr you killed ghouls you meanie" reasons.

I can't believe I'm about to praise Persona 5 for shallowly using a cliche more competently than this, but Ryuji uses lead pipes and shotguns to pound his enemies because he's a thuggish clumsy retard with a heart of gold, and this contrasts with the precision and elegance of the artist Yusuke and his weeaboo katana/three-round-burst assault rifle. Haru's wearing a man's medieval clothing while using a man's giant axe and a grenade launcher she can barely keep on target because she's got more power than she knows what to do with/can handle as the rich inheritor of a burger megacorp and has occasional tomboy moments unconnected to her usual overall one-note girly sweetheart personality. It's the same reason why the monster persona she summons is plastered with vagina symbolism despite having guns for dicks and having a villain's name even though it doesn't suit the character who summons it. The story just pretends Lady DeWinter from Three Musketeers is a hero because it doesn't want you suspecting the saccharinely-sweet rich girl with a great reason for hating you might actually hate you and be the traitor, since that red herring might confuse the target audience of obsessive tweens. Ann uses a whip and dominatrix outfit because she's horny and a submachine gun because nobody else uses one of those, fake hero Akechi uses lightsabers and toy guns as a fake hero and an edgy sword/silenced pistol as a villain, the hero Joker uses clip-fed handguns and knives because edgy, and straight-laced police girl Makoto uses kung fu with spiked knuckles plus a police revolver.

This fic's characters could still use their current weapons (or lack of weapons in the Zigger's case) even with power armour on. It wouldn't be too OP for LP and friends to use if they proceeded to fight deadlier foes. The moment they all get armour worth a damn and Velvet stops wearing dresses with padded armour or zebra military uniforms or whatever could be a big dramatic turning point where they start out struggling to defeat Raiders and then get better-equipped over time to meet ever-greater challenges. LP and pals wouldn't need their plot armour if they armoured themselves properly. Bullets wouldn't need to conveniently miss them at point blank range even when fired from an entrenched machine gun nest they're charging head-on, bullets could ricochet off their armour while giving them something challenging to maintain and repair between fights.

Also, was thinking about LP's religion/Steelhooves+Ziggers.
It's under-utilized!
Wakka from Final Fantasy X LOVED Yevon's religious BS and HATED the Al Bhed for being heretical tech-loving heathens. This changed during the story. He learned Yevon is BS and racism is wrong and he ended up befriending Rikku the Al Bhed girl.
Genius!
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.307525
307535 307539
>>307523
Must you? Couldnt you be like
"I dont like this" and spare us the irrelevant, tangential, and obviously self-gratifying diatribe?
Seriously, you could just say "I dont like <thing> and then fill your post with an endless reeeeeeeeeeeeee without diminishing the (absent) quality.

A wise man says many things with few words. A fool uses many words to say nothing.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307535
307539
>>307525
>A wise man says many things with few words. A fool uses many words to say nothing.
I'm going to have to concur with this.

t. guy who has written hundreds of thousands of words at this point to say "Fallout Equestria sucks."
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307539
307541 307542
>>307525
Plz direct your criticism towards the gay pony fic. I'm trying to make my posts take as few posts as possible since making many posts in quick succession would put the thread closer to bump limit.
>>307535
Glim, do you think LP's religion and Steelhooves's gradually declining hatred of ziggers should be focused on as a major plot point and sign of character development/growth?
This "celestia and luna are gods" religion... is it something specifically from LP's vault made up after the apocalypse or something made up by Rarity's Ministry Of Image or something decided upon by the generation that knew Celestia and Luna died to save them and what scraps of a future Scootaloo made for them in the Stables? What are the core rules of the religion? Does it ever harm LP and Velvet's ability to be murderhobo bastards? The author could intentionally characterize LP as a "cafeteria christian" who picks and chooses what fragments of the religion to follow while ignoring what is disliked and pretending to be a true follower of the faith yet is able to adapt to anti-religious circumstances better, while portraying Velvet as a hardline religious extremist for a pacifistic religion dreamed up during peacetime by a generation unaware that zigger evil is the reason why their nation fell. So much about this story is half-baked and uncreatively cliche. Tired cliches are dropped in and half-assed for the sake of decoration. Religion isn't core to this story like it was in FFX with its evil god and hypocritical sometimes-anti-tech religion and suicidal savior priests who die to buy the world a few years without the evil god around.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307541
>>307539
Littlepip's religion isn't well enough defined to really say anything meaningful about. In fact, no other character seems to share it. It's almost as if Kkat threw it in as an incidental character trait and then ran with it without considering its place in the wider setting.

Part of me wonders whether Littlepip's veneration of the princesses was set up in advance on purpose because the thought of Littlepip (ending spoilers) succeeding where Princess Celestia failed, becoming her only friend, and shouldering the role and responsibility the princess attempted to take on but no longer can tickled Kkat's boner for his mary sue enough that he wanted to imbue it with narcissistic symbolism. Nothing says "my speshul OC is sooooooo great" like surpassing God.
Ninjas
3ec6f7a
?
No.307542
307547 307587
FB_IMG_1617393851078.jpg
>>307539
Bump limit is 500, so no.
Understand something. I was stripped of my admin position ostensibly for 'using staff privileges to target you' on the pretense that I was logging in to view your user ID to stalk you all over the site to know when it's you posting. Since I resigned and no longer have staff powers, if the allegations against me had any merit, I wouldnt be able to identify you all over the site. And yet, I can and have all the same. I'm not mad at you, Nigel, nor the person for and to whom this is directed; this is not revenge or a grudge or anything like that.
But I am here to prove a point. Besides, you and I have a rapport and contrary to most of your detractors, I have been and still am putting in the work trying to help you improve. Abrasively, but sincerely.

Anonymous
179c5e2
?
No.307543
307547 307623
Been lurking these threads for a few months now after reading through the previous ones. It's very enjoyable and often educating to read your take on these stories, so know that there is another autist out there that appreciates your efforts Glim.

I'd like to add " The Rise of Darth Vulcan " by RHJunior (https://archiveofourown.org/works/5553836/chapters/12811085) to the list. It is unfinished and by the looks of things it will remain so for quite some time judging by the infrequent updates, so I understand if you don't want to review an unfinished work. I remember quite liking it, but then again I did like "The Sun & the Rose" until you pointed out its obvious flaws so I'm curious of what you'd think of this story.
Anonymous
297ef48
?
No.307547
307550
>>307542
>'using staff privileges to target you' on the pretense that I was logging in to view your user ID to stalk you all over the site to know when it's you posting.
I guess, it's bettter to be safe than sorry but still. I can basically always tell when it's Nigel and when it is not. His writting is distinct.
>>307543
>"I'm 6'5, 220, and there's two of me."
Anonymous
649accc
?
No.307550
>>307547
>I can basically always tell when its Nigel and when it's not
Couldnt have said it better myself
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307587
307588
>>307542
You lost admin rights for that? That's rough, buddy. They shouldn't assume you were using admin to peek at my IP. I'm one of the site's few british users and the only one who's into anime and plays guitar/piano and likes gaming. I sound like an autistic person because I am one, and I'm more blunt and straightforward than I probably should be. Plus the second I mention Silver/Sunrise or my big titty rabbit bitch giant sword indie game that's a dead giveaway. Who else would have detailed insider knowledge about that? Someone I've spoken to for hours about my indie game? I'm trying not to do that since I want to keep things mysterious until it's ready for real trailers. I don't want anyone to know I'm using the L2 button like a shift key to increase the number of buttons available on the average controller because of the game's complexity, or to get overly hyped about the high speed exciting action gunplay and stylish 2d handmade sprite art. Besides, I can't talk about how I improved upon the Devil Trigger mechanic until I think of a name for it that's less likely to get me sued than Hare Trigger. I love the pun because hare means rabbit and it sounds like hair trigger as in gun. Anyway, I hope they reinstate your admin rights soon.

I was thinking about how little of a shit the audience is supposed to give about the ponies of LP's stable. I think I get better at writing when I analyze this story's failings and wonder how its worst mistakes could be improved.
I could call Fallout 3's opening shit for hours but at least it contained named characters who interacted with the main character and made an impression so when the characters die or randomly turn evil or whatever you'll theoretically feel something.
I barely fucking remembered the bullshit about LP's desire for a mural on the wall.
It would stick better in our heads if, at the start of the story, Littlepip interacted with these characters.
Littlepip could establish her character traits by interacting with them, too! She could encounter an asshole in charge of her and whether she snarks at him and gets in more trouble for it or tries to do something about him abusing underlings while failing to help anyone and making things worse for herself or meekly tolerates his bullshit while fantasizing about stabbing his nuts would tell us a lot about her. We could establish who LP is before she becomes loathed by the stable and chooses to get out of the stable and into the wasteland. The guy who doesn't want a mural could get into a big argument about the mural, which would make it incredibly ironic when he is murdered by Steel Cunts and turned into a raider's idea of a mural. As it currently stands, the forgettable character of "littlepip's boss" doesn't even have a name or line of dialogue as far as I'm aware.
LP could also start the story with a dream sequence she has while snoozing during her repair-pony job before she gets woken up by Velvet asking for pipbuck removal. Or her boss screaming at her and calling her a dumb useless cunt before Velvet shows up. This dream sequence could start the story with exciting action to make the first chapter less of a snoozefest, establish what kind of shit LP dreams about and what kind of heavily armed hero she always wished she was, give the audience scenes of LP murderhoboing and dungeon crawling to give the audience an example of what to expect, even exposit some explanations on exactly how the PipBuck and guns and magically enchanted guns and SATS work in a manner far more interesting than the first chapter's dull "I need to tell you about pipbucks. It can do a lot of things. It can even glow like a flashlight!" infodump straight to the audience. LP's near-instant switch from ordinary nerdy shy civilian to callous commando murderhobo would be a little less absurd if she was established as someone who always fantasized about violence while stuck in her boring mundane life. She should still struggle more with the violence at first though. Maybe even object to Calamity's violence a few times when it's just the two of them so he can give her a speech on the necessity of violence for maintaining/restoring a civilized and moral society, intimidating evildoers into looking elsewhere for their prey, securing and protecting what's rightfully yours, and eliminating active threats to your life and liberty. Calamity should have taken a mentor role at the start of this story, right?
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.307588
307599
>>307587
>l2 shift button for more functions
Interesting. I had a similar idea yeaaaaaars ago for a Tenchu: Stealth Assassins esque game that featured a counter attack system utilizing a similar method, given the limited number of available buttons on a (at the time) ps2 controller. Hope it works out
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307599
>>307588
Thanks mate. https://youtu.be/IyguXc3DYz8 this funny vid puts my biggest complaint about fallout 3 into a funny minute-long vid with great visuals.

I also thought in a better version of this story, Chapter 1 Dream Sequence Littlepip would be an unrealistically invincible quippy plot-armoured mary sue specifically to contrast with how feeble and pathetic LP should be upon actually entering the wasteland. Like how Kung Fu Panda fantasized about being awesome when he was a loser at the start of the movie. Being canon LP who's so invincible she can charge power-armoured foes and charge into their automatic fire and win should be a fantasy that dies swiftly once she's exposed to reality. She should lose all her feelings of invincibility and give up on Velvet until a character growth moment makes her feel bad for Velvet and able to save her from something specific. Upon entering the wastes she should nearly die to raiders, flee from them with injuries that hurt for the entire rest of the story, get mugged and completely fucked over by Monterry Jack, tell Frank The Watcher/Spike to go fuck himself when he says "go back to ponyville", and solely seek a reasonably safe home away from all the danger. New Appleoosa seems like a good home and she's offered a room if she saves them from a nearby cave of poisonous wildlife, she blows up the entrance to seal the place off like a smart person instead of dungeon crawling some cartoonish antiwoman stable as thoroughly as possible as her friend begins dying poison before blowing the entire vault up and then healing her friend. Then it turns out NA is dominated by Old Appleoosa and she's drafted into an all-out rebellion against Red Eye's town but helps very little despite doing her besr. Then the Steel Rangers force her to work for them and going to Tenpony Tower is somehow a vital stage in their plans. Then I'd scrap this "steel rangers vs LP's home" since it makes the faction a bunch of irredeemable child-slaughtering cunts. And going into Red Eye's territory only to be a slave, fight in the thunderdome, escape with a slave, and get off with no slaps to the wrist and a "Please fucking bother someone else" job offer from Red Eye is a bit silly. Also makes the Alicorns look stupid for not noticing LP. Littleshit didn't even dye her hair or try much of a disguise beyond dirt and slave rags. Maybe she could hear Velvet's songs on the radio and that could convince her to visit Tenpony Tower? Or the Steel Rangers could want some data-interceptor gadget strapped to the top of the tower so they can see what the tower's omniscient surveillance system sees and use that intel to better fight a war against the alicorns and Red Eye or both. Any scenes where LP wins should be because she's doing something that is genuinely smart, not because she's levitating herself and a friend and bulletproof radioactive goo while lockpicking what she cannot see at the same time with a broken rib, or tossing a boxcar with her Phys Gun telekinesis, or hiding under a cum soaked sheet so enemies who spotted you won't shoot, or pulling a Red Dwarf plus that thing from Warehouse 13 where vibes man and book bitch drunkenly faked sleeping together, or any other preposterous bullshit that only works because Kkat knows barely anything about the real world. At rhis point I'm surprised he didn't give LP a bolt action rifle and make her "reload" it by switching its weapon type over and over since that's faster than normal reloading. A well written LP would be a total motherfucking weakling who gets marginally stronger over time while relying on powerful friends with their own agendas and personalities and her own powerful guns and armour that should be as difficult to earn as possible.

The author wants Kkat to look like an underdog so he armours her lightly and pits her against superior foes that logically should slaughter her. Then he's forced to cheat on LP's behalf and make her invincible so she doesn't die. It's like watching a Fallout Let's Play made by a little bitch on easy mode who turns on the God Mode cheat when even slightly challenged!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0402e14
?
No.307608
307617
qakt5m0v42641.jpg
>>307450

Littlepoop and Velvet follow the Overmare into the formerly sealed off part of the stable. For just a single faint moment, kkat manages to almost slip some genuine feeling in here.

Littlepoop notices her mother, standing around with some of the other stable residents talking about what just happened. She appears to be intoxicated. Littlepoop notices her and calls her by name, at which point she turns, utters a quick exclamation about barely recognizing her, and goes back to chatting with her friends.

I'll say that the mother's behavior is not entirely convincing here; not so much the rebuff of her daughter, but in the way she's just sort of standing around casually chatting like this. The author's obvious intent here is to present this mare as a self-absorbed and terrible mother, which he basically accomplishes, but being self-absorbed doesn't necessarily mean she wouldn't be personally affected by what just happened in the stable.

Here, I'll just go ahead and dump the entire exchange in verbatim since it's fairly short:

>As the Overmare slowly guided us through the crowd towards her office, a familiar voice froze me in place.
>“Mother?”
>I looked up, and there she was. Standing in a small clique of friends (notably absent Mrs. Sparkle Cider). She turned and looked at me with a vaguely scandalized expression. “Is that Littlepip?” she asked one of her friends.
>The other mare answered in the affirmative.
>“I don’t even recognize her,” mother said. Not with awe or maliciousness, but as a casual statement of truth.
>I felt all the life drain from me as she looked me over. My blood had turned to ice water. My stomach knotted up, then sank to the lowest part of my body it could find. The world seemed to stretch away from me.
>She turned away from me, delving back into her conversation, my presence barely augmenting her tale. “I was traumatized. I mean, I’m going to have nightmares of this forever. I’m going to need therapy. And as horrible as this sounds, my first thought was ‘that will never come out of his apron!’ (Because he was wearing that lovely yellow one with the…”
The way she talks here makes it sound like she just witnessed a casual fender-bender on the street, and she's standing around gossiping with the neighbors about it. Even if she's only focused on herself, she still ought to be emotional and hysterical here; she was almost killed. This is exactly the kind of thing a self-absorbed alcoholic would get emotional about.

Anyway, it's clear enough what kkat is trying to do here, and he more or less succeeds except for two problems. The first is that he lacks subtlety; the mother's behavior here is exaggerated and unrealistic in order to drive home the point that she's a bad mother and a self-absorbed alcoholic. The basic idea is perfectly fine, in fact this is probably the closest this author has come to making me actually feel bad for his otherwise insufferable OC. However, there are better ways to do this, which I will get into in a minute.

The second problem here is that, like many of kkat's other good ideas, he resolves the problem immediately after introducing it, without giving it enough time to make a significant impact on the reader. Here, watch what happens:

>Still… She was alive. Alive and exactly the same. I was right here. Again.
>“Mom?”
>Suddenly, Velvet Remedy was between us, and her hoof was striking my mother across the face so hard it knocked her down.
>I stared. Velvet Remedy had just hit my mother.
>Velvet’s voice sounded like she was throwing all the hurt and rage in her behind it. It wasn’t a scream, but it was somehow much louder than that.
>“You. Have suffered. Nothing.”
>She turned from my wide-eyed mother and lowered her head, pushing me away.
Velvet basically whiteknights for Littlepoop, telling her mother that the suffering she feels she has endured is nothing compared to the suffering that her daughter has experienced. "Suffering" here refers not only to LP's literal life and death struggles in the wasteland, but also to the emotional scars she no doubt suffered as a result of being raised by this sub-par mother. This is a fairly straightforward condemnation: LP has grown up to be the heroic Mary Sue that she is today through her own efforts, and with no thanks to her mother's dubious parenting abilities.

All of this is fine conceptually, but as ever the execution is poor. There has been almost no mention of LP's mother until now; we knew she was an alcoholic and a less-than-fit mother from some snippets in a couple of LP's monologues, but apart from that we know virtually nothing about her or their relationship.

Like many other events in this story, this one just sort of randomly materializes out of nowhere and resolves immediately. Whatever emotions LP might be feeling as a result of seeing her mother again after all this time and by "all this time" I mean the roughly one month she's been gone from this stable, we can't be expected to sympathize deeply because we have not been properly introduced to this character, nor have we had time to witness their dysfunctional relationship for ourselves. In much the same way that we had no direct frame of reference for understanding LP's feelings on the attack on the stable itself, we can't really be expected to feel whatever LP is feeling during this encounter with her mother. All we can do is draw from our general knowledge: LP's mother is an alcoholic, alcoholics are usually bad parents, so the two of them likely had a fractious relationship.

A better way to handle this would be first to establish LP's mother as a more central character in LP's life starting from the beginning of the story, and second to develop this later meeting between them into its own side-arc. LP should spend some time here trying to repair her relationship with her mother, only to ultimately realize that she's wasting her time and that her mother can never change. I'll elaborate more on this in my next post.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0402e14
?
No.307617
307618 307619 307639 307921
1619722702378.jpg
>>307608

In keeping with the Glim Glam Greater Theory of Cascading Story Problems (patent pending), we once again see evidence that foundational problems in how a story is conceived and approached snowball into larger issues as the text itself is developed. What we've got here is proof that just shitting out text as it pops into your head is a bad approach to writing a long-form story, and that it's worthwhile to take the time to think and plan things out before actually sitting down to write.

I'd like, for a moment, to go right back to the very beginning of Fallout: Equestria, to the very first line in the text (well, the first line of the text proper, excluding the Introduction):

>If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life -- explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next -- I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
The author elected, regrettably, to begin his war epic with a long, excruciatingly dull technical spec about what PipBucks are and how they work. We've already covered why this is bad in and of itself, but what I'd like to emphasize here is that currently, some 300,000-odd words later, we are seeing much deeper problems that stem from the way the author chose to open his story.

These early passages are our introduction to Littlepoop: who she is, where she came from, what her background is. The way the author handles this section, we are led to believe that Littlepoop's life in Stable 2 up until the point where the story begins is inconsequential, and serves as merely a starting point for her adventures in the wasteland. You see this sort of thing a lot in stories where the main character is transported into another world (there is actually a specific name for this type of story, although I can't think of what it is at the moment). The first example I can think of off the top of my head is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so I will use that as an example.

In the beginning of the story, the reader is introduced to four children who are sent to live with their uncle or great-uncle or something in the country, because of air raids in London. The children's backgrounds are irrelevant; the story really begins when one of them finds a passageway into Narnia; the business about WWII and the air raids simply provides the setup that allows this event to happen. Similarly, Littlepoop's adventure begins with her leaving Stable 2 and venturing forth into the wasteland. Her life up until that point is presented as mundane and uninteresting, so much so that she has more to say about the glorified smart-watches she repairs for a living than she does about herself.

If the story dealt exclusively with Littlepoop's adventures in the wasteland, this would be fine. However, at the present point, the author has decided that he wants to do a "homecoming" episode, where the formerly unremarkable protagonist can show all the townies she grew up with what a successful murderhobo she's become. The trouble is, the author completely glossed over her experiences with said townies, so whatever she has to show them now is meaningless to the reader.

Returning to the example of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you'll note that while the story begins and ends with the children living normal lives in England, the real story takes place entirely in Narnia. All the principle characters are part of that world, and apart from the children no one from England ever sets foot there. If C.S. Lewis had wanted to do something a little different, for instance let's say that instead of having the White Witch as the principal antagonist, he has someone from the children's regular lives follow them in and cause trouble in Narnia. At this point, the focus is no longer on Narnia entirely; the story is now about the contact between Narnia and our world. In order for this to work, we would need to have a little more background on who these children were before they came to Narnia, and what was going on in the world they came from.

Put a little more simply, if the story's conflict is between the children and someone they know, and the story takes place in a different setting than the one it begins in, then we need to know who these children were before the story started and what their world was like, in addition to whatever we need to know about the new one. Conversely, if the conflict is between the children and someone in the new world, and nothing from the old world except the children themselves ever enters, then you can just say "here are some children, they fell through the back of a cupboard, and suddenly here are all these fauns and lions and wizards and shit." Who the children were before they came to Narnia doesn't matter; it could be any group of children from anywhere and the story would still work.

It works the same way with FoE. If the story was just "Littlepoop leaves her boring life in the stable and ventures into the wasteland, never to return," then her life in the stable is of no consequence. You can just pave over most of her backstory because it doesn't matter; if the subject of her mother comes up she can just say "my mother was a drunk and she didn't love me" and that is more than enough information. However, if the mother is going to be an actual character, or if LP's relationship with her mother is important somehow, this doesn't fly.

Kkat seems to only be bringing back LP's mother for this one scene, where she is introduced as an uncaring drunk, told off by Velvet, and removed from the story all in one fell swoop. What's the point of this encounter? Unless she is going to be worked into the story as a more important character later on, I don't see one. And even if she is, everything I said above still stands: the author should have dwelt longer on her time in the stable and introduced us to these characters if it was all going to be important later.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307618
307623
>>307617
Glim, do you think this "we know nothing of LP's home and its major characters" problem could be solved if the first chapter dropped the PipBuck narration, and instead displayed an intentionally-extreme dream sequence followed by a rude awakening and the average dull life of LP? Chapter 1 could end with Velvet showing up and saying "I need your help" after her celebrity status is established through dialogue earlier in the chapter and LP thinks "she would never talk to a poner like me". Then when chapter 2 starts with LP finishing her repairs on Velvet's pipbuck at 3am, her boss bursts in freaking out over the loss of his favourite pop idol, and that boss ends up revealing to the vault that LP was the one who took Velvet's pipbuck off because "i dont want them blaming my store uwu. Sorry kiddo you're expendable". A chapter could be dedicated to a montage of LP's life in the stable sucking dog cock for two weeks while she prepares supplies and gets ready to venture out into the wastes. And then when in the wasteland all her sick supplies get robbed by Monterry Jack asap so she's as much of an underdog early on as possible.
As for stuff in chapter one she could repair some ungrateful customer's broken PipBuck, and then she's sent on some bullshit errand by her asshole boss and also has to bring home more booze for mom while thinking "my mom sucks and I hate my job" and we're seamlessly introduced to PipBuck functions like automatic map making and quest markers and radar NPC detection and quest log tracking and so on.
She could also walk past two friends arguing over whether the PipBuck 3000 or PipBuck 2500 is better and get dragged into their argument for a few paragraphs for more subtle exposition on why the PipBuck 3000 is great. And she could walk past a preacher ranting about Celestia and holy fire and purging the sinners and "a lack of love for celestia doomed the pre-war ponies!" and other stereotypical religious junk while LP thinks "I'm glad I'm not that anal about my Celestia worship" .
Maybe that preacher ranting about "mighty celestia" could notice LP and embarassingly ask something like "are you coming to the summer sun celebration in a month? We booked Velvet Remedy to show up! We had to book that godless heathen eight months in advance, but you kids love her music so it'll be worth it!"
Also LP's boss should be a colossal Velvet fanboy, establishing her fame. He could have a poster of Velvet bigger than Littlepip and himself, for symbolism! Deep symbolism.
It might be a bit of a stretch for a combat section to take place in chapter one to give LP a chance to show off SATS, since Stables are meant to be combat-free... but she could always use her pipbuck to cheat at basketball or tossing crushed paper balls into paper bins from far away. Or she could repair an ungrateful customer's broken pipbuck and test every feature in a row including using SATS on a target dummy. Bonus points if it's a funny scene where some old granny is given a stick and turned into a kung fu master while under the effects of SATS.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
0402e14
?
No.307619
307621 307655
31057.png
>>307617

[/b]Page break[/b]. In the next scene, Littlepoop's mother is gone, I suspect never to return. LP and Velvet are in the Overmare's office, and the Overmare thanks her for saving them from the invading killbots, and tells her that she is now free to come home if she likes. LP says no, she has seen too much blood and guts and dismemberment during her five weeks in the wasteland to ever feel comfortable here again.

The Overmare asks LP if she would like anything in return for saving them, and LP asks for two things: monetary compensation for the griffin mercenaries, and access to the stable's old population records. There is also some side-conversation which reveals that Velvet was able to get the password to open the stable door by combing through these records herself. Apparently the Overmare had given her Sweetie Belle's old audio diaries in an effort to convince her to accept her calling as a singer, but Velvet had instead used the information to facilitate her escape. And there we have it, the last remaining mystery surrounding Velvet's great escape is revealed to be a nothingburger.

>“CMC3BFF. Clearly, I needed to give the recordings of a previous Overmare a much closer inspection before allowing them into anypony else’s hooves.”
>Velvet Remedy shook her head. “You had to have known.”
>“I… may have suspected. But I thought you would make the better choice.”
>“I did make the better choice,” Velvet Remedy said firmly.
Why did Velvet want to leave again? Oh yeah; she wanted to be a great healer or something. How is that working out for her, anyway?

Page break. This next microscene is particularly micro. Nothing of any great consequence happens, but the author clears up the last remaining details of Applejack's life, for anyone who is interested and also for LP, who is herself interested for reasons on which I am still not clear. She apparently did make it to Stable 2, where she lived peacefully for 25 years until she died of natural causes. Apparently they buried her in the apple orchard somewhere, instead of just leaving her skeleton in the basement like the Rangers did with her sister.

Page break. Littlepoop goes to visit SteelHooves who is currently in the process of having Applejack's cutie mark painted onto his armor. Apparently all of the Rangers who took SH's side in the conflict are doing the same, to distinguish themselves from the bad Rangers who didn't. Though it's still not terribly clear what exactly their Oath entails, what the original purpose of the Steel Rangers was supposed to be according to Applejack, what the current purpose of the Rangers is according to Elder Cottage Cheese, how SteelHooves' interpretation of the Oath differed from Cottage Cheese's, or why the Rangers even wanted to attack this stable in the first place, SH announces that he is forming a new group of Rangers that follow the Applejack version of the Oath. The new color scheme apparently reflects this. Good to know, I suppose.

Anyway, even though it's not entirely clear what they were ever fighting over, the schism within the Rangers has now solidified into two distinct groups, with SteelHooves and Star Paladin Something Or Other on one side, and Elder Cottage Cheese and the non-Apple Rangers on the other. Apparently Cottage Cheese is going to Canterlot to get that Zebra black magic book for whatever-the-fuck reason I think he wants to use it to put his soul in a computer or something, and SH's group plans to take Stable 29 in the meantime. Presumably the idea here is to both use the stable as a base, and to keep the computer away from the Cheeseman to ensure he can't put his soul in it.

The scene ends with LP telling SH that she has something to tell him.

Page break. LP now proceeds to tell SH the thing she had told him she needed to tell him in the previous scene. That thing is as follows:

Applejack didn't leave SteelHooves, as SteelHooves apparently believes. She wanted to leave the stable and come find him, but Sweetie Belle, who was the Overmare at the time, would not open the door. Apparently StableTec had made a rule stating that the stables could not be opened until their monitors said that the air and soil conditions were free of radiation and whatnot. Also, there's a twist: Applejack was pregnant. I'm not sure who, but something tells me that someone in this story is going to turn out to be SteelHooves' long-lost great granddaughter or some shit.

Page break. Another short microscene follows. It turns out that even the long-lost-great-granddaughter angle was too much to hope for. I had been assuming that either Littlepoop or Velvet would turn out to be SteelHooves' descendent, probably Littlepoop, and that would fundamentally change their relationship for the rest of the story. But nope; the significance of mentioning Applejack's pregnancy in the previous microscene was simply to set up this one, in which Velvet explains to the Overmare that nearly everyone in the stable has Apple DNA because they've all been inbreeding with each other. She thinks they should all leave the stable and fuck other ponies from now on. The author devotes an entire microscene to this idiotic conversation.

It ends on this ambiguous note:

>“Hello?” I finally said. The two mares turned to look at me with matching shocked expressions.
>“Maybe there’s another way?”

However, it seems we are going to have to wait a while to see what that "other way" will be, or what it will be the other way to. After a page break, and we rejoin LP, Velvet and Calamity at some out of the way part of Sweet Apple Acres. Calamity shows them the Rock of Destiny, which appears to be some kind of password-protected hiding place for the Dashites. The scene ends with him giving the password and opening the rock. There is not even the slightest indication of why he is doing this or why any of this matters. The chapter ends here.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307621
307623
>>307619
Perhaps if Steelhooves was the type to spontaneously rant about the glory of the Steel Rangers and the greatness of their holy mission for protecting tech and exactly how his organization works we'd know more about it and know what to think of it by the time it turns evil and goes for LP's home. This could be a turning point for Steeltoes' character that makes him determined to set his organization on the right path even if it means bloodshed.

Perhaps Velvet's "I want to be a doctor" mission would be less dumb if there was one very specific place where she wanted to be a doctor, a popular trading hub full of poners who need help. Perhaps if it was Tenpony Tower this could give the group a better motivation for going there. Could do an emotional scene when they get there, where Velvet considers quitting the party but she loves her murderhobos too much to give up the adventuring life and give up on anypony she could save when travelling just to hang around this tower as one of many doctors for rich pricks. This would make Velvet's decision to stick with LP as the medic to 4 murderhobos the result of character growth.

It really is a damn shame that Kkat isn't using LP's companions as alternate viewpoints to explore the world, alternate perspectives to view it, or representations of different factions and their ideologies. At this point I assumed the author was going for a theme where each pony who is "from something" on Team LP hates it. LP and Velvet hate their home, Calamity hates the enclave, Steelhooves hates the Steel Rangers, and the zigger... also exists. Problem is, making the Steel Rangers not evil is something that should have happened during the founding of the Steel Rangers just because Steelhooves was there and the best candidate for its leader. Nothing really comes from LP and Velvet being from a stable unless you count Velvet's occasional pussy peacetime morality moments that don't amount to much because these characters lack agency. the zigger doesn't actively hate her race or its silly stories or its primitive barbaric voodoo blood sacrifice dark magic religion or the zebra nation that damned this planet. She's just there because Kkat thought one good zigger on team hero would make up for how zebras and the bullshit religion this zigger continues to follow did everything wrong. Explaining why I dislike Calamity would spoil shit.

But while a well-written party of heroes has some kind of theme binding them all along with a shared goal and possibly their own reasons for pursuing it besides the typical "lmao im saving the world from annihilation because i am a hero and i keep my stuff there" this party feels like the result of a DND min-maxer trying to make an optimal party with as much power as possible and the best numbers possible and as many ties to major factions as possible despite the lack of fleshed out personalities or backstories. This motherfucker's playing dnd with himself and cheating whenever his powergaming BS isn't enough. Who the fuck puts numbers and power levels before good writing in a goddamn story?! ...Wow, is this what it feels like to be on the other end of this?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
94183d6
?
No.307623
>>307493
>Probably autism is the biggest one, as the wider majority in a fandom are typically very hypersensitive, surface level appreciation, or hyperfixating types of people who simply take what is told to them without inspecting the nuance of something. They would never stop to think for a moment about this situation, as what is relevant and important to them is the direct presentation of things, emotions they are told to feel, as they are sort of being "directed" by the author, and they cannot comprehend much else at all.
Nail on the head. I've noticed this type of behavior before, and it's a big part of what annoys me about fanboy-type personalities.

>>307543
I'll take a look at it.

>>307618
>Glim, do you think this "we know nothing of LP's home and its major characters" problem could be solved if the first chapter dropped the PipBuck narration, and instead displayed an intentionally-extreme dream sequence followed by a rude awakening and the average dull life of LP?
I think I get the general idea of what you're going for, but imo dream sequences are kind of a hacky device and they seldom add anything meaningful to a story. Maybe a daydream or something; she's dozing off at work and fantasizing about doing some hero-type stuff, and then some Pip-Buck customer jerks her out of it by saying "are you listening to me?" or something to that effect.

The rest of your idea is much better, though. The early portion of the story where LP is in the stable is one of the few parts that I feel ought to be expanded, and it should be expanded into pretty much what you say here: a montage that gives the reader a sense of Littlepoop's shitty, boring life and the principal players in it. We should meet her mom, we should meet her coworkers and/or friends, and we should see her at work and get a sense of both what her job is and the fact that she derives no fulfilment from it. This is all necessary exposition and should occur before Velvet makes her first appearance, though it might be a good idea to foreshadow her by having LP hear one of her songs on the radio or something.

I'd probably not have LP get involved in the conversation about which PipBuck is better, but having her overhear the conversation isn't a bad idea. Probably what I would do there is have her walk by, hear the ponies talking about their PipBucks, and maybe have a quick bit of inner monologue that goes something like this:

>Ugh, PipBucks. That was the last thing I wanted to think about.

>I work on those things for a living, or at least I used to. It sounds impressive, but a PipBuck is nothing special. It's a device that straps to the foreleg and keeps track of your vitals, can show you a map of your immediate surroundings, keeps track of stuff you're carrying if you want it to...it can do a lot of things, actually. Most ponies don't even use a fraction of its features, though. Why would they? Life is easy here.

From here, she could maybe include a quick blurb about how she has a cutie mark in repairing PipBucks, and it basically brands her as a nopony because PipBucks are so unremarkable. This is pretty much all the info the reader needs about the PipBuck until it starts to feature more heavily in the story. I like the idea of having her demonstrate some of the common features by running errands for her mom, but apart from that I would downplay the use of this thing until she gets out of the stable. The early part of the story should focus on her daily life, and in that context all we really need to know about the PipBuck is basically what it is, and the fact that her job is to fix them.

I wouldn't include any early demonstration of SATS at this point; in fact I probably wouldn't even mention that it exists until the very first time she gets into a gunfight. Probably I'd have her picking up a discarded gun on impulse while ducking for cover, clumsily fumbling with it while trying to figure out how it works, and panicking because she's never been in a fight before and she thinks she's going to die. Then suddenly she has a eureka moment where she remembers that the PipBuck has a feature that can aim the gun for her; play it up like it's just some odd thing she learned about during her training that she never thought would turn out to be important.

The main takeaway though is that the first chapter should be pure exposition and should introduce us to the important aspects of LP's character: her boring life, her job and role in the stable's society, her drunk mother, her religion, and so forth. Velvet should be mentioned and LP's crush on her should be hinted at, but we ideally shouldn't hear much about her until the expository part is out of the way and we're ready to progress to the actual plot. I'd probably save Velvet's first appearance until Chapter Two at the earliest, and just have her as a voice on the radio or as a name that's mentioned offhandedly by others until then.

All in all you're on the right track here. Nice job.

>>307621
>Who the fuck puts numbers and power levels before good writing in a goddamn story?! ...Wow, is this what it feels like to be on the other end of this?
Well, the first step is admitting that you have a problem, so once again you're on the right track.
Anonymous
3c05745
?
No.307627
smiling-horse-4-1.jpg
>>307277
>You will progress at your own specifications, whatever those may be. Trust in yourself, Anon, and trust in those that trust (You) as I do.
Thank you.
Anonymous
3c05745
?
No.307628
Happy_horse.jpg
>To the left: Me reading thread.
>To the right: Average F:E fan.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.307639
>>307617
This whole segment exists because it is a quest in Fallout 3 and Kkat wanted to reference this. Albeit, the quest is much less intense--you return to your vault and discover it is undergoing a civil war. There is some vague relation to power-armored cretins later on, however. I think there's one choice to reveal the location of your vault or something to the enclave. I forget.

The funny thing is though, that even the hack frauds at Bethesda still gave this SOME vague weight, because the beginning of the game sets up your life in the vault, who your friends are, and details a bit about some of the various named characters. Kkat didn't do this, which is odd.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
4c3b063
?
No.307655
307657 307680 307689
31125.jpg
>>307619

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Racing Apotheosis

I notice this author is fond of throwing big, relatively obscure words around (apotheosis, athenaeum, and ignominious are the ones I can recall, though I believe there have been others) as if he desperately wants the reader to know that they are in his vocabulary.

Anyway, here is today's fortune cookie:

>“Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters who ruled together and created harmony for all the land. To do this, the eldest used her unicorn powers to raise the sun at dawn. The younger brought out the moon to begin the night...”
I'm sure we all recognize the opening line from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

The chapter opens with a recording from Scootaloo, which was stored on a PipBuck in Calamity's Destiny Rock. The Rock is apparently some kind of Dashite time capsule in which the various Dashites throughout the ages have placed items from their lives as a sort of record for future generations. Apparently Scootaloo was the first Dashite, or among the first, and she placed her PipBuck in here after recording this dying message.

The recording doesn't contain anything terribly useful or interesting, it's just a standard final soliloquy, of the sort we've heard plenty of times before: "the bombs went off and ack ack I'm dying," etc etc. The main takeaway seems to be that Scootaloo was the first pegasus to renounce the Enclave and strike out on her own, and was also the one who coined the term "Dashite."

The situation here is similar to what we just saw with the Steel Rangers: the author has made it clear that there is discontentment in the ranks of this organization due to differing interpretations of its goals and ideals, but at the same time he seems to assume that most readers are familiar with whatever Fallout thing these groups are analogs of, and so does not feel obligated to explain just what those goals and ideals are exactly. We still don't know anything about this Enclave: what it believes, what it is/was trying to accomplish, or why these renegades chose to leave, and I don't get the impression kkat plans on explaining it any time soon.

Anyway, it looks like this is the "weapons stash" that Calamity had wanted to grab something from earlier. He has apparently stored his old Enclave armor here, and has decided to retrieve it since it may be useful, even though he seems to have reservations about wearing it, due to whatever it represents. Again, it would be helpful if the author would at least give us some kind of hint or clue as to what exactly it represents, but again, I'm not holding out much hope for that.

>“So, my buck was a captain?” Velvet Remedy purred, wrapping the Enclave armor with her magic and floating it off the ground.
In case you've forgotten, Velvet Remedy and Calamity are supposed to be dating or something.

Anyway, at this point we learn the specifics of how Calamity left the Enclave. Like most of the big reveals in this story, the truth turns out to be pretty mundane. Apparently Calamity was a captain who was tasked with leading one of the occasional patrols that the Enclave would send out to get an update of the situation on the ground. They were supposed to simply observe without interfering; however, it seems that Calamity noticed a group of raiders attacking a caravan, and ordered his men to intervene and stop the attack. His men refused, so he punished them for insubordination. Enclave upper management sided with the troops and maintained that Calamity was in the wrong.

They demanded a public apology, but instead Calamity announced that he was leaving the Enclave and anyone who wanted to come with him should do so. There were no takers, and so Calamity left and was branded a Dashite. It's unclear at what point they forcibly removed his cutie mark. The story we heard earlier, about Calamity being a wanted murderer, was apparently fabricated by the Enclave as a means of saving face. Pity; it would have made a far more interesting backstory than what we have here, but them's the breaks I suppose.

>I remembered what Calamity had said back in Fillydelphia: Most dictatorships Ah know of tend t’ go hell-an’-highwater t’ either discredit or destroy opposin’ voices like that.
I guess the implication is that the Enclave is a dictatorship? Again, it would help if the author would give us a little more information about what this group is, what it believes and how it is structured; it might make it a little easier to form an opinion on Calamity's position here.

>“They ain’t bad ponies, Li’lpip,” Calamity whinnied. “They’re just bein’ bamboozled by their leaders. Even in the best governments, the ponies at the top don’t tell the rank-n-file what’s actually goin’ on.” He trotted in place. “Y’think the better folk o’ New Appleloosa ‘ave any idea jus’ how connected they are t’ Red Eye?”
This is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The author is just assuming we've understood all along that places like New Appleoosa and whatever the Enclave's settlement is called are structured like regular towns, with a clear division between government and people.

As little as we've been told about the Enclave, I've been assuming it was some kind of paramilitary order, which everyone who lives there is an active member of; more like a fortress than a city. Similarly, New Appleoosa didn't seem much like a town; it was more like a guarded compound run by a slaver group. I more or less assumed that everyone who lived there was a member of this slaver group, but apparently we are supposed to believe that it was just a regular town, and that the slave operation was just one business that was being operated there. I guess. This author remains vexing; he goes into autistic amounts of detail about unimportant things, but fails to provide essential details that would make large chunks of the story clearer.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
4c3b063
?
No.307657
307671 307672 307689
1619996728886.gif
>>307655

>I remembered the way the ponies in Turnpike Tavern laughed at the notion of “that buck on the spritebots” being anypony’s leader. On the other side of the bottle cap, I was willing to bet Sweetie Belle didn’t tell anypony in Stable Two about the friends and relatives dying just outside the Stable door, breaking their hooves against it as they begged to be let in.
>Hell, I was supposedly the leader of these ponies, and I was keeping secrets of my own. (The truth about the Ministry of Peace and the megaspells came swiftly to mind.) So I supposed that Calamity’s assertion was true.
Once again, LP is connecting a lot of random things together that don't necessarily connect. The overall idea here seems to be that leaders sometimes have to withhold information or lie, and the author is just rattling off whatever parts of his text he can recall that might faintly illustrate this point.

The bit about LP's also being a leader and having to do the same things these other leaders did is particularly weak. She's not really a leader in the same sense as all these others: nobody follows her command and she's not responsible for an entire settlement. She's just the de-facto ringleader of this little loose-knit band of murderhobos, from whom everyone just takes orders for some reason.

As far as the "secrets" she mentions keeping, these are pretty minor. As I recall, the "truth" about the Ministry of Peace and the megaspells just amounts to Fluttershy's having had something to do with it. I guess LP has been concealing this information because she thinks it might destroy Velvet's image of her idol or whatever. This information deals entirely with events from the past unrelated to anything currently going on, and whether or not Velvet becomes aware of it is unlikely to affect anything important. It's not really in the same category as a stable Overmare lying about ponies dying of radiation poisoning just outside the door, or the Enclave leaders telling their citizens that the surface world is too contaminated to survive on when really it isn't.

At this point Velvet takes her old PipBuck out of LP's saddlebag and deposits it into the hole in place of Calamity's armor.

>I brought up the inventory sorter on my PipBuck, scrolling through it until I realized with a pang that I didn’t have anything from my life in the Stable to give up.
This is actually pretty funny. All the useless shit this little retard carries around with her, and not a single memento of her own life. Hey, how about one of those statuettes? It's not like she needs those.

Anyway, despite having nothing to leave in the hole, LP decides to delete the crack mint recipe from her PipBuck as some kind of gesture of solidarity...or something.

Page break.

>Stable Two. I was leaving it again. This time it hurt worse. Probably because I knew that I would never return even though I could.
Did it even hurt the first time? Seems to me she was pretty indifferent to the place the last time she left here.

>I felt weary beyond simple exhaustion. The mental toll of the night before was compounding the physical expense of the battle, and of nearly dying once again.
What else is new? This bitch is always whining about her trials and travails and mental exhaustion, and she "nearly dies" once every couple of days. Seriously; in a world where you can have half your leg blown off and magically cure it just by drinking a couple of general-purpose healing elixirs, the hovering specter of imminent death just doesn't have much punch.

>Almost normal. He [Calamity] had been ruthless, I was told, in hunting down the last of the Steel Rangers. I did not begrudge him that. But this had been more than his code, more than his “policy”.
Speaking of things that the author hasn't really bothered to explain, what is this "policy" of Calamity's? I don't remember hearing about this before. It's entirely possible this is just one more thing that was casually dropped into the text nineteen chapters ago and is just now being referenced, but it seems to me that if the author had done a good job building this character, then Calamity's having some kind of personal bushido code would factor heavily into the story and wouldn't be something I'd have to ask about. Also: when did he hunt down the last of the Steel Rangers? I don't remember hearing about this before.

Anyway, we also learn that the shack Calamity used to live in once belonged to Rainbow Dash, for whatever the hell this information is worth.

>“Did Rainbow Dash ever return to the shack? I mean, do you know?”
>“Ah don’t reckon she did,” Calamity stated, his words sending a wave of bitter sadness through my heart. “When Ah got there, Ah found a pegasus skeleton curled up in a corner which Ah buried out back. Figure if Rainbow Dash had come back, there woulda’ been two.”
The saddest thing about this is that kkat will likely never realize how goddamned hilarious this running gag with the skeletons really is, or even that it's a running gag at all. Seriously; for all their apparent failings, I get the impression Bethesda at least realized the environmental-storytelling-skeleton concept was a bit silly and attempted to have some fun with it. Kkat, as far as I can tell, is 100% serious about all of this.

Also, it's worth noting that the logic here is pretty absurd anyway. I don't get the impression this shack was located anywhere that would have been out of the way or hard to find; there's absolutely no reason to assume that Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo were the only ponies in 200 years ever to stay there. That could have been anypony's skeleton he buried; it's well established that skeletons are a dime a dozen in this story.

>Another pang shot through my heart. Calamity had done better for Scootaloo than I had for… anypony who had passed on.
Kek. Those tiny little glimmers of self-awareness...

>I felt a steely resolve build within my sorrow.
What the fuck does this even mean? Does kkat even read his own sentences?
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.307671
>>307657
>I get the impression Bethesda at least realized the environmental-storytelling-skeleton concept was a bit silly and attempted to have some fun with it

Absolutely. It became a well-loved joke amidst most fans, so there's lots of skeletons dying on the toilet, or posed in awkward positions, etc.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
4c3b063
?
No.307672
307675 307678 307680
1620026910389.png
>>307657

>“Before we go, we should bury the skeletons in the apple cellar tunnel,” I said firmly. “I know we’re on the clock, but dammit if I’m gonna leave here again without doing that.”
This is probably a decent enough thing to do, but LP's sentiment still rings false. Those skeletons were there before she was born and she had nothing to do with the deaths of any of those ponies, so she really has no obligation here. While the author probably put this in here to show that LP has grown or matured somehow, I would argue this is all part of consistent pattern of narcissistic behavior on her part and that she really hasn't changed that much at all.

Consider her wasteland "heroism" for a moment. As much as she complains about how the wasteland has changed her for the worst or is cruel to her, very little actual harm has befallen her directly. Nearly all of the enemies she's made so far have been the result of fights she picked without any direct provocation. Apart from the two slavers who captured her on the night she left the stable and maybe the odd raider here and there, she has not been victimized by the wasteland or anyone in it; she just takes it upon herself to go around starting fights with anyone she considers to be "evil" according to her own arbitrary definition of the word. She assumes the role of judge, jury and executioner and goes around trying to fix things that nobody asked her to fix.

What's more, despite all of the falsely modest "aw, shucks" remarks she makes whenever anyone admires her or calls her a hero, it's clear that she inwardly believes that she is doing good and deserves a pat on the head for it. The attitude is fundamentally not that different from an arrogant white liberal who takes it upon himself to go around smashing "racism" and "bigotry" wherever he sees it, regardless of whether or not any of the "victims" asked for his help, and as with Littlepoop, there is usually a cynical expectation that the alleged "victims" should be grateful to have him as a champion. The similarity may be a big part of my visceral dislike for this character, actually.

Anyway, what annoys me about the skeleton thing here is that once again, Littlepoop is taking it upon herself to right some ancient wrong that it really isn't her place to get involved with, and she seems to once again expect some kind of recognition for it. She's not atoning for anything here; she's just doing a generally good deed, while simultaneously making sure that others see her doing it, so they can praise her and she can go "aw shucks, t'weren't nothin'."

If she really felt bad about her disrespect for the dead up until this point, and she really wanted to atone for it, she would go back to that skyscraper she visited earlier and return the statue that she stole out of Pinkie's ribcage for literally no reason. She wouldn't have to dig her a grave or build her a monument or do anything grandiose; she has absolutely no fundamental obligation to Pinkie or to any of the other random skeletons she's encountered. All she needs to do is acknowledge that she took something that doesn't belong to her, and violated a complete stranger's remains in order to do it. However, the fact that she doesn't even seem to realize her own wrongdoing there just makes her gesture with the Stable 2 skeletons that much more artificial.

ANYWAY, the rest of this scene is just more random bullshit. They wander around picking up their junk, because I guess it scattered all over the place when their sky wagon crashed, and then Calamity suggests that they go back to Rainbow Dash's old shack, because (surprise surprise) there's a safe in there that nopony has been able to open in 200 years, and Calamity thinks now would be as good a time as any for Littlepoop to take a crack at it. Sure, why not; it's not like they have anything better to do.

Page break. They bury the skeletons, and by the time they're done the Rangers have finished painting themselves up, and the group is now ready to depart. There is some brief discussion with SteelHooves over what comes next for the Rangers. It's about what you'd expect: bloody civil war looms on the horizon.

>The pony in my head whimpered, watching my actions ripple out into war and bloodshed. “I’m so sorry…”
See? This is exactly what I'm talking about; this cunt is narcissistic to the core, and her false humility only makes it more aggravating. Whatever this schism in the Rangers is about, it predates Littlepoop's involvement; she didn't cause any of this and has no obligation to feel sorry. Not everything is about you, you goddamn Mary Sue twat.

A random throwaway character named Paladin Whogivesafuck that the author just introduced in this scene essentially tells her as much, though naturally he manages to slip some praise for Littlepoop's heroism into the conversation. The scene closes with this appropriately cringe-inducing bit of angst from SteelHooves:

>As he plodded past me, he lowered his helmet and whispered into my ear, “It’s better that my child never knew me.”
He's probably right, but not for the reason he thinks. Anyway, from what Velvet was saying earlier, it sounds like everyone in Stable 2 took turns banging his daughter until nearly all the subsequent generations had Apple blood, so it's probably best that he never knew her either.

Page break.

>It was another stroke of luck that Calamity’s Shack was only a little bit out of our way towards Fetlock and Manehattan. It was, however, completely in the opposite direction of Splendid Valley. I began to worry what Red Eye might do if we delayed too long. I was hoping that his twisted generosity would extend to giving me time to rest after everything I had gone through.
What the fuck is in Splendid Valley? Why are they going there all of a sudden? I thought they were supposed to...wait a minute, what are they supposed to be doing? Looking for the Goddess, I think. Is she in Splendid Valley now?
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.307675
>>307672
IIRC Splendid Valley was mentioned earlier when talking about where the Hellhounds came from. I think it was some home of the Diamond Dogs that ponies ended up using as a dumping ground for magical waste. I guess this is where the goddess is, as Mariposa Military Base in Fallout 1 was a place holding a lot of radioactive content and the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) that the Master was using to create Super Mutants. In this fic I believe it's some kind of research facility.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
4c3b063
?
No.307678
307679 307680 307689 307711
tumblr_pc98emd9Iv1tc8nu4o1_500.jpg
>>307672

Anyway, with all of these diversions and distractions I've completely lost track of what this group's main objective is even supposed to be, but that's nothing new. At this point, they are headed back to Tenpony Tower, I think because Red Eye put a bomb in there or something, and also Splendid Valley, because apparently that's where the Goddess is, even though this has never been explicitly or implicitly stated anywhere in the text that I can recall.

The first problem involves getting into Tenpony, because Red Eye has laid siege to it. The obvious solution would be to use the underground access passage, but unfortunately SteelHooves blew it up for some reason or other. So, they decide to go in through the roof instead. This strikes me as somewhat idiotic, since Red Eye's army is bound to see them flying onto the roof of the tower, but it's possible the author has an explanation prepared. Possible, but not likely.

However, first thing's first: they need to go back to Calamity's old shack so Littlepoop can open a safe. Nice to see this group still has their priorities straight. As they near the shack, there is an odd bit of side banter between LP and Blackwing:

>“Do you think Gawdyna will be satisfied with the payment?” I called out over the rush of wind.
>Blackwing barked a laugh. “I think she’ll be surprised. Disturbed, maybe. She was hoping for rights to draw from Stable Two’s water talisman. Instead, she’s getting an offer to move the entire damn population of Stable Two, as well as its most valuable assets, to her domain.”
Stable Two's population is moving to Gawd's domain? Which is...Shattered Hoof, I think? When was this decided, exactly? An even more pertinent question is why?

This seems to be related to what LP, Velvet and the Overmare were discussing towards the end of the previous chapter: that the Stable 2 ponies need to go out into the world and make new friends, because they are all getting dangerously inbred from everypony gangbanging AJ and SteelHooves' daughter 200 years ago. What's confusing, though, is why they would all go to Gawd's fortress. It seems like the issue is with the population being cut off from the world for too long; there's nothing wrong with the stable itself. The stable is a high-tech facility with a water talisman, an apple orchard, a school, and any number of other accommodations that Gawd's fortress doesn't have. Seems like it would make far more sense for Gawd and her crew to come to them.

For whatever it's worth, the next paragraph offers a reasonable enough explanation:

>As Velvet Remedy had determined, Stable Two could not afford to remain isolated for much longer. The population needed to genetically spread, to introduce new breeding stock from the Outside. But they couldn’t just open the Stable door. Not with Stable Two near the edge of the Everfree Forest and an hour’s trot from raider territory. They needed to move. Shattered Hoof provided additional population and safety.
From here, the author rambles on about some of the convoluted problems with the proposed undertaking that aren't really worth going over in detail. Apparently they are planning to transport the trees from the apple orchard to Shattered Hoof, because for some reason that makes more sense than just planting new trees, and I guess this is a problem because the rail line runs through New Appleoosa. The astute reader may recall that New Appleoosa is where the slavers are. Even though my understanding is that Littlepoop busted up their operation and killed them all, it seems they are still operating, or are operating again, and...whatever. It don't matter. None of this matters.

Wait, turns out I've got it wrong. Old Appleoosa is where the slavers are and/or were; New Appleoosa is the town that Calamity came from originally, but apparently poses some kind of threat to the Gawdyna/Stable 2 orchard transport operation, because...wait a minute, why is this a problem? Well, the author offers us this rambling and confusing explanation:

>I sounded more confident than I felt. But Calamity’s words had reminded me that while there might be questionable or even downright villainous ponies in high places at New Appleloosa, the bulk of the townsfolk were good ponies. Hell, Ditzy Doo lived there.
There are questionable or downright villainous ponies in high places at New Appleoosa? When did this happen? I don't think we ever heard anything about their government during the time we were there. I think I vaguely recall something later on about them having connections to Red Eye or something, but...whatever. It don't matter. None of this matters.

Page break. They arrive at the shack, and once again make note of the noxious fumes coming from the burning Everfree Forest. Calamity's shack is on top of a cliff, and there is some debate over how to get up there, since the cliff is too small to land the Autobeat Airbus. Eventually, the group decides that Calamity and LP should go up, since Calamity can fly and LP can levitate herself with Mary Sue magic.

>“Oh no,” Velvet Remedy put her hoof down. “You did not bring us all the way here, Calamity, to your old home, only to not let me see it.”
>Calamity nickered, looking apprehensive and a bit embarrassed.
>“Come on now,” Velvet purred. “I showed you mine; now you show me yours.”
I think I hate these two as a couple even more than I hate them as individuals, and that goes double for Velvet. Like many severely autistic people, kkat is incapable of understanding normal human emotions, and as such his characters can only express intimate feelings for each other through crude sexual innuendo. The rest of us just have to suffer through it.

Anyway, this asinine debate over how to get up to the top of the cliff consumes the entire microscene; nothing else happens. Ultimately, Littlepoop levitates herself while Calamity flies up with Velvet on his back or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gax-289Ss_8
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307679
307685 307747
>>307678
Is it bad writing that Kkat thinks any underground bunker full of survivalists would become dangerously genetically inbred almost immediately to the point where 200 years later they decide the best thing they can do is move to a mercenary force's home and start shagging foreign wastelanders even if they've got radiation poisoning/taint poisoning/unspeakable mutated diseases?
It seems like the result of a mind brainwashed into thinking genrtic diversity is an inherent necessity to life quality and almost as divine as ordinary diversity aka the same divershitty that's fucked the real world up, not that lefties understand it.
Stable Two is an isolated underground settlement, and surely it would have enough ponies in it on day one for inbreeding to never be a serious issue unless everyone really did fuck the only Apple Family poners until they're all related. Did this stable lack any long-term planning capacity and refuse to dictate who can and cannot reproduce for the sake of genetics? Did the hottest one just get a whole harem containing all genetically healthy fertile poners? Does Kkat know nothing of tribes that survived hundreds of years without inbreeding problems or any of the animals that practice "only the biggest best animal breeds this generation's breedable"-ism?
The myth that one generation of fucking distantly related cousins will immediately turn your kids into the most impossibly inbred things hollywood jews could CGI into existence or the most absurdly disabled things royal inbreeding can produce is retarded.
Anonymous
548c81c
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No.307680
307747
gearupgradesthatmakesense.jpg
ohno.png
The return to stable 2 is filled with nods to the Fallout games, with Kkat's usual habit of mashing things together and tweaking them slightly.

- The welcoming party being gunned down in the doorway by power-armored goons with heavy weaponry is pretty much direct from Fallout 2's intro.
- At the end of Fallout 1, the player character is ordered to leave the vault and never return because the overseer believes they'll be a negative influence on the population after what they've experienced in the wasteland. Here it's Littlepip that thinks this way (so humble!).
- The inbreeding problem is a reference to the same problem existing in Vault 101 in Fallout 3, though it's worth pointing out that 101 remaining closed indefinitely was an experiment and its population was never intended to survive in the long term.

>>307672
>What the fuck is in Splendid Valley? Why are they going there all of a sudden? I thought they were supposed to...wait a minute, what are they supposed to be doing? Looking for the Goddess, I think. Is she in Splendid Valley now?
Splendid Valley was mentioned a couple of times before, though I don't recall in how much detail. Either somebody told Littlepip that it's where the Goddess lives or she pulled the knowledge out of her ass. Without digging through the text to check, both seem plausible.

>>307655
>Anyway, it looks like this is the "weapons stash" that Calamity had wanted to grab something from earlier. He has apparently stored his old Enclave armor here, and has decided to retrieve it since it may be useful, even though he seems to have reservations about wearing it, due to whatever it represents. Again, it would be helpful if the author would at least give us some kind of hint or clue as to what exactly it represents, but again, I'm not holding out much hope for that.
Worth pointing out: Calamity's armor is Enclave power armor, which (at least in the games) is on par with or superior to the powered armor worn by the Brotherhood of Steel/Steel Rangers. It also has four custom-built laser rifles on it.

Calamity is no longer a fighter jet. He is now a spaceship.

The Enclave, for some inscrutable reason, burned off Calamity's cutie mark and banished him while at the same time allowing him to hold on to this impossibly powerful and priceless piece of equipment. Calamity's response to this was to hide the armor under a literal rock. No reason is given for either of these facts. The rock itself is bizarre - are the dashites an organization? An ancient tradition? No other Dashite has even been mentioned aside from Scootaloo and Calamity, and they're separated by entire centuries. Calamity can't have had a dashite mentor, predecessor or the like because we've already been informed that he abandoned the Enclave entirely of his own volition. How did Calamity learn of this magical stash rock and the way to access it? And what do cutie marks have to do with anything?

>>307678
>Stable Two's population is moving to Gawd's domain? Which is...Shattered Hoof, I think? When was this decided, exactly? An even more pertinent question is why?
And here's the dumb cherry on the sundae of dumb that is this story arc. For all her whining and murderous rage over slavery and authoritarianism, Littlepip just sold her stable.

The griffons demanded payment for their (unsolicited) assistance and Littlepip decided that the stable needed to connect to the outside world, so she "solved" both problems at the same time. By sending the stable's population (which we can reasonably assume to be several hundred people) to go and live in a run down stonebreaking yard full of skeletons run by career mercenaries and (ex-?)raiders. The stable ponies are expected to give up a fully self-sufficient and highly defensible shelter in order to go and live in a ruin under the authority of a band of contract killers. There's no mention or even consideration of what the stable ponies think about this arrangement, and it's simply assumed that Gawd will agree to take on several hundred people of varying ages with no survival skills in the first place. Even with that clusterfuck out of the way, from the way things are worded it's as if Kkat thinks that an orchard is something you can just pick up and move.

What. The. Fuck.
Anonymous
ad75414
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No.307685
307689 307692
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>>307679
This.
It reminds me of when I watched H(omo)bomberguy on his review of RWBY. In it he compliments the fact that the team's team-attacks are named after each respective fan shipping pairing of the team. He also praises the fact that Yang and Ruby doesn't have a team attack since they are sisters.
So homosexuality is okay but incest isn't because....? But they can't even have inbred children since they are both girls, right? So what is hte problem? Aren't you the guys that shout love is love?
It just feels like they keep incest as something bad to be able to have something more to label nationalists as. Because it isn't like their sexual deviancies are normal themselves. I would go so far to say that incest is way more normal and natural (historically) than homosexuality or fucking foreigners.
A generation is a at max like 30 years or perhaps even tweenty. Each person has two parents. 1^(2xn), 2021-30n =High numbers. Then consider that our means of logistics where quite limited for the average person and you realize why people of the same race or that come from the same region look alike.
Also, horses that breeds with donkeys produce sterlized mules. So too diverse gen pools that are not complatible seems to end with bad results.
Anonymous
0681d3b
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No.307689
307692 307696
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>>307655
>"So my buck was a captain?"
EXCUSE ME, HOL' THE FUCK UP. HE COULDN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO LEARN WHAT THE PROPER TERM FOR A MARE'S STALLION IS?! WELP, there goes my patience for the next 8-10 hours!

>>307657
>"that buck on the spritebots"
I have this terrible suspicion that kkuck is the "writer's aid and proof reader" for that literal niggerfaggot dyke-wannabe who wrote Fail of Equestri-whateverlol, where, SOMEHOW, a bunch of (((deer))) took over absolutely everything despite being pathetic weaklings.

>>307678
Population transfers are neither civilly nor socially problematic when the genetic lineages are similar enough to prevent tension. The '''author''' doesn't know what the fuck he's even spewing. Then again, kkuck NEVER knows what he's done wrong and doesn't stop to contemplate failure even once.

>>307685
No. The difference is that one 'generation' of incest results in deleterious harm to the resulting genetics of the 'offspring' which compounds exponentially per 'generation'. It is mostly a disgusting practice used by 'royalty' and religions across the world in order to "godda keep durr gud blud in durr famiree". Similarities do not imply clone like features, instead what one does find are rapidly increasing defects. Faggotry is equally vile on a procedural genetic basis as that IS an inherently negative condition.

tl;dr: it ain't "love" if it's degenerate.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307692
307759
>>307685
Aye, they're always accusing us of being "Those wacky buck-toothed hillbillies/football thugs", "those cousin-fuckers", "Those klan-hatted inbred skinheads", and so on. Meanwhile they're trying to get American states to decriminalize spreading AIDS knowingly. Hell, didn't one of their feminist celebrities rape her underaged sister, get away with it, and gloat about it in her biography? Not to mention famous trannies like "Jessica" Yaniv and Lily Peet/Lily Orchard/Jerry Peet.
It's funny how RWBY's initial poor handling of the Faunus problem attracted the wrong sort to the show at the start. Now it's bending over backwards to try and pander to what it thinks the wrong sort want.
Blake the ex-White Fang member in season one openly states "Boycots and peaceful protests weren't doing anything, but violence made people listen and give the Faunus equality", whatever the fuck that means. Equality isn't something you're just given like money. Exactly how life sucks for the Faunus and how they "didn't have equality" is never stated, you're just expected to be sympathetic to Blake the spoiled rich bitch who joined a terrorist organization because her "activist" and rich tribal-leader parents didn't seem hardcore enough. WF simps will point to any "microaggression" against a faunus like one bar with a "No faunus allowed" sign or that food-seller guy from Season 3 snatching the fish away from Blake even though Weiss's credit card was denied. Fuck this show.
Later when she spots Cardin pulling bunnywaifu's ears, nobody does anything. In a school for wannabe-heroes, nobody does anything, even though she's a year older than him and should be able to beat his ass considering how effortlessly her dyke "fashun"tard friend shreds through Grimm and the show's power balance. Turns out every RWBY character not using a minigun is mathematically inferior to this boring bitch in terms of Grimm kills per second and high-value target elimination. Seriously, some autistic power-scaler who gives a fuck, count how many seconds all of Team RWBY and JNPR took to take out one Giant Nevermore VS how quickly minigun bitch killed hers.
Initially, the White Fang's acts of violence against the Shnee Dust Company (and Weiss's family) were painted as a good thing because they were part of the violence that was painted as something that "got humans to listen". Even though this did nothing to stop Faunus "slave" miners from being a thing. Hell, that White Fang chameleon dyke's backstory says she got laughed at in an Atlas school for turning weird colours then violently attacked schoolfriends and got kicked out just because they laughed when another mining accident killed many Faunus including her parents. Later in the show we'll see explosive Dust mining accidents can be averted if you don't fail at life.
Blake didn't have a problem with any of the White Fang violence against random humans or Weiss's family/company until Adam wanted her to personally help him obliterate a train full of innocents. SUDDENLY, it's all too much for her. So she... runs away from her problems and hides in a combat school as a human.
Weiss grew up in fear of the White Fang, she lost friends in the company and family members to them, so they've been violent for longer than both Blake and Adam were alive, despite what the "Sienna Khan is the nice WF and Adam made it mean!" retcon later on says. Also, Blake got Menagerie to try and stop the White Fang for the first time ever. Really says a lot about those animals.
Humans don't have a human-only ethnostate to retreat to or a violent White Fang-esque organization defending them from animal violence(Can relate), and while some Faunus are miner-slaves Atlas Academy proudly sends a catgirl faunus and the black son of a failed businessman to represent them on the global stage during the Vital Tournament. Remember, Blake hid her catgirl ears in Ruby's school but in Atlas, supposed "racist central", Neon Cat is happily rainbow-fagging all over the place.
The mechanics of slavery are never explained, too. Is it an economic thing where Faunus hobos can find work as miners even though it's unsafe and consider themselves "slaves" since they randomly don't want to live anywhere else? Faunus claim their ethnostate of Menagerie, a tropical paradise, is "Overcrowded" but it wasn't as overcrowded as the warehouses FULL of genocidal White Fang bastards who booed Torchwick for being human but cheered when he revealed his plan to use stolen dust to blow holes in the city to let Grimm in, slaughtering EVERYONE they get their inherently-evil hands on. Funny how the White Fang want to genocide everyone in a human nation just because they don't like that slavery exists in another human nation. Guess those animals just chimp out whenever they're mad.
I hear many of the fighting-age muslim invaders crying "I'm a refugee, let me in without a background check and put me in a nice hotel and feed me!" bring their sisters here and cry "She's a second cousin!" so she can be allowed in, then they marry and fuck their cousin. They don't care if their generations of inbreeding result in deformities. Hell, they'd probably get extra money for it on top of what they're already paid to live here as professional anti-whites for the jews.
>>307689
It's weird how Kkat uses "Buck" as "boy but for ponies". Sure, his excuse is that PipBuck (PipBoys from Fallout) sounds less awful than "PipStallion" but here's a fucking crazy idea... WHY NOT INVENT YOUR OWN NAME, AND YOUR OWN IDEAS?
Or use some other word that starts with B. Maybe a horse-related word.
Anonymous
ad75414
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No.307696
307698 307759
>>307689
Yeah, totally. I didn't mean to imply that incest wasn't bad for a gene pool, I just wanted to point at the hypocracy of these degenerate lefties. But evidently inbreeding leads to genetic disceases and such.
It is always where to draw the line. A friend I had in highschool, On of the few friends I had at the time that also liked mlp., he once made said that the reason why english people are so ugly is because they have been isolated on their island and they need immigrants to not get more inbred. He was a typical lefty/swedish patriot.
He also was huge fan of this story. I think he said that he read it like two or three times and had listened to it on audio book two times.
>Similarities do not imply clone like features
Well put. It is easy to otherwise assume that just because something is similar that they have to be the same or be there for the same reasons.
Anonymous
ad75414
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No.307698
>>307696
I don't think english people are ugly. He blurted that out of nowwhere, as if it was some type of common knowledge.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3001e19
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No.307711
307725
1620111087257.jpg
>>307678

>I was… pushing exhaustion. The effort was almost painful. But I was doing it.
>I was flying!
>It was worth it. For just a little bit, I was actually flying.
>It had not been a graceful act of freedom; as I was neither a pegasus nor a bird. It had been work, like galloping uphill against the wind. But I had done it. And for a moment, all the horrors and pain of the last few days was forgotten in the rush and exertion.
Why is this suddenly a big deal to her? She's done this bullshit levitation stunt countless times before.

Anyway, page break. For some absolute nonsense reason, it takes Littlepoop less time to levitate herself up to the top of the cliff than it takes Calamity to fly up there. Since she's got some time to kill, she decides to have a look at another of her memory orbs. I've completely lost track of how many of these things she still has or where she obtained them all, but this one is apparently broken somehow, and when she dives into it the experience is incredibly painful.

The scene takes place inside the main office of Rarity's Ministry of Image. LP views the scene from the perspective of a zebra spy wearing an invisibility cloak. Rarity is arguing with a male unicorn, who turns out to be Prince Blueblood. Blueblood has apparently proposed marriage to Rarity, who has rebuffed him. He is trying to convince her to reconsider.

>Rarity’s riposte was controlled, calm, even charming. “Humility was a lesson hard learned, in fact. It’s called maturing. Something which, sadly, you seem to have little acquaintance.”
This passage isn't really noteworthy on its own, but I've highlighted it as an example of kkat's comically midwit-tier writing style. The word "riposte" isn't misused here, but a more common word like "retort," "comeback," "rejoinder," "reply," etc would have worked just as well. I suspect he chose this particular word for the same reason he chose to call Homage's book collection an athenaeum instead of a library: he picked up this impressive-sounding word somewhere though I can't imagine where; maybe J.K. Rowling has a wider vocabulary than I give her credit for, and he wants to show it off.

In my view there's nothing wrong with being a little arrogant if you're confident you can back it up :^), but be advised that if you do something like this, readers will delight in pouncing on you if you make a minor mistake. Case in point:

>Something which, sadly, you seem to have little acquaintance.
This should say "Something with which, sadly, you seem to have little acquaintance."

What makes this even funnier is that the focus of this scene is Rarity's mocking of Blueblood's arrogant, foppish behavior.

Anyway, the two of them yammer on for awhile. To kkat's credit a couple of their barbs are actually pretty funny. Eventually, Blueblood takes his insults a little too far, and Rarity has him physically removed from the premises. Meanwhile, the zebra whose body is being inhabited by Littlepoop draws a dagger, intent on assassinating Rarity as soon as she is alone in the room. It's not entirely clear what happens next, but somehow Rarity gets the drop on the zebra and kills it. At this point, she confiscates the invisibility cloak and examines it, and Littlepoop realizes that this is where she must have gotten the idea for the StealthBuck.

>But the zebra’s hadn’t gotten this magic from us; we had gotten it from them.
"Zebras" here should be plural, not possessive.

ANYWAY, Rarity explains to the zebra that she had managed to (somehow) sneak a stun grenade into its saddlebags, which had conveniently gone off at the precise second the zebra had been poised to strike, and had conveniently affected only the zebra despite Rarity easily being within the blast radius of the grenade. She then taunts the zebra by showing it the book that was most likely its mission objective: the mysterious zebra necronomicon that has been an on-again, off-again MacGuffin in this story for some time now.

The orb sequence ends, and Littlepoop awakens on a cot in Calamity's shack. He informs her that, while she was in a trance, she apparently went mad and flung herself off the edge of the cliff, and Calamity had only just barely managed to catch her. Considering how often this numb twat chooses to dive into these stupid orbs at completely inappropriate moments, I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened before.

Anyway, they both yell at her for awhile, and she starts to cry and apologize, and then Calamity establishes some new ground rules for her: she is no longer allowed to touch a memory orb unless she is safely on the ground and they are not in the middle of a battle. It seems to me that this would just be common sense; sort of like "don't squirt ghost pepper sauce up your own urethra; it hurts" or "don't cut your dick off; you won't be able to grow it back if you can't pass." Then again, these characters haven't shown themselves to be terribly bright so far.

>Having laid the law, Calamity allowed his expression to soften.
The correct expression here is "having laid down the law." Having "laid the law" suggests that Calamity is banging a district attorney or something.

With all of this out of the way, Littlepoop now turns her attention to cracking the safe in Calamity's floor. There is nothing of interest inside except another one of those retarded statues; this time it's the Rainbow Dash one. I'll actually give kkat like half a point here, simply because of all the M6 ponies Rainbow Dash is probably the one most likely to keep a statue of herself in her safety deposit box. Anyway, the inscription on this one is "Be Awesome." I can't quite tell which "stat" it's supposed to boost, but at this point that hardly matters. As far as I can tell it just provides a general boost of vim and vigor. Against all reason, I am still waiting for the author to provide a non-video-game explanation for what the fuck these statues are and why they exist.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3001e19
?
No.307725
307730 307741 307759
1620125813310.png
>>307711

Page break. Calamity puts on his Enclave armor, then decides he doesn't want to wear it and takes it off again. Meanwhile, Littlepoop opines that it would be nice to give Derpy a thank-you gift for donating a bunch of free stealth bucks to the griffons, so they decide to send her some fucking muffins. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. Literally nothing else happens.

Page break. They are back on the bus, flying to Tenpony I guess. Littlepoop notices Strawberry Lemonade, and despite the unsexiness of the Steel Ranger armor starts having sexual fantasies about her. The author makes a sophomoric innuendo about how "tasty" a Strawberry Lemonade sounds to Littlepoop, yet a much funnier and entirely accidental innuendo goes sailing right over his head:

>Twilight was spreading across the wasteland as we approached Fetlock.

Anyway, they notice some smoke coming out of the Stable 29 entrance as they pass, which could either mean good news or bad news for the renegade Rangers. Then a flare goes up, which SteelHooves apparently takes as a good omen. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The group approaches Tenpony Tower. It is currently ringed by Red Eye's soldiers, with flying griffon patrols circling the building. There is also an alicorn on the roof.

Alicorn or no, I still don't see how they would be able to fly this gigantic airbus over the soldiers' heads, past the air support, and touch down on the roof without anyone noticing, but as it turns out this is a moot point anyway. The dumb bus runs out of fucking batteries just as they near the tower, and begins to plummet. It is all Littlepoop can do to use her levitation to slow their descent, and the glow of her magic aura attracts the attention of the idiot soldiers.

The snipers open fire, and the alicorn fires some bolts of electricity or something at them. Littlepoop begins to worry about losing her concentration and dropping the wagon, but Xenith uses some kind of potion or something to create a barrier around the two of them. Littlepoop gains some kind of extra boost to her magic from the Rainbow Dash statue she just touched earlier, which enables her to not only reverse the fall of the wagon, but levitate it back into the air and move it toward the roof of the tower. Jesus H. Christ I'm getting sick of her bullshit Mary Sue levitation ability. Seriously; I'll pay a million caps to the raider that saws off this cunt's horn and brings it to me on a satin pillow. If he brings me her PipBuck along with it I'll double the bounty.

Then, out of absolutely fucking nowhere, Homage appears with some kind of super-powered alien gun not even making this up; "alien" is literally the word kkat uses to describe this gun and blows the alicorn to smithereens. Then, LP lands the bus down and the two of them lez out.

Page break. Homage is predictably excited to meet a zebra, just as I'm sure the other residents of Tenpony Tower will be predictably hostile towards her if and when they meet.

>Inspiration hit me. “Homage, would you allow…” I paused. “Could you ask DJ Pon3 if Xenith could spend some time in the M.A.S.E.B.S.?”
I feel like I ask this every time it comes up, but what the hell is the M.A.S.E.B.S. again? The fact that I don't remember just shows how badly written this entire story is. As I've often complained, technical information is just haphazardly scattered about all over the place, with few clues ever given to its actual significance. To keep accurate track of all of the info the author has dumped on us, the reader would have to be either literally autistic, completely obsessed with Fallout and/or FoE, or both.

Anyway, whatever the fuck the M.A.S.E.B.S. is, Homage agrees to take Xenith there. Apparently it's going to help Xenith find her daughter, so maybe it's got something to do with that giant camera network that Homage/DJ Pon3 has all over Equestria. After this matter is settled, there is some utterly cringe-inducing side banter about bondage and spankings that goes on far longer than it has any right to. Nothing else happens.

Before we move on, I feel like it's worth mentioning that this entire conversation takes place on the rooftop. They just landed their airbus here, and the entire massive army that is currently surrounding the tower saw them land. There was an alicorn standing on this roof just minutes ago, though it is never explained how it got there, or why it chose not to enter the building even though there is clearly an unguarded door up there. Also left unexplained is why Homage didn't elect to blast the thing well before the group even arrived, since she obviously has the firepower and obviously knew it was there. One last thing: Red Eye's forces include multiple griffon snipers, who can fly, and were just fucking shooting at them as they tried to land. However, after the bus lands, none of these idiots make even the slightest attempt to gun them down, even though they are all just standing around chatting casually about fucking spanking each other with their guard completely down. Just food for thought.

Page break. Littlepoop is tired and horny and wants to get diggity down with the DJ, but before she can do that she has to take care of some things. She and Homage take Xenith into the room with all the camera monitors, which I guess is called the M.A.S.E.B.S., and they show her the network of spy cameras Homage has set up. For some unexplained reason, Red Eye's troops still haven't bothered to dismantle the transmitter-jiggy that Calamity et al attached to the Fillydelphia broadcast tower while LP was on her slave mission, even though they appear to have just slapped the thing on and walked away, and it would probably be easy as hell to remove, but whatever; Homage can see all of Equestria now, apparently. After Xenith is settled in, LP attends to her next most important task: arranging the delivery of a goddamn muffin basket for Derpy.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307730
307747
>>307725
That faggot Kkat really should have thought up a better acronym for the all-seeing magical surveillance system than MASEBS. Something that directly hints at its purpose.
How about SISTER-I? As in SISTER-EYE and SISTER model numbered with the roman numeral 1 because it's the first of its kind, and a reference to Big Brother from 1984 and Brother Eye from DC Comics. You could also call it a reference to MLP's two sisters and how female-focused everything is.
SISTER-I. Surveillance Intelligence System Theologistical Enhanced Recon model number I.
Theologistical might not be a word but the pony who designed it doesn't need to know that. It still sounds suitably divine in nature for a culture that would think "all seeing divine friend" upon seeing an all-seeing surveillance tower instead of "oppressive big brother device that raped privacy to death". Could do a memory orb scene where Twilight points this out to the underling that named this and built this according to her specifications.
>Twilight: Theologistical isn't a word.
>Peanut Nutter the mad scientist: Well, you could have told me that before I set it up!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307741
307748 307759 307785
1620045476908.png
>>307725

With the crucial matter of the muffin basket now satisfactorily attended to, Littlepoop moves on to the more mundane and trivial items on her agenda. She starts by spilling her guts about how SteelHooves murdered Chief Grim Star for some unknown reason, and finally closes with what is clearly the least significant item of all: the fact that there is a God damned atomic megaspell hidden in the building they are currently standing in, and it could conceivably go off at any minute.

Homage takes this news pretty well all things considered. Littlepoop naturally suggests evacuating the population from the tower, but Homage says no, first because if she left all her broadcasting equipment behind she wouldn't be able to call herself DJ Pon3 anymore, and second because there are a bunch of secrets and technology and shit that the Ministry of Arcane Sciences left behind in this building, and she doesn't want Red Eye to get his hands on it. Hooves, whatever.

>“Littlepip, did you ever wonder how I could stay here, DJ Pon3’s public assistant, when the stuffy lot in this place despise him so?”
I have literally been demanding this information for chapters upon chapters now. In fact, this question doesn't even touch upon half of the things that bug me about her living situation, and her "secret identity" as DJ Pon3.

However, it appears that Littlepoop is not quite as quick on the draw:

>I had to admit the question had never occurred to me.
Probably too busy daydreaming about vaginas. Oh well; whatever. Let's hear what Homage has to say.

>“There is a secret society within Tenpony Tower. They are the ones who, I dare say, are really in charge.” She backed up and looked around. “There are places in this building that are sealed off from the general public. Places were the Ministry’s secrets played out. All manner of magical research and development.”
As corny as this is, I'll admit that it at least provides a succinct explanation for most of what I find illogical about all of this. If Homage has some sort of arrangement with the Freemasons who run this place, it would explain why she has the nicest apartment in town rent free, and why nopony seems to ever bother her even though she makes a regular habit of talking shit about everypony who lives here. Oh, and incidentally, it's "where the Ministry's secrets played out."

Anyway, there's some autistic blather about alicorn shields that I don't entirely follow, and some even more autistic blather about Twilight Sparkle and bypass spells and whatever; the overall gist of it is that the Ministry of Arcane Science conducted a bunch of weird experiments here, and there is all sorts of dangerous shit being stored in this building that needs to be kept from Red Eye. Littlepoop concedes that it probably makes more sense to go along with Red Eye's plan than to defy him, if only to keep his attention away from Tenpony.

Unfortunately, the autistic blather begins dragging the conversation further and further from the point. Homage never really explains what the "secret society" in Tenpony is exactly, or what her connection is to it, or what kind of arrangement they have. She seems to know an awful lot about whatever Twilight's ministry was doing here during the war, which would imply that she is fairly high up in the infrastructure; on the other hand, it's kkat, so who the fuck knows? There really hasn't been any clear explanation for how any of these microcommunities we've encountered are structured or how these societies work; it's always just vague references to "the government" or "the Overmare" or "the elite." Most likely this is just one more crucial aspect of his setting that kkat neglected to even think about, because he was too busy dilating his man-pussy, and dreaming up goofy weapons and idiotic stat-boosting magic tchotchkes to hide in safes.

Anyway, there is a somewhat informative tidbit buried at the very end of this long and extremely jumbled conversation:

>“The shields in Tenpony Tower were set to allow only Twilight Sparkle and the three highest ranking unicorns in the Manehattan M.A.S. hub to pass through. Turns out, I’m a direct descendant of one of those high-ranking unicorns,” she revealed to me. “Just like the ponies who actually control Tenpony Tower. That’s why they want me here.” Homage added cautiously, “As long as I don’t make too many waves.”
Best I can figure, Tenpony is run by the descendants of the pre-war M.A.S. elites, and Homage is one of them. Because of this, they tolerate her stupid radio show and basically let her do whatever she wants, even though she bashes their society constantly while contributing nothing of any serious value to it.

Also, she has apparently been telling the Tenpony elites about how great and awesome Littlepoop is:

>“I’ll admit, I’ve been talking you up a lot. And I think I’m finally getting the others to come around. It won’t be long before I can put the special resources of this tower at your hooves.” Homage smiled sweetly. “Let me give you the extended tour.”
Oh, goody. It's funny, I was just thinking about how Littlepoop isn't nearly powerful enough, and how she really ought to have some more ridiculously overpowered pre-war gadgets at her disposal. Amazing how kkat and I are just on the exact same wavelength about that.

Page break. Homage takes Littlepoop through some kind of spell-protected secret passage that only the Tenpony government is allowed to use, and shows her something called a "megaspell chamber." Apparently each chamber can be used to cast one, and only one, megaspell. This one apparently casts a spell that was named after Celestia, and acts as some kind of missile defense system...or something. I think. However, it can only be used when the sun is shining. Obviously, this makes it useless in Edgequestria since the sky is permanently overcast.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307747
>>307679

>Is it bad writing that Kkat thinks any underground bunker full of survivalists would become dangerously genetically inbred almost immediately to the point where 200 years later they decide the best thing they can do is move to a mercenary force's home and start shagging foreign wastelanders even if they've got radiation poisoning/taint poisoning/unspeakable mutated diseases?
In a word, yes.

>>307730
He definitely could use some catchier names for these things.

>>307680
>Splendid Valley was mentioned a couple of times before, though I don't recall in how much detail. Either somebody told Littlepip that it's where the Goddess lives or she pulled the knowledge out of her ass. Without digging through the text to check, both seem plausible.
I definitely remember it being mentioned; as I recall Homage has a picture of it on her wall, and it was some kind of research facility or something during the war. Now it's super-irradiated and full of monsters I think. However, there has been no mention of the Goddess living there (I actually went back and checked), and I can't think of any other reason why the group would need to go there, particularly since it seems like a dangerous place that is normally avoided.

Once again, a significant problem in this story is kkat's inability to translate video game storytelling into conventional storytelling. In an open-world game, you've typically got some kind of map, and the map will have little blips on it that represent places you can go to trigger missions or cutscenes or whatever. It's an acceptable way to move a linear story along while still allowing the player some freedom of movement. However, in a novel it doesn't really make much sense to have the character just up and say "I'm going to Splendid Valley because it's highlighted on my map." It makes even less sense if you eliminate the map entirely and have the character suddenly decide to go to Splendid Valley for no obvious reason at all.

Unfortunately, this is how Littlepoop seems to make most of her decisions. Early on, she just suddenly decided to go to Fillydelphia for no reason at all, then took a detour to Tenpony Tower for no reason at all, and so forth and so on. A lot of it, too, seems to be that kkat himself is more concerned about cramming in an analog to every single significant mission and DLC mission and whatever the fuck else from Fallout 3 than he is about telling a coherent story. So, even though it doesn't really make much sense for his main character to randomly decide to seek out the DJ on the radio, or for Red Eye to be holding Thunderdome-style gladiator battles while simultaneously trying to rebuild civilization, or for most of the other bizarre turns the plot of this story has taken us on, it makes sense to the author because it was in Fallout 3 somewhere, and he assumes that the reader will see it the same way. The end result is this long, chaotic, rambling mess in which this character just jumps from adventure to adventure seemingly at random, without anything coherently stringing the adventures together most of the time.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307748
>>307741
Was thinking about what you said about how LP goes around whiteknighting for people who never asked for her help.
Would it improve the story if Zigger the Zebra didn't want to be saved by Littlepip, and by telekinetically dragging herself and Zigger out of the arena they both lost due to Ring Out meaning they both get killed if caught?
This would basically force a zigger who was happy working for the baddies into working for the "goodies"
this could force LP to question if going around imposing her morals and views on others through force is really a good thing, and if it makes her anything like Red Eye. Probably does, in the sense that both like forcing others to abide by their worldview.
A competent author would seek to humanize Red Eye and those who follow him through zigger while using what Zigger sees outside of Red Eye's slaver empire to poke holes in the villain's ideology to make the inevitable villain-to-hero turn convincing.
Also it still bugs me that Kkat thinks if LP looked into a mirror that shows her "evil self", she'd see a dying failing murderhobo in spiked raider armour, something completely different from a successful murderhobo in an armoured Stable Jumpsuit. That's a lazy design and a shallow idea. Not even Madeline's Badeline from Celeste was this lazily designed. Kkat should put more effort into that apparition's design. And it should show up in LP's nightmares. Maybe even make it show up in LP's head as an invisible saboteur taunting her IRL and encouraging her to take Mint-Als and do evil things/take the less-moral easy road out. I once saw a boring fic with one excellent scene where a character who intentionally acts like a powergaming optimization-obsessed munchkin looked into a magic mirror that shows his true desires, and he saw himself but infinitely powerful with all good shit ever and nothing left to do but sit on a divine throne and be bored. This fundamentally shook the guy to his core, made him question if optimization and power and importance is really what he wants, and this led to him being nicer to others. Seeing the end result of what he wanted at the time changed him for the better. And when Dante saw an evil copy of himself in DMC3 he fought it and kicked its ass, "surpassing himself" and earning the Doppelganger Style ability that lets him clone himself since DMC3 is about Dante growing to accept the responsibility and legacy of his father and protect it from Vergil. When Naruto talked to Dark Naruto he had to confront the fact that he still resents the bastards who hurt him and overcome this pain so the Nine Tailed Demon Fox can't use this pain against him. Most of Persona 4's cast overcame their Shadow Selves. The idea of the hero seeing an evil version of himself is a common one in fiction that's been used for all sorts of purposes. But LP? She just saw a cliche "evil" version of herself, something effortless to dismiss and forget about. It wouldn't surprise me if the evil version of herself had fangs and hissed while brandishing a retarded folding double-bladed red lightsaber, because that's the most retarded thing to ever exist.

Also, was thinking about the story's structure. Aren't we 300k words in? How much of the story is LP actually working towards a clear goal for valid reasons for the benefit of the whole wasteland, and how much of it is random bullshit sidequesting/dungeon-crawling?
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.307759
307760
>>307692
Stop ranting about animu shit.

PipColt would be the easiest, best, and least retarded version assuming anyone has a mild understanding of equine terminology. PipSqueak would be a decently amusing canon reference for an upgraded version, equivalent to Fallout:NV's gold PipBoy. Then again kkuck would definitely go: DID ANYONE GET THAT REFERENCE?!?!?!?! IT'S SO FANNY BECUZ THERE'S A PONY WITH THAT NAME IN THE G4 SHOW!!!! The last one would potentially be PipStall, because that's where a mare is isolated to be bred. That'd be CrAzY sExIsT ThO oH NoEz!

>>307696
My sarcasm and disgust levels are always at 100/100. They never decrease as you can tell. There is no 'safe amount' of incest since the damage is rarely apparent in the next 'generation'. Not only that, it's hilarious when dipshits perform Olympic level mental gymnastics trying to argue that "it's a normal thing tho! Just trust me!"

>>307725
>>307741
Easy solution: get a modder to create an addon quest during the Brotherhood of Steel meeting. After convincing the NCR Ranger to leave/kill him/have him killed, the player must now kill LilShit or else the bomb collar the player was fitted with goes off. As an aside: rigging the act of sawing an object off in that game is quite simple. And no, there's no means to remove Big MT bomb collars since only <15 know how. One is dead (Elijew), the 3 BoS heads, though the Think Tank had that information deleted from their memory. Fallout 2 has a couple bits of dialogue on bomb collars while during the F:NV Old World Blues DLC it is explicitly stated that numerous shipments were sent elsewhere. The Enclave and Brotherhood retrieved all of them.. somehow.

Never try to make sense of an insane person's views or recollections. They do not know they are insane, thus it is impossible to comprehend their "motives" in any realistic fashion.
Anonymous
793e90c
?
No.307760
308583
>>307759
>It is always where to draw the line.
>There is no 'safe amount' of incest
I guess I should clarify what I meant. I meant that one can ask where something is defined as incest or not. Since people who have many-generations-back shared ancestors end up together today without even knowing it. Such cases aren't refered to as incest so it's a bit of arbitary line, unless of course you mean that people shouldn't even share a single ancestor no matter how far back, which seems impossible to me or at least highly unlikely.
>My sarcasm and disgust levels are always at 100/100.
Wait, you use sarcasm. Ah! I got it, you're joking. *Slaps knee* Good one.
Anonymous
c1df8c9
?
No.307766
308583
>>306842
Wasn't expecting an expert on trees and composting here, but I'm impressed.

As for the 12.7mm problem, I think it's easier to settle if the pistol rounds are .50 AE, which is a real round. It's by no means a practical round and is not used in revolvers afaik.

>>307247
Good points
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3001e19
?
No.307785
307800 307802 307807 307921
1619871545943.png
>>307741

Page break. Homage continues taking Littlepoop on a guided tour of all of Tenpony's closely guarded secrets. It's odd that she doesn't seem to have any official permission to show her this stuff, and it's odd that nopony seems to be guarding any of these closely-guarded areas.

Anyway, the next portion of the tour involves spells for agriculture. Apparently, Tenpony has the technology to purify soil and water, but it's not quite powerful enough to be practical on a large scale. The effects are only temporary, and the magic at its current level wouldn't be able to purify soil long enough to grow anything in it. However, they can use it to grow potted plants. Maybe this allows for some limited degree of food production? I don't know; the text isn't really clear on this point.

Littlepoop immediately sees the potential for something like this if it were to be amplified by the Gardens of Equestria supercomputer that Spike has. This is a reasonable enough connection on its own, but she proceeds to jump completely off the rails from here:

>It was time to tell her.
>When I was done, Homage collapsed weakly. “Me?” She looked at me, as if pleading for me to renounce the truth. “The… salvation of all of Equestria… is on me?”
>I nodded. “You. Ditzy Doo. Four others. We don’t know who yet.”
Homage? Ditzy Doo? Four others? These are the six ponies they need to activate the Gardens of Equestria? When did this happen? How was this decided? I don't remember reading anything about this.

The astute reader may recall that earlier, we learned from Spike that the Gardens of Equestria requires six ponies with six specific virtues in order to function. The six virtues are analogous to the six original Elements of Harmony, which the computer uses as the basis of its power. We also learned that, although he had hoped early on for Littlepoop to be one of the chosen, it doesn't look like she is. No real explanation is ever given as to why.

Here is exactly what the text has to say about it in Chapter 21:

>“In all of Equestria’s history, there has only been one pony who has ever been able to wield more than one. (Trust me, I have a lot of books on the subject.) And that was Celestia. She used the power of the Elements of Harmony to banish the monster her sister had turned into. Only with the Elements can magic that powerful be cast. And only Celestia had the ability to use them all.”
This tells us that, post-Celestia, each Element can only be wielded by one pony, so in order for the spell to work, he needs to find exactly six friends, with each individual representing one specific Element.

>I stared up at the nearest dais. The tiara, Spike had informed me earlier, was the Element of Magic. I found myself reminded just how pathetically un-magical I was. For all the raw power I had learned to tap, I was truly a one-trick pony.
This part doesn't really make a fuckton of sense, but it seems to be saying that, despite how preposterously overpowered Littlepoop's magic is, she isn't magical enough to be the Element of Magic. Again, the author doesn't really provide a clear explanation of why this is, but for the time being we can just run with it.

>“Hey,” Spike scolded, reading my expression. “It’s not your fault. Hell, imagine how hard it is to find a pony with the virtue of laughter in the Equestrian Wasteland.”
>I thought of Ditzy Doo, and felt a spark of hope. We might be the wrong ponies. But maybe I could start Spike on the right path to finding the ones who are. “I think I know who you’re looking for.”
And this is where it completely stops making sense. How does she get Ditzy Doo as the Element of Laughter? Or is that even what this is implying? As usual, the text is about as clear as mud; however, it's apparent that Littlepoop somehow intuited that Ditzy is one of the six. How did she reach this conclusion? There's no obvious logical connection. If Littlepoop, with all of her ridiculous Mary Sue powers that allow her to levitate boxcars over her head, isn't qualified to be the Element of Magic, then what the hell are Ditzy Doo's qualifications for being the Element of...Whatever? Laughter, I guess? As I recall, she can't even talk, let alone laugh.

What makes this even more bizarre is that this is the last word the text has on who the mysterious Six are; from the last place I quoted, the conversation between Spike and Littlepoop ends, and no more is said about the Gardens of Equestria for eight more chapters. Now, we suddenly have this:

>When I was done, Homage collapsed weakly. “Me?” She looked at me, as if pleading for me to renounce the truth. “The… salvation of all of Equestria… is on me?”
>I nodded. “You. Ditzy Doo. Four others. We don’t know who yet.”
Not only does the author provide no explanation for why Ditzy Doo should be one of the Six, he never even mentions Homage. Littlepoop apparently decided, on her own, without informing the reader, sometime between Chapters 21 and 29, that Homage represents one of the Elements of Harmony. Which one does she represent? How did she reach this conclusion? When did she reach this conclusion? This is literally the first thing we've heard about it, yet the author presents it as if it's something we should already know, or should have figured out naturally.

Of all the things that infuriate me about this text, by far the most infuriating is the way that kkat just slaps the motley components of this story together according to some bizarre autismo-logic that only makes sense to him, but he seems to think that all of it makes perfect sense on its own and requires no explanation. Seriously, what the hell is Homage even supposed to be the Element of? Licking carpet? How did Littlepoop settle on Derpy, of all the ponies she's met in this godforsaken shithole of a world, as the Element of Laughter? None of this makes any goddamn sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r7X3f2gFz4
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307800
>>307785
If this story declares Homage, who keeps her identity secret from her settlement and her all-seeing surveillance system secret from the world while putting no effort into verifying half the storys she's told before blabbering on the radio about them, like when she insulted whatahisface on the radio with that "What goes around comes around" talk and believed Steelhooves's lie about Grim Star dying to save the stable, I'm going to have a fucking stronk.
It's bad enough that he thinks Derpy, some elderly tortured existance of a ghoul pegasus, is the new element of laughter just because she seems nice.
Imagine if Bootleg Pinkie Pie joined the party and got to grow and learn over time, becoming the group's mascot while trying to raise everyone's spirits. Could do some tragic scene where the miserable poner tries to raise everyone's spirits even though they're all crying and she's badly hiding her sadness. Being the new element of Laughter and Pinkie's successor, not just her cheap imitation, would mean the world to her and make her a less retarded character.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3001e19
?
No.307802
307804 307806 307921
1620148969587.png
>>307785

Page break.

It seems that the news that she is, for some unexplained reason, the Wasteland Savior puts Homage in the mood to get her drink on, so she and Littlepoop go to the club and get krunk. They sit around and talk about Homage's friend Jokeblue, and Littlepoop talks about shooting one of the SteelRangers. This is mostly just more weeping and moaning from Littlepoop about how the wasteland is turning her into a murderer and she doesn't like the pony she is becoming and blah blah blah. Nothing else happens.

Incidentally, how is that pesky little business with the nuclear bomb hidden in the Tower going? Any idea what the two of you are going to do about that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sB24zOcV_Q

Page break. The sense of time is completely muddled as usual, but as far as I can tell Littlepoop & Co. spend the next few days goofing around in Tenpony, almost as if there weren't a bomb hidden in the building that could go off at any minute. Seriously; I can understand not wanting to do Red Eye's bidding by going out and killing the Goddess, but can LP seriously not think of any better use of her time than going to the fucking spa with Homage? Maybe, oh I don't know, looking for the stupid bomb? Trying to find where it's hidden? Maybe disarming it or something? Reprogramming it to use as a weapon against Red Eye? No? You don't want to do any of that? You'd rather just fuck around and go to the fucking spa and bake fucking muffins for the next few days? Okay; you go right on ahead, girl. You've earned yo'self a break.

Anyway, in the meantime we learn that Xenith has made some minor progress in finding her long-lost daughter, but she doesn't like Homage for some reason. It turns out that it has something to do with her weird zebra superstitions; I guess the gun Homage used to blow the alicorn away reminded her of Nightmare Moon, or something. It's too autistic to go into and probably doesn't matter, or if it does it won't matter for another 20 goddamn chapters and by then I'll have forgotten all about it. Anywho, Xenith explains all of this and then leaves, and then Homage comes back from the kitchen with fucking muffin batter on her nose, and she and Littlepoop fuck some more. This is literally all that happens in this microscene.

Page break. In what is quite possibly the most abrupt scene cut yet, we suddenly rejoin the party back on the Sky Wang. They are flying over Splendid Valley of all places, though we still don't know why exactly they want to go there.

>A sinkhole several miles across indicated where the balefire bomb had been detonated. The bomb had been snuck in underground and detonated.
The second sentence here is redundant. We already know the bomb was detonated, because it says so in the first sentence. The fact that it left a sinkhole behind indicates that it probably happened underground. There is no information in the second sentence that hasn't already been clarified by the first.

>On the cusp of the crater, I saw the crumbled walls of the Maripony. Once a station for gem mining, the building had more in common with Shattered Hoof than any of the Ministry Hubs that I had seen.
How does she know the history of this building? What exactly does it have in common with Shattered Hoof? Is it that they were both used for gem production? What exactly makes her think this building is a Ministry hub? For that matter, how did she manage to figure out that all the other Ministry hubs were Ministry hubs? She seems to have this weird knack for spotting these things, even though they are usually hidden in nondescript locations. Incidentally, these questions are rhetorical; I know perfectly well that the answer to all of them is "Mary Sue divination powers."

>“Whoa nelly! If the Goddess done survived that, Ah reckon she prob’ly earned two-hundred years o’ livin’.”
And, just because we haven't heard from him in awhile, here's a typical hee-haw comment from Calamity that adds exactly fuck-all to the conversation.

Anyway, the situation here is pretty much what we've come to expect from this group of utter morons. Even though this appears to be the final boss fight of the story which is weird since there are still 16 more chapters of this dreck left to slog through, one of which is literally long enough to qualify as its own short novel, and even though the entity they are fighting is a literal Goddess, they have absolutely no plan whatsoever, and LP isn't armed with anything more than her trusty revolver. I'd say this story has reached peak silliness, if it hadn't already reached peak silliness by around Chapter 3 or so; it's mostly been holding steady since then.

ANYWAY, blah blah blah, there's some more irrelevant banter, some sex talk, a little more bullshit about delivering muffins to Derpy because that's obviously important right now, and then five alicorns attack. Welp, let's get this over with. What kind of bullshit victory is LP going to pull out of her ass this time?

>“Dammit, Ah shoulda worn that damn Enclave gear after all,” Calamity cursed.
Why didn't he? What was even the point of having him make a special side trip to get that armor if he wasn't going to wear it?

AAAAANNNNYYYYWAAAAAYYYY, the alicorns surround them and give them the standard bad-guy greeting speech: "welcome to our kingdom, lay down your arms or be destroyed," and so forth and so on. The group apparently decides they are outgunned, even though they've killed plenty of these silly things by now. What makes this even more ridiculous is that the group seems surprised to have to suddenly face multiple alicorns, even though they knew in advance that they were going up against the leader of the alicorn hivemind. Anyway, Littlepoop, in her infinite wisdom, determines that the alicorns want something from them, and that is the only reason they are still alive. So, they make like Frenchmen and surrender.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307804
>>307802
Surely if Calamity got some chances to use his overpowered armour, and did so, it would improve the story by setting up how powerful this armour is. This would make it a huge deal if LP ended up fighting a fuckton of enclave poners in enclave armour. Right?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307806
307808 307903
friendship-ended-with-meme-57f4f4202419b.jpeg
>>307802

Page break. The alicorns lead them to their headquarters.

>I was surprised when the alicorns brought us to what looked like a security substation within the building.
Why does this specific thing surprise you?

>This small room was almost… intact.
Ah, I see. Yes, I suppose that is surprising. Imagine having nearly unlimited magical power and using it to fix up a building you live in. Imagine wanting to fix up a building at all. Why not leave it as a crumbling radioactive ruin filled with skeletons, and just move in without changing anything? If you really want to redecorate, just hang some bloody entrails from the ceiling like a normal person. These alicorns clearly have some pretty weird, avant-garde design sensibilities.

Anyway, it seems I spoke too soon about this story having already reached peak silliness; it clearly can and will get much sillier from here. This is what happens:

The alicorn hivemind leads them into a little room with a bunch of old monitors. The voice of the collective, which seems to speak to them telepathically, says that the Goddess wants to show them something. The monitors turn on of their own accord, and show them a scene from 200 years ago.

Twilight Sparkle is standing in some kind of a factory, on a catwalk above several bubbling vats filled with some kind of obviously-magical goo. A blue unicorn named Trixie is brought into the room and introduced as Test Subject 1. Though I'm sure everyone reading this will recognize the character, I'd like to remind you all that, in this story, we only know her as the mysterious resident of a ruined shack who was mentioned once and only once, all the way back in Chapter 13. Twilight offers her a cup of the mysterious goo, which I'm sure is perfectly safe to drink and will not have any adverse effects on her at all.

However, it seems we won't get to find out what this substance is or what it does, because before Trixie can drink her cup, the factory is suddenly hit with a megaspell or something. The whole place gets kerploded, and Trixie falls into one of the vats. Then, everything goes black.

The monitors cut back on at an undefined point in the future. We see a much more haggard Twilight Sparkle. She appears to have gone several days without food or water. She narrates a standard goodbye letter of the sort we should be well accustomed to by now. It seems that the vat chamber was protected from the megaspell, but the spell to open the door was damaged or something, so now Twilight is trapped in her own safe room, because her own protection spells are too powerful and she can't override them. Oh, the irony.

Anyway, Twilight gives her "ack I'm dead now" speech, and Littlepoop predictably starts crying even though she never knew this pony and has no particular connection to her, and then some creepy stuff starts happening. Eventually, some kind of magical tentacle monster emerges from the vat, and reaches for Twilight Sparkle. Unfortunately, it doesn't go the way you were probably hoping.

The creature begins to speak. For some reason, we are unable to hear its voice, but Xenith can read its lips on the monitor. The long and short of it is that Trixie, who fell into the vat of magic goo, was mutated by said goo into some kind of super-powered entity of pure magic. I'm sure you can probably figure out where this is going, but just so we're all on the same page, I'll go ahead and spell it out:

Trixie is the Goddess. Yes, the all-powerful Goddess, leader of the alicorn hivemind, feared by the zebras as Nightmare Moon and heavily implied throughout the story to be probably Luna, turns out to be...Trixie. Welp, this story is full of surprises. Despite its myriad flaws, I have to at least give it that much. This is a twist I would not have predicted. M. Night Shyamalan move over; there's an even bigger faggot in town.

Anyway, there's a page break in here, but it's completely meaningless because the scene basically just continues unbroken. The Goddess-thing rises up out of the vat, and we see that it is made out of Trixe and also all the ponies she's absorbed, so probably Twilight is in there somewhere too. We learn that the Goddess is aware that Red Eye is plotting against her, but little does he know that she is also plotting against him, and blah blah blah.

The reason the Goddess has brought them here and showed them its origin story is because it has a quest for them. I honestly can't make hide nor hair of this autism, but I'll do my best to walk us through it:

>“And why us?” I asked.
>{{BECAUSE THE SECRET THAT RED EYE SEEKS, THE SECRET HIDDEN EVEN FROM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL GODDESS, IS LOCKED AWAY INSIDE A WAREHOUSE ON MINISTRY WALK IN CANTERLOT!...}}
So at first glance, this appears to be a standard "go retrieve the ancient talisman of power" quest. However, it turns out there's a little more to it.

Naturally, Littlepoop somehow just knows exactly what Trixie is talking about, based on some obscure line of text from like 700 pages ago:

>Oh! So that’s the place Red Eye is trying to get into. I remembered a conversation with Watcher:
>Yes, one of Equestria’s heroes did decide that her Ministry would be the Ministry of Awesome. They even built a Ministry Headquarters for it on Ministry Walk… After a few years, Luna ordered it crated up, and they began using the M.Aw HQ for storage.
As usual, Littlepoop is connecting dots that don't automatically connect. If the end result of this is going to be that Rainbow Dash invented some kind of super-weapon and it's being stored in the headquarters of her old Ministry, then fine; however, just have the Goddess tell us this. It is incredibly obnoxious to have this already-too-powerful-and-too-talented-and-too-obnoxiously-humble-about-it main character constantly pull these random insights out of her ass based on the flimsiest of connections and be right every single time.

Almost out of space, will continue.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307807
brain.jpg
>>307785
Littlepip intuiting the element bearers with little to no evidence or understanding is a particularly egregious case of her sue power to read the story's script. Before she met Spike and spent an hour or so at his cave telling stories and bearing witness to war crimes, did she even know what the Elements of Harmony were, let alone how they might work or how a potential bearer might be found?

The logic of Derpy being the element of laughter is probably something like "even after two hundred years of misery and suffering, she can still look on the bright side and bring people happiness". That's the best I can do, at least. It's tenuous and not that that's really borne out in the text, since she's been out of focus for the bulk of the story and barely qualifies as an acquaintance to most of the viewpoint characters.

Homage is Honesty, because of course she is.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.307808
307811 307816 307820 308164
1620188431362.gif
>>307806

It only gets wackier from here. The Great and Powerful Goddess continues:

>{{…WITH CONTROLS WHICH CAN ONLY BE OPERATED BY A PEGASUS...}}
>Clever. So, the Goddess didn’t actually need me. She needed Calamity. I wondered how Red Eye was planning to get past that.
Calamity or...literally any pegasus. Seriously, there's a whole goddamn city full of these guys just floating above the clouds. You're an all-powerful alicorn hivemind. Just send a few of your clones up there and grab a fucking pegasus; it's not that hard.

>{{…AND BEYOND A SHIELD WHICH ONLY A MINISTRY MARE CAN STEP THROUGH!}}
>And that would be the Bypass that Red Eye was trying to get through. But why did…?
>Oh! Of course. Close family or direct descendants thereof. The Goddess needed Velvet Remedy as well. Once again, I was the one just clearing the way.
Velvet's lineage remains one of the stranger points in this story. Everyone keeps referring to her as royalty or something, but all she really has to justify that pedigree is a loose connection to Rarity due to being descended from Sweetie Belle. Rarity was never royalty in the first place, she was at most a high-ranking government official, and Velvet's connection to her is so far removed that she can hardly be called her descendant.

Look carefully at what this says:
>Close family or direct descendants thereof.
This means that the spells protecting these secret Ministry areas were designed to only allow Ministry mares and their immediate kin or direct descendants to pass. Rarity was a Ministry mare; Sweetie Belle was not. Velvet is Sweetie Belle's descendant, not Rarity's. If they were only one generation removed from each other, you might be able to argue that being her niece counts as "close family," but great-great-great-great grand niece or whatever the fuck is several bridges too far.

Here's the other thing: we just learned that apparently Stable 2 has been inbreeding for so long that everyone has trace amounts of everyone else's DNA. Forget about the logistical issues that make this unlikely for a second; the author established it as fact, so for our purposes it's a fact. So...by this logic shouldn't everyone in Stable 2 be related to Rarity? Or was Sweetie Belle too high and mighty to participate in the mass orgy that ensnared everyone else in the stable and made their children all second cousins of each other? This is why it pays not to make your story too convoluted: if you're not careful, you can easily end up creating logic problems and outright contradictions.

Anyway, the rest of this is just rambling nonsense. The long and short of it is that Trixie needs two things: whatever the hell is being stored in this Ministry of Awesome warehouse, and the zebra necronomicon that everyone in this story is after for whatever the fuck reason.

Page break. A scene that was initially set up to be a boss fight has turned out to be an even bigger letdown than the actual fight probably would have been, so LP & Co. are allowed to leave the alicorn hive unscathed. Back on the Fart Wagon, Littlepoop begins to muse to herself about some of the random autismo details of the things that Trixie just told her, and connects it with some other random autismo details that she remembers from 20 chapters ago.

>“She said… Red Eye hadn’t sent her any unicorns in over a year.” My mind flashed back to experiences with slavers. And the little hints that Red Eye, or at least Stern, was particularly interested in unicorns.
Nobody remembers who Stern is, you twat. She was a one-shot character from all the way back in Chapter 7 and pretty much all I remember about her is she had something to do with the slavers. I think she might have been the alicorn that LP dropped the boxcar on, though I'm not sure.

Anyway, the gist of this is that Red Eye's slavers were rounding up unicorns specifically to be fed to Trixie's hivemind. I guess their magic makes them extra-delicious or something. This is actually a little silly, since the unicorns would probably be more valuable to Red Eye as slaves. However, there's a bit more to it. You may recall that Trixie also said that Red Eye hadn't sent her any unicorns in over a year.

>“But if Red Eye wasn’t sending unicorns to the Goddess…” I said darkly, “Then he’s keeping them for himself.”
So, to summarize, here's what we know:

Red Eye plans on becoming the next Goddess after Littlepoop has killed the current one. To do this, he intends to replicate what happened to Trixie, and he is able to do this because he saw the same security videos that LP just watched. The only thing he could have learned from the videos is that Trixie fell into some magic goo and became super-powerful; this alone doesn't really help him. It seems like actually knowing how to make the goo would be the crucial piece of the puzzle here, but we'll put a pin in that for now. Presumably, he is producing this goo in his Cathedral, and is setting aside all of the unicorn slaves he's collected so that he can consume them himself when he becomes all-powerful.

There are some fairly obvious logic holes here, the most obvious of which is this: if he has the goo, why not just dive in and give himself god-powers now? What is he waiting for?

For that matter, I don't see what the point of sending LP to fight Trixie was in the first place. Trixie obviously outclasses LP by several orders of magnitude; what was LP supposed to achieve here? It would make far more sense for Red Eye to just hop in the goo, eat a few unicorns hell, he could eat Littlepoop for that matter, become a god, and then go fight Trixie as her equal. It makes absolutely no sense to send in this loony little murderhobo to fight the most powerful being in Edgequestria, and if this thing eats unicorns and gains their magic, the most likely outcome is that Trixie would just consume LP and become even more powerful. As usual, the author has not thought this through.

End of chapter.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307811
307821 307847
>>307808
Glim, what do you think of how Trixie is the Goddess in this story? She basically has The Joker's backstory from the cartoon: fell off a catwalk into a vat of chemicals and came out fucked up. Guess they don't comply with OSHA regulations in pre-nuking Edgequestria. There were a million places where Twilight could have given Trixie a cup of glowing alicorn SPUGE (Super Polymorphic Unleashing GEl) so why the hell did she choose "on catwalks directly over gigantic alicorn cum jars" instead of "In a carefully monitored and controlled laboratory with plenty of prepared countermeasures just in case a small dose of alicornification piss turns her insane". To me, it seems out of character for Twilight to do something so dumb. It also seems out of character for her to lock herself in one safe room instead of teleporting around between different safe rooms in a concealed secret network of them across Equestria. How is this teleporting fuck supposed to save her friends and get them in the same Stable if she's trapped herself in a glorified broom closet? Besides, such a dumb place can't protect her forever, she should have known that. This doesn't seem like a moment of irony sealing Twilight's fate, it seems like the author PISing away best pony through plot-induced stupidity.
Anonymous
525bab2
?
No.307816
307821 307847
>>307808
>Rarity was a Ministry mare; Sweetie Belle was not. Velvet is Sweetie Belle's descendant, not Rarity's.
I think you may be forgetting that Velvet Remedy and presumably Littlepip are direct descendants of Applejack, who was the Minster of Technology
Anonymous
525bab2
?
No.307820
>>307808
>Nobody remembers who Stern is, you twat. She was a one-shot character from all the way back in Chapter 7 and pretty much all I remember about her is she had something to do with the slavers.
Stern is Redeye's top Lieutenant or something, and is the leader of his griffin forces. She was the one sent by Redeye to kill Calamity and Velvet in the tower, and who was herself taken prisoner a couple chapters ago.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307821
307824 307847
>>307811
I'll give Kkat a tiny bit of slack here - "falls into a vat of chemicals and turns into a mutant" was also the origin of the Master, the Fallout character that the Goddess was directly based on.

That said, "hurr durrlet's test the mutagenic chemical on a catwalk above a giant vat of the mutagenic chemical" is on Kkat. The Master (or rather than human that would become the Master) was a post-apocalypse scavenger who got knocked into a chemical vat by accident while exploring the ruins of the Mariposa research facility.

>>307816
This was never made explicit. All we've been told is that Applejack was pregnant when she reached the stable (200 years ago) and that the stable's inhabitants were starting to get dangerously inbred. As Glim pointed out in >>307808, we're talking about people separated from Applejack by multiple generations. Any number of Stable 2's ponies could claim direct lineage to Applejack, and there's no way of knowing whether Littlepip or Velvet qualify.
Anonymous
c8f24c9
?
No.307824
307826 307846 307847
>>307821
>This was never made explicit
Wasn’t it? I don’t have the exact quotes from the text but Glim Glam’s paraphrasing of the genetics of Stable 2 is “nearly everyone in the stable has Apple DNA.” That’s what being “dangerously inbred” means. It means that everyone within the population share the same recent ancestors, that being the ponies who were first sealed in the vault, Applejack being one of them. It’s simple logic that if everyone in Stable 2 are direct descendants of Applejack’s daughter, and if Littlepip and Velvet Remedy are from Stable 2, then both Littlepip and Velvet Remedy are direct descendants of Applejack. If you want to milk that “nearly” and assume that, let’s say, only 90% of the inhabitants of the stable are descendants of applejack, then if Velvet and Littlepip are randomly taken from Stable 2’s gene pool, the odds that between the two of them at least one is Applejack’s eighth great granddaughter is 99%, snd the odds that both of them are is 81%. If 80% of the stable’s population are descendants of applejack, then the odds that one of the two are descendants are 96%, if 70% are descendants then the odds that one of the two of them is is 91%, and so on.

The point is that it’s damned good odds that at least one of the two are descendants of Applejack. Furthermore, there are no known descendants of any of the ministry mares elsewhere, and these two mares are the first two inhabitants of Stable 2 to both leave the stable snd come before the goddess.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307826
>>307824
Those numbers sound good to me, but is it retarded that this is the case?
It makes sense that in Fallout, these underground bunkers would have little contact with the outside world or each other. Maybe the bunkers send data on their experiments to Vault-Tec/The Enclave but that's the furthest this could be reasonably stretched.
But for ponyland, there's magic.
Where's the portal network system connecting vaults around the nation? It might make sense that Scootaloo wouldn't want her Stables to be connected since one failed experiment could fuck over other Stables, but why wouldn't any one pony in any one stable consider using scrying magic, dream-communication magic, brain-swapping magic, astral projecting magic, magical portals, magically-synchronized blank books you can use for writing and reading messages, and so on to try and reconnect the Stables in Equestria?
Oh, right, because there was no Vault Internet in Fallout 3, or a Vault where the experiment was "What happens if we give everyone the internet", or a Vault where the inhabitants tried to message another vault and got fucked over for it. Was there even an internet in Fallout? I recall the Fallout 4 Depravity mod (what a daft name for a bugfix mod that makes the main quest a little less retarded) making a "The Internet? What a wacky idea! It'll never catch on" gag in the terminals of a 120% doomsday-prepped department store taken over by the local Edgelord Militia so its basement's a prison for "rehabilitating" captured raiders into broken slaves now.
It just seems incredibly retarded that one Stable made right next to Ponyville would end up 99% related to Applejack's family in only 200ish years worth of breeding. There are only 4 apple poners in all of Ponyville! 5 if Pinkie counts, but Pinkie died clutching a Twilight minifigure to her chest in some random building. Big Mac died saving Luna from ziggers who opened fire during a peace meeting for sending Luna to it, and I forget what happened to Granny Smith and Apple Bloom but Applejack and maybe her kid probably made it to that Stable.
Were they the only ponies in the stable or something? Why didn't Derpy Hooves and her kid make it into the Stable? Where's the Sofas And Quills guy? Where's Lyra and Bonbon and other background characters in Ponyville?
Can magic genetically randomize or change poners? Canon season one magic was able to transform the Parasprites from "Beings that eat food" into "Beings that eat non-food", so it clearly doesn't work in a scientifically-accurate sense but a dreamy wishy-washy poetic kind of sense. This isn't a world of code or physics, it's a world of writing and magic can rewrite it. Magic just works, you glow your horn and make wishes and stuff happens if you've got enough magic to pull it off. What's stopping poners here from magically transforming themselves into genetically-foreign beings, or magically curing any genetic problems inbreeding allows to happen(inbreeding isn't inherently bad, it just means less genetic diversity which means less survival-of-the-fittest testing of different genes and recessive genes are less likely to be dominated by stronger genes foreign genetic partners might introduce)?
How the hell did everyone end up so genetically interconnected in such a short period of time that the entire population's willing to abandon the vault and take its plants with it to a mercenary company's home base, as if living amongst fucking Griffon mercs is the only cure for inbreeding? Griffons and Ponies are different creatures, and they've never reproduced together outside of shitty OCs made by amateur authors who think the only way to make your poner look interesting and therefore seem more interesting than it really is/make this griffon not seem "out of character for griffons" is to rely on the cliche trick of hybridization. God, I can't believe I actually got the "Make Aquilla, Silver's secretary, half-pony since she's not mean like normal griffons!" "advice" from shitty mainstream pony sites back when the only griffon we knew of was Gilda. And when Gabby the perfect griffon who's so perfect at everything she can't figure out what her talent is was introduced, they gladly ate up what they'd scream from the rooftops over if a fanfic made her up without "Lord Hasbro's" blessing. Fucking braindead, the lot of them. I'm glad I get better writing advice here.
Anyway why send the entire Stable population including children and the elderly to live with Griffons, instead of its fighting-age poners and most able-bodied and ready-to-breed after an emergency doomsday-prepping course made easy by the Stable's terminals? In Fallout 1 you could interact with a computer terminal in your vault to improve your Survival skill, I think. Why trust fucking Griffon mercenaries so suddenly and so easily? LP might like them because "They never break their contract" but why would her stable buy that so easily?
And where the hell was any mention of inbreeding during the early chapters, when LP was living in the vault? Musing to herself that "This place fucking sucks, everyone's inbred but me, surely that must be why they don't treat me how I want to be treated" is peak pseudointellectual wangsty teenager thoughts. These thoughts would make her more realistic and give her character room to grow into less of a little bitch over time. It'd be a step up from this universally-praised boringly-perfect bitch who occasionally deflects compliments/dick-sucking obnoxiously and pretends to be tempted to become evil.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307846
307847
>>307824
You could look at it that way, but if that's the case and everyone from Stable 2 can trace their lineage to Applejack, why would Littlepip conclude that the Goddess wants Velvet but not her or literally any other Stable 2 pony? The wording seems to suggest that the door opens for:
>Ministry mares
>Close relatives of ministry mares
>Descendants of either of the above

With that in mind, Littlepip's logic seems to be that because Velvet is a descendent of Sweetie, who was a close relative of Rarity, who was a ministry mare, the door will open for her. There's no mention made of Applejack anywhere in this scene. Kkat seems to have forgotten to factor the two centuries of incest thing into the whole gene-locked door thing.

On that note, why would this door be keyed to open for descendants in the first place? We're talking about what is presumably a high-security government facility, filled with all manner of dangerous items. Keying the door to only open for a small group of high-ranking officials makes sense. Keying it to open for their close relatives is dubious (would you trust every single member of your immediate family with access to your emails, let alone your nukes?). But if the goal was to keep the place secure, keying it to their descendants, stretching an indeterminable distance into the future, is just plain insane. As far as we're informed, none of the main six or their immediate relatives even had any children until after the apocalypse, the latest point at which this lock could have been put in place.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
94183d6
?
No.307847
307855
>>307816
>>307821
>>307824
The exact wording the text uses is "close family or direct descendants." You could probably grant some leeway on what "close family" means exactly, but I think a sensible definition is one's immediate family and closest extended family. So basically, parents, children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, first cousins, etc would be fine; great-great uncles and fourth cousins twice removed and things like that, particularly removed across multiple generations, shouldn't really count imo.

As to "direct descendant," I interpret this literally. Direct descendant means a direct line of descent along the patrilineal or matrilineal line (I assume that in Equestria matrilineal would be more significant). Basically, if Rarity had a child, and that child had a child, and that child had a child, then she would be a direct descendant of Rarity's. However, if Sweetie Belle had a child who had a child who had a child, then she would be related to Rarity, but not directly descended from her. The author specifically said direct descendant, not blood relative, so I'm taking him at his word there.

I'll grant that it is possible that either Velvet or Littlepoop could be direct descendants of AJ if they both have her daughter as an ancestor. The sticking point here though is that by this logic, and by the author's claim that nearly everyone in Stable 2 has Apple DNA for this reason, then LP, Velvet and most of the other Stable 2 inhabitants would probably qualify as direct descendants of AJ; thus, any of them could pass this spell. He specifically singles out Velvet for this role, and though he doesn't say exactly why she qualifies, he's devoted a fair amount of page space to establishing that Sweetie Belle was Velvet's ancestor, so I'm assuming he's implying that she can pass the spell because of this connection, not because of a connection to AJ. Thus, I feel like I'm justified in calling shenanigans here.

>>307846
>You could look at it that way, but if that's the case and everyone from Stable 2 can trace their lineage to Applejack, why would Littlepip conclude that the Goddess wants Velvet but not her or literally any other Stable 2 pony?
>With that in mind, Littlepip's logic seems to be that because Velvet is a descendent of Sweetie, who was a close relative of Rarity, who was a ministry mare, the door will open for her. There's no mention made of Applejack anywhere in this scene. Kkat seems to have forgotten to factor the two centuries of incest thing into the whole gene-locked door thing.
Basically this. My overall point is that for one thing, kkat doesn't seem to understand what "direct descendant" means, and for another, he established this bit about incest in Stable 2 without fully considering all the implications. Thus, shenanigans.

>Stern is Redeye's top Lieutenant or something, and is the leader of his griffin forces. She was the one sent by Redeye to kill Calamity and Velvet in the tower, and who was herself taken prisoner a couple chapters ago.
That's right. I'd forgotten about her. It looks like the Stern mentioned back in Chapter 7 was meant to be the same character, which makes sense. There is just too much damned information in this story to keep track of.

>>307811
>She basically has The Joker's backstory from the cartoon: fell off a catwalk into a vat of chemicals and came out fucked up.
Well, ackshually, the Joker's backstory isn't known. The story about The Red Hood getting knocked into a chemical vat is the oldest and most commonly cited origin story for him, but the "official" position is that the Joker is an unreliable narrator, that he changes his story frequently, and his version of events can't be trusted in any case. Thus, there have been a number of origin stories that have been invented for the character by numerous writers over the years. The cartoon you're citing is most probably the animated film version of The Killing Joke, based on the Alan Moore comic of the same name. The original is a classic and I highly recommend it if you haven't read it.

To answer your question though, I don't necessarily hate Trixie as the Goddess, though I do find it a little silly, but it was probably meant to be silly so I can overlook it. The Goddess turning out to be a fairly minor character when we've been led to believe it would be Celestia or Luna or someone big and important is actually a rather clever twist, and I'll give kkat some credit for putting actual thought into which character it should be. Trixie is comedically underpowered and her whole story is that she craves power and feels inferior to Twilight Sparkle, so it stands to reason she would be exactly the kind of pony who would volunteer for an experiment like this. Most hacky fanfiction authors who might want to have the all-powerful Goddess turn out to be some relatively silly minor character would probably go for one of the obvious "joke" characters; Derpy or Bulk Biceps or someone like that. Trixie is a surprisingly well-reasoned choice, especially considering this is the same author who thought "giant mutant Angel Bunny becomes a meth cook" was a good idea.

That said, I do agree that having Trixie drink the chemical while standing on a rickety catwalk over a vat of the same chemical is beyond retarded. If all Trixie was supposed to do was drink a single cup of this stuff, it would have made far more sense to have the meeting take place in an office or something. If you have to go this far outside the realm of plausibility to set up the event you want to happen, odds are you need to rethink your setup. If Trixie needed to fall into a vat of chemicals for the origin story to work, then kkat should have thought up a better reason for her to be standing on that catwalk.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307855
307872
>>307847
Say, what if Trixie was a janitor who fell into the vats due to the bomb shockwave? It would still be absurdly OSHA noncompliant...

What if Trixie saw a successful test Twilight was performing on poners to boost their magic, she saw Twilight give a cup of goo to a pony, and she decided to dive headfirst into the vat of super serum or try and manufacture her own batch that didn't turn out as good? What if Trixie sabotaged an experiment of Twilight's and the result absorbed Trixie and many others while retaining Trixie's personality? What if Twilight opened a portal to a dimension of raw magic hoping to use this as a magical laser gun but it blasted Trixie in the face and mutated her into an alicorn who immediately assumed growing wings means she's rightfully a princess now and anyone who disagrees is an enemy trying to trick her? If Kkat went with that he could make Trixie talk like Gollum and call ponies "Tricksy little ponies" and it would be hilarious. What if Trixie volunteered for a test where she is given a cup of alicornification SPUGE and drinks it weekly as she's instructed but she grows stronger and crazier like an addict and ends up fighting her way into the facility to steal more only to end up falling into the vats or knocked into them? Considering LP's struggles with crack mint addiction it would be quite ironic if Trixie was basically a steroids addict masquerading as the Wasteland's next great unifying messiah.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307872
307921
themaster.png
lavalamptrixie.jpg
>>307855
Falling into a vat of mutagenic goo works well enough as an origin, since the why and how and the Goddess/Master's transformation was never particularly important. It doesn't need to be more dramatic, just better constructed.

To go back to Fallout for a second, the Master's backstory is relatively simple - there was this military base where they were testing mutagenic goo during the war which fell into disrepair after the bombs fell. Wildlife got inside and came into contact with the goo, creating dangerous mutants which would go on to terrorize the surrounding area. A group of locals ventured into the base to try and stop the mutants at their source, but failed. One of them was knocked into a vat of goo by a broken crane and was immersed in it for several days. What emerged from the vat was a deeply altered being with heightened intelligence, compromised sanity and the ability to merge other living things into itself. That's basically it. It's not complex and never needed to be, and none of the scenario is particularly nonsensical once you accept the existence of the pulp-science mutagenic goo.

From a writing perspective what's important is what came after - the Master's madness drove him to the conclusion that he was a heightened form of humanity better suited to the post-war world, and that by incorporating other beings into himself (directly by absorbing them or indirectly by turning them into loyal super mutants) he could unify the human race and put an end to conflict and suffering. His existence poses a simple ethical question to the player: is it better to struggle against the dangers of the wasteland and the human race's inherent flaws as a regular human, or transcend these problems by giving up your individuality and becoming a monster? It's worth noting that while the game canonically ends with the Master's death, the player is also given the option to submit and join him.

Kkat's taken the (perfectly serviceable) framework of this Fallout villain and slotted Trixie in to it, which isn't inherently a problem. The problem is that there's not really anything else to it. The Goddess makes little to no argument for her own existence, however flawed, and the 'master race' thing doesn't really fly because so far, virtually everything her alicorns have set out to do has ended in failure.

I'm going to show my hand a little and point out that I really like FoE's alicorns on a conceptual level, but the way they're written in the original story really doesn't offer much firm ground.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.307903
307904
>>307806
I dont think it was ever implied that the goddess was NMM/ Luna, from what I remember. As for what the zebras referred to, it WAS Luna. That is stated to be pre-war, when Luna was appointed to be the political head of Equestria and in the public's eye. Xenith referencing the myth of the stars in recent chapters is still referring to the (old) goddesses, not THE Goddess. It's weird.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.307904
307905 307909
>>307903
This isn't helped by the fact that Xenith refers to the alicorns as "Nightmare Moons". Apparently the zebras really have a hard time telling people apart.
Anonymous
e7ad7d5
?
No.307905
>>307904
>zebras really have a hard time telling people apart.
Those fucking racists! It's 1200, poners. 1200.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.307909
307913
>>307904
The zigger can't tell brightly-coloured poners apart? But some have wings and some have horns and some have both and are fucking huge!
But ziggers are ziggers and if you can't tell them apart by their goofy ziggerish hairstyles and goofy ziggerish clothes how can you tell them apart at all? Normal people seek to look unique-ish yet presentable or normal and presentable by the standards of their chosen fashion genre, but all ziggers think and look alike unless they're one-off characters defined by their unusual lack of ziggerness!
This entire fucking edgequestrian nightmare doomsday scenario only happened because ziggers couldn't tell the difference between Nightmare Moon and Princess Luna and decided "holy" nuclear war with poners using nukes they only had thanks to Sluttershy was the best option for the planet's future!
Maybe the real moral of this story was the ponies nuked by ziggers along the way.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.307913
307916
1596156145303.png
>>307909
ExcUSE ME? Did you just assault xir with your ableist mansplaining? Maybe zer is colorblind! Maybe all you ponies DO look alike!
Anonymous
ea58122
?
No.307916
>>307913
Whoawhoawhoa here comes the fun police! Be cool.
Anonymous
c8e1afa
?
No.307921
308009 308583 309387
EvilApplebloom.png
>>307358
I bet Kkat's attempt at an homage to Lovecraft just makes you wish you were reading Lovecraft instead.

>>307389
The Brotherhood of Steel is intent on keeping advanced technology out of the wrong hands, but a pre-war vault probably wouldn't be considered the "wrong hands." I believe the only time they would directly attack a vault would be if it was experimenting on technology that was a threat to the rest of the world, such as FEV.

>>307403
Bathos is a gift that keeps on giving in this story.

>>307418
Good to know all this. This is why you should never rely on your armor alone but instead use it properly with tactics. Even knightly orders, which the BoS is modeled off, practiced disciplined tactics to maximize effectiveness.

You missed the T-60 model of power armor, which was introduced in Fallout 4 (I'd argue power armor is one of the few things FO4 got right) and designed to combine the effectiveness of the T-51 set with the ease of production of T-45. T-51 was far more advanced than T-45 but was highly expensive to make due to such things as using coated ceramics instead of steel.

>>307491
>these kinds of people are so susceptible to emotional manipulation that they can't tell the difference between legitimate tragedy and sadness porn
They cannot understand any distinction between bathos and actually well-written pathos. You'd think an elementary literature class would teach the difference, but the educational system is not something you can rely on.

>>307617
>the story is now about the contact between Narnia and our world. In order for this to work, we would need to have a little more background on who these children were before they came to Narnia, and what was going on in the world they came from.
This was essentially the prequel book to the Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician's Nephew. The titular magician dragged children (not the same ones as in the rest of the series) into other worlds because of his mischief and inadvertently released the White Witch (who is not a native of Narnia). We even see the White Witch in Victorian England at one point, so this book does mix everything up like you say. However it's very well-written, is concise, and has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

>nearly everyone in the stable has Apple DNA because they've all been inbreeding with each other
Not even in the post-apocalypse can Applejack escape remarks about incest.

>Calamity...ordered his men to intervene and stop the attack. His men refused, so he punished them for insubordination
You'd think that a character defecting from an ultra-villainous organization would have a better reason to do so. "Non-interference" while groundniggers murder each other is hardly on the same level as conducting a massacre; in fact, there could be justifiable cause to do so. This does not paint Calamity in the best light.

>>307785
>Ditzy Doo as the Element of Laughter
Besides the issues you brought up, how is this possible considering that Ditzy Doo was contemporaneous with Pinkie Pie? Are not the Elements destined at birth, or is it more of a video game thing where if the goofiest character dies the next one becomes the Element of Laughter automatically? There's no explicit logic to this.

>>307802
>A sinkhole several miles across indicated where the balefire bomb had been detonated.
A "sinkhole" or crater that large would have to be far more powerful than any nuclear bomb ever developed and would have rendered the entire continent uninhabitable.

>>307872
Solid take.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.308009
308016 308020
>>307921
I've never been taught the difference between bathos and pathos officially. While I know the difference thanks to the internet, what do you think the difference is, amd what do you think makes this story bathos/pathos?
Anonymous
c1df8c9
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No.308016
308020 308036
>>308009
Bathos is an attempt at being pathos which is ridiculous to the point of being comedic. An example in FOE would be that wannabe Pinkie Pie filly, or the cutienara party in Stable 2.
Something close to it is the trope "narm." Maybe I'm getting the definition wrong, it's a long time since I read about pathos/bathos in my curriculum.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308020
308036
>>308009
>>308016
Pathos is when a piece of writing or art evokes genuine feelings of pity, sorrow or compassion in the audience. Bathos goes through all the same motions as pathos, but in a way so contrived or ridiculous that it stops coming across as genuine, and is either grotesque, childish or funny instead. This is either deliberate, usually as parody or farce, or a result of poor writing.

Pathos:
>Mufasa falls from the cliffside and vanishes into the cloud of dust sent up by the buffalo stampede. When the dust clears, Simba emerges and discovers his father's lifeless body. The young cub begs Mufasa to wake up and nuzzles his body in sorrow.

Bathos:
>Mufasa falls from the cliffside and hits several sharp rocks on the way down, spinning head over heels in a spray of blood. When he reaches the bottom the buffalo graphically trample him; one even smashes his skull. When the dust clears, Simba emerges and discovers his father wallowing in a small lake of his own blood and urine. The young cub screams and attempts to gouge out his own eyes at the horror of the sight. Mufasa gurgles incoherently through his crushed windpipe and then loudly shits himself.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308036
308038 308043 308125
>>308016
>>308020
Excellent descriptions!
Narm is an alright term for attempted pathos that falls flat, but bathos sounds cooler. Isn't it a symptom of the first world's failing compromised education institutions that Buffy The Vampire Slayer fanproles decided they needed to invent a new word for the concept of bathos, unaware that the term existed long before they were born?
Education is a dead industry and I long for the day it's replaced by the better version of homeschooling, online self-education resources that can be accessed regardless of economic standing or pre-existing qualification certifications aka childish "permission slips from teechur". No teacher should be able to say "you can't attempt to learn X until you've studied obvious basic BS with me for 2 years while paying me for it and paying ny friends for antihumanities courses aka leftist propaganda". If someone wants to study the advanced shit without already knowing the basics he should be allowed to try. The more open education is, the easier it will be for people to meritocratically rise to their level of ability and get the skills necessary to do good for their nation, and the easier it will be to spot any subversion going on. Nobody knows what some random femscum's saying to kids during a math class in idaho unless someone thinks to whip a camera out and record her. But the rise of online classes means more parents are realizing exactly what kind of "people" (lefty teacher's union members) are teaching their kids.
Man, this story really missed a trick by not making FIM racist. Canon ponies are a little racist, talking about the greatness of their Magic Of Friendship and using "everypony" because only pony lives matter. I love it, but this story could have taken it further instead of simply occasionally implying the poners got super racist and started "anexing Diamond Dog land in Equestria". Imagine if the ponies had a Museum Of Pony Brilliance that shows off all the cool shit ponies invented and this was used to explain how lesser races were able to build guns: Twilight was a big believer in the openness of information and Rarity's smug underling who did everything wrong wanted this museum to exude the maximum smugness aura possible.
Imagine if the ponies had a regular World's Fair event every year or so where all the best pony scientists and mages got together to flex in the face of the greatest scientists and mages of other races. Refusing to show up would mean admitting you can't compete with pony superiority. There could be a gameshow-like segment where the greatest of nonpony races show off their innovations and then ponykind's best have a short period of time to invent something better. Did the griffons invent some gun? Time to give its replacement better recoil control and accuracy. Did the zebras show off a potion that makes you tougher for ten seconds? Time to invent the underwear that makes you even tougher until you take it off. Did the Diamond Dogs show off some shiny rock? Here's a magically-crafted four dimensional diamond. LP could dungeon-crawl in this place for sick loot while Velvet cries over how sad a destroyed monument to a destroyed civilization's greatness is, or better yet, it could already be picked clean and this could be the source of the wasteland's best Unique Weapons. Killing baddies who found Unique Named Weapons to earn them would be a cooler way to find unique slightly-superior guns than simply finding them at the end of random dungeons, right? It'd also mean less sudden random dungeon crawling filler scenes.
Anonymous
e7ad7d5
?
No.308038
308040
>>308036
>Did the zebras show off a potion that makes you tougher for ten seconds? Time to invent the underwear that makes you even tougher until you take it off.
Anonymous
e7ad7d5
?
No.308040
308051
Oekaki.png
>>308038
Sorry. I made this in the thought that it would all be in good fun but at the same time, I don't wanna hold your past over you as a sword.
Anonymous
e7ad7d5
?
No.308043
308051
>>308036
>Imagine if the ponies had a Museum Of Pony Brilliance that shows off all the cool shit ponies invented
>this could be the source of the wasteland's best Unique Weapons
This is actually similar to one of my own fanfic idea for this series. But in it, it's a stable that was made near a secret, technological, military base. A lot of the "newest" technology at the time was saved from the apocalypse an stored there. I'm not sure if this should be like a myth among the poners of the wasteland. Some pony found some article about the base while hacking some old ass terminal. And then the rumour about this high.tech base and what potential weaponary could exist inside it. It could make for a nice little treassure hunt race between the good guys and the bad guys of the story since the military might of such a place could provide either side with vicotry. Kinda like a weapons-only stash one-piece.
But now we are speculating. Kkat hasn't, seemingly, included any halo rings in his universe. Maybe the nuke they found could be counted as that but I don't like a few things about it's set up if that's the case. Like how it was just randomly there in a barn somewhere. Was there an explanation for that?
Really, though from my limited perspective, I don't like how samey the enviroments are so far. This is story is sort of similar to an epic fantasy, as in they wander across the land as if they were in LOTR, but similar to what I have seen of Bethesda games every local looks and feels the same. I would probably fuck it up in execution but I would try to have the party visit different locals, as in different enviroments not just in name (then again maybe I'm being too judgemental), as a way to stave of the monotony if I was gonna just have LP shoot and loot over and over again.
I don't know. Maybe, this story should have focused on it characters first and foremost and it's plot but I still think that it would have been neat with like some swamps, forrests, underground tunnels, lakes/oceans, and deserts and some accompanying wildlife and etc. for the region.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308051
308125
>>308040
It's ok, I like the Silver fanart. He was a badly written character and it's all in good fun.
I was thinking of wearing the +4 toughness armour under more armour or a stable jumpsuit so it wouldn't be immediately obvious that the underwear is important. After all, the silliest looking thing worn in a world of magic must be the strongest because why else would it be worn?
>>308043
This atory would definitely benefit from more interesting locations.
Fallout 1 had Junktown, The Hub, the adobe tribal village of Shady Sands, The Glow, the cathedral, Mariposa Base, and more. Fallout 3 was lazy with its world design because reusing the same chunks of building and concrete and wall/floor is easy. Still it had supermarkets and ruined cities with raiders, the subway tunnels with ghouls, spoooky empty parks with swings and roundabouts, Megaton the town built around the crater of an unexploded nuclear bomb without farms or water, vaults with wacky nomsense, Little Lamplight the town of kids that exile adults and somehow survives and somehow hasn't been killed by the nearby Super Mutants of Murder Pass, and there are DLC areas like Alien Spaceship Madcap Wacky Hour, Edgy Thunderdome Slave Zone, and Far Harbor 2.
FNV took place in the mojave desert and still had more interesting locations. Goodsprings the normal town, Nipton the bandit infested town with a casino and rollercoaster, Novac the scrapper settlement with a giant dinosaur tourist attraction and sniper nest and rocket testing facility, Nipton the burned town attacked by Legion, The Motherfucking Strip and Freeside and Westside, that vault with plants, legion camps, Searchlight the hyper irradiated shithole, Deathclaw Quarry, the ant racetrack, and so much more... not to mention DLCs like the beautiful one with Graham, the Big MT, The Sierra Madre, and Lonesome Road.
Magic is a blank cheque. You get to write the numbers on it and decide what to give your world. Littlepip could stumble into a town turned into a winter horrorland by its exploding nuclearmagic powered ice skating rink haunted by its murderous animatronic golems designed to teach poners to skate but now turned evil by radiation, or find an unstable portal to a quarter parallel universe where the laws of physics are fucked, or find a vault that decided to make a portal to an alien world and go there only to die horribly or mutate themselves into beings "optimized" for the challenges of this WH40K-tier death world, or enter the cum zone which a gay orgy city where even the hills and buildings are shaped like sexual organs caressed hornily by roads and cave mouths. They could meet a robot from the future here to say "there is no life where I'm from and I'm just here to catalogue and chronicle every moment in history on my way back through time". They could meet a friendly deathclaw with the mind of a pony because when the deathclaw fatally wounded her she projected her mind into the deathclaw hoping for the best. They could meet wolves from a stable full of ponies that turned themselves into wolves because they can eat meat without harming their moral fibre plus they run faster than ponies and howl sonic blasts at foes and even run on air at night. They could encounter a tiny patch of paradise where there are no problems because an illusion spell was cast there by a failed vault that stopped fucking and died thanks to constant fantasizing, and giving fantasies up to leave this fake fantasy land and save reality would make the heroes look incredibly heroic. They could encounter a cabal of dark mages that want to do evil things. Or a cabal of light mages that want to purge the wicked and unclean from this world because they think it's the only way to halt ponykind's moral decline. They could loot a cursed gun that fucks with them and forces them to take a detour to the last church in Equestria to get uncursed. They could loot a cursed book that sucks ponies in and forces them to go through assorted Brothers Grimm stories. They could fight a midget who drinks piss and fights using fang shwey. They could find the Omnitrix. They could encounter a fictional character made manifest, an intentional joke mary sue girl brought to life at the cost of the life of her creator. Part of what made Fallout The Frontier was how absurdly well-armed everyone was to the point where the Legion used tanks and the Enclave had a moon base with a bigger solar laser and assorted silly monsters. But you could get away with anything with magic. Where's the poner with a repair cutie mark who can magically fix anything even destroyed cars and broken tanks and guns and more? The author could do all sorts of interesting shit that no Fallout writer could get away with.

And what does Kkat give us? Dull, bland dungeon crawling. LP doesn't scale mountains or brave the ice and wind or struggle to keep the party together while trudging through a desert or get dragged into a civil war between fantasy monsters for the fate of a town or battle inside an active volcano or trek through a lethal forest full of living plants and killer bugs or fight haunted suits of armour in a flying medieval castle or dogfight with aliens or get forced to fight through a ghost and demon infested tower or fend off constant angel attacks. They just do fallout shit only less interesting.

Kkat lacks imagination.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.308077
308087 308125
File (hide): 0F4EFD21F6CFB36D600EC72F45F99093-6433026.mp4 (6.1 MB, Resolution:854x480 Length:00:04:31, 1583106912541.mp4) [play once] [loop]
1583106912541.mp4
"As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308087
308125
>>308077
True. I bet half of this story or more is filler and Kkat had no plan in mind when writing it. What even is LP's main goal? She found Velvet, now she's doing whatever DJ True Clopitalist Radio says except when she's assassinating alicorns for Red Eye. What are the stakes, what is the political situation, where's the shit that gets LP personally invested in this story and unable to walk away from it?

A video on writing told me instead of making the hero stop his main quest for some casual laid-back sidequesting, a good author introduces complications to the main quest that require slight detours to resolve. Supposedly this method is superior because it keeps the hero's eyes on the main goal and makes each cleared roadblock feel like a huge rewarding victory for the audience even though you are the one who set it up. It provides the illusion of forward momentum when really you halted that momentum temporarily with some filler. It's the ultimate way to lengthen a story without harming it.

The villain you're hunting fled to another continent but you can't afford your own boat and the only transport ships there have a sea monster paralyzing ocean trade.
The thingy you need from a space bug costs money you can only get from podracing.
Somebody has something you need like a key or information but won't give it to you unless you complete the sidequest.
Even FNV did that softly when Deputy Beagle refused to tell you where the guy you're hunting went until you saved him and that not-boone novac sniper refused to tell you where Benny went until you solved the ghoul problem at Repconn Rockets by killing all ghouls or helping them get to space.
But when's the last time any of LP's random sidequesting was part of an important roadblock? Well except for that retarded DJ prioritizing the aquisition of new records from an old building over all other tasks she had for LP.
Anonymous
0a66587
?
No.308125
308126
>>308036
>missed a trick by not making FIM racist
Then you write something like that. If Kkat really wanted to make ponies racist, not only would it be written in the worst way but it would make the fanbase more obsessed with racism. Count your blessings.

>>308051
Nigel, you're rambling again. You have some good ideas so write them in a text file somewhere and use them for future projects. You don't have to tell us every idea you have.
>robot from the future
Reminds me of the Robot of Christmas Past from the Future, kek

>>308087
>A video on writing told me instead of making the hero stop his main quest for some casual laid-back sidequesting, a good author introduces complications to the main quest that require slight detours to resolve.
This.

>>308077
Thank you for this.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308126
308128
>>308125
The ponies in FO:E DO become extremely racist though, as Kkat wanted to shamelessly rip off the jingoistic and ruthless Americans of Fallout + their propaganda. A ton of the lore and worldbuilding and recording and propaganda center on demonizing zebras and representing them as horrible monsters to make ponies more willing to kill them during the war.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308128
308130
>>308126
Bizarrely, from what little information we're given on the war itself, most of the anti-zebra sentiment seems to be correct. Whenever a wartime event comes up, the cause is either ambiguous (the thing with the pirates, the conflict over resources) or clearly the zebras' fault (firing the megaspells first, attempting to assassinate Celestia, gassing Luna's school, gassing Canterlot - I'm pretty sure they're also cited as inventing the explosive slave collars but can't recall where). From the information presented, the zebras were clearly the main antagonists of the war. By contrast, neither America nor China are presented as a primary inciter of the war in Fallout - they're both portrayed as pretty awful places.

I'm not sure if this is a deliberate decision or simply a matter of bad writing on Kkat's part, though the latter seems more likely. In any case it doesn't really seem to factor into anything, since Littlepip's default outlook is Ghoul/Zebra Lives Matter and that's treated as gospel even in light of most ghouls attempting to gnaw her to death and the zebras killing her own personal deities.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308130
308132
>>308128
Yeah, it's pretty funky now that I think about it.Especially when a big drive for the zebra's hostility was their stupid superstitions that they didn't even bother to try and resolve or confirm about Luna being NMM.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308132
308152 308159
>>308130
That's another thing. A war that lasted years, and yet the nation where friendship and understanding are literal superpowers tried diplomacy only once?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308152
>>308132
Not to mention, they sent Luna herself to the peace negotiations instead of Celestia.
This triggered the ziggers into opening fire. Big Mac died saving Luna and some other poners.
Big Mac wouldn't have died if not for pony mercy.
And Fluttershy's fucking megaspells... Equestria wouldn't have died if not for her belief that Mutually Assured Destruction - I mean "Communally Assured Reciprocal Existence" - could end this war and all future wars.
How did Celly/Luna not know the animalistic response the sight of Luna would ignite in the ziggers?
Was celly already mindbroken from the loss of Luna's academy? Was mindbreaking even a thing? She died holding the Pink Cloud fart in Canterlot. I forget if Luna died that way too.
And isn't it hypocritical that despite how those zigs talk about Luna like they believe darkness must be evil, they're the ones with soul magic and black magic and balefire and taint and they probably even invented The Black Book?
All that shit seems way more evil than pony magic could ever hope to be. Sure a fireball spell can slay an evildoer or burn an orphanage, neutral magic's use depends on the user, but balefire... its only non-evil usage is its use as a deterrent. At least nukes can be taken apart and repurposed into nuclear power plants, right? But zebra magic just seems like pure evil whenever it isn't potions that do whatever the plot needs. Megaspells amplify ANY spell that was put inside it. Flutters gave both sides healing megaspell nukes. Anypony could have filled one megaspell with a Land Creation spell and detonated in the ocean to create a new inhabitable landmass. Or created a nuke that turns anything in the blast radius to coal and detonated it in some random desert or mountain range to get a damn near limitless supply of diamonds and coal.
It's just fucking retarded that a species capable of making x1000 missiles while just discovering coal-burning steam power and basic gunpowder firearms (only to leapfrog straight into 2077 USA gear overnight) would ever find any resource so limited that war seems necessary.

I think Kkrap tried to make this a "morally grey" conflict. That's why we see ziggers do evil things, and why sometimes we are told ponies did mean things. This is Kkat's idea of morally grey. Good vs evil except the villain has a bad excuse and the hero is mean. But Kkat is such a lefty faggot he thinks ponies saying mean things about zigs and banning/burning/censoring books that say nice things about zigs and taking Equestrian land back from Diamond Dogs makes them as morally reprehensible as the ziggers that bombed a fucking children's school. He thinks the "mean racist" ponies deserved to lose so Fluttershy's good intentions can't save them. But LP has her ego stroked constantly. She's the hero of this shitty little story after all. So Kkat doesn't think she deserves to lose. Even when a loss wouldn't guarantee death and the story's end. Even when a loss really should happen logically speaking. Even when Kkat has to bend the rules of the universe, make impossible shit happen offscreen, and even make characters act out of character and do exactly what he wants, Kkat just can't stop rigging things in favor of his stupid overpowered boxcar-lifting triple-wielding gun-toting mary sue OC.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308159
>>308132
I was never big on the fundamental premise of the fic which made me feel that the story itself was rotten to the core. That premise of course is ponies suddenly becoming mirrors of the Americans in Fallout, which were exaggerated versions of the warlike and racist Americana of the second world war era. It's just something that in itself is a broken concept and the whole fic is predicated on this idea.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
27be963
?
No.308164
308165
1587381642968.png
>>307808

Chapter 30: Hunters and Prey

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“What are you on the lookout for?”
>“Two very angry types of movements. Slow, lumbering, powerful movements and jerky, erratic, excitable movements. Both coming for the kill.”
These things are getting increasingly more bizarre and less relevant as the story progresses. The last one quoted the opening narration monologue from the show's first episode, with no solid connection to anything going on in the chapter apart from the story's taking place in Equestria.

My best guess is that this one is another quote from one of the Fallout games, but as usual there is no source given nor is any context provided. Apparently this is a snippet of conversation between Party A and Party B, which A asks B what he is on the lookout for. B informs A that he is looking for slow, powerful movements and jerky, erratic excitable movements. He goes on to explain that both types of movements are coming in for the kill. As to what this meant in its original context, we shall probably never know, since once again the quotes are unattributed. What significance it has in the context of Fallout: Equestria remains to be seen, but based on past experience, my guess is probably none. However, I will say that my overall experience reading this story is comparable to a long, slow, powerful movement.

Anyway, moving on with the story:

>Virtues.
>My first real advice, out of the Stable, was to find my virtue. Well, no, it was to find a weapon, armor and friends.
We didn't even learn what the author means by "finding one's virtue" until halfway through the story.

>It was the advice that followed -- to find that defining positive characteristic that would get me through the darkest horrors that the Equestrian Wasteland could throw at me without losing myself -- that still eluded me. Instead, I substituted other goals, other quests. I was driven to make this blasted world a better place, a brighter place, for the ponies trapped within it.
At first glance, this just seems like another of LP's trademark moody rambles. However, there's something noteworthy in here. She is basically acknowledging that she was told to "find her virtue" early in the story, has had absolutely no success in doing so, and that most of her adventures thus far have been a complete waste of her time (and by extension, a complete waste of all of ours). Once again, the author shows that on some level, he not only understands that his story sucks, but understands why it sucks; however, he just can't seem to make that crucial leap from recognizing it to doing something about it.

>Red Eye was just too smart, too devious and too well-organized. I underestimated him at every turn, and he used it against me with skill approaching panache. Even his seemingly insane claim to approaching godhood was backed by a crafty and altogether horrifying plan.
I'll go ahead and add "panache" to our list of words kkat wants the reader to know that he knows.

Anyway, I don't really see how LP's experiences since encountering Red Eye would lead her to this conclusion. Red Eye's plan is actually pretty straightforward: he (somehow) managed to figure out how to concoct this secret alicorn goo, and he plans to bathe himself in it, become a god, and eat a bunch of unicorns immediately afterward in order to gain their power. There's nothing particularly devious, cunning or Machiavellian going on here.

There are, however, a few actions from Red Eye that don't make a whole lot of sense. For one thing, why did he choose to send Littlepoop and her friends to take care of the Goddess? Littlepoop who, despite her insatiable bloodlust, uncanny (and mostly unearned) skill with weapons, godlike levitation abilities, and Mary Sue powers of precognition, is nonetheless just a mortal pony? What was she supposed to do there exactly? She was almost guaranteed to fail.

If Red Eye had sent LP to the Goddess hoping the Goddess would kill her, that would be one thing; however, this plan doesn't make much sense either. If he simply wanted LP dead, it would have made far more sense to just kill her outright when he had her in captivity. It would have made even more sense to just imprison her with the other unicorns, since her levitation magic could be absorbed and would probably come in handy.

Overall, none of this speaks to any particular intelligence, deviousness, or organization on the part of Red Eye. If anything, it demonstrates the opposite: Red Eye appears slow-witted, mentally unbalanced, and recklessly impulsive. Even though he has both the means and the opportunity to achieve god-status right here and now, he instead elects to hold off, sending LP and her friends, none of whom he can count on or even trust, to kill his worst enemy, a task which they have little hope of accomplishing. At best, all this would achieve is alerting the Goddess to the fact that he plans to kill her, which gives her an excuse to move openly against him. At worst, he is sending her another powerful unicorn to consume, which will only add to her already substantial power. I really don't see how this makes any more sense than either consuming and absorbing Littlepoop himself, or just killing her to begin with.

>The Goddess was… insane. And yet, she was effectively untouchable. Immensely powerful. And her army of minions, while considerably smaller in number than Red Eye’s, were amongst the most formidable opponents in the entire wasteland. And they were completely devoted, if not directly controlled, by her whims. And her whims amounted to our extinction.
I think what the author is trying to do here is present something resembling a moral conundrum for Littlepoop. Both Red Eye and the Goddess want her to do something for them, and neither option is appealing since both seem to desire the destruction and/or enslavement of all the ponies of Equestria. However, there doesn't seem to be any clear way to stop either of them.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
27be963
?
No.308165
308177 308583
1587406244171.gif
>>308164

>We were racing apotheosis. And we were losing.
Two things here. First, "Racing Apotheosis" was the title of the previous chapter; that would have been a far better place for this line if it was going to be used. Second, I'm assuming the definition of "apotheosis" the author is working with here is essentially deification. To prove that I, too, can google words and access Wikipedia, here is a clarification:

>Apotheosis (Greek: ἀποθέωσις, from ἀποθεόω/ἀποθεῶ, ''to deify''; also called divinization and deification from Latin: deificatio, lit. ''making divine'') is the glorification of a subject to divine level and most commonly, the treatment of a human like a god. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre.
>In theology, apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. In art, the term refers to the treatment of any subject (a figure, group, locale, motif, convention or melody) in a particularly grand or exalted manner.
So basically, this term can either mean the literal deification of a human (and presumably, by extension, a pony), or the figurative deification of an artistic motif. Red Eye's pursuit of god-status is the only context in which it makes sense in FoE.

If we assume that "apotheosis" here refers to Red Eye's efforts to deify himself, I don't really see how LP & Co. are racing it exactly. The matter doesn't seem particularly time-sensitive; Red Eye can make himself a god at any time he likes if I'm understanding the situation. If anything, he only seems to be holding off because he elected to have Littlepoop kill the present Goddess for whatever insane reason, and plans to wait until she succeeds. If that's the case, it probably makes more sense for LP to stall him and drag out the killing of the Goddess for as long as possible, or at least until she can pull another insane plan out of her ass.

The only thing in the story she seems to be "racing" is the eventual detonation of the atomic bomb that Red Eye hid somewhere in Tenpony Tower. Incidentally, how is that coming along? Any progress on finding and/or disarming that thing? Any plans to, you know, maybe try locating and/or disarming it? No? Oh, well, I assume you at least plan to evacuate your lesbian lover and the citizens of Tenpony before it can detonate, right? What's that? You can't do that either, because Homage doesn't want to abandon her silly radio show for whatever reason and also there are a bunch of powerful magic artifacts inside the Tower that you don't want Red Eye to get hold of, even though if a bomb goes off it would destroy them anyway? Ah, I see. Well, carry on then; back to...whatever it is you're doing exactly.

Anyway, LP rambles on in her usual stream-of-consciousness style for a few more paragraphs. It makes very little sense overall and the subjects she covers don't really connect, but the overall gist of it seems to be that she has found more examples of corrupted virtues than pure ones. She makes an observation about Trixie:

>Now I had met the Goddess, the thing that was Trixie, and I knew I had witnessed the epitome of the corrupted virtue of magic. All I needed to do was find corrupted kindness and I’d have a set.
Yes, Magic and Kindness would account for two of them. In order to have the "set" she's speaking of, she would also need corrupted Honesty, Generosity, Loyalty and Laughter, and if she believes she has found those, she offers us no examples. I suspect the author means to imply that Monterrey Jack was corrupted Honesty, and Pinkie/Silver Bell *maybe* counts as corrupted Laughter; however, I have no idea about Generosity and Loyalty.

Anyway, this all seems to be beside the point:

>{{OH, BUT YOU HAVE MET CORRUPTED KINDNESS, LITTLEPIP!}}
>The cruel, sweet voice of the Goddess blasted through my head, swarmed with a chorus of whispers, mostly agreeing. The weight of her thoughts on my mind was heavy, almost suffocating.
>{{IT’S YOU.}}
I'm not really clear on whether the Goddess is actually speaking to her telepathically here, or if this is just an internal conversation she's having with herself, with the Goddess' voice playing devil's advocate. The Goddess literally can communicate telepathically, but my understanding is that LP & Co. have already left her lair and are back on the Sky Wagon now. Is there some kind of effective operating range for this thing's telepathy, or can it just talk to LP in her mind now? It would be helpful to know.

Anyway, the literal and/or figurative suggestion she receives from the Goddess seems to plant a seed of doubt in her mind:

>I had saved the slaves from Old Appleloosa only to abandon them to the care of a town that traded with slavers. I had slaughtered the raiders who raped and hunted that blue pony in Manehattan, only to walk away and leave her to her fate once the immediate threat had passed. How many more? How many other times had I inserted myself into a situation, tried to help, then left? Should I count all of Fillydelphia as a victim of my kindness? I remembered my image in the mirror, reflecting my soul. Was twisted kindness what I had seen there? Was it a monster?
LP has learned the wrong lessons from all of these experiences.

She attacked Old Appleoosa recklessly and without provocation, and unbalanced relations between that town and New Appleoosa; arguably, she caused more bloodshed and strife than she prevented. Her motivations were never clear; as far as I can tell, it amounted to nothing more than the author's assumption that "slavery = evil" is a universal truth, and thus he did not need to establish a reason why his character might feel this way about it. In any event, LP had no way of knowing that New Appleoosa was also involved in the slave trade, so ironically the only thing she feels bad about here is also the only part of it she could reasonably be excused for.

Running out of space, will continue.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
27be963
?
No.308177
308178 308179 308181
1586419992218.png
>>308165

>I had slaughtered the raiders who raped and hunted that blue pony in Manehattan, only to walk away and leave her to her fate once the immediate threat had passed.
Of all the weird stuff she selectively chooses to feel guilty about, this one has always made the least amount of sense to me. You'll recall that, at the time, the party was on top of the elevated rails. They observed a lone mare on the ground being chased by a party of raiders, which the group proceeded to snipe off one at a time. Once the threat to the mare was eliminated, they went on their way. What exactly is the problem here?

Littlepoop feels guilty because she didn't stop and escort the mare home. Why? The mare, for some unexplained reason, chose to make her home in the Manehattan ruins, a city which was ground zero for a megaspell detonation and is (iirc) still off the charts in terms of taint or radiation or whatever it's called. On top of that, the place is also crawling with raiders and slavers and monsters and whatnot. Later, LP finds that this unnamed mystery mare is among the victims of some generic mad scientist who I guess just went around capturing random ponies and experimenting on them. So clearly, this mare chose to live in a very dangerous place; would her life be any less dangerous had Littlepoop chosen to escort her home on that particular day?

Honestly, the more I think about it the less sense the whole situation makes. As dangerous as Manehattan is, crawling with raiders and radhogs and manticores and mad doctors and whatever the fuck else is around there, you'd think this mare would have had enough sense not to go wandering around, unarmed and by herself, far from the relative safety of her home village. Did she not pick up any self-defense skills at all, after all her time living in this place? I mean, Littlepoop, who grew up sheltered and in relative luxury, became a murderous wasteland badass after having spent just a few weeks wandering around out here. How is it that this mare for whom the author didn't even bother to think up a name has presumably spent her whole life in some dangerous ruined shithole in the middle of one of the worst parts of the wasteland, surrounded by raiders and monsters, and she still wound up as this clueless damsel who goes wandering around with no protection whatsoever?

I mean...it's almost as if this whole situation were just some implausible, contrived event the author threw at his protagonist just so she could learn a valuable lesson about helping other ponies, or...something. That's hacky enough on its own, but...what exactly was the lesson LP was supposed to learn here? If you're wandering around in the post-apocalyptic wasteland and you see some random slut getting raped by a ten year old, and you have to shoot the ten year old in the head to save her, you should walk the bitch home, because it's bad manners not to? Honestly, the whole event was so utterly preposterous it's hard to even say what she ought to have done or what lesson she ought to have learned; it's just hack writing on kkat's part and there's no excuse for it.

And while we're on the subject, if this encounter was supposed to be some kind of life-defining event for Littlepoop that's going to be continuously referenced throughout the rest of the story, would it have killed the author to at least give this character a name and maybe a simple, quick backstory? I mean, seriously; it's My Little Goddamn Pony. How hard is it to think up a quickie name for a one-off character, so you at least can call her something other than "the blue mare?" Just name her Boysenberry Cupcakes or Sunshine Sprinkles or some shit; fuck.

Anyway, moving on. The rest of LP's monologue here isn't really worth going over in detail, but I'm going to quote it to give you an example of what I've been dealing with:

>How many more? How many other times had I inserted myself into a situation, tried to help, then left? Should I count all of Fillydelphia as a victim of my kindness? I remembered my image in the mirror, reflecting my soul. Was twisted kindness what I had seen there? Was it a monster?
>No… no this was sick and poisoned thinking. It was the Goddess mercilessly tormenting me where I was weak. I had a virtue. A good and true one just waiting for me to discover it.
>I had to.
Everything about this character exudes narcissism. The question she is grappling with here is whether she deserves to be called a monster because she hasn't done enough. This reminds me of that scene from the end of Schindler's List, where Oskar is crying and rending his clothing because he didn't sell his car to save two extra Jews; the only difference is that here I'm not laughing. It's a shame he didn't bring one of them along to help sell it; he probably could have haggled the price up enough to save at least three.

As humble as LP tries to act whenever anyone starts sucking her off for her alleged heroism which is pretty much a constant occurrence in this story, she obviously has an extreme messiah complex and feels that it is her responsibility, personally, to single-handedly right every wrong in the universe. What's ironic about it, also, is that her altruism has nothing to do with saving other ponies; it's all about her.

"Am I a horrible monster because I haven't been able to single-handedly kill every bad guy and rescue every slave and somehow return Equestria to this glorious idyllic past I've never seen or experienced or even read about until I started poking around in old terminals that for some reason still work after 200 years? No wonder the Goddess is laughing at me!" It's as if she genuinely believes that all of this, the wasteland, Red Eye, the Goddess, the untold thousands of ponies who are probably being raped and murdered all over Edgequestria as we speak; all of it is just some gigantic lesson intended to teach her what her virtue is.

Get over yourself, twat.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.308178
>>308177
>painfully cute Twilight
Oof
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308179
>>308177
Isn't it bizarre that this murderhobo can't semanticate a pony virtue onto her actions until this point?
According to what the author was going for...
LP is the spark that brought her friends together and is an incredibly powerful telekinetic. She's magic.
LP is Loyal to her principles and friends, and hates feeling betrayed by her friends and even her own expectations about where things in a Stable should be. It can't be Calamity, he shot his troops for refusing to help save ground-poners.
LP is honest because uh... sometimes she tells the truth I guess. It can't be AJ's husband, he murdered Grim Star for protecting his home from ghouls.
LP is kind and generous enough to risk life and limb for others and she makes obnoxious quips so she's Laughter too. Velvet the mamipulative bitch can't be kindness considering how eager she was to flirt with LP to get back at Calamity, and what's left for Xenith? How generous/fun can a slave be? Insert sex slave joke here.

LP's inability to pick a pony virtue to focus on makes the author seem incapable of picking just one virtue for his retarded mary sue OC to embody. It's why Velvet can't be kinder than LP without also being a hypocritical semi-pacifist bitch and Calamity can't be more loyal than LP and Steelhooves sure as fuck can't be more honest. Trying to make their OC embody more than one element or even all elements even though this makes the character concept less focused... this is a common trick for lazy fimfic writers, along with making up a new seventh element of harmony. Or retconning the EOH so they only work in the presence of somepony with something only the OC has... according to the author, anyway. So many fimfic authors who want to make "their own mane six" keep forgetting how the characters interact and how they bounce off each other. It's not enough to just have one of everything for a complete set, you need to think carefully about the character dynamics. Otherwise you end up with an unbalanced set like Team LP, where everyone feels like a simplistic AI teammate following LP around while dispensing occasional dialogue snippets, calamity is a non-character, wannabe-Fluttershy can't be called kind at heart with a straight face, and not even the 200 year old soldier clad in magically-healing auto-repairing piston-assisted magical power armour with assorted heavy weaponry can out-damage or out-useful or out-hero LP.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
27be963
?
No.308181
308189 308192
3678303 - Friendship_is_Magic InfraYellow My_Little_Pony Twilight_Sparkle.png
>>308177

Page break. It turns out I made a slight error earlier: LP and the crew are not back on board the Butt Bandit, they are still in Splendid Valley, being escorted by alicorns back to where they parked. On the way, LP sees a map on the wall and makes a very obvious point of studying it despite the alicorns watching their every move. Also, apparently the Valley is rife with kkat's taint. Calamity theorizes that taint amplifies the Goddess' power somehow and enables her to read their minds and speak with them telepathically. This actually answers one of my earlier questions about her telepathy, though as usual it seems like these characters are just making inferences based on nothing. How did Calamity reach this conclusion exactly?

Also, as much as it makes me shudder with revulsion even to type this, I find myself a little curious about the nature of kkat's taint. I thought taint was some horrible kind of magic residue that has all sorts of nasty side-effects that can't be cured. Am I now to believe that the party has been splashing around in this stuff for the last hour or so and they've suffered no effects whatsoever? The announcement that Splendid Valley is full of it doesn't seem to bother them much.

Anyway, just as they are about to climb back on board the Butt Wagon and float off into the sunset, Pyrelight squawks a warning that causes them to hold back. The alicorns don't notice, and are instantly killed as a bunch of magical energy blasts shoot up from the ground. It turns out that a bunch of hellhounds, which you may recall are a sort of mutated diamond dog, have burrowed up under the landing pad.

The scene is initially very promising, and for just a split second it almost looks like kkat has written an exciting fight scene. However, the football is once more yanked away just seconds before I can kick it: the fight is over within the space of a couple of paragraphs, the party doesn't really participate, and nothing really happens to them as a result of it.

The Goddess manages to fire off some kind of sonic attack which is amplified by the Maripony PA system, and this stuns the hellhounds long enough for a few more alicorns to appear and tear them to shreds. Meanwhile, Velvet has cast some new kind of protection spell she suddenly has for some reason, and the group sustains no damage except for Calamity, who gets hit in the wing by a stray blast of energy. This blast, we are told, would have "turned him to ash" had he not been under Velvet's spell. As it stands, it blows a hole in his wing large enough for Littlepoop to "put her hoof through." However, in this story, this is hardly a serious injury; he'll probably just down a potion or two and be fine by the next time we see him.

The action continues to fizzle from here:

>The attack continued, but now the flurry of poorly-aimed beams of magical energy were replaced with a small number of expertly aimed ones. The attacks flashed uselessly against the alicorn’s shields. In the wake of the sonic attack, the hellhounds didn’t charge the base again.
Apart from giving rimjobs to homeless men under freeway overpasses, there are few things kkat is better at than yanking the excitement out of a battle scene.

Page break. As anticipated, Calamity's injury is not even remotely serious by the standards of Edgequestrian medicine, but as ever the author tries to convince us that it is:

>I looked to Velvet and asked, “Will he be okay? And will he be able to fly again?”
>Velvet took longer to answer than I would have preferred. “I can repair the structural damage to his wing with my mending spell, but I can’t heal the wound. He’ll need at least one extra-strength restoration potion to begin to heal properly, more if he wants to fly again anytime this week. And right now, we do not even possess a healing potion.”
Translation: all he needs to do is chug a couple of fucking magical cure-all potions and he'll be just fine. But oh noes! We don't have any magical cure-all potions right now! We used them all up the last time someone suffered what would in any other universe be a mortal injury!! Dun-dun-DUNNNN!!!

Seriously; kkat is the undisputed master of both the sub-overpass rimjob and the anticlimactic battle scene.

Speaking of anticlimactic battle scenes, this one is still going on, albeit in the background. There are apparently some hellhound snipers off in the distance shooting at them. The Goddess keeps sending out alicorns to take them down, but as soon as they get near they burrow underground, so it's kind of a stand-off right now, with neither side gaining any ground. It's not clear why the hellhounds are attacking Maripony in the first place, but that hardly seems important at this point.

Anyway, blah blah blah, Velvet needs to perform some kind of surgery on Calamity's wing to remove the magically-damaged flesh, and she needs to anesthetize him for awhile. Xenith conveniently has a magical potion handy that will somehow prevent blood loss, so no worries there. Meanwhile, LP wonders if she can pull her idiotic levitation trick to once again whisk them away to safety, but oh noes!! She can't levitate them fast enough to avoid the snipers! Looks like they are stuck here until they can find some medical supplies!!! Dun-dun-DUNNNN!!!

As usual, kkat peppers what would, in the hands of a competent writer, be at least a mildly exciting action sequence with some mindless daydreaming from Littlepoop about Xenith:

>She’d kept her silence for how many years? I knew how impossible it had seemed to form friendships with my peers in Stable Two, having been the awkward blank-flank with the alcoholic mother. Being a zebra in the Fillydelphia slave pits would have been even worse. I wondered if she ever bothered to learn the names of most of her tormentors. Is this the way she had come to identify ponies in her mind?
I know the battle scene is anticlimactic and all, but is this shit really appropriate right now?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.308189
308194 308265
download (11).jpeg
>>308181

Anyway, the long and short of their current situation is that they need medical supplies to help Calamity, and there is unlikely to be anything in Maripony that they can use. For some reason, Calamity knows quite a bit about the surrounding area, and he informs them that if they can get him to a place called Old Olneigh they should be fine. However, in order to get there, they will need to cross several miles of irradiated, tainted land populated by intelligent, vicious dog-mutants that can burrow under the ground and ambush them from virtually anywhere. As usual, Littlepoop claims she has a plan, and until I'm proven wrong I'm just going to assume her plan involves some ridiculous Mary Sue bullshit that will defy all credulity.

Page break. Seeing as how the last scene ended with our intrepid heroes stuck in an apparently hopeless situation, you would be fully justified in wondering what sort of wacky Mary Sue bullshit Littlepoop might yank out of her ponut in order to extricate them. However, if you were actually hoping for something like this, you'd be disappointed; we are simply informed that the diamond dogs hellhounds "gave up" after about an hour.

Presumably, for this entire duration of time, Calamity was just sitting there with a hole in his wing, patiently waiting for the shitstorm to subside so they could go scavenge around for fucking panacea potions. As dire as the situation is supposed to be, at this point we've been through this drill many times, so I'm assuming there is little to actually be concerned about, and there will be little tension or excitement. I am also assuming that, much like the time when Littlepoop was walking around with a punctured lung, three broken ribs and a shattered leg, Calamity's injury will not hamper him in any significant way, nor will it prevent the party from doing what they usually do, which basically amounts to wandering aimlessly around and looting anything that isn't nailed down. However, I will ask the reader to keep in mind that Calamity now has a giant, gaping hole in his wing. Pic related for reference.

>I stood on the railing ringing Maripony’s short water tower, my binoculars floating in front of my face. From here, I could just make out the shapes of Old Olneigh in the distance, resting peacefully.
Just out of curiosity, what is Old Olneigh, anyway? Is it a town? Another fortress, or a factory perhaps? I'm assuming that it's a reference to some well-known Fallout location that's been given a horse-pun name, and I'm also assuming that kkat assumes I already know what he's referencing and therefore he doesn't need to describe it. However, some basic, cursory explanation that at least gives us a clue as to what sort of destination the party is traveling to would be helpful here.

>Turning my gaze towards the horizon, I glimpsed a shadow that may have been Ponyville. Beyond that, the sky turned hazy and thick from the smoke of the Everfree fires. Walking around the rim, I realized I could spot three of those needle-like towers rising into the cloudy heavens above. I was fairly sure that one of them was the same one I had spotted from the outskirts of Cloudsdayle, but I hadn’t seen the others before.
I will reiterate my complaint that the geography in this story is dreadful. There is no clearly established spatial relationship between any of these points, and it is impossible to keep a map of this place in my head, let alone remember how many of these stupid radio towers there are supposed to be or where they are all located.

Anyway, the alicorns are still around, but they seem to be paying them no attention whatsoever, either positive or negative. This strikes both Littlepoop and Calamity as passing strange.

>“Maybe the Goddess is taking a great and powerful nap?” Xenith suggested. Calamity snorted a laugh that ended in a wince.
As bronybait jokes go, this one is subtle enough not to be obnoxious. However, t's questionable whether Xenith would even make a joke like this, or if the others would find it funny. None of them would have any way of knowing who Trixie was before she became the Goddess; as far as any of them know, she's just a unicorn who lived 200 years ago and was accidentally knocked into a vat of mutating rainbow goo. Littlepoop only knows her as a pony who lived in a cottage where she found a note one time, Calamity would logically have the same amount of information (or less), and we have no reason to believe that Xenith would have heard of her at all.

I think the Goddess may have referred to herself as "great and powerful" a couple of times back when she was giving her speech, so I suppose if that's what Xenith is meant to be referencing it would make sense enough. However, if we're supposed to believe that all three of them somehow know this mystery unicorn's catch phrase from 200 years ago, I have no choice but to call shenanigans.

>“Hey, Xenith,” Calamity suddenly announced, “Ah never said it, but Ah wanted y’all t’ know Ah’m glad yer free an’ all.”
>Merciful Celestia, Calamity. Awkward much?
The author would have done well to just leave this autism out entirely.

>I felt for him. He was trying to connect with the new member of our group. He had been the most welcoming of her, trusting my judgment. But since then, they hadn’t really bonded the quiet way Xenith and Velvet Remedy had, or even established the sort of relationship (would rivalry be the best word? grudging respect?) that Xenith and SteelHooves shared. They were friendly acquaintances; and I suspected Calamity was trying to find a way to turn that into true friendship.
Have any of these characters bonded with each other? Is that actually the author's perception of what's been going on? At any rate, other than some sparse, frivolous dialogue exchanges, none of these ponies have really interacted much with Xenith. And SteelHooves...wait a minute, is SteelHooves even with them right now? If not, where did he go?
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308192
>>308181
Taint in the story has always been presented as liquid supercancer, causing malignant mutations that are irreversible with RAD-Away compared to the easily-healed normal radiation.

That was the impression I always got. However, it seems that Kkat intended for it to be based upon the FEV in Fallout, which is a government-made material to induce advanced evolution and mutations in subjects, which created the Super Mutants that the Alicorns are then based off of. Judging from its presence and use in Splendid Valley, that seems to be the intent. But I sure didn't get the impression that it was meant to be FEV, and instead seems like liquid death.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308194
Old_Olney.jpg
Old_Olney_Sewer.jpg
foe__hellhound_designs_by_zookz25_d7zefbz-fullview.png
>>308189
Old Olney is one of the "endgame" level places in Fallout 3, and it's full of Deathclaws, which is what Hellhounds are based upon. So this side mission exists solely to act as a reference to the game. Just thought you'd like to know.

Also damn for such a shitty story it has nice fanart. Always a shame.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
27be963
?
No.308265
308276
62A4B4B25139AD7F191A93596FA9CB32-843209.png
>>308189

>Calamity trotted around the alicorn. She turned lethargically, keeping him in her sight. “Ah’m tempted to start shootin’ ‘em. Take out as many as we can.” Velvet shot him a look of alarm and he backed down with a grin. “Ah didn’t say I was gonna. Ah just said it was temptin’.”
See? That giant smoldering hole in his wing doesn't bother him at all. 'Tis but a scratch.

Anyway, it seems that Littlepoop has some kind of a plan for getting to Ole Miss or whatever the fuck the town they're headed for is called, though we don't yet know what it is. Velvet casts another one of her "wards against disintegration," which is apparently the spell she cast earlier that prevented Calamity from being killed by the blast that injured his wing. Though we still don't know where or how she learned this new magic trick, we do learn a bit about how it works. The spell can be cast on multiple individuals, and it apparently protects them from being "disintegrated;" however, the catch is that if one person gets hit, the spell breaks for everyone and the group is no longer protected. So basically, they're protected from getting shot, as long as they can avoid getting shot in the first place.

Velvet puts on her zebra armor or whatever she has, and Calamity puts on his Enclave armor that he logically should have been wearing to begin with, and I guess SteelHooves isn't with them anymore because he hasn't been mentioned in like forever. Incidentally, I've been wondering what happened to SteelHooves, so I skimmed the last few sections of the previous chapter to see if I missed anything. It does not appear that I did; he simply vanishes from the story after the group lands at Tenpony Tower, and there is no further mention of him other than his name appearing in conversation a couple of times.

Since the other Rangers, Strawberry Lemonade and that whole bunch, have also disappeared, I'm guessing the implication is that the Rangers all left to take care of Ranger stuff; the battle over Stable 29 or whatever they've got going on. Meanwhile, LP, Calamity, Velvet and Xenith all came out here to deal with the Goddess. It would have helped if the author had bothered to actually clarify this; even though we can probably assume this is what happened, it's bad form to have major characters just suddenly exit the story without explanation.

Anyway, once all the prep work is taken care of, we find out what Littlepoop's "plan" entails. Things get very, very stupid from here. To understand what LP does next, it's important to have a firm grasp on what the problem is:

They are currently stranded at Maripony. The alicorns on duty offer enough protection from diamond dogs to make this a safe location to rest; however, they need medical supplies, and in any case they couldn't simply remain here forever. Their next destination is Ol' Kentucky, but they can't fly there because Calamity injured his wing. So, they need to go trudging across several miles of open country. Unfortunately for them, this country is filled with diamond dogs, who can burrow underground and attack them at any time with their high-powered magical laser weapons.

So, how do they get around this, one might ask? Do they simply armor up, have Velvet cast her protection spell, and try to move through the hostile terrain as quickly and quietly as they can? This would be far from ideal, but under the circumstances it would seem to be their only option. Plus, it would make for a potentially exciting adventure, right? A dangerous, forced march through enemy territory, where they are hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed, and one of their party is suffering from a grievous wound? A situation where the odds are against them, but they must succeed, because the only other option is grim death? I mean, a writer would have to have his head jammed completely up his own ass not to see the potential value in a scene like that, right?

Ah, but you're forgetting: this is Fallout: Equestria, the game where everything is made up and the laws of physics don't matter. Moreover, kkat, apparently mistaking himself for a homeless man under an overpass, attempted to give himself a rimjob, and in the process got his head wedged firmly in the depths of his own ass; or at least I'm assuming that's what happened, because there really isn't any other explanation for the direction he chooses to go here.

So, here is what happens: Littlepoop has her three friends stand on top of a discarded chunk of concrete, which she then proceeds to levitate with her ridiculous, ridiculous, so goddamned utterly ridiculous Mary Sue magic powers. She herself remains on the ground, planning to walk all the way to Auld Lang Syne while carrying her three friends on a floating slab of fucking concrete. One might wonder, if she's planning to go to all this trouble anyway, why she doesn't just climb onto the platform herself, and float all of them the whole way there, without any of them having to touch the ground and all its dangers? She's done this kind of thing plenty of times before, after all. However, it seems that this would just be asking too much of our noble Sue; she fears that she would not be able to handle the extra weight, and would eventually have to set them down midway through. Kkat, apparently too busy trying to tunnel all the way to the back of his own esophagus to think about anything rationally for five whole seconds, seems to regard this as a concession to plausibility.

Even ignoring the ridiculous troll-physics here, this entire plan is an affront to sense for multiple reasons. Velvet has all of them protected with her spell; however, LP is the most vulnerable since she is the one on the ground. If she gets shot, the spell breaks, which means that none of them are protected, rendering the spell pointless. Moreover, if LP is hit she obviously stops levitating them, which means they come crashing down and get killed by diamond dogs anyway.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
24736b5
?
No.308276
308283 308288
1382847030314.png
>>308265

>While I would not say as much, I was grateful to be able to take the risk in their place.
>Was this something Corrupted Kindness would do? As soon as I had that thought, I pushed it out of my mind. I couldn’t afford self-doubts right now.
>As I reached the cracked edge of the Maripony base, I hesitated. My PipBuck was click-clicking, warning me of the radiation. But there was no sound, no special display on my E.F.S., designed to warn me of taint.
>Old Olneigh suddenly felt a very long way away.
Not only is this whole plan of LP's an affront to common sense, kkat elevates it to the level of unintentional comedy by having LP once again assume that she's doing something noble and self-sacrificing here.

I'll say it again: this whole plan is beyond stupid. Levitation does not give the group any kind of advantage here, in fact it actually does the opposite. If the diamond dogs choose to attack while LP's attention and strength is focused on levitating her friends, she's at a disadvantage and can't react as quickly as she could normally. Even though she is under Velvet's protection spell, if she manages to get shot, the spell will be broken, as will her concentration; the entire group will come crashing down, take damage from the fall, and have to deal with the diamond dogs anyway, except without the added protection of Velvet's spell.

Not only would having them all simply walk from Maripony to Old Faithful be a better choice story-wise, it would actually be a safer approach to the problem. If they were walking, they would all be responsible for their own safety, and could participate equally in the group's defense. Pay special attention to this; read it twice if you have to. LP has chosen to carry her friends in what she perceives as an act of self-sacrifice for their benefit; she is trying to keep them from harm and assume all of the danger herself. However, if she had simply accepted that she is only one member of the group, that her friends can take care of themselves, and that the weight of the world doesn't rest squarely on her shoulders withers; whatever, she would actually be putting them in less danger. Once again, we see Mary Sue's Littlepoop's narcissism rearing its ugly head; there is a much simpler, much safer solution to this problem staring her right in the face, but she can't see it. No matter how much false humility she projects on the outside, LP can't accept the existence of a universe that she isn't the absolute center of, and neither can her creator.

In the hands of a competent author, this idea could actually be utilized as part of her character arc. There's a pretty obvious friendship lesson in here for Littlepoop: she needs to learn how to accept help, lean on her friends, and realize that the fate of the universe doesn't depend entirely on her. I still hold out some faint glimmer of hope that the author also realizes this and is deliberately setting things up this way for this very reason; however, a lesson like this would require a level of self-awareness from both the author and LP that neither of them have demonstrated so far. I suppose we shall see what happens.

Page break. Littlepoop goes trudging along the train tracks, carrying her three friends on their concrete platform about ten or twenty feet above her head. On the way, she encounters some bloatsprites and some kind of mutated plant monster that crawls up out of a gorge they have to cross. She kills them all and crosses the gorge apparently she can still levitate her gun and use targeting spells while levitating all three of her friends twenty feet in the air; it pays to be the author's chosen Mary Sue, but gets hit with some kind of acid that the plant-things breathe and her hind leg and saddlebags catch fire. She screams, which alerts a hellhound that comes bursting out of the ground ahead of her, but it's far enough away that Calamity can snipe it from up on his comfy little platform, so no biggie there. Eventually she puts out the fire on her leg, and continues along her merry way. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Unsurprisingly, they encounter no further opposition, and arrive at Old Yeller without incident. But oh noes! The place is crawling with hellhounds. Whatever will they do?

Incidentally, at some point between the end of the last scene and the beginning of the current one, the levitation business managed to get even stupider (if you can believe it):

>I flopped over, telekinetically floating the binoculars to my eyes. I still couldn’t feel anything -- Velvet Remedy’s anesthetic spell doing its work -- but that didn’t prevent me from using my levitation spell. In fact, it almost made it easier. I had spent the second half making myself light enough for Pyrelight to carry while I floated the others and the wall behind us.
Apparently, Littlepoop is not only carrying all of her friends with her ridiculous, ridiculous, RIDICULOUS levitation powers, she's doing it while doped up on Velvet's anesthesia spell. I guess concentration isn't something you need to bother with when you know the universe is going to just bend itself to your will one way or the other.

The bit about Pyrelight I don't entirely follow, but I think what this is saying is that she apparently had the fucking bird carry her while she simultaneously levitated everyone else on a floating platform. Presumably, the significance of this is that it prevents her from having to touch the ground, which means they don't alert the hellhounds...or something. I guess. Since the author has never really established how big this bird is or what its carrying capacity is, I can't even gage exactly how idiotic this is; however, it will suffice to say that kkat has earned himself another interdimensional bitch slap, and his fake tits have now flown all the way to the Crystal Empire.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
24736b5
?
No.308283
308284 308304 308318
ponk copter.gif
>>308276

Incidentally, whatever that plant-creature was, its breath was infested with kkat's taint, so I guess Littlepoop has taint troubles now.

Anyway, blah blah blah, they are standing on top of an overpass near the town and are observing it with binoculars. The place is crawling with hellhounds as I said, but I'm sure the author has some bullshit idea for how to get the party past them, so that hardly matters. They notice some kind of ridiculous pedal-powered helicopter thing, probably based on Pinkie's ridiculous pedal-powered helicopter thing from that one episode of the show where she had one, and LP gets the brilliant idea to use it to get them back home. Apparently her original idea of walking the entire way from Maripony to Ol' Dirty Bastard while carrying three ponies and a concrete slab with her unicorn powers wasn't quite ridiculous enough for kkat, so he's decided to knock it up a notch. Bam! For the return journey, it appears she will be doing the same thing, except while flying some kind of bicycle-helicopter-contraption and probably also juggling chainsaws and playing a harmonica with her butthole.

Beyond this, the town is the sort of thing we're accustomed to seeing: lots of old, ruined buildings which they will no doubt waste a lot of time pointlessly exploring, an overturned wagon with some boxes that Littlepoop will no doubt recover about 50 or 60 new memory orbs from and I'm sure kkat will make us watch them all, and a tank which for some reason has been painted rainbow colors. This provokes a completely pointless side conversation about rainbows, which goes absolutely nowhere, until eventually it peters out and the scene ends.

Page break. The group begins a practical discussion of how to deal with the hellhounds guarding Ye Olde Pube. Calamity and Littlepoop want to snipe them, but Xenith has the much more practical and interesting suggestion of using stealth to sneak into the town, get supplies, and sneak out, while only killing the hellhounds that they can't avoid. However, Littlepoop pulls rank on her because apparently she has rank and the crew begins randomly blasting at the hellhounds. They manage to kill ten, but the rest of them are now alerted to their presence, and have gone underground.

Page break. The hellhounds come after them, using their burrowing powers to sneak up underneath them and ambush them without running through their line of fire, as anyone with even a tiny iota of common sense including Xenith and even Velvet could have told them they probably would. They manage to kill a few of them, but they keep coming. Also, they are apparently trying to burrow through the overpass supports and collapse it.

As if all of this weren't enough, Velvet Remedy chooses this of all moments to revert back into sensitive hippie mode, and begins squalling about how they could have tried diplomacy first, and maybe they could still try it now. Out of absolutely nowhere, she begins to sing, and for some reason, this has the effect of scaring away all of the hellhounds. I guess her music sucks even more than I assumed it probably does.

Page break. For some bizarre reason, the hellhounds ran away and stopped attacking them, so they simply walk into the town. However, they are being sneaky about it now.

>We were taking Xenith’s advice now. Not engaging. Moving swiftly and quietly. Of the group of us, only Velvet Remedy was unskilled at stealth, so I was floating her along with us.
Why is Velvet the only one "unskilled at stealth?" None of the others apart from Xenith have ever done anything particularly stealthy that I've seen; they should all be noobs at this. Calamity stomps around like a clydesdale, and Littlepoop couldn't be subtle about anything if her life depended on it. Xenith is the only one in the group who has actually demonstrated any knowledge of stealth tactics; she should be schooling all three of them.

Anyway, considering that they are hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by an enemy that is actively looking for them, you'd expect them to do the sane thing and just head straight to the hospital, get their supplies, and get the fudge out. However, Littlepoop still wants to snoop around. She finds the corpses of four Steel Rangers, one of whom is not wearing armor, but is dressed in some kind of ceremonial robe that bears their logo. Whatever significance this might have is unclear, but I think I remember someone saying something about the Brotherhood of Steel also having scientists and priests and other non-combatants among their ranks, so my guess is that this pony is meant to be one of those. Of course, LP also loots the corpses and finds some StealthBucks, some magical ammunition, and another goddamn memory orb.

After this, they almost bump into some hellhounds, but decide to keep being stealthy for now. They sneak away without incident.

Page break. For some idiotic reason they decide to explore the ruined firehouse, and while inside they get ambushed by a hellhound. Xenith manages to stealth-kill it, but it wounds her in the throat as it goes down. Xenith now has a hole in her throat "the size of a memory orb," which I'm assuming carries about as much practical significance as the hole in Calamity's wing. Also, even though the text only mentions a single hellhound attacking them, for the rest of the scene it keeps referring to two hellhounds, both of whom they apparently managed to kill. Not sure what this is about, but I also can't be fucked to care. I assume it's just another case of kkat's awkward description.

They disembowel the two dead hellhounds to throw the others off their scent. The usual bullshit accompanies this act: Velvet grouses about how they could have used diplomacy to solve their problems, and Littlepoop's inner monologue whines about what a horrible monster she's becoming. Nothing else happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNzsA8VfNV4
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308284
>>308283
The heroes are basically raiders right now. They're raiding the Old Oneyplays settlement that's inhabited entirely by Diamond Dogs. Oh sorry, "Hellhounds". They want the medical supplies here, so when given a choice between stealth and minimum violence or maximum carnage they say "Remember, no Diamond Dogian". If these monsters actually had minds and souls and families and could talk, would that be fucked up or what? I bet a smart author who planned on challenging LP's murderhobo nature and her racist "all enemies must be shot and all nonponies are monsters unless they look ponyish enough like ghouls and zebras" assumptions would sprinkle in a ton of hints here, making some "monsters" throw themselves in front of fleeing smaller ones while wounded limping ones die hugging each other and crying and catch one looking at a pre-war pony porn magazine and they encounter one beast hiding in a cave with smaller monsters and open fire without realizing until it's too late that this beast was surrounded by one batch of younglings and pregnant with another batch. LP could spot some of them huddling around the open fire of a flammable radiation barrel and think "time to show off" and ignite the barrel with an incendiary round, expecting a sick explosion but they roll around screaming while doused in flaming radioactive goo that slowly heals them as the fire scars them agonizingly and LP stares in horror thinking "What have I wrought? I feel as thoigh the precipice of darkness and the darkness's dark heart has taken my soul filled with light and filled it with the darker darkness within darkness, or advanced darkness if you will". Velvet would actually get to be right about pacifism for once instead of looking retarded for insisting nopony hurts what seems to be nothing but another breed of monster. Then again Velvet would need some sort of reason to assume the dogs are people. And would pacifism and trading even work with these dogs? I don't think they brought anything they could use for bartering. Plus rule one of negotiations is "Don't look too desperate" and nothing screams desperate like trying to get medical supplies for your pegasus friend with a huge hole in his wing... currently concealed by power armour he randomly and briefly decided not to wear just so he could take that wing damage, putting it on later because he no longer needed to be vulnerable enough to force the group into a detour to Old Coney Island.

Kkat is a cum-gargling niggerfaggot.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308288
308695
maxresdefault.jpg
download.jpg
>>308276
Pyrelight is meant to be a typical MLP phoenix, just irradiated. Their size, as you may remember, is as such:

Also, this thig is literally made out of radiation, is there a mention of possible adverse affects from it carrying her?

Glim, what are your opinions on how Kkat handles the dangers of the wasteland? I know your thoughts on stuff before, but in the case of Alicorns and Hellhounds, these are absurdly powerful entities that would be utterly NIGHTMARISH to encounter in any sensible setting. In fact, their parallels in Fallout ARE the endgame-tier. They are creatures that can slaughter entire groups of hardened wasteland veterans that are well-armed in only a small amount of numbers. Kkat took Super Mutants and Deathclaws and made them EVEN STRONGER to an absurd degree: Deathclaws got intelligence, tactics, the ability to use heavy energy weapons and guerilla warfare-tier burrowning, and Super Mutants got a hivemind, magic, and different abilities.

Fighting even one of these things should be an almost guarantee you're gonna get fucked up. Kkat vastly increased the proportion and scale of power, while keeping the power of the protagonists and "normal" ponies roughly the same, but in the end combat ends up EASIER than it should be. It's fucking bizarre.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308293
308295 308695
Also, Glim, do you think the story and its author have changed over time?
Do you think the story has improved, grown, even evolved? Or devolved?
I've seen many fanfics start out bad and improve over time as the author matures and becomes more knowledgeable about writing, gaining more experience and useful feedback.
Many even take moments of accidental awfulness near the start and say "I meant to do that", giving an unintentionally-callous character a growth arc where the hero confronts and overcomes this flaw after he suddenly becomes unable to ignore it any longer.
And for some the author doesn't necessarily improve but the fic improves anyway once the fanfic "goes off the rails" and the tale becomes more original and unique.
This fic was uploaded chapter by chapter onto Google Docs and Fimfic.net over time, but I don't think Kkat has improved as an author since this began. Sometimes he'll use some big words or purple prose. But that doesn't make Kkat a good author. This is still a dull dungeon crawl of a story about stupid characters in a world of idiots where Kkat can make people do stupid things that make no sense. Kkat made the Ponyville Raiders stop using tactics so they could die to LP early on. Kkat made the slavers in Red Eye's territory unable to pursue and swarm and capture LP until he said LP needed to talk to Red Eye. Kkat decided even though Steelhooves was willing to kill Chief Grim Star and get away with it he shouldn't also free Monterry Jack because he thought it would make LP "failing" to save him by being stuck in rehab or enjoying spa treatments more dramatic. Kkat decided Calamity shouldn't wear his OP armour until he gets a hole in his wing that forces him to visit Old Boney for medical supplies he somehow knows about and then put the armour on even though they're supposed to be trying to kill The Goddess right about now.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308295
308297
>>308293
Kkat wrote this in about a year to my understanding, so unlike most terrible authors they didn't have as much time.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308297
308298
>>308295
Do you think uploading this on google docs first was a smart move on Kkat's part? Its awfulness turned critics away without letting them comment directly on the story, and if they wanted to say anything about it they could either criticize it on a forum full of brainless fanboys or criticize it in the comment section of Equestria Daily, getting shouted down and dogpiled by crazed fanboys either way. Meanwhile the braindead fantards it was aimed at were able to become a cult following, advertise it on assorted sites, and upvote it en masse when it eventually made its way to Fimfic, and Fimfic's target audience of leddit children believe popularity=quality so when they saw a massive fic with a massive number of upvotes they read this trashy novel of usually-almost-acceptable quality and called it the greatest thing ever because it's the greatest thing their backwards standards will ever allow them to bother picking up. These fuckers never read Shakespeare or anything Greek, but they think they're smart because their hobby is pretending to be intellectual experts in the fields of cartoon fanfiction and unscientific campy sci-fi fanfiction.

Godawful and fundamentally-broken stories like Nyx's story and Littlepip's story didn't fly under the radar, they flew into a faulty Bronytard radar that misidentified them as peak writing quality.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308298
308313 308695
>>308297
I don't think it was a smart move, and not in that way either.

It was uploaded to Google Docs because to my recollection, fimfic either didn't exist, or was really small at the time. Equestria Daily was the primary means of experiencing content in the brony fandom, so naturally you would upload it to there and one of the primary formats they accepted (it might have been at the only one at the time, I can't remember) was hosting your story on Google Docs and linking it there.

As for doing so to avoid criticism, I don't think it was intentional. People, especially mentally stunted, young, impressionable people with poor taste (young bronies) tend to like things and not put a single ounce of criticism toward the stuff they view. Popularity occurs due to opportunity and advertisement. At the time, FO:E crossed over two hot and popular franchises at the peak of one's popularity, and was one of the first grand adventure stories of its kind in the fandom. It was also cool and dark and edgy. Any actual criticism would naturally go unnoticed amongst all the fans it acquired singing it praises.
Anonymous
5a71738
?
No.308304
308695
2ce1790eaefdfda9f2754c95f99ac106.jpg
276573d604919176c945e633134750ab.jpg
8c6020f3f90a80fcf4038711935b62bb.jpg
>>308283
>Fighting even one of these things should be an almost guarantee you're gonna get fucked up. Kkat vastly increased the proportion and scale of power, while keeping the power of the protagonists and "normal" ponies roughly the same, but in the end combat ends up EASIER than it should be. It's fucking bizarre.
Kkat doesn't even fake tension. Even with an op mc you can still put the scene on pause to make it seem as if there might be a possibilty that the hero won't win this with ease. There are even other ways to go about making it seem like the outcome isn't already determined but kkat just have Littlepeen beat the baddies in an instant.
Why not even artifically prolong the fight?

>Pics
Could just been one comic page. Littlefag checking irrelevant memory orbs at the worst times was the joke. Nerding out about mesmetron or whatever is gay.
However, thought you would like it glimmerglam.
Anonymous
5a71738
?
No.308305
Added to that, real men don't need hypnosis to rape woman. What a pussy.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308313
>>308298
That makes sense.

Is the way Kkat sometimes writes fights or other supposedly-shocking moments in a "this already happened and I'm diffusing the tension way too early and already telling you the results before I explain how we got there, sometimes before I tell you what caused the event that turned out okay in the first place, without trying to write the scene chronologically for optimal tension because I hate fun. We fought but it was easy and we won because blah blah blah" manner a symptom of 100% bad writing, or is it just some alternate style of writing? Because I fucking hate when Kkat does that. What benefits could this "writing style" possibly offer? It takes the sting out of scenes that should be thrilling and gives the impression Kkat was simply too lazy to write out the scene properly and make it sound cool.
Either start with the shocking event and then explain it, or make the event's explanation shocking.
"A Raider attempted to kill me but I was fine because Calamity sniped the raider with his shotgun" is lame.
This is cooler, right?
"The raider spotted me and charged straight at me, rape on his mind and a bulge in his tattered and steel-spiked leathers. I barely had time to raise my gun before the Raider's head shattered like a watermelon taking a sledgehammer suppository as a solid slug split his skull and sprayed my face with viscera. When the Raider fell, I witnessed Calamity fight to keep a grin off his face as he reloaded his shotguns with practiced ease. When I first got a good look at his weapon, I wondered how this Pegasus would use a shotgun. Surely, I thought, the result would turn out to be as graceless as a boxer attempting to type with boxing gloves on. But it turns out, the answer is 'with incredible speed and proficiency'."
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
961fbd7
?
No.308318
308326 308583
1584872088127.png
>>308283

LP goes to the upstairs bathrooms in the firehouse and manages to scavenge some bandages and whatnot from a couple of first aid kits that are up there. Why she is wasting her time in here, when she already knows the shit they need is down the street in the hospital and there are several reasons why speed should be a factor here, is beyond me.

>I sat, braced against the wall and picked the lock on the medical box in the little mare’s room. The lock clicked open with ease. I opened it, emptying the box of its meager medical supplies and adding them to the supplies from the medical box in the little buck’s room. Nothing that would help Calamity’s wing, but the small healing poultice would close and heal Xenith’s wound. The wasteland sometimes gave small favors.
First of all, "the little mare's room" and "the little buck's room" should both be the plural form of the possessive: "mares' room," "bucks' room." To say "the little mare's room" would imply that the room belongs to a single little mare, which usually means a bedroom; that's obviously not what's being implied here.

Second of all, Xenith has a goddamn hole in her throat. I am not a medical expert of any stripe, but I think I can say with confidence that having a hole in your trachea approximately the size of a baseball is an injury that will require a little more treatment than just rubbing some goddamn ointment on it. I can understand pushing the bounds of plausibility here and there for dramatic reasons, but this is just too ridiculous. Xenith needs to be in the ICU right now; she shouldn't even still be conscious. If they don't have the supplies on hand to immediately treat this, by all logic Xenith should be a goner.

Anyway, Littlepoop takes the ointment back up to the kitchen, where everyone is waiting for her I guess. Velvet performs some minor surgery on Xenith, which seems to close up the wound in her throat well enough that she can basically function. After this, Velvet and Calamity sneak away to make out or something, and, unsurprisingly, within a few minutes Xenith is feeling well enough to get up and walk around.

The author uses a brief conversation between Xenith and Littlepoop as yet another opportunity to heap compliments disguised as criticism upon his beloved OC. Littlepoop asks Xenith point-blank "do you trust me?" Xenith says no, and when prompted about why, provides this canned response:

>“You are a very quick thinker and equally swift to act,” Xenith continued, crouching to check lower drawers. “This makes you adaptable, perhaps more than any pony or zebra I have ever known. It allows you to improvise where others would be paralyzed. But it also leads you to rash actions from hasty decisions and gets you into trouble as often as it gets you out of it.”
How about simply "I don't trust you because I've only known you for a week and you seem crazy?" Or better yet, how about "I don't trust you because I was a slave up until last week and I usually don't trust anyone?"

The kind of response Xenith gives here is generally bad writing, partly because it doesn't feel like something the character would actually say, and partly because it once again calls the reader's attention to the fact that too much of this story revolves around Littlepoop.

Littlepoop's question, literally, is "do you trust me?" However, their actual exchange is closer to an employee evaluation survey: "give me a list of things you think I do well as your manager, and things you think I could improve upon." The fact that Xenith is able to answer so quickly and so thoroughly indicates that she has put a great deal of thought into it beforehand, which doesn't make sense and is actually somewhat denigrating to Xenith as a character.

Sure, she owes LP a favor for getting her out of the slave pits, but at the same time, she's got a life of her own, and a missing daughter to find. She's got more important things to worry about than giving personal growth advice to this weird little klepto she happens to be teamed up with for the moment. Put yourself in Xenith's shoes here. What would you be thinking about, if you were her? How would you answer a question like this from Littlepoop, if she just suddenly asked you out of the blue?

The author seems to want to pretend that he's writing something like MLP: a story about a group of friends who support and learn from each other. However, what he's really writing is a story about one character, who has several friends who exist only to cheer her on or occasionally scold her. They ostensibly have their own personalities and backstories, but their role in this story is mainly to orbit around Littlepoop and help move what I will generously call her character arc along. If you want to write a genuinely good ensemble story, you can't do it this way; you have to give each character a distinct personality and treat them as if they actually matter.

In MLP, you have six distinct characters, each of whom have their own traits that make them endearing and occasionally irritating. The story revolves around how they relate to one another, how their different personalities occasionally clash, and how they nonetheless manage to learn from each other and grow together. While kkat obviously wants Littlepoop to learn and grow as a result of her friendship with these various supporting characters, it only works in one direction. Velvet notices that LP has a drug problem, and sends her to rehab. Xenith notices that LP is impulsive and reckless, and tells her she needs to learn to think things through. Calamity chastises LP for disappearing into memory orbs at inopportune moments and makes her promise to stop. SteelHooves is such a non-presence in this story that he literally just vanished without explanation, and I didn't even notice for about half a chapter.

What has LP done for any of her friends? What have they done for each other?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
961fbd7
?
No.308326
308330 308333
1584645342020.png
>>308318

Also:

>a very quick thinker and equally swift to act
>makes you adaptable, perhaps more than any pony or zebra I have ever known.
>allows you to improvise where others would be paralyzed
What story has Xenith been reading? Because I've been reading the one where Littlepoop pulls completely ridiculous plans out of her ass one after another, that have absolutely no right to work but somehow manage to work anyway, simply because the author wants them to.

Anyway, continuing to fish for compliments, LP now asks:
>“Do you think I’m evil?”

To which Xenith replies:
>“No, little one. You are one of the most caring souls I have ever met, pony or otherwise.”
I'm trying to think of anything LP has done in the time since they met that would lead Xenith to form this conclusion about her, and am coming up dry. Although it sounds like Xenith has spent most of her life getting the crap kicked out of her by slavers, so we might have different ideas about what "caring" means.

From here, the conversation abruptly changes gears. It gets weird, then bawdy, then very weird, in that order:

>“Do you think I’m cursed then?” At her odd expression, I clarified, “I have been touched by Homage.”
This is one of the weirdest topic jumps I've run into yet. What does being touched by Homage have to do with being cursed? I see no connection here, literal or figurative.

Anyway, Xenith interprets the "touched by Homage" comment in the most low-brow way possible. The conversation makes a 90 degree turn and devolves into sex banter. Then, it abruptly shifts back to the strange track it was on:

>I took a moment and composed myself as best I could. “So… am I cursed? Because I love Homage?”
Where is this business about curses coming from? Did I miss something here? When has it ever been suggested that LP's relationship with Homage has somehow cursed her? Whatever the author is trying to do here, I'm not seeing it.

Xenith's answer somehow manages to be even more confusing than the question:

>“The zebras may have been wrong about Nightmare Moon,” she admitted. “You ponies may have been right. The wielders of the Elements of Harmony may have broken whatever hold the stars had over Nightmare Moon. Luna may have been… different.”
>“But that does not mean that the touch of the stars was still not upon her. That it did not influence her in more subtle ways.” She looked to me. “I am open to your beliefs, but I ask that you be open to mine. Perhaps there is truth in both.”
What the fuck does any of this have to do with Homage or Littlepoop? How is Nightmare Moon connected? Nobody even brought her up.

>“But Homage is not evil, she is not twisted, she is no Nightmare Moon,” I insisted. “In fact, she saved our lives. She saved yours.”
>Xenith nodded with a sad smile. “And would you not say it was quite an amazing shot?”
>“Absolutely. It was an… what?”
>“The weapon from the stars wants to kill,” Xenith said. “It yearns to kill.”
>Okay, now that was just creepy.
At this point I have literally no idea what either of them are even talking about.

>“I will accept that Homage is a good, kind pony. And that she is not cursed. Because you ask me to,” Xenith conceded. “Even though I do not trust your judgment, I believe you speak truthfully in this. And I suspect you are better experienced at matters of the heart than I am”
Okay, I've read through this conversation a couple of times, and I think I'm beginning to get a handle on what the fuck they're talking about. They are referencing something they talked about earlier, in Chapter 29. There was a scene in which Xenith admitted to Littlepoop that she didn't trust Homage. She offered us this by way of explanation:

>“Did you not see the weapon she used? Your lover had been touched by the stars. She is cursed. No good can come of her.”
This is in regards to an incident where Homage shot down an alicorn that attacked them as they were landing at Tenpony Tower.

So, as I understand it, this is basically what's going on here:

When Homage shot down the alicorn, she used a weapon that, for some reason or other, Xenith associates with Nightmare Moon. As a result of this single incident, she believes that Homage is cursed, and therefore does not trust her. So, when Littlepoop asked Xenith if she trusts her just now, and Xenith said that no, she does not, LP became concerned that it might have something to do with her relationship to Homage. Her concern is that Xenith believes that she might be cursed, on account of how she has been lezzing out with Homage, who is also cursed. However, it seems that Xenith distrusts for for an entirely different reason altogether.

Anyway, though she seems willing to accept that Homage is probably not evil herself, Xenith still seems to believe that this gun Homage used to kill the alicorn is cursed or something, and as such is still wary of her. She closes with this remark:

>“But I ask in return that you keep an open mind to the things I believe, and a watchful eye for warning signs. The stars take the greatest delight in giving us the means to destroy ourselves and each other. Do you truly think that your relationship has not changed now that she has taken a life for you?”
I guess the significance here is that Homage might actually be cursed, or...something. Honestly, this story was always convoluted and bizarre, but this is turning into some pure weapons-grade autism right here, and I'm really having a difficult time following all of this. If someone who has read this before, and understands whatever the deal with Homage's gun is, wants to fill in whatever gaps I've left open, they may feel free to do so.

Anyway, I guess this completely bizarre and random conversation has led Littlepoop to conclude...uh...well...I'm not actually sure. Here's how the scene ends:

>Regardless of whether Xenith’s superstitious fears were justified, she had led me to re-examine what had happened in a less self-centered way.
>I looked up into the zebra’s eyes. “Thank you.”
Your guess is as good as mine.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308330
>>308326
One particularly galling thing about Xigger's "I will respect your beliefs and you should respect mine. The stars are at least a little evil and Luna was at least a little NMM. There must be at least a little evil influence there. After all, the alien laser gun used by Homage on that Alicorn was shockingly accurate! That gun yearns to kiiiiiiiill!" bullshit is that she has a problem with Homage owning an alien disintegration ray even though Homage wouldn't have had to use it on an evil Alicorn if Xigger's people didn't create evil Alicorns by nuking equestria using megabombs filled with inherently evil magic fire/taint/radiation and built from reverse-engineered healing megaspells gifted to them by ponykind in the name of peace.

This Xigger is not entitled to respect. NMM is not Luna. Xigger beliefs that nuked equestria and necessitated the use of that star blaster on evil mutated brainwashed alicorns in a hive mind are not entitled to respect. Kkunt is a faggot for believing respect is something everyone who wants respect mutually owes each other, when in actuality respect is something that must be earned. It's funny that after Past Sins tried so hard to make Luna/NMM a part of Nyx the OC, this story tries to pretend there's something slightly correct about the asinine Zebra beliefs that stars=bad and Luna must be evil because stars=bad and ponies must be evil if they accept Luna as their princess. It's like an author took that Nightmare Night FIM episode to its "logical" conclusion. Except there's a big fucking difference between children afraid NMM will eat them if they don't give a statue enough candy and an entire race of unrepentant and hypocritical dark magic users pretending they have the right to pretend any association with the night sky makes Luna and all of ponykind evil. LP has murdered countless ponies, it would be hypocritical for her to lose all respect or even a little respect for Homage just because she saved the day and shot one Alicorn with a gun that would do more good in LP's videogame protagonist hammerspace inventory. I haven't seen a fanmade piece of shit this bad since I played Jotex The Speedior.
*family guy cutaway of Sunrise playing Jotex The Speedior and saying "it's shit"*
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
961fbd7
?
No.308333
308341 308614
2329843 - Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Princess_Cadence Twilight_Sparkle ratofponi.png
>>308326

Page break. As I suspected, the fact that Xenith just had a giant hole blown through her neck has no serious effect on her. It seems that Velvet's little bullshit quickie surgery and some ointment was all it took to patch her up, and now she's right as rain again. And since they happen to be in the kitchen of the firehouse, why not cook something? It's not like they're in some kind of life-or-death situation here, or that they're supposed to be raiding the hospital for supplies because Calamity still has a gaping hole in his wing, or anything like that.

Xenith opens the fridge, which I'm assuming hasn't worked in 200 years and could not possibly contain anything safe to eat, and finds a lump of moldy cheese or something. Meanwhile, Littlepoop gets some pots and pans together so they can grill it up. While they are doing this, LP tries to make small talk again. She asks if Xenith trusts her to tell the truth, and Xenith answers that yes, she does, unless LP feels that it's in her best interest to lie.

>Crap. I hated to think she might be right about that. I would have preferred to be more like Homage. But if it came to telling the truth or protecting my friends, I had a track record of choosing the latter. And while I regretted the necessity, it was rare for me to reconsider the choice. Did this mean that I was playing SteelHooves to Homage’s Applejack?
So, Homage is like...Applejack now? Which means that her Element is supposed to be...Honesty? I guess? It's a good thing the author told us this, because I certainly wouldn't have pieced it together from anything she's said or done in the story. As to what Element SteelHooves is supposed to represent in this example, I have no idea, and can't really be fucked to care. I think the implication is that he's dishonest or something.

In the end, we never get to find out whatever it is that LP wanted to tell Xenith, because they end up arguing about weird zebra semantics for a couple of paragraphs, and the conversation fizzles. Xenith goes back to making moldy cheese soup, or whatever the fuck she's supposed to be doing here. I think she's cooking up one of her potions or something.

Anyway, out of nowhere Xenith spouts a bunch of angsty nonsense that isn't really worth quoting or analyzing in depth. The gist of it is that she seems to have had a fairly rough life: before she was a slave, she had a husband who is implied to have been abusive. Before that she lived with her parents, who appear to have also been abusive. She seems to be saying that she has never known an existence where she wasn't treated as property, and she regards Littlepoop as just one more master in a long chain of masters.

Nothing else happens.

Page break. For some idiotic reason they are still exploring the firehouse, and for some other idiotic reason they are now purposely hunting the hellhounds instead of trying to avoid them. They find one that for some idiotic reason is hiding in a storage closet, but then it turns out to just be a bloatsprite. There is a lot of irrelevant side-banter that jumps from topic to topic: Velvet training Pyrelight to hunt rodents, Littlepoop wanting to know how to clear the clouds away from Tenpony Tower so she can use that solar-activated whatchamahoozit spell of Homage's, bullshit bullshit bullshit. We learn that apparently a sonic rainboom would be able to clear the clouds; beyond that, literally nothing happens in this microscene.

Page break. They are still in the thrice-damned firehouse, but apparently they've reached the end of it and are prepared to move on to the next building they plan to tediously crawl. They come to a window, and there's a long drop underneath it, and they have to jump across if they want to get to the next building, and blah blah blah, yada yada yada, long story short they do.

They find themselves in some kind of office building. There appear to be hellhounds, or at least enemies of some kind, on the floor below them, but neither this nor the immediacy of Calamity or Xenith's medical conditions deter them from snooping around up here. Littlepoop finds a book on explosives, as well as a recording which she naturally feels compelled to listen to. The recording is an old internal communication for a mining company that presumably operated in this town. It explains that an inspection is coming up, and everyone needs to be on their best behavior. It also mentions diamond dogs being in the area, which are described as if they are only a minor nuisance; presumably this is before they mutated into hellhounds. We also learn that diamond dogs can be driven away using certain audio frequencies, which explains why they fled from Velvet earlier (though not how she would have known that this would make them flee).

They get to the staircase, and there are a couple of hellhounds sniffing around. They don't notice the group because Xenith has camouflaged their scent; that appears to be what the moldy cheese concoction she was brewing a few scenes ago was about. They decide not to engage the dogs, and go up to the roof instead.

Page break. On the roof, they encounter a hellhound which is quickly dispatched. They also discover some kind of radio antenna, a terminal which still works for some reason despite being exposed to the elements for quite some time, and a bunch of dead pegasi in Enclave armor. Despite the presumed urgency of his still-untreated medical condition, and despite the fact that the corpses are basically mummies, indicating that whatever happened here happened a long, long time ago, and despite the fact that he has absolutely no reason to care about whatever happened here since it involved the Enclave and he isn't part of the Enclave anymore, Calamity nonetheless vows to get to the bottom of whatever happened. Littlepoop naturally tries to hack the terminal, but discovers that Enclave terminals are apparently made out of clouds and can't be hacked.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308341
308534 308614
>>308333
>enclave terminals made of clouds
>well if LP can't touch them with magic or hooves they simply cannot be hacked! - Kkat
Calamity's a pegasus, he should be able to operate them and LP should be able to tell him what to do. If the terminals can't be operated by Pegasi they'd be worthless to the Pegasus Enclave. Could put a funny scene ANYWHERE BUT HERE SINCE HE CURRENTLY HAS A HOLE IN HIS WING AND SHOULD NEED THAT CURED ASAP where she tries to walk this boomer-level tech-illiterate motherfucker how to hack and hilarity ensues.
Anonymous
7f7907a
?
No.308367
dd5a12e7d577b532ea82a38c2eb15875.jpg
Ministery of Faggots.jpg
>So, Homage is like...Applejack now? Which means that her Element is supposed to be...Honesty? I guess? It's a good thing the author told us this, because I certainly wouldn't have pieced it together from anything she's said or done in the story.
She is a lesbian journalist; of course, she is the element of honesty.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308451
308551
Been thinking about how so many fanfics are uploaded chapter by chapter, meaning the author can't go back and edit old chapters unless he does exactly that, editing/deleting old versions of the story. But how would a reader know the story's been edited and how, unless the author points out all revisions? Any revisions would force the reader to forget what was in the old version of the story and re-read the new scene, but for its context you might end up needing to re-read the whole thing.
Uploading a story chapter by chapter and "flying by the seat of your pants" seems like a stupid way to tell a story because it stops you from making a second or even third draft with the benefit of hindsight as efficiently as you could if you uploaded the story in a complete and finalized state.
Who's to say you won't get a great idea for something that should have happened in chapter four while writing chapter thirty? Who's to say the story arc you're currently writing might actually go somewhere instead of being forgotten once the next one starts?
Shit like this is why I'm finishing my Sunrise fic before I upload even a single chapter. I might end up doing another rewrite after that based on feedback, fixing any leftover flaws or errors. But Fallout Equestria is a bloated, obese, maggot-infested tranny of a story because it fails to properly transition "FIM-accurate ponies" into "Ponies that did some wrong things and slightly helped contribute to the apocalypse while fighting Ziggers who did everything wrong" and like a tranny's infected imitation of a vagina, it is a poor imitation of the real deal (a good story) that fails due to fundamental flaws inherent to the very concept of the thing.

Fallout isn't JUST the guns. Fallout isn't about the guns. It isn't JUST recognizable characters and locations like The Master and Tenpenny Tower. It isn't JUST about the monsters. You won't make a better Fallout story by ripping off what came before while enchanting guns with fire and turning deathclaws into intelligent lasgun-wielding pack hunters. Fallout is about people and choice and the fallout (heh) of those choices, but that's sailed right over Kkat's head like his fake tits whenever he's punted in the fake cunt so hard it sends his fake tits blasting off again. It's why Fallouts 1/2/NV let you kill important people and screw yourself out of experiencing all the game's content. You can make bad choices, screw your vault over and reduce its time limit, say dumb bullshit to piss NPCs off... Some quests force you to make choices without obvious good answers. Choice matters, thematically and in the character-building turn-based tabletop RPG combat.

It'd be fine to turn the people into ponies and great to keep writing about choices and consequences, but how does choice factor into these characters? Or the story? Does choice, or a meaningful lack of choice/inability to choose, thematically matter to the characters and story?
The Mane Six tried their best and failed. Xiggers chose evil every time.
LP repeatedly "chooses" to do whatever she's told and keep being a murderhobo, and for a while she relied on drugs to boost her gamer stats until she suddenly didn't need them any more. It's not as if drugs stopped her from choosing to do the right thing, a mandatory addiction-curing session forced onto her by her friend stopped her from saving a life she already wanted to save. She makes choices for others and never gets called out or fucked over for it, like when she got that slave town involved in a war or kidnapped Xigger.
Velvet chose to leave her stable while saddling LP with the blame for her choice, but how is this "doctor" life she chose working out for her? Does she find picking bullets out of her friends and lover with a knife and tweezers fun? Oh wait, medical skills are damn near pointless in a setting with magical healing supplies that fix anything except when the author says so.
Calamity "chose" to kill his underlings for choosing to obey Enclave rules and not choosing to help the surface and become a wandering gun who left his OP armour behind for a while then got it then took it off to get his wing pierced then put it back on, and Steelhooves has been refusing to make the choices AJ would have wanted him to make for over 200 years. And Xigger the slave was practically kidnapped by Littlepoop and forced into this adventure, yet she's perfectly fine with it because these NPCs lack depth and agency and Player Character roles of their own.
I know themes can be deeper than characters just doing the word chosen to be the theme. I've seen great stories where choice is the theme because characters get screwed over by their own unwillingness to make tough choices or the consequences of bad choices or the fact that they intentionally lack agency as all choices are made for them until they learn important truths and grow. But this story doesn't lean hard enough on any of its many confused juggled concepts to make anything a theme or central thesis besides LP's confused search for her own number one moral, since Kkat can't just pick one thing for his mary sue to be good at or one moral value for her to prioritize/represent above all others.
Just like when Kkat wrote LP's vault to get slaughtered during a party and also survive the attack and hoped nobody would notice, he wrote LP to embody all the morals he cares about in every way he could think of and hoped nobody would notice. LP tries not to keep secrets with her friends while the DJ puts no effort into verifying stories reported to her if she likes them. Velvet "Kindness" Remedy tried to use LP's love to get back at Calamity. Anypony who could be called more deserving of an Element Of Harmony slot than LP has something disqualifying them from the title, something Kkat tried not to give her. Kkat wanted this grave-robbing impulsive lying inconsiderate slut to be the most moral character in his story and that drags everyone else down.
Anonymous
072e2d9
?
No.308534
308552
>>308341
>Calamity's a pegasus, he should be able to operate them and LP should be able to tell him what to do.
You think someone whose very title means that they are a good problem solver -hacker- would realize this solution.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.308551
Spoilered
>>308451
On one hand my bias is telling me yes. On the other this is a better constructed post. With an over arching flow and direction. Current story examples and related parent materials to pull the essence of what you're saying.
>pic related

>Any revisions would force the reader to forget what was in the old version of the story and re-read the new scene, but for its context you might end up needing to re-read the whole thing.
Yep. Sometimes they repost the whole story, or chug right on through.
>Uploading a story chapter by chapter and "flying by the seat of your pants" seems like a stupid way to tell a story because it stops you from making a second or even third draft with the benefit of hindsight as efficiently as you could if you uploaded the story in a complete and finalized state.
>Uploading a story chapter by chapter and "flying by the seat of your pants" seems like a stupid way to tell a story
It is very accident prone.
On the fly editing, constant self referential checking, rereading, a cheat sheet, and possibly minor altered states of consciousness.
>Who's to say you won't get a great idea for something that should have happened in chapter four while writing chapter thirty?
That is the risk and consequence. Luckily mitigation can occur, but the problems accrue over time unless found and delt with. Usually with asinine bowties or bullshitting that it was all part of the plan from the beginning. Or just dealing with those consequences in a meaningful manner.
Or don't... the work will be flawed in many ways. And the peak condition it could be may not occur.
Depends on what the goal is for it, and what purpose the story or writing is for.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308552
>>308534
It would be one thing if this Pegasus Enclave Computer could only be operated by Enclave Pegasi and Calamity wasn't ex-enclave. But he is ex-enclave.
It would be one thing if this Pegasus Enclave Computer could only be operated by active Enclave personell and Calamity's old ID had its permissions revoked when he was fired. But no ID is necessary.
It would be one thing if the party decided to split up, so Calamity and Velvet sneak to the hospital while LP and the rest noisily murderhobo it up and thin Hellhound numbers and loot random buildings to stop the Diamond Derps from figuring out that Littlepip's Littleshits are specifically here for medical supplies because if the dogs reinforce that location Calamity is fucked.. But Calamity is right fucking there.
It would be one thing if Calamity was unconscious or delerious from blood loss and unable to operate a computer for LP even if she used her magic telekinesis to puppet this guy's hooves Weekend At Bernie's/Doflamingo style because a Pegasus needs a body full of Pegasus Magic to touch/manipulate clouds and he's pretty much out of magic. But Calamity is mostly fine because having a massive unnatural hideous gaping hole in your body is only a problem in Kkunt's book if he admits it is. Hehehe get it? Because Kkat'a a tranny

Littlepoop has an Enclave cloud computer (Kkat's a faggot for that pun) only Pegasi can operate and an ex-enclave Pegasus friend right next to it. And she doesn't even consider trusting Calamity or one of her other soulless mindless murderhobo NPC companions with this job just because you can't ask your companions to lockpick or hack for you in Fallout 3. I know Kkunt's a gaming-obsessed twat with no truly original ideas but damn mear any game on the planet with "puzzles" this simple would let you click Calamity and then the computer, or walk up to the computer and press Triangle when Calamity is close enough to it, or draw a line between Calamity and the computer to connect them, or type Use Calamity On Computer. What, will Calamity only operate the computer if LP finds a gun that shoots bananas out instead of bullets and shoot it at the computer? Does she need to play a round of Guess The Verb with a shitty text based adventure game? How the hell can someone have so little imagination? Shit like this makes me want to draw LP getting hurt, but Kkunt would probably like that. So I should draw dumb bullshit happening to LP instead.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.308583
44fd9d88bd53da902de401f9f1fdcbce.jpg
>>307760
Indeed, there are major differences between random genetic drift/distribution (natural occurrences of mating) and specific inbreeding. Both of those in humans is not well understood. However, there is a lesser understood side to this: there is a genetic incentive to mate with those of the same species that have similar appearances, which creates more genetic drift thus producing healthier succeeding generations. Here's an excellent resource on that:
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Habsburg-Jaw-And-Other-Royal-Inbreeding-Deformities-and-Disorders

The fact that "modern" kikes have 25+ specifically deleterious genetic disorders caused by inbreeding throughout the past 2,500 years is incredibly amusing. However, that also shows why inbreeding, even presupposing 6th+ removed cousins and further, is still a net negative over a time.

>>307766
Not an expert by any means. Learned more from the farmers, usually 2-5 families on a 20-50 acre plot, than from "modern farming" nonsense.

Most likely, yes. My previous post:
>>306993
shows historical cartridges that were common enough to be viable for 50+ years, then the development of the .50AE in 1983. Since .50AE doesn't have an extended rim, no, it can't be used in a revolver. Although.. I suppose one COULD design a revolver in that cartridge using moon clips, but that's a fucking waste of material and time when there's 5 other rimmed .50 cartridges in use. Unfortunately, they're all memes and would best be used in a lever-action carbine.

>>307921
Standard heavy armor tactics from 2,500 years ago still apply today, except instead of mounted lancers knocking down and stunning/injuring heavy troopers until they flat out give up or die, we use somewhat more efficient firearms. The big deal here is that the Brotherhood of Steel is... written poorly. With their knowledge of power armor, they'd KNOW that sending a few veteran/elite people in those tin cans against a literal horde of infantry using service rifles whom will chip their armor away over time is stupid. This is why I look down at F:NV's depiction of the battle for that one solar powerplant as being a stupid plot convenience.

The T-60 model is a particularly egregious (and terrible) retcon of Fallout 1/2/NV lore, especially since it only shows up in Failout 4. The T-51 was rushed into service and even fielded into China, but now there's this MAGICAL SUPER-BETTER T-60 that somehow never got talked about until the second-to-latest continuation of Failout occurs? Another annoying plot convenience.

>>308165
The whole "setting one town against another" schtick is played WELL in Fallout 1, 2, and NV. The Vault Dweller, Chosen One, and Courier can all help in several instances using rather non-linear solutions. The best example is in 2:

Modoc is a town that relies on brahmin (mutated cows) has been suffering from an extended drought. One of their number, Karl, discovers a large, seemingly abandoned yet well tended and water rich farming setup southwest of them. Before this the Chosen One can meet Karl in The Den, and talk to him about why he ran away. He'll mention Modoc, what he saw at a farm, and then pass out drunk. Also one of the town's children has gone missing, which is an important fact later on. After Karl disappears, the town's leader tells the Chosen One that Karl reported the place has a number of spiked corpses covered in fresh blood and witnessed 'ghosts', stating to investigate at night. Upon reaching the farmstead at night, the Chosen One and his/her companions investigate only to find the 'corpses' are basically scarecrows covered in blood. CO and company are then taken captive by a number of ghouls and humans emerging from a well hidden trap door. Sensibly, they don't resist and kill them all.

Chosen One and company are taken to the commune's leader whom explains the circumstances: their ancestors were a small militia group that sealed themselves underground when the bombs dropped, but their food stores had run low a few years before. To counter that they took the best seeds available and worked heavily at night to build a small farm above their bunker. The region's amount of contamination (caused by FEV virus) was surprisingly low, and the aquifer below them had only been tainted slightly. However, they've lived underground for multiple generations, that trace FEV enough to mutate their eyes and skin. Not only that they've developed what is known as Cave Dweller's Fear: looking up at the day or night sky causes severe psychological trauma, so each one may only spend a short amount of time outside. While it is possible for a few to work during daylight hours, they have limited apparel and virtually no protective headwear to do so.

If the Chosen One doesn't go murderhobo, they'll find the missing child, talk a bit, then return to the leader and ask if said child can be returned to their family. The leader will say yes if CO takes a letter to the Modoc's leader. If CO does that, Modoc's leader is suspicious and demands proof that Karl and the child are safe. Now, IF the Chosen One has already met Karl (or returns to The Den to speak with him), examined the 'corpses', and talked to the child, they can settle the matter peacefully. Both towns will greatly prosper and create a much larger community, which is the canon ending since it's mentioned in NV.

It's fascinating how retarded kkuck is.

>>308318
Once again, kkuck FAILING to use the the proper word 'colt' and substituting it with his own neurotic dogshit.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308614
308617 308618
faithful sneed.png
>>308333

>I stopped, frustrated. The very idea of terminals and locks that I couldn’t get into because they were made of clouds was just… just… wrong and unfair!
I get the impression that this is an attempt at self-deprecating humor, but once again we see that one of this author's major shortcomings is his obsession with making his OC be the best at everything all the time. As >>308341 pointed out, since LP "knows" how to "hack" terminals, and Calamity is physically capable of operating the controls, the two of them could easily solve this problem by working together. However, this idea doesn't seem to occur to kkat.

Though he does do this:

>I sighed, tossing up my hooves in exasperation, and trotted back to the others, letting Calamity work on hacking the terminal. Instead, I moved to the edge of the building.
Apparently, anyone can "hack" a terminal; it's just LP who has the highest aptitude for it, along with her high aptitude for nearly everything else. However, since her curiosity to see whatever's on this terminal instantly evaporates as soon as she realizes she can't take credit for "hacking" it herself, she leaves Calamity to puzzle it out on his own without sharing any of her divine Mary Sue "hacker" wisdom.

Once again, this story suffers immensely from its heavy reliance on video game cliches for much of its logic. In a game, it makes sense to leave snippets of information lying around for the player to stumble across. It also makes sense to add a layer of challenge by requiring a special skill to unlock certain messages, and to require the player to spend skill points to level it up if he wants to unlock messages with higher difficulty. Leaving "terminals" lying around, that require a "hacking" ability to open, is a convenient way of doing this and keeping it consistent with the setting.

You could just as easily have a "translate languages" skill that is required to decipher messages written in a foreign script, or a "bypass enchantment" skill required to pull information from magic texts; it's all pretty much the same thing. All it amounts to is restricting certain information to players who have leveled up a certain skill, and using "hacking" or whatever as a plausible in-world explanation for why that information wouldn't just be immediately accessible.

In a story, however, this doesn't really fly. Being able to "hack" locked computers is a plausible enough skill if you want your character to be able to bypass certain challenges involving computers, but you need to have some plausible explanation for why the character would be able to do this. Usually this is factored into their backstory; maybe your character is a comp sci major, or had a father who was a famous hacker, or something. It also helps to divide these sorts of skills between characters; for instance the "hacker" character is probably not going to also be a world-class athlete or an expert marksman, and likewise the "fighter" character is probably not going to know much about computers.

Point is, you need something a little more believable than just that the character took some kind of "hack" ability during character creation and dumped X number of skill points into it. Also, once you've established one character as the "hacker" character, it's usually a good idea to just leave all the hacking to that one individual, especially if you haven't established anyone else as having talent in that area. Even if Calamity technically has enough skill points in "hack" to be able to legally hack this cloud terminal, it makes no sense story-wise to have him do it, because we've never seen him hack anything before and nothing about his character suggests he would be able to.

Also, you need to be careful about how and when these abilities are used. Again, while it might make sense for a player in a video game to occasionally stumble across "terminals" that contain interesting messages they might want to read, you can't apply the same sort of environmental storytelling techniques to a novel and expect it to work the same. If your character needs to hack a computer system to complete some task related to the story that's one thing, but in this story it's mostly just been Littlepoop cracking into various random terminals she comes across for no other reason other than to be nosy. What makes it even more questionable is that she usually has something far more important she ought to be doing.

Speaking of which, as she leaves Calamity to puzzle over the "cloud" computer durr hurr hurr I made a pun, she goes to the edge of the building and uses her binoculars to check out the hospital, which is ostensibly the whole reason they even came to this place.

>I looked down into the main road of Old Olneigh, a Mane Street with a set of train tracks running down the center. Hellhounds scampered about, moving from one building to another in packs. Hunting us.
>And night was falling.
Gee, it almost sounds like they ought to be hurrying and just getting what they came for, instead of dicking around with computer terminals and potion brewing and whatever other nonsense they've been dicking around with.

Page break. Out of literally nowhere, we are dropped into another memory orb. We are given no explanation as to how or when she decided to peer into one (though it appears she is flat-out ignoring Calamity's request that she not poke around in these things when the group is in a dangerous situation).

This memory belongs to Rarity. In it, she and Rainbow Dash arrive in Old Olneigh to try and reason with the Diamond Dogs who keep causing mischief in the place. Absolutely nothing interesting or obviously important happens, but there are a couple of random snippets of info. We learn that the main whatever-hub of RD's Single Pegasus Project (which I think has something to do with the giant broadcast towers) is around here somewhere, and that at one time Luna revived the Shadowbolts to scare the zebras.

Nothing else happens.
Anonymous
f010e10
?
No.308617
308620 308621 308695
The Modern Ideal of Masculinity.jpg
857fad2d3c8a4c752446743f51035539.jpg
>>308614
No offense to your review series. You can't do anything about what Kkat wrote in the past. Although I read through the filter that is (you)r posts, instead of being directly exposed to the story; I'm soooo bored. Fucking endless repetitions of entering memory orbs, terminals, or reading about easily won battle, and seeing forgettable locations.
In a sense, the opening of this story is a perfect fit: "Grey.
The walls of the maintenance stalls were all a very monotonous, dull grey."


Actually, now that I think about it the story has picked up some momentumish lately. Kkat just hits the breaks at every turn with all this looting.

This would have been more excusable if the iterations were different, and a bit more colorful! That's one merit with these hellhounds. At least I will remember this location and the hellhounds because they are a new type of distraction or pebble-like obstacle on Littlepip's journey. In a sense, this makes the story worse because I prefer having as little of my brain occupied by it as possible.

Btw, >Options >Custom Emojis >Ex. Littlepip.
:littlepip:
Look what you done Glimity Glam ;P
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308618
308619 308653
durrrrrrrr.png
>>308614

Page break. When LP comes out of the memory, she discovers that Calamity has somehow inadvertently activated some kind of mechanism by messing around with the terminal, and whatever he did is making the hellhounds swarm on their location. On the bright side, however, he learned what the terminal was for: apparently something something blah blah blah the Enclave, which is more or less what they already knew before he started screwing with the damn thing. Fascinating; I guess it pays to just randomly slap buttons on every computer you walk past without caring a whit for the consequences. I'll have to try that at work sometime.

Anyway, it appears we are going to have to wait a bit longer to find out if they ever made it to the hospital or not, because the chapter ends here.

Chapter Thirty One: Life Interrupted

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“We all go through periods of darkness. In such times, we can turn to the Goddesses, but it’s good to have friends.”
Friendship, you may recall, is one of the significant themes in this story. Even though it really hasn't come up much so far, the author keeps assuring us that it is very important to Littlepoop and the group of side characters who tag along with her.

Anyway, the chapter opens with another one of Littlepoop's inner monologues. This one is even more midwit-tier than usual, and mostly consists of a lot of incoherent babbling and rhetorical questions, all revolving around the subject of memory. It's not really worth summarizing, but there are a couple of minor highlights:

>And what of higher thought? Reasoning and rationality? If I were to forget the discoveries that led to a realization, would I be able to grasp that revelation anymore? Could I piece together the logic of an argument if I could not remember having the argument?
Seems to me that most of LP's "revelations" are exactly that; random pieces of information suddenly beamed into her head from some divine source. I am loath to recall any significant puzzles in this story she's actually reasoned out on her own, based on connections she could have plausibly made, using the information that was directly available to her at the time. So, while this question may be interesting to an armchair philosopher, I'm not really sure how applicable it is to Littlepoop herself.

>Were memory orbs nothing more evocative than particularly well-written books?
Hard to say, kkat; maybe try reading and/or writing one and we can compare them.

Page break. When we last left our heroes, the hellhounds had been summoned by some sort of mind-control signal that Calamity had accidentally unleashed, using some kind of radio antenna that the Enclave had set up for just this sort of purpose, apparently. They are now slowly mobbing towards them like an insensate horde of zombies.

Anyway, the hellhounds begin climbing over the edge of the roof, and the gang starts fighting them off in the usual way. Meanwhile, Calamity opens one of the crates the Enclave apparently left up here, and finds some kind of mysterious device made out of clouds.

>Another hellhound clawed his way onto the rooftop directly behind Xenith. The zebra danced, giving a well-placed buck to the creature’s chest. I heard ribs break, and the hellhound fell, rasping, fighting for breath from what I knew was a punctured lung.
As LP would also know from experience, having a punctured lung simply means that this particular hellhound will have to go about its day to day business without suffering any sort of handicap whatsoever, until it is able to heal itself at its own convenience using whatever bullshit Deux Ex Medicine™ happens to be lying around.

Anyway, a hellhound eventually manages to tear one of Velvet's front legs off. The text naturally makes a big deal out of this; however, we've had characters lose limbs and suffer grievous injuries in this story before, and I'm not falling for it this time. I'm going to assume that reattaching the leg will just be a simple matter of downing a couple of potions and casting a spell or two.

>Calamity held Velvet, looking stunned. His eyes glistened; his armor was slick with Velvet’s blood.
The sad part is that this whole battle would have actually been a well-written scene, if the author hadn't already gone to such lengths to make medicine in this story ridiculous. It's hard to take any injury, even dismemberment, seriously at this point.

Anyway, Xenith gives them some kind of anti-blood-loss goop to dip both the detached leg and Velvet's bleeding stump in, and then Calamity orders Littlepoop to levitate everyone except the two of them. Meanwhile, he takes LP on his back and gallops toward the cloud thing he found in the crate. Turns out it's some kind of magical flying cloud carpet, which they can conveniently ride over the mob of rampaging hellhounds to the hospital across the street. However, instead of everyone just climbing on board, they have to use this goofy arrangement, because only Calamity can stand on clouds because something something blah blah pegasi.

So, LP climbs onto Calamity's back, Calamity jumps on the cloud, LP levitates Xenith and Velvet and Velvet's leg, and they all float away to relative safety.

Page break. They float safely and comfortably to the hospital across the street, which conveniently enough was their original destination. Even more conveniently, the helicopter-thing that LP saw in the last chapter, that she plans on using to get them back to the airship, is sitting right on the fucking roof. More conveniently still, the hellhounds are not paying any attention to them at all; for some unexplained reason, the beacon that Calamity accidentally set off is designed specifically to attract hellhounds, which means they are all currently swarming the previous building like moths. And, as a little red convenience cherry to top off our convenience sundae, LP has noticed that for some unexplained reason, the hellhounds avoid the hospital anyway.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308619
308621 308623
1606804208277.png
>>308618

Despite the fact that, once again, this cunt and her friends have fallen ass-backwards into the best possible fortune, Littlepoop naturally seems to believe that somehow, the wasteland is shitting on her again and their situation is dire:

>I hated this plan.
>Words could not describe how much I hated this plan. The only things making me agree to this plan were a severe lack of time, an inability to see a better way, and the spark of hope borne from that one hellhound’s reaction. A hope that, maybe, the hellhounds had an aversion to the hospital that would protect us.
Let's recap their present situation. They found, completely by accident, a literal magic carpet that only Pegasi can use, which helped them escape from a swarm of hellhounds that are now conveniently distracted by the beacon that Calamity set off without even knowing what it did. On top of that, the party was able to use said carpet to fly them directly to their destination, which previously they would have had to cross a street patrolled by hellhounds in order to access. And on top of that, the helicopter-jiggy they were planning to use for their escape happens to be sitting on the fucking roof, and Calamity just happens to know how to fix it, which he will do while LP and Xenith go down into the (conveniently empty) hospital to scavenge supplies.

About the only negative here is the fact that Velvet got her leg blown off. However, let's face it; that's pretty much the equivalent of a skinned knee in this completely ridiculous universe. Calamity still has a giant gaping hole in his wing for crying out loud, and it doesn't seem to really bother him that much, or prevent him from doing anything he normally does other than fly.

Now, for contrast, here is Littlepoop's take on the situation:

>We had no time to lose, and we now had two major injuries that demanded top tier medical supplies. I prayed to Luna that this place had not been stripped clean already. That somehow, for any reason, this hospital was still well stocked.
All of this is technically true, and in any other story this would probably count as a sticky situation. However, based on the wacky logic of FoE, there's really no reason time should be a factor here. We can probably count on that beacon keeping the hellhounds distracted for exactly as long as kkat needs it to, and I really see no reason why either Calamity's wing or Velvet's leg should be any more of a problem than Littlepoop's punctured lung earlier, which didn't hamper her much at all. As to the hospital, why wouldn't it still be fully stocked? Littlepoop and her friends have subsisted on mana from heaven for pretty much the entire story, and I see no reason why it should suddenly dry up now.

But wait! Just when you thought everything was going great for the party, the author throws this curveball at us:

>“Ah crap,” Calamity said, still staring across the cloud bridge. I turned in alarm, my stomach dropping. Oh Goddesses, please, not anything else! Please!
>“Ah left muh helmet.”
Oh dear, he left his helmet. Whatever shall he do?

However, it's not just an aesthetic issue; turns out he can't operate the ridiculous overpowered suit of armor that he wears without the helmet. Incidentally, I'm not even sure why he took it off in the first place. All the author gives us is this (from a microscene or two earlier, right after Calamity opened the crate and found the cloud thing):

>I would have facehoofed if the noise Calamity made at the sight hadn’t been one of triumph. The pegasus lowered his head and kicked off his helmet, his orange mane bursting free. His wide eyes and self-pleased smile gave me a boost of joy. He’d stayed hidden behind that black, insectoid mask too long, and I had missed him.
First of all, kkat, slap yourself for "facehoofed." Second, he literally just took off his helmet for no goddamned reason. He knows perfectly well that he needs to wear that thing in order to operate his retarded Enclave suit, they are right in the middle of a goddamned battle, and he is not performing any action that would necessitate removing the helmet. He just took the damn thing off for no reason beyond that the author wanted him to leave it behind, so that he would be thus handicapped when LP had to leave him alone, thus making the scene more "exciting." If it wasn't glaringly obvious before, kkat is a card-carrying hack, and at this point I have mentally slapped him so hard, so many times, that his fake tits have left the map of Equestria entirely.

Anyway, despite the fact that nothing is attacking them at the moment, and that they have every reason to believe that this state of affairs will persist for the foreseeable future, LP is now terrified of leaving him alone to fix the chopper without her Mary Sue god-powers to protect him. However, she knows that a Sue's gotta do what a Sue's gotta do, so she reluctantly goes with Xenith to the access door, and together they head down into the hospital.

Page break. LP and Xenith begin what is by now a very familiar routine: going through an old, ruined building room by room and scavenging for supplies. Even though the signal across the street ought to have summoned all of the hellhounds away from the building, and despite LP's Mary Sue premonition about them avoiding the hospital for whatever reason, she still sees a bunch of red blips on her radar. Oh dear, however will they get themselves out of this latest jam? Let's all prop our eyes open so we can find out.

Anyway, she turns a corner and for some reason there is a radio playing DJ Pon3's latest broadcast. It's the usual spiel; Littlepoop is a hero and blah blah blah. It basically just recaps events we've already witnessed, so there's really no need to go over it. However, it does mention a battle between the Steel Rangers and the Steel Ranger Outcasts. The implication seems to be that this is where SteelHooves ran off to, though he is not mentioned by name.
Anonymous
66557d7
?
No.308620
308621
>>308617
That's been a grievance of mine as well which like you said isn't Glim Glams's fault but damn it feels like we've been at this story for a year. I remember with that Sun and the Rose it was fun reviewing that one since we could see the potential for a really good story and there were snippets of new things to joke about. The armored plague suit, ambassador pills, Irish stereotype earth pony rep, Celestia's harem, the main character beng terrified of rats centuries after the black death, the epilogue.

Suppose like Glim said though, this is a war. Sure we won't pull the veil back on Fallout Equestria and have everyone see it is infact not one of the best literary works in human history (seen plenty say that) but we here have to beat kkat's taint and finish this story. (Also if one of Nigel's spoilers he mentioned at the begining is true then whew boy I want to see Glim's reaction.
Anonymous
ccf97ea
?
No.308621
308695
>>308620
I looked over my post >>308617 because of yours. I want to stress that I enjoy this thread (you) >>308619 I just wanted to illustrate that even though I don't even read it with you, the endless recycling of tedious, checklist-like ideas being displayed in this story somehow seeps through to me and bores me to death.
It is noted by me that you basically only mention LP's looting sprees in your posts. I guess it's more like you show me the tip of an iceberg and I can imagine the rest. So through my understanding of what you're dealing with I get frustrated at the heel-dragging nature of this story.
But you do also remind me of it often enough for me to be annoyed by it (the story, not you!) because you kinda have to recap for your posts to have context, which is understandable.

Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308623
308630 308672
1pu81jwjupu21.png
>>308619

Scratch that; there actually is something in Homage's broadcast worth looking at more closely:

>Let me tell you of some of the ponies who did step up. Because you are not going to believe this! The Steel Rangers, a saddle-full of them at any rate, decided to buck their Elders and pledge themselves to helping out the suffering folk of this Equestrian Wasteland! You heard me right, children. Some of those metal-clad powerhouses are on our side now!
Whose "side" exactly? Are there sides?

One of my earliest observations about this story was that, on the one hand, it tries to be gritty, morally ambiguous realism, and on the other it tries to be cheesy, good-versus-evil melodrama, and it doesn't do either particularly well. Kkat seems to want to divide his characters squarely into "good guy" and "bad guy" camps, but the world he made doesn't really lend itself to that kind of setup.

As far as I can tell, Edgequestria is mostly everyone vs. everyone, with varying degrees of cooperation and rivalry between individuals and groups. There are small pockets of organized civilization, such as whatever Red Eye is trying to build, along with scattered settlements like Tenpony and New Appleoosa that seem to function like independent city states. In addition to this, you have groups like the Talons, that fight for whoever hires them, individuals like Topaz and Deadeyes who run operations intended to benefit only themselves, the "slavers," who seem to be part of Red Eye's empire, and remnants of pre-war orders like the Steel Rangers and the alicorns, who operate according to rather poorly established rules of their own. Anyone who doesn't fall into any of these categories appears to be either an NPC or a raider; basically an unaffiliated normie who either tries to live peacefully or goes around raping and murdering for the fuck of it.

None of this suggests any apparent good/evil divide; most individuals are concerned primarily with survival or profit, and most organizations are the same. Ironically, Red Eye, the villain, is the only player on the board who has any goal higher than this; he seems to have a messianic view of himself, and divides the world cleanly into those who follow his cause and the unenlightened masses, who are simply waiting to be conquered and assimilated. I could see him reducing the world to black and white concepts like "the good guys" and "the bad guys."

However, from Homage's perspective (or anyone else's, really), there aren't really any "sides," just a chaotic mishmash of disparate groups fighting with each other. When she says that the Steel Rangers are "on our side now," exactly whose side does she mean? Tenpony's? Littlepoop's? Red Eye has been more or less established as the story's main villain, but there isn't any organized opposition to him, and in any case, the Steel Ranger Outcasts don't seem to have any clearer of an affiliation than the Steel Rangers do. Once again, the author has not done a very good job of establishing what the Rangers stand for, what they stood for originally (in the pre-war era), and what exactly these "Outcasts" are trying to stand for as opposed to whatever the Rangers stand for. So, it's hard to understand what the hell Homage is talking about here.

>That ain’t easy. And their Elders have ordered them hunted down. I have reports of Steel Rangers and Steel Ranger Outcasts fighting in the streets from Manehattan to Trottingham. But I’ve also got amazing reports of these Outcasts taking down raider hovels and galloping to the aid of caravans. So if you should happen to see one of those new Outcast Knights or Paladins, give them your thanks. And maybe a little ammo.
This paragraph illustrates what I'm talking about quite nicely. Taking down "raider hovels" is good because...raiders are bad? Helping caravans is good because...caravans are good? Who exactly are the "good guys" and "bad guys" supposed to be here? Who gets to decide which is which? Based on what criteria? Homage is speaking as though she is addressing a group of ponies who, even if they are not necessarily organized, at least share the same basic values. But what are those values exactly? How does she know her audience shares them with her? As far as I can tell, her show is just being broadcast to anyone who has a radio.

Part of the problem here is that kkat doesn't really understand the essence of either of the two franchises he's trying to blend, and he isn't creative enough to effectively blend them even if he did understand. The "gritty realism" side of this story most likely comes from Fallout, which I get the impression is structured similarly to this world: a bunch of self-interested factions fighting each other for their own benefit, along with a bunch of unaffiliated individuals who are just trying to survive, some of whom are more sadistic or greedy than others. The "melodrama" side of the story comes from MLP: that world is divided cleanly into nice characters, like the pretty pastel ponies, and the mean characters with the darker color palettes. Obviously, these are two very different story formats, and they aren't directly compatible with each other.

The way I would probably handle this would be to focus on the show's idea of Harmony (good) vs. Discord (evil). The state of the wasteland, with its many disparate, self-interested factions, would represent the Discord concept quite well. The objective of the "good guys," therefore, would be reestablishing Harmony. Again, it's a bit ironic that Red Eye seems to be doing precisely this, but is going about it in a clearly destructive and twisted way. I suspect this was intentional on kkat's part, but what he's failed to do is establish a clear alternative. There is no faction, force or ideology in this world representing pure Harmony; it's hinted at, but never really defined. LP, Homage and others are meant to be its avatars, but they have no unifying values or principles.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308630
>>308623
You're right, but one massive source of melodrama comes from Fallout 3 which was made by the retards at Bethesda instead of the genuises at Obsidian aka Black Isle Studios.
In Fallout 3, characters can be Good, Very Good, Neutral, Evil, or Very Evil and you gain or lose karma points for killing them accordingly. Some dialogue options and quest endings like insulting someone or fucking innocents over for no reason or blowing up a town nonsensically built in the crater around an unexploded nuclear bomb just because a rich guy told you to will harm your karma score. Defending yourself against Raiders will inflate your karma score so much that it's genuinely hard to maintain an evil karma score in this game.
There were quests in Fallout 1 and 2 without a clear right or wrong answer. That's gone. In F3 you can either be a sneering cruel edgelord who kills goodies for no reason or a mindless murderhobo who's praised like the second coming of Christ just for killing a few baddies and completing a few random sidequests here and there.
Also you can raise your karma score by doing nice things and giving water bottles to perpetually thirsty hobos. You can bomb Megaton and do all sorts of evil shit and still end up with a good karma score at the game's end because you killed too many Raiders that attacked you on sight first. Some characters are marked as Essential, so important that if you gun them down they'll pass out for a bit and then get back up with full health because the game designers don't want you to kill those characters. Bethesda only got worse at Essential Character shit over time, tons of utterly unimportant NPCs in skyrim and fallout 4 are unkillable just because BugthEAsderp didn't want you to end up without this random merchant or that random NPC who's important for one dialogue line in one optional story scene or this character who can't be killed yet because you haven't been told to kill him yet by another NPC during the main quest.
Kkat clearly loves the melodramatic and nonsensical Fallout 3 more than actual good games like Fallout 1 and 2, since most stolen elements come from F3.
For god's sake, they're in the bombed out ruins of DC 200 years after the war, still living in scrap huts and scavenging 200 year old Cram and Canned Corn from the local Super Duper Mart(tm). By the time this is happening the NCR is a fully functional country pushing 1 million citizens with transportation and education and a corrupt democracy/burocracy and a military and factories and more. But in F3 the good-guy Steel Rangers abandoned their "preserve tech" mission to help people by randomly fighting monsters in ghoul-infested subways and raider infested ruins while doing very little to protect trading caravans and settlements. Meanwhile the Enclave wants to turn a water purifier on so they can have a monopoly on the clean water. And either its retarded demanding whiny childish boss or equally-poorly-written AI overlord want to fill the purifier with a virus that kills the irradiated now and is named FEV for no fucking reason besides marketing. So the BOS and Enclave have a war over who gets to turn a water purifier on (a magical water purifier powered by a magical matter conversion machine called a Geck because yay retcons and iconic names) and on BOS's side they have a giant fucking robot named Liberty Prime that tosses nukes from its back like american footballs while yelling "COMMUNISM DETECTED ON AMERICAN SOIL" and "COMMUNISM IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF FAILURE". I like Liberty Prime, he's funny even though it's retarded that a dying america running out of resources would build a giant robot when its OP-For-The-Time-Period power armour suits are so much more effective.
Basically this story is mostly Fallout 3 when it comes to its Stupid Mutants and Stupid Mutant Behemoths, BOS knockoff Steel Rangers that eventually split into baddies who are bad for no reason and goodies who kill raiders, Ashur/Red Eye Philadelphia slaver empire, and more. That's one big reason why the story is so retarded. The other reason is that Kkat is a retarded nigger faggot whose mother plays card games in hell.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308653
308658
>>308618
I could only assume the thing calamity activated is some kind of sonic emitter, which would absolutely make a dog go mad and have them pursue the source at all costs until it's shut off at the very least. Does the text mention this at all? It would explain things at least, as an outpost in a pace with dogs would have something like that set up.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308658
308664
>>308653
If the enclave cloud computer diamond dogs can't control or touch is some kind of sonic pain wave emitter, why wouldn't it be turned on to drive the dogs out of there?
Why would the Enclave leave a device like this so close to Alicorn territory, when Alicorns have Pegasus wings and can control clouds/treat them like malleable yet solid objects as well as any normal pegasus?
why is this absurdly convenient retard machine right there in the most absurdly convenient place possible right when LP is blabbering her "Woe is me, the Wasteland hates me and life is suffering and the odds are stacked against me" bullshit?
It's still hard to believe fantards think Mary Sue LP had it hard considering how hard the setting will bend over backwards to arm and enable and encourage her.
Anonymous
cfce02c
?
No.308664
308669
301ba38fe44f42d0fc0c0f2fd816bf32.jpg
>>308658
>If the enclave cloud computer diamond dogs can't control or touch is some kind of sonic pain wave emitter, why wouldn't it be turned on to drive the dogs out of there?
That's a good question.
>Why this place?
Are you asking the leaf about this? He didn't write the story so why would he know? At most he said:
>It would explain things at least, as an outpost in a pace with dogs would have something like that set up.
Which doesn't mean he defends how it's there or where it's there for but why it was set up.
I guess you're actually asking rhetorical questions that are not adressed to anyone in particular. It just seems like you're asking the leaf specifically because you reply to his post in yours.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308669
308671 308679
>>308664
Whoops, didn't mean to make that post a reply pointed specifically at someone. Those are rhetorical questions.
I just don't see a good reason for enclave operatives to come here of all places, risk getting shot out of the sky by Hellhounds and Alicorns, risk getting spotted by one Alicorn and bringing an entire swarm of hive mind Alicorns faster and stronger than all but the top one percent of Pegasi, set that machine up, not use it, and fuck off home.
It's not like they wanted to conquer this location or take something rare from this place. Aside from the hospital's medical supplies that really should have been taken by someone or used up in the past 200 years nothing good seems to be here. And it's not like the Enclave activated this machine specifically hoping it would drive Hellhounds out of their home and into Alicorn lands to cause some bloodshed and chaos the Enclave could exploit in a proper military operation. I hope Kkat tries to justify this later on but I don't see how any good explanation for it could exist.
It would feel less contrived if LP just suddenly found an amazing top tier gun with plenty of bullets and a nearby terminal to explain Kkat's "it was Hugh Jelly's and he died here" excuse for a weapon backstory. Like when she stumbled into finding Little Macintosh the OP "hunting revolver".
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308671
308673 308754
>>308669
IT's more likely a reference to how the Enclave, when they started emerging into the wasteland in Fallout 3, had outposts placed all over the map. I don't remember if there was some kind of terminal that operated some turrets or something attached to one, though.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308672
308682 308699 308714 308719
1594767774915.png
>>308623

Anyway, the characters meant to be heroes in this story have nothing that really defines them as such. You could probably argue that the "evil" in this story is the state of anarchy and extreme individualism into which most of Equestria has fallen; basically Discord. Red Eye has arisen as the only entity in this world who stands in direct opposition to this, but it's clear that the author wants to present him as a sort of corrupted Harmony, not as the true Harmony that Equestria once had.

I actually think all of this is perfectly fine; the basic groundwork for an epic fantasy novel is here. The problem, however, is that the ultimate goal, true Harmony, is not represented in any of the "hero" characters so far. Littlepoop, for all the praise the other characters in this story heap upon her, has no self-evident heroic qualities, or even any personal goals or motivations. She just does whatever random thing she wants to for any random reason that occurs to her, it just magically works out for her most of the time, and somehow we are meant to see her as this altruistically-motivated hero who goes around making the world a better place.

Even if we take it at face value that LP's deeds are heroic, what is her motivation for doing them supposed to be? What was her initial call to heroism? What is she fighting for exactly? We are given a vague impression that she wants to make Equestria "better" somehow, but how exactly does she define "better?" Does she have any goals she's trying to achieve, either for herself or for others? The author never clearly establishes any of this, for LP or for any of the others in her party.

LP left her home stable basically because she was bored and wanted to look for the pony she had a crush on, who as it turns out also left more or less because she was bored. As soon as she's outside, she realizes that she has no idea where her crush ran off to, gives up immediately, and just sort of wanders around for awhile picking fights for no real reason. Eventually she finds her crush again through sheer dumb luck. The two of them team up for basically no reason beyond that neither of them has anything better to do, eventually find some other ponies who are in the same situation, and from there they just sort of wander around picking locks on safes and getting into random fights with random enemies.

What makes things even more confusing is that now the story seems to be hinting that Homage, not LP is the true hero. However, Homage has even fewer heroic qualities than LP does. After the truth about the Gardens of Equestria spell is revealed, Spike just sort of randomly decides that LP is not the Wasteland Savior even though he originally thought she was, without ever explaining his reasoning. From there, LP just sort of randomly decides that Homage represents the Virtue of Honesty and that she is the true Wasteland Savior, and it's not clear what the reasoning behind this is either.

Anyway, tl;dr this story could have been turned into a decent epic fantasy if the author knew what he was doing, but unfortunately he didn't. Instead of a story about Harmony vs. Corrupted Harmony vs. Discord, it's a story about Discord vs. More Discord vs. Corrupted Harmony vs. some autistic klepto and her autistic friends, who, despite being little more than avatars of Discord themselves, manage to become the good guys by default simply because there are no other viable options.

Moving on with the story.

>I moved forward, following the voice, nudging open the door to the office where an old radio sat, dusty and neglected, the face above the dial still glowing as the speakers gave DJ Pon3’s voice a slightly tinny echo.
So, basically, sometime before the bombs went off, somepony left a radio on in this abandoned hospital office. 200 years later it's still playing, and conveniently is tuned to the only station that still has anything being broadcast on it. That thing must have some pretty good batteries.

Anyway, presumably to distract us from how illogical this whole scene is, DJ Pon3 reads another "personal message" to the "wasteland savior" written by "his assistant." It's basically just a sappy "I wuv you and want to kiss you" message, and it produces a boilerplate response from Littlepoop: she flushes with embarrassment, Xenith teases her, blah blah blah.

>“Aw… now ain’t that just romantic? Don’t that just tug at your heartstrings? When did my assistant get so cheesy? Oh, and there’s a P.S.: Thirty-one. Huh. What’s thirty-one mean?”
For just a moment, I thought that "thirty-one" might be a coded message of some sort; maybe a clue, or the launch code for the Gardens of Equestria, or something else that might eventually be relevant to the story. Then I remembered that there is a running gag about Homage counting the number of orgasms she gave Littlepoop, or the number of orgasms that Littlepoop gave her, or something like that. So, logically, this would mean that "thirty-one" represents the number of times this story's cringey sex-banter has made me upchuck my lunch.

Page break. LP and Xenith find some minor medical supplies, but so far nothing of the caliber they would need to reattach somepony's leg or repair a hole in a wing. LP notices a locked door leading to a nurses' station, and proceeds to investigate.

>I poked my head through, coughing, and saw that the ceiling had collapsed, filling most of the room. Broken terminals and office supplies littered the floor around large hunks of structural material. I could see partially into the room above where a bathtub teetered, hanging from the washroom above only by the plumbing.
Someone actually made a fan animation of this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNUYrra8nz8

Anyway, LP finds a cabinet with a bunch of shit in it: pills, another memory orb, and a tin of crack mints, which I presume is significant. Much like kkat, she decides she can take it all.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308673
308697
>>308671
Makes sense, but it still seems odd that they'd bother making outposts below the cloud line when they have the country coated in clouds and they have a floating mobile capital.

@Glim
This isn't a book or technically even a story but can you add this https://youtu.be/YJgstZQAzcw ten minute video to your list of things to analyze for literary merit and writing lessons? It's a "youtube poop", a video edited for comedy, and it would be interesting to see what comedy writing lessons can be learned from it. A guy made an hour-long video analyzing the crap Ratchet And Clank 2016 reboot released with the crap movie and a different guy edited it and some other sources into this hilarious short video. Sometimes it takes syllables and edits them together to make someone say "cock" or "holy shit you're a faggot" or "this is a gay nigger" when they originally didn't say that. Funniest shit I've ever seen! You don't need to know anything about Ratchet and Clank for the ps2 or its shit 2016 reboot to get the jokes.
Anonymous
e84de23
?
No.308679
>>308669
Yeah, I had my suspicion it was something like that.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308682
308683 308684 308754
1594437407362.png
>>308672

After a brief battle against her inner self regarding the crack mints, LP exits the nurses' station. As soon as she is back in the hallway, she is confronted by some kind of Lovecraftian horror from beyond the stars:

>The… thing that shuffled down the hall before me had clearly once been meant to be a pony. There was enough pony left in its face to tell that horrifying truth. There was no way to describe the vile, sickening body of the thing -- the best my brain could manage was the idea that a pony had started to melt, losing all her fur and keeping only sporatic tuffs of her mane and tail, only for the flesh beneath to stop melting (arbitrarily and not all at once) and then begin to bloat and metastasize. Its eyes, sunken and huge and red, stared into mine. Its tongue had swollen and stretched, bursting out of its muzzle and splitting into tendrils as they hung down from the wreckage that had once been its mouth. The tentacles writhed individually, as if in great pain.
Every now and again the author proves himself capable of thinking up interesting ideas; it's a shame that he can't make better use of them. Some of his creatures are admittedly not bad. The brain bots I remember being kind of an interesting concept, the hellhounds could have been interesting if they had been used more effectively, and whatever the hell this thing is, it's downright creepy. Will kkat be able to make good use of it? Experience says no, but I suppose since I'm stuck here for another 14 chapters, I may as well take another run at the football.

Anyway, my run at the football ends predictably, with me lying on my back wondering what the fuck just happened. For about five whole seconds, the author produces a somewhat creepy scene: the creature's tentacle-tongue seizes Littlepoop as she is stricken with horror, and lifts her into the air. It's implied that the creature intends to tentacle-rape her, which seems like the kind of scene kkat would come up with. Unfortunately, for all the buildup, it ends pretty anticlimactically; Littlepoop fires a few shots into it with Lil' Macintosh, and it dies. Xenith comes running out at the sound of the shots.

>I got shakily to my hooves. Little Macintosh’s bullets had torn gaping holes in the meat of the thing. “W-w-what is t-that?!”
>“I do not know,” Xenith said fearfully. “But we must be cautious. There may be more of them, and they possess a Stare.”
If the author's idea here was to give us a brief glimpse of a creature that will continue to play a role in the story, then this was a decent enough scene; if this is just another pointless one-shot monster that makes only one appearance, the scene was disappointing to say the least. As to what "the Stare" signifies, I'm not sure. I assume it has something to do with Fluttershy possibly being tentacle-raped.

Page break. They go into the pharmacy, and find a few more varieties of medicine, but so far their search for extra-strength panacea potions is coming up dry. Another rape-monster attacks them, and LP dispatches it with a couple of shots from her zebra rifle. Nothing else happens.

Page break. We rejoin LP and Xenith at some indeterminate point in the future. Apparently LP has learned a bit more about the rape-monsters, and apparently they are as much of a letdown as the rest of the monsters in this story have turned out to be. As terrifying as they appear, they are slow-witted and easy to kill; the main thing about them is they have some kind of hypnotic "stare" ability that can paralyze you while they get all up in your orifices. As long as you don't look directly at them, they can be dispatched fairly easily.

>There were a few pony skeletons here, two with cracked pelvic bones. An ill shudder racked me as it occurred to me that the poor mares had not been killed by the horror which had invaded them, but the horror that had come out.
It also appears that the environment-skeleton situation has reached a new level of unintentional comedy. Apparently, the tentacle-rape monsters reproduce by violating a pony and impregnating it. After an unknown period of gestation, the newborn monster bursts forth, killing its host in the process.

It would seem that some mares wandered into this abandoned hospital for some unknown reason at some unknown point in the past, were raped by one or more of these monsters, and then for some reason decided to hang around the place where it happened until giving birth. Their pelvises then exploded, and the monsters that were born from this unholy union continue to skulk around the building, seeking to propagate their species by (I guess) raping whatever creatures happen to wander in here.

I'm not entirely sure what the idea here is supposed to be. Do enough mares keep wandering into this abandoned hospital in this out-of-the-way town populated by hellhounds to allow this species to reproduce? Or is the implication that there was only one generation of these things, and all of them are 200 years old? I'm assuming it's because of these things that the hellhounds eschew this building, but is there any particular reason why the rape-monsters have never tried to expand out into the rest of the town? For that matter, if they're slow-witted and easy to kill, and the hellhounds are supposed to be hyper-intelligent, then why wouldn't the hellhounds just exterminate them all?

The situation here seems similar to the mutated cat-things LP and Calamity encountered in the abandoned stable way back in Chapter 5: it's a creepy enough idea for a monster, but it's odd that an entire species would remain confined to a single building, particularly when there is nothing obvious keeping it contained and a lack of food would give it a natural reason to expand outward. In the case of the rape monsters specifically, you would think the lack of mates/hosts would also drive it to explore the area surrounding the hospital.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308683
308768
brainbot.jpg
deathclaw.jpg
Centaur-Fallout-3.jpg
>>308682
>Every now and again the author proves himself capable of thinking up interesting ideas; it's a shame that he can't make better use of them. Some of his creatures are admittedly not bad. The brain bots I remember being kind of an interesting concept, the hellhounds could have been interesting if they had been used more effectively, and whatever the hell this thing is, it's downright creepy.
Sorry to piss in your chips, but all these monsters are based heavily on creatures from Fallout except with a minor pony twist. The brainbots are pretty much a 1:1 copy, the hellhounds are deathclaws with digging powers and guns, and the gruesome hospital creatures are just Fo3's centaurs with extra rape because apparently they weren't disgusting enough.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
389c726
?
No.308684
308743 308754
shimmy.png
>>308682

Anywho, they keep exploring, and eventually come to a room marked "isolation." LP's radar-thingy shows two entities nearby: one hostile and one not. She also hears some bizarre dialogue coming from another nearby room:

>“Oh dear, oh dear,” came a slightly tinny voice from the other side of the swinging operating room doors.
>“Misses Tulip, I’m afraid you’ve come down with a serious case of death. I’m afraid this is beyond my meager skills, but I do recommend plenty of bed rest and I will alert the next available doctor to your condition.”
>“Good afternoon Mister Tester,” said the oddly cheery voice. “I’m pleased to see some of your color has returned. Let me change your IV tubes for you. No, no, don’t fuss. You’ll only make this harder. The straps are for your own good.”
inb4 some kind of pre-war nursing robot is performing medical treatment on either a bunch of dead poners, or on the rape-monsters, because it can't tell them from the poners it's programmed to treat.

LP and Xenith sneak inside. The robot voice continues to say creepy things as they skulk around rummaging through cabinets. Eventually they find one that contains the type of supplies they need.

Page break. They've got what they need, and the logical thing to do would be to simply get the fudge out. However, Littlepoop's autism compels her to check out the room that the robot voice is coming from:

>I nudged open the door and looked around. The operating room was full of gurneys, most of which bore the skeleton of a pony. A few were empty. And one held the bloated, fleshy body of one of the horrors. It was strapped down with an IV needle jabbed into it. The IV tube was less than a yard long and dangled off the creatures’ bulbous mass, the other end attached to nothing.
>A bright yellow, multi-limbed medical bot hovered from gurney to gurney, “helping” its patients.
Called it.

LP shoots the rape-monster strapped to the table, and then disables the medical bot. Apparently, she intends to reprogram it so they can use it to perform surgery on themselves, or something. At this point I'm not even going to bother asking how a low-level apprentice PipBuck technician who didn't even take her job all that seriously would know how to reprogram a sentient robot from 200 years ago.

Page break. Littlepoop emerges from the operating room with the disabled robot and the medical supplies. There is absolutely no reason for either of them to stick around here, and my understanding is that LP is supposed to be worried about leaving the wingless Calamity and the three-legged Velvet alone on top of the roof; however, Littlepoop's autism compels her to explore the last door she hasn't checked out yet.

>It would only take a minute.
>I hooked my hacking tool into it and went to work.
This is the second time a "hacking tool" has been mentioned. At other points, I believe she's hacked these terminals using her PipBuck or just by typing on the keyboard how a horse would be able to do that, or why a society of horses would invent a device like a keyboard in the first place, is a question for another day. Most of the time, it's not even explained how she does it; the author just says that she "hacks" the terminals and leaves the question of how she does it to the reader's imagination. I'm beginning to suspect that he didn't even bother to think up a consistent or plausible method for her to use. I almost want to go back through the text and comb through all the hacking instances to see if there are any inconsistencies or continuity errors, but at this point I can't really be bothered.

Anyway, she goes inside, and finds about what you'd expect her to find. It's some kind of laboratory, in which experiments appear to have been conducted on the rape-monsters. There is of course a terminal, which of course Littlepoop is able to hack and extract pertinent information from. Here is what she learns:

Twilight's Ministry of Arcane Sciences was working on some kind of transformation potion, and this is the substance that eventually became known as kkat's taint. We already more or less knew this from Trixie's scene, but this fills in the details and gives it a name: IMP (Impelled Metamorphosis Potion). Apparently, there was a bunch of this stuff being stored here, and somehow a pony named Peachy Pie came into contact with it and transformed into this rape monster. The message also mentions that Fluttershy was in the area trying to negotiate with the Diamond Dogs or something; I'm not 100% sure on this part, but I suspect this fact combined with the fact that the rape monsters have a "stare" ability implies that Fluttershy also came into contact with IMP, and was transformed into one of the rape monsters. She then went around impregnating whatever mares were in the hospital at the time, and her descendants are the tentacle rape monsters with "stare" that LP has been fighting.

Page break. This part basically just summarizes everything I outlined above (minus the bit about Flutters), and connects it to the other things LP has learned in the past few chapters: Twilight invented Taint, Taint turned Trixie into the Goddess and created all the other monsters they've encountered so far, and Littlepoop has herself been exposed to Taint (I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but when those plant monsters attacked her on the way here they sprayed a little Taint on her, and she's been experiencing a mild itching intermittently throughout the last few scenes).

Page break. The two of them return to the roof and announce that they have what they came for.

>Velvet Remedy was looking decidedly bad, but I thanked the Goddesses that she was conscious.
Nice to see that having her leg blown off hasn't been too much of an inconvenience for her.

>Calamity stood at the edge of the building, looking down. I noticed his helmet in his mouth. He had run across and gotten it!
Are you fucking serious?!? How?!? He can't even--oh, fuck it; what's the use?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ddc8c37
?
No.308695
308698 308700
DF31016F35DFC784FB6726773C7AFF9A-282080.jpg
>>308288
That visual helps, thanks. Though I now have to call bullshit on that bird's being able to carry a pony any significant distance, even if it's a smaller-than-average pony unless she grips her by the husk, I suppose.

>what are your opinions on how Kkat handles the dangers of the wasteland?
actually, you summed it up pretty nicely:
>Fighting even one of these things should be an almost guarantee you're gonna get fucked up. Kkat vastly increased the proportion and scale of power, while keeping the power of the protagonists and "normal" ponies roughly the same, but in the end combat ends up EASIER than it should be.

As I've said before, kkat seems to genuinely lack creativity. He's come up with very few original ideas here; almost everything is directly ripped off from MLP or Fallout, in fact it seems that even stuff I've initially given him credit for is actually just stuff from Fallout. He basically just takes baddies from Fallout, slaps an "Equestria" skin on it, and maybe adds a few bells and whistles. His additions don't actually add all that much, all he really does is take something already bad-ass and try to make it even more bad-ass; kind of like mounting a laser cannon on the back of a lion and giving it PCP. It's creativity at about the level of a middle-school kid. If kkat was at around that age when he originally wrote this I could probably let it slide, but since evidence in this thread suggests this fic was actually written by a grown-ass man in his thirties, I'm not really willing to give him quite as much leeway.

His lack of creativity bleeds through even more when he attempts to use the elements he's extracted and enhanced to construct a story. He can take something like a Deathclaw or a Super-Mutant or whatever and think of ways to make it even bigger and scarier and stronger, but he can't think up any particularly interesting or innovative ways for his protagonists to vanquish an enemy that probably outclasses them by quite a bit, so he either just has them come up with some implausible bullshit to win (dumping a boxcar on an alicorn), dumbs down the enemy so it falls for some idiotic trick (tossing a memory orb at an alicorn so it paralyzes itself), or just bypasses the fight entirely (the group is being threatened by batwings at the end of a scene, and at the beginning of the next scene the battle is over and all we're told is that "they won"). Either that or he just gives the enemy some Achilles heel that makes it really easy to beat once Littlepoop figures it out (these rape-monsters seem to be the best most recent example of this).

Basically, this whole story reads like some middle school kid sneaking into his little sister's room and using her pony toys to act out scenes from Fallout (badly). From what you guys have been telling me, nearly every major story arc, if you can even call them that, in this novel has been lifted directly from Fallout 3 and lightly skinned with MLP lore. Kkat's only significant creative achievement has been thinking up specifically how to skin them (I'll give him some credit here and acknowledge that he has mostly constructed an internally consistent world), and this story he slapped together to string the different Fallout scenes together, which up until this point has wavered between being a lame, incredibly dull dungeon crawl and being borderline nonsense.

>>308293
>Also, Glim, do you think the story and its author have changed over time?
I've observed very little growth or improvement as this thing has progressed. It's pretty much been the same level of bullshit since we started this thing.

>Do you think uploading this on google docs first was a smart move on Kkat's part?
I generally don't approve of uploading a story chapter by chapter as you're writing and calling it a finished work. I can see uploading rough chapters one at a time to a writing group or a small community like this one, just to get notes and suggestions from people, but in that case I'd call it a rough draft and make sure everyone knew that it was still a work in progress. From what I can tell, it appears that kkat was actually publishing these chapters one at a time after writing them and calling them finished, which is a huge mistake. If you wanted to write something this way, the way to go about it would be to write out the entire story in advance, edit and revise it, probably show it to a few people and get notes on what they think could be improved, then rewrite it, then upload the polished chapters one at a time.

>>308298
>As for doing so to avoid criticism, I don't think it was intentional. People, especially mentally stunted, young, impressionable people with poor taste (young bronies) tend to like things and not put a single ounce of criticism toward the stuff they view. Popularity occurs due to opportunity and advertisement. At the time, FO:E crossed over two hot and popular franchises at the peak of one's popularity, and was one of the first grand adventure stories of its kind in the fandom. It was also cool and dark and edgy. Any actual criticism would naturally go unnoticed amongst all the fans it acquired singing it praises.
This is pretty much my best guess at why this story is as popular as it is.

>>308304
The concept is actually pretty funny, I'm surprised the idea of LP potentially getting molested while lost in a memory orb didn't occur to me. If I wanted to write a parody of FoE, I'd probably have a running gag where she jumps into memory orbs at random inappropriate times, and then wakes up in ridiculous situations wondering how she got there.

>>308617
>>308621
This has been my experience as well. There's sadly very little variation from scene to scene in this story, the whole thing has just been one long, boring trek across a depressing wasteland. I try to make it as amusing as I can, but sometimes there's nothing else I can say besides "this sucks."

Image familiar is why it's a bad idea to photoshop when tired
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ddc8c37
?
No.308697
308698 308702
>>308673
There's not really a whole lot of literary merit to analyze here, as comedic video editing is a different topic entirely. I have actually always rather liked YouTube poop, and like anything else there's a technique to doing it well, but it's a whole separate topic from trying to tell a story and it's not really relevant to this thread. I guess in general comic timing is important, as is avoiding too much repetition. Editing someone's voice so it sounds like they're saying "fuck" or "shit" is funny the first few times you hear it, but it gets successively less funny the more often you do it. Again, it's an interesting enough topic of discussion, but it's not really appropriate for this thread.

As an aside, if you're interested in YouTube poop, this one is pretty much the gold standard as far as I'm concerned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTdxPliBdZs
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
ddc8c37
?
No.308698
>>308695
>>308697
btw I'm Canadian now
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308699
308703 308768
Old_Olney_S._Wilson_Building.jpg
>>308672
Do you want to know the funny thing about this scene? The STRUCTURE of the room is a reference to one area of fallout 3 in Old Olney. Weird how Kkat went so far into referencing Fallout stuff that they're copying how a location is structured.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.308700
308701
>>308695
One could reasonably assume that Kkat wrote the story as he did because he had to play through the game for a bit in order to ponify it (as has been stated, just slapping a pony sticker on it) for each chapter. If hes as uncreative as the evidence suggests, its probable that he was literally playing through as he wrote each bit, likely hopped up on the dopamine and serotonin he was getting from the autism brigade who were quick to fellate him for his efforts and who, as you point out, refused to apply any real critical assessment of it.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308701
>>308700
Kkat does a lot of roleplaying and is currently spending his days playing through a ponified D&D rules system for his Fallout:Equestria story. When playing through Fallout 4, if I recall, he did a big trascribe play-by-play of it through his fimfic blogs. He also has a history of roleplaying as a furry character before he went into the MLP fandom.

From other instances I can only assume, this story is a roughly-altered play-by-play of his experiences playing through Fallout 3, and Littlepip is just his oc he made to roleplay as. Her core skills are skills most players take when playing Fallout 3 (lockpicking, sneaking, small guns), her "trademark weapon" is a ponified version of one of the best fo3 guns - The Blackhawk magnum, she goes through the motions of most of the storyline, and reacts to events the way you'd expect the average sensitive player to react.
Anonymous
a960d5f
?
No.308702
>>308697
Two of my favorite YTPers are Danfago700 (unfortunately his YTPs are unlisted now, I think) and DikeKike. The Extended Weekend of Sparkle is a MLP YTP that actually has an overarching plot, while still being nonsensical. There are also YTPers like Awfulfawful and Originalname, who stray into less conventional directions for YTP than pure comedy.
Anonymous
a960d5f
?
No.308703
>>308699
That actually looks kind of looks like some of the City 17 areas toward the end of HL2, which came out 4 years prior. It's probably a coincidence, because it's a logical level design for a ruined city setting, but it did remind me of it.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308714
308719
>>308672
>Anyway, the characters meant to be heroes in this story have nothing that really defines them as such. You could probably argue that the "evil" in this story is the state of anarchy and extreme individualism into which most of Equestria has fallen; basically Discord. Red Eye has arisen as the only entity in this world who stands in direct opposition to this, but it's clear that the author wants to present him as a sort of corrupted Harmony, not as the true Harmony that Equestria once had.

>I actually think all of this is perfectly fine; the basic groundwork for an epic fantasy novel is here. The problem, however, is that the ultimate goal, true Harmony, is not represented in any of the "hero" characters so far. Littlepoop, for all the praise the other characters in this story heap upon her, has no self-evident heroic qualities, or even any personal goals or motivations. She just does whatever random thing she wants to for any random reason that occurs to her, it just magically works out for her most of the time, and somehow we are meant to see her as this altruistically-motivated hero who goes around making the world a better place.

This is actually a quite brilliant perspective, that being the general themes of oppositional forces to ponies and their natural states being anti-harmony. I definitely want to focus more clearly on this in my story, since the ideas draw pretty close to that by themselves already, with both sides being a kind of corrupted and twisted harmony that requires shaping.

Thanks for this, it will help a lot.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.308719
Spoilered
>>308672
>>308714
In Fim Equestria it uses the hermetic occult principle of fractalization, as above, so below, for the structure of conflicts.
The whole setting of Equestria is the macrocosm to the single pony microcosm.
The whole rest of the FiM world is a shithole, and ponies have despite the long odds figured out the means to perpetuate healthy development on multiple levels.
During Celestia's reign her country purged many sicknesses and ailments. In the process losing something important. The magic of Friendship. The harder than coffin nails, and can self repair this boat I sawed in half the ponies and their bonds, renewal bullshit.
Despite being the single greatest nation for their own possible self destruction by individuals, they thrive.
The individuals even the heroines face their greatest dooming force, themselves. When that's not confronted and delt with it spills out and topples others into very real consequences.
Friendship among its many abilities such as taking wise gut actions, one happens to be thoughtfulness of others and all they are.
The state of being completely self absorbed or consciousness contraction is the penultimate force to be combated.
Their successes and failures are varied.
Due to a poisoned understanding or misunderstanding, ignorance, or self refining and mastering (success or failure).

Cozy Glow, Tirek and Chrysalis are seemingly outliers. They're not for one reason. They don't know how to fully recover, help, and 'convert' them yet. They are too personal for Twilight, Equestria, and everyone for now.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308720
308768
Lately I rewatched Legend Of The Seeker, in preparation for trying the books for the first time. I don't know what "Objectivist themes" are but if communists hate them they must be good.
Thinking of how hard LOTS's author tries to distinguish the good guys who sometimes do bad things (lying, stealing, killing, etc) for good causes when there is no better option from villains who do stupid evil shit for fun or because it's easy and the quickest/most fun way to get what they want, I've noticed how Kkat barely tries that with LP.

Littlepip is already called a Good Pony, so the thought that these hellhounds might not want her to raid their settlement and kill some hellhounds and steal medical supplies doesn't even occur to her. She doesn't even stop to consider a nonlethal approach, or what the consequences might be if she goes in guns blazing and fails to kill all of them. This murderhobo's so certain everything will all just work out for her if she acts like a gamer who's unafraid of death or pain or a level designer with "lmao I feel like fucking the player over" on the brain.

Do you think LP would be a better protagonist if she and the author had a clear picture in their minds when it comes to exactly what a good person is and what a good person should be?
Kkuck's "I am a zebra and I respect your pony beliefs by not killing you so please respect mine by not laughing at my Luna Derangement Syndrome or pointing out how that species-wide zebra disorder doomed your country and mine" moments scream the sound of an author afraid to think deeply about what separates fundamentally good and fundamentally evil people from the lazy and the self-interested.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308739
I just remembered that time Littlepip stumbled upon the shoddy handiwork of the only other lockpicker in the Wasteland.
If this "bad Littlepip" was more of a character in this story it could provide a better reason for why there are audio tapes/holotapes/audio logs/memory orbs/whatever in random locations along with sick loot and ammo: Bad Littlepip stashed them there during her travels whenever she ended up overencumbered from carrying too much random crap at once.
LP could make trying to find Bad LP or undo the damage she dealt part of her main quest.
Bad LP's holotapes could say something like "I met a panicking mare who begged me to save her daughter in Bleak Falls Barrow, I said sure but only to get her to leave me alone. You'd have to be crazy to go in that raider-infested shithole" to give LP a sidequest to go there. Could give the sidequest a tragic end where the raiders already raped and killed the daughter. Or a super tragic end where the raped daughter is alive but begs LP to kill her.
Bad LP's holotapes could say something like "I'm going to Dawn Falls, a waterfall north of here, because I hear that place glows at night" to give LP a reason to go there just in case Bad LP is still there.
And Bad LP could have made her own holotapes that say things like "I saved this town today" but they're found in the ruins of a town destroyed and slaughtered by the negative consequences of the wannabe-hero's bad actions.
A smart author could make Bad LP into everything Good LP doesn't want to be, to contrast the two and get LP thinking about what better alternative the Wasteland needs and how to make it. Nothing elevates a story quite like a damn good rivalry.
Or Bad LP could be the smart one who imvestigates the past of the Wasteland and provides his findings in holotapes for future generations because he thinks knowing what happened will magically tell people how to avoid letting it happen again.
Or it could be played for laughs. Bad LP could be the Dan Hibiki of this tale, a clown and walking joke.
I've played games where audio logs are cleverly placed to be a part of the main experience and games where they're just dumped in random places like the Clusters in Saints Row 4. This story wastes time with pointless backstory details like "the rock-breaking prison here was managed by Diamond Tiara who died horribly" and random nanoscenes from the Equestria At War Failure% Speedrun instead of getting the most important facts of the story solidly stated within the tale before it's over and before these facts become necessary to understand what is currently happening in the story.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
459f912
?
No.308743
308758 308760
f41.jpg
>>308684

Believe it or not, it actually gets much, much sillier from here:

>I looked to the building across from us. All the hellhounds were gone. The antenna array was smashed to pieces. I crept to the edge, casting a glance first to the Griffinchaser II. It still looked like a mess, but I could see the work Calamity had done.
>Calamity set down his helmet. “In case y’all missed it, they’re tellin’ us t’ surrender.”
>Looking down, I saw the hellhounds surrounding the building, some carrying energy weapons. A few dozen carrying torches. Most were armed only with their claws. Standing on a dilapidated wagon was one particularly large female hellhound holding a megaphone.
>“You come down now!” she barked, her voice carrying, “Final chance!”
In case it isn't clear, here is what happened:

The hellhounds, at some point, managed to destroy the antenna that was making them swarm all over the fire station. One would expect that the next logical step would be for them to swarm into the hospital and finally kill the intruders they've been chasing around town for-like-ever now. However, the hellhounds, who can tunnel through nearly anything, and have some kind of taint-enhanced super-intelligence, and are armed with fucking death lasers, are scared to enter the building on account of the slow-witted, slow-moving rape-monsters that LP was able to effortlessly kill with her goddamned revolver. So, they decided to do the next best thing, and surround the hospital so that the intruders would at least not be able to escape.

While all of this was going on, Calamity, who still can't fly due to his injury, managed to somehow climb down from the fucking roof, sneak past the gigantic mob of hellhounds, climb up to the roof of the fire station, retrieve his goddamned helmet, climb back down, sneak back through the mob of hellhounds again, and climb back onto the roof of the hospital, all without being detected or harassed by either the hellhounds outside, or the rape monsters in the hospital. Also, bear in mind that while he was doing this, he presumably would have just left Velvet lying alone, completely undefended except for her stupid pet bird, with her goddamn leg blown off.

Best case scenario, assuming he was able to pass all of his stealth checks or whatever the fuck and sneak past the hellhounds with no trouble, this act could not possibly have taken less than twenty minutes, and I feel that a safe conservative estimate would be half an hour. It's not clear how long LP and Xenith were poking around in the hospital, but I suspect about 45 minutes to 1 hour would be a reasonable estimate. So, let's say that for approximately half of the time these two were gone, Calamity was busy retrieving his stupid space-pony helmet, while the love of his life was lying defenseless (and minus one leg) on top of the roof.

Now, here's the fun part. In addition to this, he was also able to (mostly) repair the "Griffinchaser II," which you may or may not remember as the ridiculous pony-powered flying bicycle contraption that LP wants to use to escape this place. This means that, either before or after he decided to leave Velvet alone so he could retrieve his special helmet for the Enclave armor he doesn't even like wearing, he was able to fix whatever needed to be fixed on this 200 year old thingamabob that has sitting up here since time out of mind, and presumably get it into some kind of working order, all while the hellhounds were amassing outside. Incidentally, even though the hellhounds are armed with laser death cannons or "magic energy weapons," or whatever the fuck they're called, for some reason they have elected to simply surround the hospital and are not raining gunfire down upon the exposed and mostly defenseless ponies on the roof.

I've spent a lot of time shitting on kkat for writing his novel like a video game or a tabletop RPG session, but there's another angle I've neglected: even if this was a game, it would still be complete bullshit. No DM in his right mind would allow Calamity to do what he does here and get away with it. No self-respecting game dev would throw a scenario this preposterous at a player and expect them to take it seriously. I call so many shenanigans on this scene that shenanigans are going to rain down from the heavens like the firestorm that destroyed Sodom, which I assume is a city even closer to kkat's heart than San Francisco.

Anyway, where the fuck was I?

The hellhounds bark at them and demand their unconditional surrender. Calamity wonders aloud why they don't just storm the hospital, and Littlepoop tells him that he is better off not knowing, because hurr durr tentacle rape. Even though these hellhounds clearly have no intention of entering the hospital, and even though Calamity was presumably able to sneak past them without trouble earlier, and even though they now have the medical supplies they came here for and a perfectly viable means of escape, these characters all still seem to view their situation as hopeless. Naturally, kkat can't resist hamming it up as much as possible:

>He turned from the edge, picking up his helmet again and walking towards Velvet Remedy. His eyes looked older than they had the day before.
Technically, his eyes are older than they were the day before.

>“Not… your… fault,” Velvet Remedy insisted to the pegasus as he laid down next to her.
>He set down the helmet and nuzzled the charcoal unicorn. “Yes it is. Ah’m the one who got ‘is wing shot. An’ Ah’m the one who wanted t’ snipe the hellhounds. Y’all faced alla this shit t’ help me. An’ Ah ain’t gonna forget that. Not ever.”
Don't forget, you're also the one who left Velvet here to fend for herself while you ran across the street to grab your helmet that you never even had a reason to remove in the first place. But let's be fair: you've all made some pretty moronic decisions recently.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.308754
308768
453d6020d9f2d1a5fcf00e0ab4ecc359.jpg
>>308671
The Enclave was not in hiding until a decade after Fallout 1's canonic ending. The mainland US Enclave probably had 50+ locations they were utilizing, including a giant offshore oil rig specifically used to advance their Pre-War technology. Around 10-20 years before Fallout 2 (confirmed by Avellone and other story writers) the Enclave's knowledge had increased to the point that they expanded heavily upon the T-51b power armor AND X-01 armors to create the Mark 2 power armor, which is called the X-02 "Standard Infantry Power Armor". Poseidon Oil was one of the biggest tech companies Pre-War, and it focused heavily on the X-01 project which would eventually advance the X-01 prototypes (T-0X models) which fielded in tiny numbers at the end of the Atomic War, long before it was even finalized. During the time from the Atomic War up to Fallout 2 (through a few bits of content ingame and a SHITLOAD of cut content that was 100% completed, yet not implemented for reasons unknown) and in Fallout: New Vegas, we discover that the Enclave had hundreds of small sites spread across the western mainland US, most of which were offshore technology labs. Nearly all of those were set up off the coast due to the fact that they would suffered zero damage. The California Poseidon Oil Rig was utterly untouched by fallout hurrdurrgeddit, yet also featured the biggest command & control center for the entire Enclave, a massive Vertibird hangar (imagine a V-22 Osprey except not shit since it wasn't a useless sack of trash). Most uniquely, it held an armory featuring roughly 1,000 suits of X-01 power armor prototypes and experimental variants tended to hundreds of talented technicians, engineers, researchers, scientists, veteran power armor troopers that fought in China, and at least ONE confirmed AI core that was roughly ZAX level.

Failout Three fucks up and retcons Fallout 1/2/Tacics lore by stating that the Enclave's 'main base' was... somehow... with no explanation given... ....on the East Coast. Even though it's virtually IMPOSSIBLE to travel through Radioactive Tornado Alley (everywhere from far-eastern Colorado all the way to Kentucky and up into Canada) since most people that attempt such a journey DIE in the first couple hours.

Less ambiguous lore in Fallout: Tactics which is PARTIALLY not canon for numerous reasons, mostly due to being a goofy, light hearted, fun, and not intentional game since it didn't get much of anywhere? Although the BoS recruiting 'weirdoes' was confirmed as canon EXPLICITLY STATES that said gigantic radioactive tornadoes fucked all military & civil satellites. Why? Said satellites were BTFO by the massive radioactive & ionic hellscape across the world for >200 years (before the Chosen One from Fallout 2 was sent on his/her quest to retrieve a G.E.C.K.). Which means outside of LAND LINE internet connections or radio systems, no one could transmit a fucking thing. Fallout 3 hams the Enclave up as having a 'gigantic' presence on the East Coast... except for being COMPLETELY CUT OFF from the West Coast! The entire east coast is proper fucked since it's a radioactive shithole with only a few locations that are considered 'livable', even in power armor! Add to this that Mexico, South America, and Canada are deliberately stated to be so lethally radioactive that nothing can survive. No, not even the horrific radiation-loving mutated creatures that THRIVE in radiation are able to enter those regions, much less survive more than a couple minutes.

tl;dr: kkuck is the biggest nonsensical faggot outside of a certain other furfag whom tries to show themselves off as a wannabe """brony""".

>>308682
That... is some painfully retarded Aliens fanfic shit. I don't even have words.

>>308684
HORSES WOULD NOT USE KEYBOARDS, EVER! WHY WOULD HIGHLY MAGICAL-TECHNOLOGY ADVANCED SPECIES DESIGN SUCH AN INEFFICIENT, SLOW, AND ASININE SYSTEM? They HAVE 'memory orbs' and yet can't use fucking solid state biometric impulse readers?! This is even more flat out retarded than the entirety of every shitty high sci-fi tech series I've read, especially including that goycuck-lite novella series named (((Honor Harrington))), and THAT is saying a great deal. I can't even any more.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
459f912
?
No.308758
308761
1600093324293.jpg
>>308743

Anyway, since the entire party is back on the roof and the story can continue, the hellhounds decide that now would be a good time to try and destroy the foundation of the hospital. Littlepoop sums up the situation in her usual elegant style:

>Luna-eclipsing orgasms! The Goddess-damned hellhounds were taking out the fucking foundation!

Fortunately, though, Calamity was able to get the helicopter bicycle working, so they all climb on board. Or, rather, LP climbs on board and begins pedaling, and once again summons her Mary Sue levitation powers to float everyone else into the air as she pedals away to safety. The hellhounds, presumably, are too busy digging away at the foundation to think of shooting the slow-moving contraption, or the unprotected ponies levitating around it, out of the air with their laser death cannons.

Page break. The gang flies back to Maripony, where Xenith gets to work on another of her special potions. The potion will somehow augment Velvet's natural healing powers so that she can reattach her own leg, and...oh, whatever. They're using some kind of screwball zebra alchemy to take an already preposterous medical procedure and make it even more preposterous; that's basically all you need to know. Meanwhile, Littlepoop reprograms the robot she took with her, because I guess she needs it to perform surgery or something. Then, since she has nothing better to do at this point, she decides to drop into yet another memory orb.

The memory belongs to Rarity. The scene takes place in a spa, and Rarity is offering emotional support to Fluttershy, who is crying. Flutters is upset because she gave megaspells to the zebras in the hope that the war would end if both sides could obliterate each other. Presumably, that didn't work out so well. At some point, Rainbow Dash learned about this and accused Fluttershy of being a traitor, which also seems to have made her sad.

Rarity is worn out from consoling Fluttershy, so she excuses herself and goes to the restroom. While she is in there, she takes out an old photograph of the Mane 6 together and reminisces about happier days. Then, after taking a gigantic, steaming, watery shit I may have embellished this part a little she composes herself and heads back.

Sweetie Belle greets her on the way out, and informs her that Applejack has been in an accident. Presumably, she is talking about the elevator accident we witnessed earlier. It seems that AJ has since come down with a bad case of coma, and Sweetie Belle wants to know if the two of them would like to come to the hospital with her. The shock of this news causes Rarity to temporarily lose her composure and drop the framed picture of her friends that she was looking at. However, she informs her sister that yes, she and Fluttershy will come to the hospital, and Sweetie exits.

>The moment Rarity was alone again, the usually elegant unicorn swayed on the verge of fainting. As she braced herself against the sink, her eyes fell to the picture on the floor. A slight crack now ran down the glass, separating Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy from Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle.
The symbolism here is so tastefully subtle that you could bash yourself into a coma with it.

The scene ends with Rarity contacting one of her Ministry of Image subordinates and informing him that she will indeed be moving forward with some project or other, and she needs to hire a magician. Though I'm sure the author hinted at it in an earlier memory, I can't be fucked to remember which project she's talking about. I think it had something to do with zebras and magic and stuff.

There is one small thing I noticed in this memory scene that merits attention:

>Rarity felt weak from barely contained sadness, an exhaustion I knew all too well.
This indicates that Littlepoop can feel Rarity's emotions while she is viewing her memories. However, at the beginning of this very chapter, LP had this to say:

>I knew from experience that a memory orb only preserved sensations. When inside a memory orb, I saw and heard and felt, tasted and smelled, but I was not privy to the actual thoughts and emotions of the hosts whom I rode.
Here we have LP stating that the memory orbs only contain replays of sensory data, and do not include emotions or thoughts. The contradiction here is blatant, and it's now even more curious why kkat bothered to include the long soliloquy about memory that opens the chapter, since it had nothing to do with what was going on at the time anyway.

Page break.

>The trip back was a long and occasionally eventful one, but it was only in trying to look back on it afterwards that things became strange.
As usual, time and location in this story are vague. It's unclear where they are going, how long it took them to get there, and from what point in the future LP is reminiscing about the event. As far as I can tell, they are on their way back to either Tenpony or Junction R7, because those are the only two locations that would make any sense for them to return to.

Assuming I still understand their itinerary, the party still has several quests to complete before this horrible journey through this barren, lifeless wasteland can end I'm talking about our journey btw, not theirs. Red Eye wants them to kill the Goddess, the Goddess wants them to investigate Red Eye's warehouse, and there is still the little matter of the spell bomb that is hidden somewhere inside Tenpony Tower. Despite our having traversed enough words between LP's encounter with Red Eye and the present to comprise an entire short novel, the group's progress on all three of those missions so far is exactly 0%.

Anyway, Calamity's wing seems to be basically okay, and since we haven't been told otherwise, I'm assuming he's pulling them in the Sky Wagon again. Velvet has her reattached leg in a cast, and apart from being tired seems none the worse for wear. Meanwhile, LP's taint troubles are still itching her.
Anonymous
525bab2
?
No.308760
308768
>>308743
>Calamity, who still can't fly due to his injury, managed to somehow climb down from the fucking roof, sneak past the gigantic mob of hellhounds, climb up to the roof of the fire station, retrieve his goddamned helmet, climb back down, sneak back through the mob of hellhounds again, and climb back onto the roof of the hospital, all without being detected or harassed by either the hellhounds outside, or the rape monsters in the hospital.
Isn't there some kind of cloud thing the group used to fly from the fire station roof to the hospital that Calamity could use? Seems like he could just fly across that way.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
459f912
?
No.308761
308808
1621340952872.gif
>>308758

The ending to this microscene is rather bizarre:

>Thankfully, Velvet Remedy turned her spotlight on Xenith. “Yesterday when that siren went off, were you hearing it just in your ears?” Velvet Remedy asked.
>The zebra gave her an odd look. I didn’t blame her, finding the question equally strange until I heard Xenith’s answer: “How else would I be hearing that dreadful noise?” She seemed to consider, “I have felt sounds before, low vibrating rumbles, but this was no such sound.”
>Velvet Remedy nodded and looked to the rest of us. It took me a moment, but when the realization hit me, it seemed so obvious that…
Littlepoop seems to get it eventually, but she doesn't seem to want to let us in on whatever it is just yet. I honestly have no idea what she's trying to imply here. It's never really been explained how Velvet figured out that she could manipulate the hellhounds with sound frequencies, and it seems that whatever she knows about this extends to zebras as well. I'm hoping the author plans to fill us in on this eventually, and this isn't just another situation where he assumes we're following his insane autistic reasoning.

Anyway, the subchapter ends awkwardly, with a trailing ellipsis...

Then a Page break

...then the next scene begins with another ellipsis. However, out of literally fucking nowhere, they are in the middle of a fight against a bunch of zombies. No, really, this is happening:

>…I was looking down the scope of Little Macintosh as the zombie-pony came into view. A slight squeeze of the trigger and Little Macintosh roared. The creature’s head exploded.
>I turned, checking for any more of the flesh-eating zombies, but my E.F.S. compass was clean of red. I floated my weapon away, feeling a pang. It was tragic and terrible that these zombies were once living ponies who had become trapped, imprisoned in decaying bodies and minds, slowly tortured by the rotting insanity that turned them into mindless monsters bent on devouring other ponies. Yet part of me remembered all too horrifically that there were even worse fates.
Soooo....wait. Are they still on the Sky Bandit? Is this a flashback? Did the author just randomly skip a huge block of time again? I'm so confused. Maybe the next paragraph will clear things up a little.

>I turned back to eating my soup. The others were settling back down to dinner as well. Twilight was fading. The ruins of the old power substation loomed about us.
At this point I'm beginning to think kkat is doing this intentionally to confuse me. Either that or he just assumes that no one is even reading anymore, and he's just mashing his keyboard with his palms now.

Anyway, I guess they are suddenly eating dinner, which I guess was suddenly interrupted by zombies. I hate it when that happens. They appear to be at a power substation, because that's a place to be I guess.

>We had chosen it because the crumbling walls would shield the light of our cookfire. Calamity had wanted to push the rest of the way to Manehattan, but yielded to our persuasions.
So now they're going back to Manehattan? Wait a minute, is that where Tenpony Tower is? I'm really having a hard time keeping track of all this shit, but I think the answer is yes. So, presumably, the situation here is that they were flying on the Sky Bandit, decided to land at a power substation for dinner, and then some zombies showed up and attacked them. That's...as good an explanation as any I suppose. I'll let you guys know if I learn anything else.

Next, a traveling merchant suddenly shows up out of nowhere. She is initially frightened by how heavily-armed the party is, but she agrees to join them for soup when she sees that they don't intend to rob her. Apparently she has a pet bear, who travels with her for protection.

Nothing really happens here, but apparently Calamity managed to scavenge a bunch of extra weapons from Old Olneigh at some point between fixing the bicycle-copter and sneaking through a literal army of hellhounds to get his helmet back. I'm beginning to wonder if Calamity is going to turn out to have some kind of time-freezing ability; it wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing this author has thrown at us, and it's pretty much the only plausible explanation for how he managed to do any of this.

Anyway, the characters rib each other about their kleptomaniacal habits, and then, for no obvious reason, Littlepoop announces that she wants to return to Shattered Hoof and talk to Gawd. Yay, just what this story needed: another pointless detour.

Page break. The author does the same kind of goofy scene transition again:

>I found myself smiling at that. A thought struck me. “Hey, Calamity, could we take a swing by Shattered Hoof on our way? I want to talk to Gawd…”

>*** *** ***

>…I frowned as Velvet Remedy once more submersed herself in the original Fluttershy Orb.

This author already has a problem with jarring and confusing scene transitions; I've complained more than once about the way he will just randomly skip huge blocks of time or drop the party into the middle of a confusing situation without any explanation. However, with this new technique, he's somehow managed to take an already bad habit and make it even worse. Seriously, unless Littlepoop dropped acid somewhere and he wants to show that she's tripping balls or something, this is a really, really bad stylistic choice.

Anyway, I guess LP is concerned about Velvet going into the Fluttershy orb or something; I don't know. I'm having a hard time following what the hell is going on, honestly. The author seems to be gradually building towards some kind of big revelation about Fluttershy that I guess is going to disturb Velvet or something; either that or Velvet is supposed to be slowly going crazy from the orb. I'm not sure which yet.

In any case, they are now back on the Sky Bandit and are nearing Shattered Hoof. LP blathers nonsensically to herself about memory orbs for awhile, and then Blackwing flies out to greet them.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
eb4640c
?
No.308768
308771 308832 308993
tenor.gif
>>308720
>I rewatched Legend Of The Seeker, in preparation for trying the books for the first time.
From what I remember, Legend of the Seeker bears very little resemblance to the books. Sam Raimi basically just took the characters and the locations and the basic story and turned it into another Hercules/Xena type show. As I remember it's not necessarily a bad show in its own right, but it has very little to do with Goodkind's novels, and it doesn't even attempt to cover any of the Objectivist stuff.

>I don't know what "Objectivist themes" are but if communists hate them they must be good.
Objectivism is Ayn Rand's philosophy, Terry Goodkind was heavily influenced by her and it shows in his books. I was more into it a few years ago when I was more of an ancap-libertarian, but I feel like I've sort of outgrown it at this point. It does a good job of explaining why Communism is evil/dysfunctional, and maintains that the pursuit of self-interest against the interest of others is morally justified, which I agree with. The problem I have with it is that it still deals with the world in purely materialist terms, and places human rationality above everything.

I actually like Goodkind's take on Objectivism a little better than Rand's, and his stories are more enjoyable as well. What's interesting about him is that at times he brushes up against Traditionalist themes as well, particularly in regards to heroism, though I think for the most part he was pretty boxed in by Rand's ideas.

I'll warn you that his books can be something of a time commitment; there are I think 13 books in the Sword of Truth series, he doesn't actually get to the main plot until I think the third book, and all the books are fairly long. If you've been paying attention to my threads you might also notice that he does a lot of the same things I yell at fanfiction authors for doing: he tends to lecture the reader, he veers off topic quite a bit, his characters often sound like they're reading prepared speeches, and his emotional interactions can sometimes feel cheesy or forced, or like he's trying to emotionally manipulate the reader. He was also mostly making the story up as he went, and it shows; he kept sort of haphazardly adding things to his universe with each book, and sometimes he creates contradictions that he has to clumsily retcon.

However, overall, I think he's a very good read, and the philosophical content of his books more than makes up for his occasional inelegance as a writer. He makes a lot of incisive observations about morality, particularly as regards Communism and other collectivist ideas. He has some interesting things to say about organized religion as well.

If you begin tackling the books and decide you don't like them, at least keep going until Faith of the Fallen, which I believe is book five. It's still one of the most inspiring novels I've ever read.

>>308699
Huh. Yeah, I see exactly what he was trying to do with that scene now. The two buildings were sort of falling into each other. As is usual for this story, the geography in that scene was poorly described, and I don't remember if the two buildings in question were the hospital and the fire station or the fire station and something else, but if it was the former it might explain how Calamity was able to move about a little easier.

>>308683
See pic.

>>308754
The longer I stare at that image the more "wat" I see. I'm going to save this for...uh...research.

>>308760
That might actually be what kkat had in mind, tbh I'd forgotten all about that thing. I think I was imagining it as sort of a single-use device, like the cloud floats you from point A to point B, but as soon as you get off of it, it poofs out of existence. I still call shenanigans overall, since the hellhounds would still be able to see him floating back and forth across the street and would logically shoot at him, and if he reached the opposite roof while they were still swarming the tower he would have logically had to fight at least a few of them.

Mostly though, I just don't see what the point of the whole excursion was. There was no practical reason for Calamity to even remove his helmet in the first place, so I can only assume that the author had him do it because he wanted him to be handicapped by his inability to use his power armor in the next scene. However, it also necessitates his having to make a special trip across the street just to retrieve the stupid thing, since presumably the author still wants him to be able to use the armor later. It's just a clumsy way to set something up; you have to make this character go out of his way to drop something he has no reason to drop, then have him go out of his way to retrieve it later.
Anonymous
3b563fa
?
No.308771
308988
4e357b9ef7ec0354d3588ffa388da894.jpg
8b4bebf0c71b7abd12d164cc0bbefc45.jpg
a968bf92ba48c8d1d7faf6d3f66f3aed.jpg
0b2ae76d04df3bfcf9e3ece3d5a4de8d.jpg
2a2ef8f991bfc6575998664431d6ca19.jpg
>>308768
>If you begin tackling the books and decide you don't like them, at least keep going until Faith of the Fallen, which I believe is book five. It's still one of the most inspiring novels I've ever read.
I disagree. If you don't like a story, then you can drop it at anytime you like.
Can't he just skip the other books, in that case, and move on to the fifth?

>Pics
I discovered that the artist who drew the images that I've been posting here also makes gay stallion porn pics and likes communism. These are his images. I thought the last two were comical since, iirc the communists of the past viewed faggotry as something vile that the bourgeoisies engaged in and the OC with the watermelon kinda looks like Penstroke's.
His FOE art is bretty gud tho, imo. Sad 'bout his aids.

Anonymous
3b563fa
?
No.308772
308773
Fuck. That second image might be a spoiler. But then again, maybe not.
Would you believe me if I were to tell you, Glimmer Glammery, that the hero of this story fights one of the villains at one point?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308773
>>308772
That's just the boxcar alicorn from forever ago. Not much of a spoiler.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
d88d9ea
?
No.308808
308814 308818
8FBDB9FC7BE78935431FFDF45174D5B4-875778.jpg
>>308761

Page break. As far as I can tell, this trailing ellipsis business is here to stay, because kkat just did it again. I'm actually beginning to wonder if Littlepoop wasn't dosed with something, or if she's going insane, or something like that, because the transition here is so random and so jarring that not even kkat could have failed to notice how random and jarring it is.

The way the scene opens up seems to suggest something like this. The previous scene ended with Blackwing and the other griffons flying out to meet the party near Shattered Hoof. Littlepoop tells Blackwing that she has a proposition for her, and then the scene ends with a trailing ellipsis. When the next scene opens (again with an ellipsis), LP awakens in Dr. Helpinghoof's office. You may recall that Dr. Helpinghoof is the rehab specialist that treated Littlepoop for her mint problem.

Two things have happened to Littlepoop in the last few scenes that might have triggered some kind of delirium: she was stung by some kind of taint-monster in the desert, and then later while searching the hospital for supplies, she found another tin of crack mints which she took with her on impulse. Though we have not actually seen her eat any of the mints, it's entirely possible that she popped a couple of them at some point, then went overboard with them, and is now coked out of her mind. The other possibility is that exposure to taint has altered her mental state somehow. Either of these might explain why the narrative is skipping around so much and we're getting these weird ellipsis-transitions between scenes; however, since this is FoE, we must also consider a third possibility: kkat is just a shitty writer and he legitimately sees no problem with these sporadic, jarring scene transitions.

Anyway, we won't find out what's really going on until we read further, so we may as well keep going. Littlepoop suddenly wakes up in Dr. Helpinghoof's office, and does not seem particularly surprised to find herself there. Velvet Remedy limps in and starts chewing her out:

>“I can’t believe you!” she nearly shouted. “After everything we’ve been through! You used them again!?”
This at least confirms that LP has once again been riding the Altoids, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

>“I had to,” I said evenly. “It was the only way.” The only way to make sure Red Eye listened. “But it was just a one-time thing, and I sought treatment immediately.” I leveled a gaze at her. “On my own, I could point out.”
So...she came here voluntarily? I guess? Is that what we're supposed to take away from this? Also, what was that bit about Red Eye?

What's confusing here is that, as far as I can recall, Dr. Helpinghoof's office is in Tenpony Tower. Since they were on their way to Shattered Hoof at the end of the last scene, this means that the story just skipped over a massive chunk of time. Between the {...} at the end of the last scene and the {...} at the beginning of the current one, LP has traveled to Shattered Hoof, spoken with Gawd about whatever she wanted to talk to her about, and then traveled back to Tenpony. At some point along the way, she apparently also got all tore-up on crystal meth Tic Tacs, and apparently wound up high enough that she felt a special trip here was in order.

I feel like this ought to be such a common-sense concept that I shouldn't even have to spell it out, but here it is anyway: you can't skip over this many significant events between scenes and expect the reader to just roll with it. The jump between these two scenes was random and sudden enough that the only explanation for it is that Littlepoop is losing her mind for some reason, and can no longer be considered a reliable narrator to the extent that she could ever be considered a reliable narrator to begin with. If this is the case, then I'm willing to grant kkat some leeway here; however, if she is supposed to be lucid and this is just bad writing, then I'm afraid I'm running out of alternate dimensions to bitch-slap kkat's fake tits into.

Anyway, LP and Velvet argue about drugs for a bit. Velvet demands to check LP's saddlebags to see if she's still holding, and to LP's relief does not find anything. Meanwhile, this small passage might provide a clue as to what's going on:

>I prayed that my addiction and the little pony in my head hadn’t somehow played tricks with my memory. I was going to be doing too much of that on my own.
This seems to support the theory that LP's mental state is somehow degrading, and her version of events should not necessarily be trusted.

Velvet scolds her for a bit longer, and then turns her attention to one of the clinic's nurses. She asks if "it" is going to hurt. The nurse assures her that "it" will not. It would appear that LP is about to undergo some kind of procedure, but the author leaves us in the dark as to its nature. The scene closes with this cheesy zinger:

>As we walked away, I heard Velvet Remedy moan, “You’re going to destroy yourself trying to save the entire wasteland, Littlepip...”

Page break. The author does his now-familiar ellipsis-transition again, and LP awakens in an unfamiliar location. She is strapped into a chair looking up at a mirrored ceiling. We get a few more clues about her mental state:

>The last thing I remembered was being in Helpinghoof’s clinic. I seemed to recall that I had been treated for PTM use, and voluntarily at that.
>But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember actually taking one.
>Or, for that matter, I didn’t remember volunteering for treatment, although I could remember acting as if I had once it was over.
Incidentally, this last sentence should either read "Nor did I remember volunteering for treatment" or "Also, I didn't remember volunteering for treatment." The way it's presently written is grammatically incorrect and reads awkwardly.

In any case, it would seem that LP is indeed losing her mind, or was drugged, or both.
Anonymous
5849ecd
?
No.308814
308988
>>308808
It's funny. If Kkat had been a better writer, probably the first thing that'd pop-up in our heads would be that LP is an unreliable narrator. This entire story is, according to the begining, told by her.
Though, it's funny to imagine sitting on the opposite side of a campfire as she spins the tale of her life. Then, all of a sudden, she goes quiet in the middle of telling it and then jumps far ahead. You'd think she'd explain to whomever she is talking to that there's a gap in her memory, when it first comes up. What a drama queen;P
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6b8ea7b
?
No.308818
308820
1621404466862.jpg
>>308808

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have finally received confirmation that the surreal time skips over the last few scenes were intentional and not just kkat being a faggot:

>A deep, alien terror started to envelop me as I tried to retrace my actions, only to find my memories of even the flight back to be piecemeal at best. Ever since leaving Maripony, my sense of time had become swiss cheese. But the scattered moments I did remember didn’t leave me with the impression that I had been losing time.
"Swiss" should be capitalized. Also: how would LP know where Switzerland is?

The bad news is that the explanation for why the skips were occurring turns out to be somewhat mundane:

A male unicorn, who appears to be the nurse from the clinic in the previous scene, suddenly appears and tells her not to panic. Then, Homage steps out from somewhere and also attempts to provide reassurance. She gives her a hug, and then introduces the nurse as Life Bloom. It appears that Life Bloom has been selling spells to Velvet Remedy (I'm not sure when that was mentioned, but the author seems to treat Velvet's having bought spells from somepony as information that we should already know), and that he is also a member of the secret society that runs Tenpony.

We learn that Life Bloom is some kind of magic savant who has somehow mastered the memory-extraction spell that ponies 200 years ago used to create memory orbs. He hands LP a box of orbs and tells her that they are her own memories from the last few days. There is also a note in the box, which LP appears to have written to herself, telling her which orb is which, and which ones are important. It also contains a rather cryptic instruction to not view any of the orbs until after she returns to Maripony with the "black book."

Homage then takes the box away from her and locks it in her personal safe. She asks her what she plans to do next.

>I shook my head, completely at a loss. I felt untethered. Adrift. I didn’t know what my plans were. What I was supposed to be doing next.
How is this any different from the way she usually feels?

Anyway, since she doesn't have a proper answer to Homage's question, she decides that the sensible thing to do is to take a few days off:

>I hated the idea of spending another day on myself when there were ponies in the Equestrian Wasteland suffering and dying because I wasn’t there to help them. But this wasn’t time spent for me. This was for my friends. And I couldn’t do anything without them. I needed them, now more than ever.
It's really a shame that Life Bloom couldn't have found a way to extract her narcissism and false humility while he was rooting around in there. He could have then put it into an orb, and locked the orb in a box, and dropped the box down a crack in the rocks, and filled the crack in with cement, and built a Denny's on top of it. And then dislodged the entire acre of land that the Denny's sat on from the earth itself, and attached rocket boosters to the bottom of the earth fragment, and launched it into the cold depths of outer space. And then fired missiles at it.

The scene ends with some more revolting banter about orgasms.

Page break. We are once again dumped unceremoniously into a memory orb, though it's a little easier to place in context now since the memory in question belongs to Littlepoop herself. It appears she decided to partially disregard her own instructions and view the "table of contents" orb. Also, since the last time we saw these orbs they were being locked away in Homage's safe, I'm assuming she must have plied her safe-cracking skills on her little girlfriend. It will be interesting to see if there are any consequences for this. Actually, I'm assuming any consequences will be more disgusting than interesting, since any talk of such things between these two usually involves several paragraphs of cringey banter about spankings and bondage.

>“If you are not me, then these memories are not for you,” I felt myself say with what was actually my own mouth. This was supremely weird; I was riding me.
I could probably make a low-brow joke here if I wanted to, but I'll admit this is actually kind of an interesting idea. Being able to relive your own memories by stepping "inside" yourself and seeing a playback of the event would admittedly be a pretty weird experience.

>“Please do not watch any more of them, and return them immediately to DJ Pon3 or his assistant at Tenpony Tower.”
"Oh yeah, and if you're one of the thousands of enemies I've made during my bloody month-long killing spree across the wasteland, please kindly return these orbs to my friend, and don't use the information you could learn from them to harm me or my loved ones in any way. Thanks."

>That deep itching was gone. I had stood in front of this mirror, saying these things, after Life Bloom had used the Taint Purge spell on me.
Again, I could probably make a low-brow joke here about Littlepoop getting her itchy taint purged, but I think it would be more constructive to point out how totally lame it is that kkat went to all the trouble of introducing this taint business but never did anything interesting with it.

Protip: if you're going to have something happen to a character, make sure there's a reason for it. I don't mean just a basic cause/effect relationship, I mean try to make events like this significant to the overall story, not just things that happen to the character on her way from point A to point B. Nearly all the injuries in this story have been like this: Xenith kicks LP in the ribs, LP gets a punctured lung, she walks around like that for awhile, and then she heals it somehow. Velvet gets her leg blown off, she cries about it, LP goes and rustles up a bunch of silly potions and robo-surgeons and whatnot for her, and then a couple scenes later she's fine again. What's the point of any of this?

I'm running out of space, I will continue this thought in a new post.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6b8ea7b
?
No.308820
308821 308824 309035
1621405193801.png
>>308818

Earlier, LP got hit with Taint. All through the subsequent scenes, we kept hearing about how she was itching from it must... focus... on... serious... analysis... must... not... make... itchy.... taint... joke. Her attention is never focused on it, but she's aware of it ...hnnnng..., and we are periodically reminded of it. Usually, this is used as a means of foreshadowing something that's going to happen later: we basically know what Taint is and what it does, but its effects seem to vary depending on the individual and on how much of it they were hit with. So, we don't know exactly what it's going to do to Littlepoop, but we can imagine that whatever it is won't be pretty. Is she going to go crazy and murder her friends? Maybe turn into a bat or a giant hamster or something? Will it transform her into some kind of eviler version of herself? We don't know. Maybe the Taint gives her superpowers, but it also transforms her personality, and she changes into some weird combination of Red Eye and the Goddess. Maybe her dream of "saving" the wasteland gets twisted into some kind of megalomaniacal quest like it did with Red Eye, and her friends have to take her down in order to save her from herself.

Any one of these ideas would have made for an interesting storyline, and generally that's why you would introduce something like this. If your character gets sprayed in the taint in one scene, and then we periodically hear about how itchy she is throughout subsequent scenes dammit, couldn't resist, and then suddenly she starts losing large fragments of time and waking up in strange places, most of us are going to assume that you're fucking going somewhere with it. To go to all that trouble of setting up what could potentially be the first interesting storyline you've ever written, and then just suddenly yanking the rug out from under us and saying "oh yeah, she went and saw some doctor and he had a spell that could cure her troubled taint and she's fine now," is a pretty shit move. To yank the rug on us now, after forcing us to slog through approximately 400,000 words of mind-numbing ridiculousness with another 200,000 to go, is borderline sadism.

At this point, you have pretty much ensured that the only people still reading your novel are masochists like me, who are willing to wade through the most abominable dreck imaginable just so they can make gay jokes about you, and the kind of brainless retards who, for reasons I will never comprehend, seem to unironically enjoy literary diarrhea like this.

I'm pointing all of this out because I see fanfiction authors do it all the time. Nearly every author we've looked at has done this to varying degrees at one point or another (I've even done it myself at times). It tends to be a byproduct of off-the-cuff writing, because this is the way a human will naturally tell a story if they haven't thought it through in advance: first X happened, then Y happened, then Z happened. This is how real life tends to play out most of the time, which is why a person will naturally default to telling stories linearly like this, but in order for a story to be entertaining, X Y and Z usually need to be connected somehow. Otherwise you're just randomly stringing events together and the story meanders. You might be able to get away with it in a relatively short story, or if you're going for comedy or a tall tale randomness can sometimes work to your advantage. However, if you're trying to do a 600,000 some-odd word epic and all you're doing is stringing disconnected events together first X and then Y and then Z and then the entire rest of the alphabet, usually whoever is reading or editing, or critiquing is going to have a gun to their head by around the 40,000 word mark. And just for a point of reference, in FoE that would take us to about Chapter 7.

Anyway, moving on.

>“Now, assuming I am me… and this is supremely weird. And I thought writing the note felt bizarre…” I paused, apparently re-gathering my train of thought. Did I usually ramble like this?
Yes, you do. Also, it's worth noting that kkat at least seems to be going somewhere with LP's memory loss. Whatever she did that she doesn't want herself to remember, it seems to be a high-stakes gamble that could potentially cause her to...lose herself. I guess. God, I hope he actually is going somewhere with this. Lucy, if you don't hold that goddamn football still I am going to punt you right in your itchy taint.

There is now a bit of silliness where the LP in the memory orb realizes that future LP (known to us as present-day LP) will probably disobey her own instructions and watch the orbs before the note she's going to write says she can. She proceeds to chastise her future self for probably doing the things that she is going to tell herself not to do, because apparently she can't make herself do shit. Following all of this still? Good.

Anyway, she eventually gets to the bloody point. She apparently has a plan for dealing with the Goddess, but she doesn't want herself to know it, because the Goddess can read her mind if she gets too close to her. So, she thought up the plan, told everyone involved what they need to do (without telling them anything about the overall objective), and then had Floof Pickle or whatever that nurse's name was extract her memory, put it into these orbs, and then erase it so the Goddess can't read her mind.

I could probably nitpick a few things here, like for instance that LP now knows that she erased her own memory to trick the Goddess, which means the Goddess will at least be able to figure that much out from reading her mind, and will be on guard when they meet again, but I'm willing to let it slide. These "I have a plan but it's super sekrit" arcs are always fun, and is the first time this author has tried to do anything even remotely clever. I'm curious to see where it goes.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.308821
308823 308830
>>308820
Assuming all that memory orb shit (make urself forget so ebil mind reader will be thwarted) isnt in Fallout, that sounds like it was pulled straight from Code Geass
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308823
>>308821
That's likely where Kkat got it from but the Memory Gambit(TM tvtropes) is one of the oldest story ideas ever.
Surely, since this is supposed to be LP recapping her whole life to a stranger, the future-her telling this story wouldn't bother skipping scenes present-her doesn't presently remember thanks to the scheming of past-her. It would likely improve the story if Kkat actually had to figure out how to justify the monumental nigger moment of pure unrefined bullshit coming in hot. This clumsy lazy cliche attempt at creating intrigue by skipping a chunk of text and then dangling it in front of the audience's face is solely done so the author won't have to describe the bullshit stages of LP's plan. I won't spoil it amd I hope nobody else spoils it but when we get to the peak bullshit moment, remember how the story presented LP's amnesia here. She made her offscreen preparations for this plan offscreen and we are not told what the plan is until after the incredibly dumb plan happens because this illusion makes the plan seem cleverer and more mysterious than it actually is.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308824
>>308820
>Any one of these ideas would have made for an interesting storyline, and generally that's why you would introduce something like this. If your character gets sprayed in the taint in one scene, and then we periodically hear about how itchy she is throughout subsequent scenes dammit, couldn't resist, and then suddenly she starts losing large fragments of time and waking up in strange places, most of us are going to assume that you're fucking going somewhere with it. To go to all that trouble of setting up what could potentially be the first interesting storyline you've ever written, and then just suddenly yanking the rug out from under us and saying "oh yeah, she went and saw some doctor and he had a spell that could cure her troubled taint and she's fine now," is a pretty shit move. To yank the rug on us now, after forcing us to slog through approximately 400,000 words of mind-numbing ridiculousness with another 200,000 to go, is borderline sadism.
With the benefit of hindsight, all I'll say is that the taint thing does end up going somewhere. Not somewhere particularly interesting - in fact the outcome ought to be fairly predictable at this point - but at the very least it's not just a throwaway. She mutates alicorn powers, specifically their regeneration and lengthened lifespan. This has no downsides whatsoever but does, of course, lead to navel-gazing and angst about how she's "no longer a pony". It's mostly an excuse to have her survive even more inane near-death experiences.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.308830
>>308821
Yeah it's not in Fallout.

Memory Orbs, or as I call them, Exposition Spheres, are made to be ponified analogues to the Fallout idea of holotapes, which are meant to be recordings of events related to lore. This version just has you experience the event beforehand instead of listening to or reading about it. It's much more clever and interesting as a concept, and can be played around with as shown in the story, but it comes at the cost of abruptly stopping the story to dump a mass amount of exposition and scenes from what is basically another story into the midst of the current plot.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.308832
1262239.png
>>308768
You're welcome!
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308872
308970 308990
Perhaps this story would be improved if chasing Velvet Remedy remained LP's goal but Velvet became a rival, an alternate second protagonist whose wishy-washy peace-loving bullshit made things worse for everyone she encountered while LP hunted her down and solved problems intelligently and practically, sometimes using smart deals where everyone benefits and only using force when necessary. But over time, Velvet compromises on her ideals more and more while LP loses her love for Velvet a little more every time she walks through the aftermath of one of Velvet's attempts at "helping". Eventually, Velvet ends up working for Red Eye and the slavers because she's lost all her ideals and just wants an end to the fighting. Or better yet she ends up working for the Alicorns because they seduced her into thinking their Raider-brained edgy-coloured edgy-named piss-drinking Trixie-worshipping faggot army is the best hope for the Wasteland, and the Alicorns turn Velvet into a superpowered Alicorn (maybe an experimental evolved hyper-alicorn? An Ascended Alicorn, or Ascendicorn if you will) so the final battle between LP and Velvet can look sicker. No matter what evil faction Velvet ends up in their final battle must be emotionally significant to the characters involved and onlookers like the best battles from My Hero Academia. Like when Deku fought Muscleman in front of whatshisname to prove you can believe in heroes. Without that depth it would just be Deku punching an asshole.

By taking LP's initial goal of "find Velvet" and tying it to the factions trying to take over the Wasteland, LP is absolutely forced to get involved in battles for the Wasteland's fate in meaningful ways. It neatly divides the story into the part where everything is about Velvet and the part where everything is about the Wasteland as a character in its own right and the baddies and goodies fighting over it. Also LP can morally grow from "I need to get Velvet and drag that bitch kicking and screaming so I can go home and sleep in my old bed and take a shit in a nice bathroom and take a real shower and never have to gun Raiders down over tins of beans again" into "I must save Velvet for her sake" into "I must save this Wasteland".

LP's sueness would seem less retarded if she got her semi-Alicorn evolution earlier on AND it made her look so fucking weird that many NPCs hated her or wanted nothing to do with her. This could add story depth by not making absolutely fucking everyone love Littlepip within seconds of meeting her. Her absurd telekinesis needs an excuse and as long as her alicorn wings turned out crippled and useless she wouldn't gain anything from the transformation and what she loses (a normal appearance) could enhance any subplot about racism and judging others the faggot author wants to do. It could even make Homage seem nicer for not finding LP's Halficorn appearance disturbing.

This evolution for LP could make her seem less retarded and egotistical when she talks about how only she can be the hero and she's probably letting poners die by taking a break from Wastelanding to gobble coochie with her lesbain butt-buddy. And it would give her a better reason to fear turning into a monster. And it would give the villains better reasons for wanting to manipulate her against their enemies even if it means letting the heroes get away with failed assassination attempts.

Also that part near the start where LP wears Raider clothes and then gets shot for it and then never wears it again was retarded. If LP gradually wore more raiderish clothing it could symbolically represent her "losing her morality uwu". And it's hypocritical for LP to get shot for wearing Raider clothes when Velvet is running around wearing Zigger military gear from before the war when she's not wearing armoured dresses.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308877
308878 308879 308883 308970 308990
As for the irritating lack of difficulty LP faces, Kkat's faggot goomer consoomer brain could understand hardcore difficulty better if he ever touched Hideous Destructor, the doom mod that makes things agonizingly realistic.

You no longer run at 30mph. Demons are deadly now, fireballs can curve around corners and enemy zombie marines can snipe you. Weapons and ammo have weight. Backpacks have their own separate inventories.
Damage causes injuries that will lower your HP and shake your scope and leave you bleeding out. You must remove all your armour and your backpack and equip the medkit and use it to heal you, but you're fucked if your medkit is in your backpack. If you're on fire you need to flee and shake and strip and find water.
Ammo is scarce and scavenged from enemies, some foes use bullets for guns you lack. Some magazines for UAC rifles have DRM so you can't reuse them, but you can force them in anyway only for this to give you a "fuck you - management" message and fuck up your Bullets Remaining counter.
The more heavy shit you carry, the slower you run and the less stamina you have for sprinting, and sprinting under a heavy load fucks up your heart rate which fucks up your gun aim. You can't equip all guns ever and there are named weapon loadouts that give you different guns at the start.
And speaking of magazines, magazines are tracked individually, the mod includes a Magazine Manager for a reason. You must find moments to individually autistically manage the bullets within your magazines to avoid equipping a partially or mostly empty mag during combat or having more bullets than magazines.
Those big pink fuckers can fake their own deaths and flee invisibly.
Exploding Barrels now also release Hell Energy which revives nearby dead demons. Mimics can disguise themselves as exploding barrels and shoot you when you're not paying attention. Pick a weaker Loadout Class and you might get grenade traps. Or a HERP or DERP turret, one is a stationary autofiring gun turret and the other is a moving gun drone but both have very limited ammo.
At this rate I'm surprised there isn't a Sanity Meter where taking damage and looking at enemy corpses gives you more Stress Points which hurts your heart rate and stamina and aiming stability even more while sanity can only be restored with drugs or consumable heavy luxury items or repeatedly kicking dead monster corpses and losing too much sanity forces you to do retarded shit mid-combat like stripping naked and going melee-only.
These painful changes will force players to move slowly and peek around corners and carefully avoid taking damage from any of the countless OP upgraded enemies. Every action in this hellish experience matters and must be thought through. You're no chosen one here, just a soldier literally and metaphorically going through hell.
This mod is cock and ball torture taken as a suppository and if anyone needs to go through this transformative experience of personal growth that purges weakness from the easy-mode gaymer soul it is Kkat.
Anonymous
fd18b92
?
No.308878
>>308877
Why can't you stop? I'm trying to let bygones be bygones here, and I will admit that I have taken thing too far at times but you have to meet me half-way.
Anonymous
fd18b92
?
No.308879
308880
>>308877
Btw, not to be like that, but that game sound tedious af. If everything you use is weak and sucks, then what? Is there any strategy left to use? If barrels brings back demons you already killed, then what is the point of baiting a group of enemies next to an exploding barrel? You kill a group and you revive a group in one move, and the problem remains it seems.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308880
308881 308883
>>308879
Whoops, sorry for going overboard with the game explanation.
This story should treat getting injuries and having injuries and the act of curing injuries with more seriousness than "I ignored the broken lungs and hole in my wing and missing limb until I decided to cure it by using one healing item or murderhobod for a bit until I found a healing item of sufficient strength". Treating these injuries and treating the treating of injuries as severely as they are treated in that game would help make all fights feel like tense struggles for survival instead of dull forgone conclusions. It would also give LP and pals a great reason to avoid combat.
We all know LP and pals can't die 300k words into a 600k story but they could get horribly injured in a way that permanently (or at the very least until they find a healing item of sufficient strength) hurts the character and their capabilities at any point.
Just imagine Littlepoop getting horribly injured on her way to save a town because she was too arrogant and overconfident, taking a detour to find healing items, using them with Velvet in a long and agonizing medical scene full of body horror where LP passes out from pain, waking up in a bed, and being sad when she's told that town she wanted to save was razed to the ground. LP could grow from the experience.
Or Calamity could get an injured wing and feel bad about his inability to fly for ages, questioning his life choices and if he's useless or not now.
or if the author feels like padding this story with more filler, LP could get her horn injured to remove her unbearably overpowered telekinesis and require a lengthy journey to find the last functional Auto-Doc medical robot in the Wasteland.
Or if the author wants to make LP seem heroic and hardcore she could get her horn injured and keep powering on even as the lack of magic cripples her ability to do basic shit without the help of her friends.

Off topic comment on the mod: The mod is intentionally trying to be a painful hardcore milsim experience with fall damage and everything. "the dark souls of doom" without the jank hitboxes and poorly explained systems like poise. if you don't like the resurecting hell barrels you're going to loathe the Archviles that can set you on fire instantly after seeing you for long enough and raise dead enemies from the dead. A mod didn't add them, they're canon to Doom. fanmade levels love getting creative with them, it's great to release them into rooms full of enemies the player was forced to kill or put one untouchable archvile into a level and make going through hell to kill it the focus of the level.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.308881
308883
>>308880
>sorry for
No, you're not. You've been conditioned to apologize in the face of a well intentioned rebuke, cuz 'if you say you're sorry its okay' and you're off the hook. Its not okay, and you're not off the hook. At least have some dignity and admit that you cant control yourself unless beleaguered to the point of having no recourse.
Please try to show consideration for non-adversaries BEFORE being called out for being inconsiderate. Ot will do you AND those you encounter some good.
[-]In addition[/-] fuck it
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.308883
>>308881
>>308877
>>308880
An apology contains multiple parts. Each part is vital, if at times merely implied (depending on severity and if it's the first time), yet action must always occur. Technically the prestep is considering if you should apologize
What and Who has been violated? Correctly identifying is a massive component. Keep in mind this can include non-physical things such as promises.
How one will prevent such a violation from happening again.
Asking how to make amends.
The enacting the amending actions.

This is saying you'll under go a change big or small, and associated repairing actions if they can be done.
It's not easy, and it may be painful if undergone. But such actions build character in a positive way.
But seriously identifying where things have been broken and why is important.
>>308877
>This mod is cock and ball torture taken as a suppository and if anyone needs to go through this transformative experience of personal growth that purges weakness from the easy-mode gaymer soul it is Kkat.
No, that's self flagellation for 'teh raelism'. It won't purge weakness if it was that easy for change to the foundational level military would use it for everything constantly.

>Whoops, sorry for going overboard with the game explanation.
>Off topic comment on the mod:

That's not alright. Yes it is objectively and technically counts as an interesting game fact, but in the current context (context is everything) the promises have been broken, and then sodomized again immediately after. Your vows, promises, and words are losing value.
Your actions over time have been lacking. Social bonds and words mean something important to people with morals. It builds the fundamental layers of trust and good society.
Without even this task how can anyone trust you with anything?
That sounds harsh because it is harsh.
Shit has been rough, and you've been delt a crapsack of a hand. That makes this holistic practice now all the more important for you on a personal level because (((they))) stole that from you.

Do what you want
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308890
308892 308970
I know what went wrong and in the future I'll try harder to avoid posting irrelevant shit along with my posts. I'll also try to figure out how to trim words from my posts without losing the meaning where possible. Should I add more extra words to my apology like one of those youtube apology videos and say something like "I have made a severe and continuous lapse in my judgement and I apologize deeply from the bottom of my heart" instead of just "whoops"?
Thinking on it, instead of listing most of the game's changes to make the experience of playing gzdoom unfun I should have skipped over those that wouldn't affect this story for the better.

LP is carrying over ten different guns right now and an uncountable number of pounds of ammunition.
While constant autism over clipazines and which ones are filled to what degree would drag the pacing of the story down mentioning this once as a reason to ever consider using revolvers would help make her weapon choice seem less retarded even though rifles are better than revolvers.
While she's described as wearing saddlebags it's never any sort of challenge to get anything from them. Even in combat. even when wearing armour. Her saddlebags never truly exist because LP has a bullshit magical videogame inventory where a bigass sniper rifle is effortless to conceal and carry without it "printing" in her clothing or sticking out from its holster and getting stuck on doorways.
Imposing hard limits on what LP and friends can carry would make this bullshit less retarded. Hell, Steelhooves has strength-enhancing power armour, why not make him carry most of the useless shit?
The members of the party that wear light armour (and fucking armoured dresses in Velvet's case) would benefit from a "heavy armour would slow me down" excuse that's backed up by something shown in the story. If the medic knows people are going to fire at her she should be better armoured than anyone, not dressing like she's trying to impress someone.
LP should be scared when fighting bullshit she's not prepared for. She slipped too easily into a murderhobo unconcerned with the loss of any life she doesn't think she's supposed to care about. If instead of relying on VATS autoaim to stop time and queue up attacks on enemy body parts effortlessly, she panicked during combat and this fucked up her heart rate and aiming accuracy, this would make her fights more interesting.
and if ammo was severely limited, every shot made and missed would feel like it mattered.
Alicorns would be incredibly deadly for those used to hiding behind cover fighting gun-toting raiders if alicorns could fire lasers or magic blasts that curve around cover.
If Kkat allowed the unique abilities of enemies to pose a major threat to the heroes it would help make combat encounters feel more tense and distinct. As it stands, everything is a loot piniata best shot or crushed with heavy objects. We're told enemies are tougher and more dangerous, but while they might have more HP than the last area's baddies they never seem to grow in threat level and force Team LP to be more cautious or handle unusual magical bullshit. Bring on a slime monster that can't be crushed and must be lured into lava or near liquid nitrogen sources! Bring on an alicorn killsquad with magic darkness-creating grenades and one spotter with a NightVision Potion! With all the bullshit overpowered healing items, why not add barrels that resurrect dead enemies as evil zombies?
I think that's everything.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.308892
Spoilered
>>308890
>I know what went wrong
You broke your promise. That's what went wrong. Sorry is an important promise that the course of action is halted and going to change, as soon as possible.
The quickest way to lose a friend
FOREVER!
Littlepip has nothing, and adding or removing anything would make the story better. It's half assed thin and vapid self insert character for itchy taint kkat virtue signaling around Fallout. Tell them to feel something they'll do it, because that's what they've been trained for. So they'll overlook it all.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308970
308974 308990
>>308872
>>308877
>>308890
Most of these are pretty bad takes. The main problem is that FoE's internal logic operates much like a videogame, where everything ultimately happens for the benefit and gratification of the main character and their player. You don't fix it by making things less like a videogame you don't like and more like a videogame you do. You fix it by creating a setting with clear and coherent rules that all of the characters follow and thinking through reasonable chains of cause and effect within those rules.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308974
308976
>>308970
There are games out there with clear and coherent rules that won't bend or break themselves for the benefit of the player even if it means killing them. Why wouldn't making this story more like those super hard games help?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.308976
308980 308990
>>308974
Videogame storytelling is fundamentally different to prose storytelling. "Hard" does not automatically translate into "good", particularly from the point of view of an audience that can't interact with what's happening. The story would be just as bad if Littlepip kept on losing over and over again for contrived reasons.

The problem with FoE isn't that Littlepip isn't challenged enough per se - the problem is that whenever a challenge appears, the laws of reality bend to get her past it with minimal trouble. She pulls out a new skill or weapon, a convenient coincidence happens, or the enemy simply turns out to be a bumbling retard. There's little to no genuine matching of skills or wits because Littlepip, from the start, is better at everything that matters than everybody else, and that simply isn't an environment that favors suspension of disbelief. She's the only lockpicker in the world, almost immune to pain and injury, a crack shot at all ranges despite lacking training and practice, and a telekinetic savant with deductive abilities that would only make sense if she had Kkat's own notes in front of her. Without exception, everything her enemies try to accomplish fails.

Littlepip doesn't need to be given autistically difficult challenges. She needs her skills dialed back to the same level as those of her opponents, and likewise said opponents need to be dialed up a bit so that a challenge is presented. A clash of equals is always far more interesting and engaging than a curbstomp, particularly when it's clear that there are immediate and lasting consequences for failure on either side.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308980
308991
>>308976
Good point. And even if the fight scenes were thrilling and gripping the story would still be thematically confused and philosophically empty.

So much of this story's backstory is told to characters by other characters, or told to the audience by the characters or notes, or told to other characters during memory orb flashback scenes instead of shown to us through flashback orbs. If you're the type to tear up at the thought of ponies anexing "Diamond Dog" land you will, but that's an incredibly shallow way to write. Would be better if a memory orb forced LP to experience the pain and fear of a young diamond dog fleeing and looking back just in time to see his parents get gunned down. Kkat relies on maudlin brute force to get emotional responses because he lacks subtlety. By focusing on the biggest shit he can imagine he forgets about the little guy.

Did Kkat put any thought into the story's themes?
We're far enough into the story for people to realize Ziggers did everything wrong, right? Ponies only got mean after war with zebras broke out.
Yet in the ruins of a former utopia scorched with necromantic dark magic balefire by poison-bomb-using soul-magic-loving ziggers terrified of Princess Luna for seeming almost as spooky as them, LP's pet zigger insists that just because the zigger's tolerating the pony's presence, the zigger's retarded views on stars must be respected. Insists a shred of the nonsense idea that burned Equestria to the ground must be respected, as if that's simply polite. Even though it's only a short walk from "the stars are evil" to "anyone associated with stars such as Luna must be evil" to "anypony working for Luna must be evil too" to "time to break out the armed guards of demanding refugees with chemical weapons".

It would be bad enough if the bullshit zebra religion was about "muh nature spirits" or "muh ancestors" or something that can't be debunked or proven true yet is still diametrically opposed to pony science+magic for no real reason.
It would be slightly less shit if they were exaggerated Luddites who believe technology is evil, and the industrial revolution is for faggots, and any polution makes you 999% evil even if it means letting more poners eat and live, and eating grass while fleeing from lions/tigers/bears that eat your eldest and youngest and frailest is the only life a quadruped should lead.
But stars? Everyone knows stars aren't evil. Not in this world or in Equestria. Luna is canonically not NMM, NMM is what Luna calls herself when her misery over being the less respected and less important sibling overwhelms her and/or what she becomes when evil magic fucks her up depending on the interpretation. The former means "Nightmare Moon" is basically a goth phase for Luna to help her cope with crippling depression and the latter means the dark magic really responsible for NMM could call itself "The Nightmare" and possess anyone, even Rarity or Twilight or Spike or Derpy.
For a stupid reason, the zebras and ponies war. Is this supposed to tie into some kind of "war is bad and pointless" theme? It can't, because damn near all of Littlepip's problems are solved with violence. She wakes up every day and chooses violence against against Raiders and Slavers, against feral ghouls aka zombies, against Alicorns and Chimeras and Radscorpions and Taintflies and Hellhounds, againat anything that poses a threat to her or the ponies she's decided to save no matter what they have to say about it.
She lacks an alternative to the problems of the Wasteland she wars against. And the story isn't going out of its way to ppint this out to her and encourage her to form a functional moral code and philosophy she can teach to the next generation when she gets too old for this murderhobo shit. Kkat seems to think simply picking one random virtue and holding on to it is enough to keep you sane in a world of constant wars for survival, even though the only truly moral thing you can try to do in such a shit world is fix it. She isn't directly trying to rebuild the world and help repair towns destroyed by the war. Her goal isn't to help turn Tenpony Tower and the surrounding area into a safe and prosperous economic powerhouse able to produce enough well-armed fighting-age males with robot drone support to deter other factions from war while the degeneracy and unsustainability of other factions destroys them from within. Littlepip is a wandering gun with an itchy trigger finger. Well, an itchy horn. Kkat could use some cream for that to go with his itchy taint.

Making Ziggers responsible for the end of the world for retarded reasons and then pretending the act of pretending their retarded views have any shred of merit is simply politeness...
Of all the worst ideas Kkat could have possibly used here, this is the worst possible thing. (harr harr geddit that's a thing ponies say in the show)
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.308988
308993
>>308771
>Can't he just skip the other books, in that case, and move on to the fifth?
Technically he could, though this would place him smack dab in the middle of an ongoing story, and he wouldn't understand some of what's going on. It wasn't my intention to say that the Sword of Truth books are bad; they have their flaws, but overall it's a worthwhile series to read. I'm simply warning him that there's a time investment involved, and that Goodkind has some defects as a writer. It's in my nature to be critical, even of things that I like.

>images
I actually rather like the way that guy uses color. His shit choice of subjects is kind of a pity. The last one is definitely Peen Stroke. The watermelon and the sublime look of anticipation on his face makes the whole thing even funnier.

>>308814
If you want to get technical about it, every first person narrator should be considered unreliable. A talented writer can make good use of this. One of my favorite weeb properties is a VN series called Higurashi no Nako Koro Ni, and the author does a brilliant job of using unreliable first-person narratives to construct a mystery.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.308990
308993
>>308872
>>308877
The problem with your takes on things, apart from what posts >>308970 and >>308976 point out, is that you seem to think that slathering on additional layers of complexity is going to make a story better.

LP's Mary Sue nonsense is infuriating, but a big part of what makes it infuriating is that she's such a poorly drawn, unlikable character to start with. Her friends are the same way for the most part. If kkat had managed to create an interesting, sympathetic, likable group of characters who interact well with each other, and can draw the reader into the world and get them emotionally involved in whatever these characters are struggling against, then I could frankly look the other way on how ridiculous and farfetched most of those struggles actually are. I'd probably still comment on it, but I can still enjoy a logically preposterous story if it's moving enough to care about.

You would be better served by learning how to tell a simple story effectively than by trying to think up ways to make a complicated, ineffective story even more complicated.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.308991
308992 308993 308997
>>308980
>Good point. And even if the fight scenes were thrilling and gripping the story would still be thematically confused and philosophically empty.
This is true enough, but everything you go on to say from here illustrates why so many people find your posting style aggravating.

The way it basically goes is this:

Anons in thread:
>Nigel, please stop being an incoherent sperg
Nigel:
>okay, I will stop being an incoherent sperg
>*spergs incoherently*

To illustrate this, I'd like to break down your post:

>Did Kkat put any thought into the story's themes?
With this statement, you seem to be presenting a thesis: kkat did not put any thought into this story's themes. However, the words you proceed to vomit from here don't really support this idea.

>We're far enough into the story for people to realize Ziggers did everything wrong, right? Ponies only got mean after war with zebras broke out.
This summarizes events in the universe's history that led up to the events of the story. None of that has anything to do with the story's themes, or attempted themes.

>Yet in the ruins of a former utopia scorched with necromantic dark magic balefire by poison-bomb-using soul-magic-loving ziggers terrified of Princess Luna for seeming almost as spooky as them, LP's pet zigger insists that just because the zigger's tolerating the pony's presence, the zigger's retarded views on stars must be respected. Insists a shred of the nonsense idea that burned Equestria to the ground must be respected, as if that's simply polite. Even though it's only a short walk from "the stars are evil" to "anyone associated with stars such as Luna must be evil" to "anypony working for Luna must be evil too" to "time to break out the armed guards of demanding refugees with chemical weapons".
This dense word-salad is basically just you expressing a personal opinion on Xenith's worldview, and implying that all other characters in the story should naturally reach the same conclusion. This is entirely your subjective opinion, and once again, nothing here has anything to do with themes.

>It would be bad enough if the bullshit zebra religion was about "muh nature spirits" or "muh ancestors" or something that can't be debunked or proven true yet is still diametrically opposed to pony science+magic for no real reason.
>It would be slightly less shit if they were exaggerated Luddites who believe technology is evil, and the industrial revolution is for faggots, and any polution makes you 999% evil even if it means letting more poners eat and live, and eating grass while fleeing from lions/tigers/bears that eat your eldest and youngest and frailest is the only life a quadruped should lead.
Basically, what you're saying here is that you think kkat's idea for the Zebras' belief system was bad, and he should have used one of your ideas instead. You're entitled to this point of view, but again, this all relates to the technical construction of the world's backstory, has nothing to do with themes, and is drawn entirely from your subjective opinion.

>But stars? Everyone knows stars aren't evil. Not in this world or in Equestria.
This is conjecture. Everyone doesn't know this; kkat's zebras obviously didn't, or else they wouldn't have acted as they did. The way kkat set up his story, the zebras needed to believe that stars were evil so they could misinterpret certain key actions taken by the ponies as acts of aggression, so that the ponies could misinterpret what the zebras were doing as an unprovoked attack. Thus, he made the zebras in his story believe something that is demonstrably untrue. Whether or not his specific idea was good or plausible is a separate conversation and, again, has nothing to do with the story's themes.

Anyway, after some off-the-rails blathering about Nightmare Moon, you finally get to the subject of themes:

>For a stupid reason, the zebras and ponies war. Is this supposed to tie into some kind of "war is bad and pointless" theme?
Well, basically, the answer to your presumably rhetorical question is yes. If I had to hazard a guess, the overall theme the author was going for here is that miscommunications lead to tragedy. What's ironic is that here, you're basically disproving your own thesis. The position you've taken is that kkat didn't put any thought into what themes he would use or how to express them, but this shows that clearly he did; you're just objecting to how he went about it.

Kkat was trying to show that miscommunications can lead to tragedy, and he illustrated this point by presenting a horrific war between two cultures that arose because they didn't understand each others' point of view. Your objection is not that the author failed to put any thought into what themes he would use or how to express them, it's that you don't like how he went about expressing the themes he chose. You feel that the zebras' worldview is implausible and that they ought not to have held this view. However, you don't present anything to back this up beyond your own subjective view that it's a silly idea. You also seem to be making the argument that kkat's choice of theme was stupid, which is also a subjective opinion, and which you also don't back up with anything except more of your own subjective opinions.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.308992
308994
>>308991

Continuing.

> It can't, because damn near all of Littlepip's problems are solved with violence. She wakes up every day and chooses violence against against Raiders and Slavers, against feral ghouls aka zombies, against Alicorns and Chimeras and Radscorpions and Taintflies and Hellhounds, againat anything that poses a threat to her or the ponies she's decided to save no matter what they have to say about it.
>She lacks an alternative to the problems of the Wasteland she wars against. And the story isn't going out of its way to ppint this out to her and encourage her to form a functional moral code and philosophy she can teach to the next generation when she gets too old for this murderhobo shit. Kkat seems to think simply picking one random virtue and holding on to it is enough to keep you sane in a world of constant wars for survival, even though the only truly moral thing you can try to do in such a shit world is fix it. She isn't directly trying to rebuild the world and help repair towns destroyed by the war. Her goal isn't to help turn Tenpony Tower and the surrounding area into a safe and prosperous economic powerhouse able to produce enough well-armed fighting-age males with robot drone support to deter other factions from war while the degeneracy and unsustainability of other factions destroys them from within. Littlepip is a wandering gun with an itchy trigger finger. Well, an itchy horn. Kkat could use some cream for that to go with his itchy taint.
Here, you're actually beginning a new topic. These statements have nothing to do with either the point you were trying to make originally (that kkat didn't put any thought into his themes) or the point you end up actually making (that kkat's specific ideas suck because you, personally, hate them). What you're basically saying here is that LP does not have any underlying moral code or central motivation to her character that would justify the way she behaves. Though she expresses a desire to improve life for the residents of the wasteland, she offers no viable alternative to the way things are at present, and her actions are disruptive without affecting any positive change.

This argument has nothing to do with either the story's central themes or the author's technical approach to expressing them; this is basically just an argument for why Littlepoop is an inferior hero. While I don't disagree with any of it, it has nothing to do with either the thesis of your post or the tangent you went off on while trying (and failing) to prove it. Moreover, all you're really doing is restating ideas that I, and others in this thread, have already expressed much more articulately than you do here.

This is what people ultimately find frustrating about trying to read your posts. Everything you write turns into a long, stream-of-consciousness rant that starts on one topic, finishes on another, requires a great deal of effort to read and extract meaning from, and in the end doesn't contribute anything new or insightful to the discussion at hand. Your posts are exhausting to read; even more so because they seldom contain anything that is actually worth reading.

>Making Ziggers responsible for the end of the world for retarded reasons and then pretending the act of pretending their retarded views have any shred of merit is simply politeness...
>Of all the worst ideas Kkat could have possibly used here, this is the worst possible thing. (harr harr geddit that's a thing ponies say in the show)
This conclusion would have worked better as a thesis statement than the one you actually chose, since it more accurately expresses what you were trying to say. Unfortunately, it also highlights the fact that all you were really trying to say was "kkat's ideas are bad because I, personally, don't like them." Was it really worth typing out all of that autism just to say something this fundamentally simple? Was this idea even worth expressing in the first place?

So, to summarize, before making a post, here is what you should consider:

>does this post clearly communicate the idea I am attempting to express?
>is the idea I am attempting to express even worth communicating to begin with?
If the answer to the first question is no, then you should rewrite the post. If the answer to the second question is no, you should just discard the post entirely; odds are nobody wants to read it, and you will just get negative replies if you post it.

A few other things to consider:

>legibility
Why you continue to favor single-line spacing between paragraphs is beyond me, but as a general rule, any time you hit the "return" key while typing, just hit it twice. Also, try to avoid long, rambling run on sentences like this one:
>Yet in the ruins of a former utopia scorched with necromantic dark magic balefire by poison-bomb-using soul-magic-loving ziggers terrified of Princess Luna for seeming almost as spooky as them, LP's pet zigger insists that just because the zigger's tolerating the pony's presence, the zigger's retarded views on stars must be respected.

>staying on topic
Please pick a single topic and make sure that all content in the post relates to that single topic. Be sure that the topic in question relates to what is presently being discussed in the thread.

>coherence
Instead of just typing words as they pop into your head, take a moment to formulate your thoughts into complete, articulate sentences and then type them. Alternatively, you can write a sentence however you normally write it, and then go back, re-read it, and revise it until it at least resembles something the English speaking world can understand.

And remember, if you have nothing to contribute to a conversation that is worth saying, no one will think any less of you if you just stay quiet.
Anonymous
736027c
?
No.308993
>>308988
>>308768
>and maintains that the pursuit of self-interest against the interest of others is morally justified, which I agree with.
In all situations? But then again, it wouldn't be surprising since Objectivism sucks. There, I won the argument;)
>>308990
>>308991
It's funny. I have been thinking about posting fundamentally the same posts The basic ideas of the posts. but decided against it.
So basically this.
Anonymous
7f47f32
?
No.308994
>>308992
>Your posts are exhausting to read;
This. I have noticed how my eyes always want to glaze over them when I try to read them.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.308997
309387
Fallout Equestria.png
>>308991
Shit, you're right. I still suck balls at this. What I did cut from that post ended up fucking the whole post up.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong for Kkat to write about two countries that war over a miscommunication/massive difference in culture, or write about poners warring and struggling to survive in the aftermath.

I'm sure that a good author with the benefit of hindsight could have made this premise into a better story. "Things sucked because of misunderstandings" isn't an inherently bad idea. But I don't think Kkat intentionally wanted to make things so far-fetched when it comes to how far the misunderstandings go for the pre-war era.

It seems far-fetched for an entire country to fully believe in a religion that has a devil (Nightmare Moon) but no God. No "path to salvation" that makes you holier/reduces the hold evil forces have over you/guarantees you a better afterlife/whatever.

Almost every religion that wants to control the behavior of its followers includes instructions on how to live your life that makes it different from a religion-free life, but the zebra religion doesn't feel fleshed-out or interesting. It doesn't seem like both sides of this "country argument" had a point.

It feels like an afterthought used to justify what zebras did, rather than an integral part of their culture and them as a whole. They killed for their faith, but what do they do and sing and worship when they're not killing? What are their holy symbols? What are their holidays? I'm not asking for 100% of the information but we barely get 1%. Did Kkat mean to make religion look bad compared to the "The six virtues of the elements of harmony/virtues in general are my religion" ponies? His world lacks other faiths. Maybe if both religions had good and bad points their holy war would be better-written as a whole?

It seems far-fetched for that religion to be so popular when it hypocritically says "Stars are spooky evil gods that can subtly influence ponies and events for the worse, and Nightmare Moon/Luna are the same ponies and surely evil, but spooky types of magic like the manipulation of souls and bloodbending and horrific body-horror poison gas creation and the creation of inherently-evil necromantic fire are A-OK"

I could see Pinkie spending tax dollars on parties and Rarity spending them on art contests. But it seems far-fetched for Rarity to start censoring books and for Pinkie Pie to start disappearing ponies with her 1984 ministry, and even Kkat noticed this. But instead of changing it to be more in-character he just said some of the Mane Six sucked at controlling their ministries.

It seems far-fetched for the entire zebra species besides Zecora to have so much faith in "Purple Alicorn bad" that the kind acts of ponies before and during the war don't shake their faith. The first use of a megaspell was when Fluttershy fired a healing blast that revived ponies and zebras alike on a battlefield ponies just won!
And then Flutters gave healing nukes to both sides!
This seems like some grand act of mercy that would end a war. Or strike the fear of non-beneficial nuking into Zebras and convince them to end a war while the remaining megaspells still contain Heal spells instead of Ice or Explosion spells.
If ponies were the only ones with nukes it would make sense for the Zebras to say "It's now or never, time to strike and hope for the best or get nuked next time we disagree on anything!" it would make sense. It would make the Zebras assholes, but consistent assholes. Instead, Fluttershy (who directly works for the government) gave the Zebras a tool that can heal.

And it's a tool they turned into makeshift nuclear bombs and smuggled into pony lands to kill more ponies. Surely their hateboner for ponies would have worn off by now? Pony cities could only go boom because Zebras were allowed into pony lands by not-Fluttershy AND armed with megaspells by Fluttershy. "War is bad and sometimes it happens over tragic culture clashes" might have been Kkat's goal when writing this, but ponies sealed their own fate by being too nice.

Fluttershy's actions weren't a miscommunication. They were the actions of one individual doing what she believed was right, no matter what the rest of the world said/thought. Same with Scootaloo and her decision to give each Stable an experiment. So how come when Littlepip does what she believes is right no matter what the rest of the world says/thinks, she gets to be right, she gets to win, she gets rewarded with guns and sex and fame, and there are never unforseen negative consequences to being too nice in what's supposedly a hellish world even crueler than Old Equestria?
Monterry Jack robbed her ONCE early on. No more punishments for being a goodie.

Trying to use fewer words now.

It bugs me that before the nukes fall war is bad, but after the nukes fall violence is almost always the answer.

Littlepip's murderhobo antics didn't drag Appleoosa and New Appleoosa into a long bloody conflict that killed countless innocents.

LP's occasional "I want to solve this problem with violence!" and "I'll explore this enemy-filled dungeon because I feel like it" moments don't get her friends horribly injured in a way that matters to their bodies and group cohesion and opinion of her.

I'm not asking for peace to be the answer 100% of the time, just one or two moments of "actually violence is bad and understanding is important" would be fine since it could give the heroes moments to make choices that differ from the ones made by ponies of the past.

Mutated monsters are just monsters, Raiders are evil for fun, Slavers are pure evil according to the author(thundrdome), and Alicorns are drones in a hive mind controlled by a shallow "Mwahaha I'm evil" take on Trixie. The baddies Team LP fights are too evil to give peace a chance.

Why even have a pacifistic diplomacy/barterer character in the party if she almost never gets to be useful or right about anything compared to Littlesue, Wasteland Savior?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5f738aa
?
No.309035
309045
1621253676600.png
>>308820

Anyway, the rest of this is just LP going over which orbs correspond to which memories. Orb #4 apparently contains a memory of her conversation with Blackwing, and it sounds like she may need to actually watch that one for some valuable information. Orb #6 contains the memory of her taking another crack mint, and may or may not contain essential information. More likely than not, it's just two hours of insane rambling about the cultural significance of Night Ranger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGp-4NP76MM

Orb #8, we are informed, contains the memory of time spent with Homage, and is implied to be dirty. The chapter ends here.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Conversations in the Calm Before

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“We could form our own secret society.”
Insert Jeffrey Epstein joke.

Rather than one of the long, rambling inner monologues that the chapters usually open with, this one opens with an actual scene. Littlepoop is putting the orbs back in the safe, and Homage catches her. There's some forced emotion: Homage gets angry with Littlepoop for lying to her and betraying her trust and blah blah blah. LP is asked to "sleep elsewhere" tonight, and is sad.

Page break. Littlepoop continues to mope like a little teenage emo twat as she rides the elevator back down to wherever.

>It took me most of the ride down the elevator to figure out why I needed punishment as much as I deserved it. There was no question of the latter. The pit in my stomach and the self-loathing in my heart told me that I had done wrong. I had wronged myself. And far worse, I had wronged her. My voice in the darkness.
Protip: don't do shit like this. What LP actually did isn't that bad, and Homage makes it clear that it's not over between them, she's just a little upset. Part of writing is being able to accurately gage the mood of a scene, and tailoring both your narration and your characters' reactions to fit that mood. Absolutely nothing that happened in the previous scene calls for this kind of heavy brooding and angst from Littlepoop. The fight between Homage and LP was mostly contrived, and LP's reaction just makes it worse.

LP's actions were quite predictable. Most people, if they woke up with no memory of the past few days, would be curious about what happened. If they were then informed that all of their memories were contained in a box they aren't allowed to open, their curiosity would double. If they were then left alone with the box and told that they were on their honor not to open it, odds are they would open it anyway.

Anyone with a basic understanding of human nature pony nature, whatever could predict what most average people ponies, whatever would do in this situation. If it were really this important that LP not view her memories, Homage should have hidden them in advance and then not even told her that the orbs existed; she could have just hung onto them and given them back to her when it was all ogre. Moreover, LP is compulsively curious about stuff like this anyway; she can't even keep her hooves off other ponies memories, so what in the world would possibly make Homage think she could be stopped from viewing her own? Telling LP not to break into a safe is like telling kkat not to suck 1,000 dicks in a row. If anything, Homage deserves punishment just for expecting a different outcome that what actually took place.

>And with that, even if she forgave, I would never be able to accept forgiveness until she had punished me for it too. I couldn’t move on while my tail was twitching. I needed something to fall on my head, or I’d always be looking for it.
This reference to Pinkie's Pinkie Sense is inappropriate. To my recollection, LP has never witnessed Pinkie's tail-twitch routine in action during any of the memory orbs she's been inside, and thus should have no knowledge of it.

Even dumber is that the author literally acknowledges this in the next paragraph:

>I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d come up with that analogy (“Awareness! It was under ‘E’!”), but I knew that it was appropriate.
The "it was under 'E'!" gag doesn't work for exactly the same reason that the tail twitch gag doesn't work: LP has no idea what these things would have meant in their original context, so they should mean nothing to her. To Pinkie Pie in the Friendship is Magic cartoon series, a twitchy tail means that something is about to fall, and "it was under 'E'!" refers to a place where she found a book one time. To Littlepoop in FoE, a twitchy tail is a twitchy tail, and the phrase "it was under 'E'!" is as meaningless as the phrase "the condor faps at midnight" or "kkat will never be a woman."

Anyway, LP has the blues, and she wanders back to the hotel suite that I guess her friends are staying in. She casually unlocks the door with her telekinetic powers, because apparently she can do that now yes, believe it or not, kkat actually found a way to make her lockpicking skills even more obnoxiously overpowered.

>My mind was largely elsewhere. I was determined to remain at Tenpony Tower for a little while longer, not for myself but for my companions. Each of them had nearly died in the last few days.
"Nearly died" is pushing it, honestly. I mean, yeah; all of her friends have technically suffered what would be life-threatening, traumatic injuries in most universes, but in this one pretty much everything is curable with band-aids and potions, including severed limbs and punctured wings. Also, isn't there still a bomb here?

>I had a lot of repairing to do. I wondered if I should try to get them counseling. Or should we work through this alone?
I'm not really clear on what she's talking about here. I seem to remember Calamity and Velvet fighting about something or other earlier, but I don't recall what it was about. It seemed like they had mostly patched it up, but who knows? The emotional interactions in this story are so half-assed it's hard to tell what I'm supposed to be feeling.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5f738aa
?
No.309045
309047 309048
1620573312318.jpg
>>309035

>Couldn’t I have at least left myself some notes? Of course, as they say, hindsight is… well, no, even that didn’t really apply. My hindsight was perforated. Even worse, I was smart enough to realize that I shouldn’t be trying to put the pieces back together. If I thought about things too much, I might be able to reconstruct lines of logic that I didn’t want to have in the forefront of my brain when I next confronted the Goddess. I suspected that Trixie’s telepathy didn’t extend much beyond reading my surface thoughts -- if it had, I think things would have gone a lot differently in Maripony. (Or perhaps she could, but it just required a level of focus the Goddess couldn’t commit to while maintaining connection to all her alicorns. The fact that Calamity had been able to surprise her about something he had been looking at told me she wasn’t nearly as on top of current thoughts as she wanted us to believe.) Still, if I knew the plan or even suspected what I was up to, there was no way I could avoid thinking about it while I enacted it.
This whole thing buttresses my argument that LP should not have even been told anything about her memories in the first place. She clearly knows herself well enough to have realized that if she erased her memories, hid them in orbs, and then told her memory-erased self where the orbs were, that her curiosity would get the better of her and she'd end up viewing the orbs anyway. She also knows herself well enough to realize that, if she knew her memories had been erased and why they were erased, that she would be virtually incapable of stopping herself from thinking about it. Odds are, whatever plan she thought up before would probably occur to her again if she spent enough time thinking about the problem, and here she's putting herself in a situation where she knows she will have no choice but to think about it. She basically set herself up to fail.

Once again, kkat has a decent enough idea here, but he utterly fails on the execution. LP thwarting a mind-reading enemy by erasing her own memory so she doesn't know her own plan is a completely wacky, comic-book-tier story idea that is honestly perfect for a setting like this. However, as I noted above, the way she's going about it creates a number of unnecessary roadblocks to her own success.

What she ought to have done is simply come up with the plan, give everyone else their instructions, and then write down instructions for herself, essentially using herself as an unwitting pawn the same way she's using everypony else. Then, she could have had her memories preserved in orbs and give the orbs to Homage, along with instructions that tell her to hold onto them and not tell future LP about their existence until after the Goddess had been defeated.

The way this would look from our perspective is that suddenly and inexplicably, LP loses several large fragments of time, and wakes up on Dr. Helpinghoof's medical table. Neither she nor we have any idea what's going on. The doctor then hands her a note from herself, exactly as he did in the actual story. However, instead of a note informing her that her memories have been extracted into orbs and that she's not supposed to view them, it should just be a set of simple, seemingly pointless instructions: go to X location and do Y.

From here, LP would simply be following instructions on notes she left to herself. The instructions would be vague and confusing, but things always work out the way the notes tell her they will, and always lead her to additional notes, so she learns to trust them. What would make it even better is if she doesn't even initially realize the notes are from her past self, she simply sees them as notes from some mysterious benefactor. LP would probably spend a fair amount of time speculating about who wrote the notes and what is happening and why she lost her memory, and we would be as clueless as she is. The big reveal would be when she finally discovers that she is carrying out a plan she formulated herself.

The point is that LP should not know what's going on, and neither should we. This would not only add an element of mystery to the story and make it more interesting to read, it would also make more sense according to the story's inner logic. However, if you reveal from the beginning that she deliberately erased her own memory and explain why she did it, the mystery is gone; the only thing we're left to wonder about is the actual nature of the plan. Huge missed opportunity for fun storytelling here.

On a related note, I actually skimmed some of the comments from the previous chapter, and I noticed that a lot of readers mention being initially confused by the time skips the author introduced; the weird ellipsis-transitions that I also made note of. Though I was grousing about them as they were happening, believe it or not the time skips were actually a good technique and the author was employing them more or less effectively.

If you're making your reader grumble because your book is badly written, boring, or unintentionally vague or confusing (as most of this book has been), that's a bad thing; however, if your reader is grumbling because they lack information about something and wish they knew more about it, or something is disconcerting to them, or a character's treatment of another character is making them angry, or the book is sad/depressing, believe it or not this kind of grumbling is good. It's a sign that you're actively engaging your readers instead of just boring the crap out of them with a long, ridiculous dungeon crawl.

Even though he wound up ultimately dropping the ball as usual, for a moment or two kkat was actually doing a good job. Intentional misdirection is one of the most interesting and fun tools a writer has at his disposal, and if you can learn to use it effectively you can take nearly any screwy idea and turn it into something interesting and engaging.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309047
disregardworlddominationacquirelunch.png
>>309045
There's another big problem here. When a writer intentionally informs their audience that the hero has a plan without telling them what it is, they're almost always giving them an unspoken guarantee that the plan will succeed. In theory the audience is meant to be gratified by learning what the plan is as it unfolds, rather than seeing a plan they know about succeed against the odds.

In other words, the very setup of this scenario has planted a giant, glaring death flag on Trixie's head and deflated any possible threat she might still have posed.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5f738aa
?
No.309048
309055 309084
1620823021563.jpg
>>309045

Anyway, as she's musing about all of this stuff, LP opens the door to the hotel room and observes that Velvet and Calamity are on the bed, apparently playing "pin the tail on the pony." To make matters worse, they're doing it all wrong. Naturally embarrassed for them, LP decides to sneak out before they notice her.

>I had become rather exceptional at stealth. I was able to slip out fast and smooth, without making the slightest peep, without being seen.
Of course she's exceptional at stealth. I mean, sure; she never really used stealth or practiced stealth or did anything especially stealthy until the last chapter. But on the other hand, she spent a whole afternoon practicing it the other day; there's absolutely no reason she shouldn't be an expert by now. At this point, I'd be shocked to learn that there's anything she isn't exceptional at.

Anyway, she passes her stealth check with flying colors and sneaks out of the room, but fucks up and lets the door click shut behind her. She hears Velvet and Calamity shout her name in unison, and she runs off down the hallway. For no apparent reason, she hears Xenith shouting "Doooooom!" from some undisclosed location. Cue the canned laugh track.

Page break. Even though Homage already told her to fuck off for the rest of the day, she goes back upstairs and knocks on her door. However, it seems that Homage is either out or is not answering, so she decides to just wander around Tenpony Tower for a few hours.

>I heard a chime in the atrium below. The elevator doors slid open. I crouched flat on the balcony as I saw Velvet Remedy and Calamity step out into the atrium, Calamity helping support Velvet with one of his wings. Oh Goddesses! I couldn’t face them right now. I backed up against the M.A.S.E.B.S. door, hiding.
Like many autistic individuals, kkat does not have even the most basic grasp of how actual human interactions work, thus his attempts at mimicking such interactions through his characters are usually not convincing. Frankly, I'm not great at navigating situations like this either, but I have at least enough basic sense to figure out how normal people would probably react.

Much like LP's "theft" of her own memory orbs from Homage's safe, the situation here is nowhere near as big a deal as kkat tries to make it. LP walked in on two of her friends fucking. Sure; it's a little embarrassing for everyone involved. However, she knows that the two of them are a couple, they had every reason to expect privacy when she suddenly barged in without knocking, they're all adults; what's the big deal here? It made sense enough for LP to run away in embarrassment, but there's no reason for Velvet or Calamity to come chasing after her. Presumably, being walked in on would have killed the mood, and they probably wouldn't have been able to finish, but there's no reason to go confront her about it. Just leave it alone, let her make a graceful escape, and the next time they all see each other they can have a giggle about it; simple as that.

Anyway, while she's hiding she overhears some of their conversation. Naturally, kkat doesn't miss an opportunity to have his peripheral characters slyly heap praise upon his beloved Mary Sue:

>“Ah honestly don’ think ya give Li’lpip enough credit. She’s got too much heart t’ let jealousy eat away at her. Or us. Ah reckon Ah got more t’ worry ‘bout in that regard from yer bird.”
Seriously, would it even be possible for these characters to speak an ill word about this twat behind her back? For that matter, do any of them ever think about anything other than Littlepoop?

Every time we overhear a conversation between any of her friends, it seems like they are invariably discussing Littlepoop. Oh no, I think Littlepoop has a drug problem; oh no, I think Littlepoop might be jealous of our relationship; oh no, I think Littlepoop might be feeling a little down, what can we do to cheer her up? It's like the entire universe and everyone in it revolves solely around this one character.

Anyway, I'm not quite sure where kkat is trying to go with this, but the issue seems to be that Velvet thinks LP might be jealous because she still hasn't gotten over her crush on her. Calamity seems to think it's the opposite, which is strange. Again, I'm not quite sure where the author is trying to go with this.

>“Quiet? Yes, now that you mention it. If she was in Homage’s company, I would expect we’d be able to hear her. At least, that is what Xenith would have me believe.”
In his usual crass fashion, kkat veers the conversation off-track just so he can clumsily toss in a bawdy joke. Joking or not, it's completely illogical for Calamity to be thinking this way. LP catches them fucking, almost dies of embarrassment, and then immediately runs upstairs so she can fuck Homage? Why would anyone assume that anyone else would ever behave this way?

Next, we are forced to sit through several paragraphs of perfunctory banter about orgasms. Because I love you people, I won't subject you to any of it. Well, maybe just a little:

>“Indeed,” Velvet said with a slight trace of bitterness. “Clearly, Homage’s cutie mark should be Littlepip. Obviously, that’s what she’s best at doing.”
Author's italics preserved. Look, I don't mean to come across as a prude or anything; I can enjoy a ribald jest as much as the next chap. However, this author's sex jokes are just so cringey and so low-brow that I just want to guzzle bleach every single fucking time the subject comes up.

That said, I will admit that I basically agree with Velvet here; it really seems like Homage doesn't do all that much in this story besides sing LP's praises on the radio and munch her box whenever she needs a break from murder and mayhem. Homage is essentially a background character who occasionally gets to be a source of some of the story's revolting sex humor. What exactly are her qualifications for being the "true" Wasteland Savior again?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309055
309387
>>309048
Missed oppprtunity: If Calamity spent most of the early story's relationship sideplot making things worse by constantly assuming Velvet, Littlepip, and Homage (and maybe even Xenith) all want him and are fighting over him in their own weird ways, it would give the author a source of sexual comic relief besides this obnoxious sex-related talk. Surely Kkat watched at least one harem comedy that thrived on comedic misunderstandings. Hell, it would excellently fit the Equestria At War era's "misunderstandings are bad" theme if the party start off misunderstanding each other constantly and then grow closer and learn more about each other and stop misunderstanding each other.

Those scenes where someone mentions LP getting a lot of orgasms... Did anyone laugh at this? They feel weirdly juvenile. More juvenile than a YTP that edits characters to randomly mention semen, because you mostly know what to expect from a YTP. Knowing this "comedy gold" comes from a 30+ man who's probably pushing 45+ right now feels even weirder.

Could also explore Enclave Pegasus culture through Calamity's views and mannerisms whenever they don't line up with how his "stereotypical yeehaw shotgun cowboy" persona acts, and could examine those behaviours more when he trusts his friends enough to drop the act around them. Then again his character would need to be deeper than:

personality: yeehaw shotgun cowboy.
Backstory: blah blah blah Enclave blah. Blah blah blah only good member blah.
Element: probably a pegasus thing like loyalty even though he betrayed his faction and slaughtered his underlings for not betraying their orders and faction's principles.
Weapon: shotguns and sometimes OP armour.
flaw: Nudist - Sometimes this character must remove his OP armour or its helmet temporarily for contrived reasons

It sure would say a lot about Enclave Pegasus society if Calamity said something that said a lot about Enclave society.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5f738aa
?
No.309084
309087 309092
1620961921704.png
>>309048

From here, the conversation takes a surprising turn. Velvet and Calamity share a brief dialog exchange about the present ambiguity of their relationship, which for one brief, fleeting moment almost feels like natural speech. Unfortunately, Littlepoop chooses that precise moment to autistically open and shut the door she's hiding behind, and the moment is ruined. An awkward, half-assed attempt at humor follows, and the scene ends with Littlepoop's hoof in her mouth.

>I realized that my awkwardness would be taken as discomfort over what they knew I had seen and not what they didn’t know I had heard.
I can no longer summon the energy required to decipher what the fuck this sentence is trying to say.

Page break. They all go into Homage's room for some reason and she serves them tea.

>At last, however, I had been able to put solid thoughts to my feelings. The problem now was how or even if I should voice them. What if my worries were correct? What damage would I do by shining a light on them. Or worse, what if I was wrong, but my questions led to doubts in their own minds?
At this point I have completely lost track of what LP is supposed to be freaking out over. Is this still because Homage told her to sleep alone tonight? Or is there something else?

>The silence stretched awkwardly between the three of us. Velvet looked patient but strained. Calamity fidgeted.
>If I said anything, it would have to be now, while they were together and could draw support from each other as they answered. But what if…?
>Calamity rubbed a hoof on the table, absently asking Velvet, “Hey, ya figure they did it on here?”
It almost feels like a waste of time to even highlight this, but for those in the gallery who haven't been reading along with the actual story, I just want to show you an example of the kind of mind-numbing crap I've been wading through this entire time. Seriously, visualize this situation:

>socially awkward thing happens
>group of friends is sitting around, nobody knows what to say
>out of absolutely fucking nowhere, in an apparent attempt at levity, Friend A suddenly asks Friend B: "Hey, do you wonder if Friends C and D have ever had sex on this table we're sitting at right now?"

NOBODY FUCKING TALKS LIKE THIS. Not one group of actual, sentient beings in the history of this universe or any other has ever, will ever, or would ever, behave this way. Ever.

I don't often say this Disclaimer: I actually say this all the time, and I doubt kkat will ever read these words, but nevertheless, it needs to be said: Kkat, you are, without a doubt, the biggest, tranniest, most sperm-garglingest faggot who ever walked the streets of San Francisco. Trying to number the dicks you have choked on and shoved up your ass in your time on this earth would be like trying to number the stars in the sky or the grains of sand in the Sahara. The only thing more surprising than the fact that you actually thought this story was worth writing is the fact that you were able to stop sucking row after row of cocks long enough to put pen to paper. The experience of reading this pile of shit has been comparable to the experience of filling an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool with rabid weasels, giving all of them PCP, dousing them in hot sauce, and then shoving them one at a time up my own urethra.

Though I will never be able to reclaim the hours of my life I have expended reading and critiquing this excrement, I can take some small measure of satisfaction from knowing that, assuming the information I've received about you is accurate, you are now a middle-aged transvestite. You are old, balding, paunchy, and the last traces of your youthful androgyny have faded, never to return. There is now nothing standing between you and the realization that you are a hideous, revolting, dickless train wreck, and that there are only two possible ways your story can end: either you man up and eat a bullet now, or you hang on for another decade or two, until some lethal combination of Vicodin, Xanax, Southern Comfort and hormone supplements causes you to gracelessly expire on the floor of your one-room apartment, where your earthly remains will be slowly devoured by your many cats.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Littlepoop, in an effort to counter Calamity's display of absolute autism, unleashes an autistic torrent of her own. Velvet eventually takes pity on her and succinctly sums up her concerns: Littlepoop is worried that Velvet and Calamity are only dating each other out of convenience. The glaringly obvious fact that LP is dating Homage for essentially the same reason appears to be lost on all four of them.

The next few paragraphs are a mixture of rambling autism, cringey sex banter, and saccharine false praise. About the only thing that redeems any of it is that, for once, Velvet and Calamity are heaping false praise on each other instead of on Littlepoop.

In the unlikely event that anyone actually gives a shit, Calamity claims that he could have had any skooze he wanted back in Cloudsdale or whatever the fuck the Pegasus Enclave's city is called; I honestly can't be fucked to remember, but he turned them all down. Velvet was apparently the first of the many mares who ever looked at him whose affections he considered worth reciprocating. I'll tell you why, if you promise not to laugh:

>But none o’ the mares in the service shared muh feelin’s ‘bout helpin’ the ponyfolk down here. A right turnoff, if’n y’ask me.
Yep, that's right. Only a steadfast commitment to alleviating the suffering of others can ignite the balefire in Calamity's grenades. What a guy.

And what about Velvet?

>“You truly care about ponies,” she continued, her eyes roaming over Calamity. “And I’ve seen how you are with us, especially with Littlepip,”
"Ooh, Calamity, your compassion for all living things just makes my no-nos froth, I tell ya whut." Blecch.

I challenge anyone to read this microscene from start to finish without vomiting.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309087
309090 309387
>>309084
>>“You truly care about ponies,” she continued, her eyes roaming over Calamity. “And I’ve seen how you are with us, especially with Littlepip,”
...is it worth recalling that in Calamity's very first appearance, he shot Littlepip almost to death for wearing the wrong clothes?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309090
309387
>>309087
Speaking of which, did Kkat ever specify exactly how Calamity (back when he was in the enclave) punished his Enclave underlings for refusing to help the ground-bound poners? My mind immediately jumped to gunning them down on the spot since "the first to start firing" is usually a character trait of his.

For fuck's sake, didn't he confess to LP/Velvet that he's a Dashite before we even knew what that was, killing the mystery?

Kkat keeps telling us Calamity is motivated by the desire to help the wasteland's poners but why does he feel this way? Where is his drive? His defining character moment? One moment in his backstory where he decided to be a goodie instead of a baddie? What single quote sums up his characrerization? What did he do to help the Wasteland before LP came along? At least Steelhooves spent his life gunning down Alicorns in the middle of nowhere. Deep down, who the shitting fuck is Calamity?

Kkat put no thought into how "Calamity the ex enclave operative" and "Calamity the yeehaw cowboy" and "Calamity the retard who left his helmet behind" and "Calamity the gun lover" and "Calamity the shoot first ask questions later prick" and "Calamity the faggot who refuses to wear his power armour usually and sometimes takes his helmet off for no reason" and "Calamity the guy who whines to Littlepip if she goes a while without taking him on dungeon crawls like he's a pokemon who misses combat" and "Calamity the guy who says nothing when he's poisoned and dying in a Stable full of Chimeras but Littlepip prioritizes looting the stable and blowing it up over getting him cured" and "Calamity the kind-hearted soul who refused to shag any bitches in Cloudsdale unless they loved surface dwellers like he did" and "Calamity the first in line to shoot a rapey colt even if his GF hates him for it" and "Calamity the guy who doesn't even blink when Spike burns an Enclave member alive for a show of force" and "Calamity the guy who once shot Littlepip for wearing raider clothes" all play off one another and merge into a consistent character personality that makes sense for his background and role in the story.

Good writers make what a character says and does into elements of characterization, right? A character shouldn't just do a thing because the plot needs somebody to do it. A character should do a thing because that is what that character would do in that situation. It's one of many reasons why Doctor Who sucks now: the authors keep fucking this up.

If I was still autistically overexplaining irrelevant shit I'd overexplain everything about Arcade Gannon from Fallout New Vegas instead of focusing on what matters.
His "Snarky prickly guy on the outside. Sometimes he says odd shit and knows more about energy weapons than a doctor like him should. Mystery! Intrigue! On the inside, thoughtful intellectual and descendant of the Enclave and technically an ex-member fundamentally motivated by a desire to do good even if it fucks him over" shit works. He keeps others at a distance and sarcasm is his shield, but there's more to him than sarcasm. When he warms up to you the armour comes off. He sounds so damn genuine... When he gets you to help him get the old band back together for the grand finale it isn't just because "lmao why not". It's because he thinks this is the optimal way to help as many people as possible and make sure the Legion doesn't win.

Arcade doesn't just comment on shit randomly, he says stuff when he sees deep shit relevant to his deep themes. How you convince ex-enclave members to rejoin influences his thoughts and final decision to give you his power armour and spend the final battle as a medic away from the front lines or put his armour on and fight that battle. He humanizes the Enclave, a faction invented to represent all that Shitmerica became when the world "started to run out of resources" (despite the abundance of nuclear power) and went to war over what little was left. He's a good fucking character and every single piece about him works. Except his "stimpaks out of fruit and other fantastical improbabilities" line, he should visit Goodsprings some time and talk to Sunny.

He is undoubtedly one of the greatest things in Fallout New Vegas. If someone played that and encountered this glorious turbofaggot they would remember him even as specific stats and optimal stat builds fade from memory.

When Kkat wanted "inspiration" for his characters, he looked at Arcade and simply saw "ex-Enclave non-evil guy with a laser gun" and thought he was being creative when he gave Calamity shotguns with laser-like accuracy instead of laser guns.

Calamity is a fitting name for this absolute motherfucking disaster of a character.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5f738aa
?
No.309092
309126
1619394944700.png
>>309084

Anyway, this whole conversation just gets progressively more ridiculous. The title of this chapter is "Conversations in the Calm Before," and I suspect that most of it is just going to be more of the same: the characters will spend most of this chapter talking things out before the action, such as it is, resumes in the next chapter. This is probably kkat's idea of character building; the problem here is that these characters were such weak clay to start with that there's little that can be built at this late stage in the game.

None of these characters really have any sort of firmly defined personality traits you can work with, beyond superficialities like Littlepoop being a lesbian and Calamity being some sort of cowboy or something. None of them have any clearly defined values, but here the author has given them all this sort of vaguely-defined altruism as a motive. They're all here because they want to "help ponies" and "fix the wasteland." I'm guessing the idea is that this vague altruism is meant to be a common value that binds them together and strengthens their friendship. By and large it doesn't work.

Seriously; who are any of these characters at their core? What defines each of them as an individual? What motivates them to do the things that they do?

Velvet, as far as I can tell, is supposed to be some sort of kindhearted pacifist, whose deep admiration of Fluttershy inspired her to become a medical pone. I feel like I've already covered why this image of her is pretty far from the mark. She aggravates me for a number of reasons, but more than anything because she tries to be many things at once without having any core personality traits that clearly define her. The author has tried to show us several different Velvets: the kind and sweet healer, the sultry seductress, the shrewd negotiator, the bitchy manipulator. If blended together convincingly this odd combination could make for a complex, interesting character; however, kkat really has no idea how to do this. She mostly feels like a weird mishmash of several contradictory traits that she erratically shifts between. None of them feel like the "real" Velvet.

Calamity, as I've said in the past, I find to be probably the least objectionable character in this group. However, this is mostly because the author made very little effort to actually develop him, which means he's mostly just been a pleasant, affable background presence who plays no serious role in the story beyond providing air support during battles and occasionally saying things like "yee-haw" or "whut in tarnation." Like Velvet, he doesn't really have any defining traits apart from superficialities, but unlike Velvet he doesn't try to be 19 different ponies at once, so he doesn't come across as insincere. His simplicity is probably the best thing he has going for him.

However, I don't even remotely buy the motivation the author tries to give him here. For instance, here is what Velvet has to say about him:

>“I didn’t know it at the time, but you are so much more. I always wanted to be a medical pony, and I embraced the first chance I got to. But I left my home behind for selfish reasons. You cut your shackles because they were preventing you from helping other ponies. You freed yourself out of compassion and kinship.”
Calamity supposedly left the Enclave out of some kind of vague desire to "help the ponies below," and I imagine kkat wants us to see this as his motivation now. But his behavior and overall bearing throughout the story doesn't really support this. I've always seen him as a generally good-natured lone wolf who doesn't kill out of malice, but he'll kill if he needs to. He's a realist who takes life as it comes; he doesn't go out of his way to help or hurt anyone, he just takes care of himself. He's never come across as a high-minded altruist.

What's interesting about all of this is that earlier, kkat was trying to create tension between Velvet and Calamity by presenting them as opposites. The fight they had over Calamity's shooting of the rapey colt during the infamous Blue Mare scene tried to draw a line between Velvet's (supposedly) kind but impractical nature and Calamity's cold but well-meaning pragmatism. However, now, the author seems to be saying that they have the same nature and the same motivation. This is why the conversation in this scene feels like insincere mush: the author never defined clear values or personalities for either of these characters, so any attempt to mine them for depth is going to come up dry. If your characters are stuffed with fluff to start with, you're not going to dig anything out of them besides fluff no matter how deep you go.

>I found myself fervently wishing at Calamity to not blow it. I wasn’t happy for them because I was worried they were going to get hurt. But I wanted them to be together, I realized. I hoped for them. And Velvet’s words were like a ray of real, untainted sunshine. For the first time, I really thought maybe they could last together. So long as Calamity didn’t say anything stupid in the next few minutes, that was.
This is a good sample of what most of the scene has been like. The author is just flinging thoughts around haphazardly and hoping that something will stick. Where is LP's concern about Velvet and Calamity's relationship coming from all of a sudden? We've never heard her mention any of this before this chapter; in fact, their relationship has barely been dealt with at all.

The problem is that kkat has avoided giving either of these characters any serious development throughout the entire story so far, and now he's trying to do it all in one shot. He never established much of a personality for either Velvet or Calamity, never established why exactly they were attracted to each other, and this is certainly the first we've heard of Littlepoop being worried about either of them "getting hurt." The author just flings all of this at us out of absolutely nowhere.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3148f6e
?
No.309126
309129
1619045376610.jpg
>>309092

To illustrate what I mean, we can take a look at Calamity's assessment of Velvet:

>“Well… she’s beautiful,” he started. “Not jus’ outside. Behind her outer beauty an’ occasionally abrasive personality, she’s really beautiful inside.”
First of all, the phrase "occasionally abrasive personality" is completely outside Calamity's usual speaking style. Is that really how this character would word this? Second, this doesn't feel like an accurate assessment of either Velvet's actual personality or Calamity's perception of it. Honestly, it feels more like the author is realizing that he never really gave Velvet a personality, and now that he needs to have one of his characters explain why he likes her, he realizes that he can't think of a good reason why anyone should like her. So, he just has Calamity throw out the usual bullshit generalities that any guy might say if he were put on the spot like this: "she's beautiful inside, she has a good heart, she's kind, she's beautiful, blah blah blah."

He goes on:

>“Look, when we first rescued her, Ah didn’t know what t’ think. She was helpin’ slavers. An’ she was… well… Ah was expectin’ her t’ be fancy an’ prissy an’ high falootin’ like the folks in this Tower here. But she weren’t like that at all. She’s beautiful, but she’s… I dunno… down t’ earth?”
This isn't the first time we've heard a character say they thought Velvet was snooty or fancy. I think SteelHooves or someone called her an aristocrat or a princess earlier, and I think some of the other background characters have also referred to her this way. However, again, her behavior doesn't convey this impression at all. We've seen plenty of "sultry" Velvet, but if kkat wanted that side of her personality to exude class or sophistication, he fails even harder than usual. Sultry Velvet is pretty much the opposite of classy. Let's take a look at a few quick examples:

>“Oh, but you are,” Velvet cooed maturely.
>“I know,” Velvet purred.
>“And just what are we now?” Velvet said silkily.
I've noticed this about her for some time, and it's part of what nauseates me about both Velvet as a character and kkat's handling of sex in general. There is absolutely no subtlety to it. Whenever she's feeling amorous, Velvet is always "cooing" or "purring" or being "silky." If the idea here is that she's supposed to be sophisticated and sexy, this isn't cutting it. Sophisticated women don't need to try this hard; this is more like desperation. Velvet's behavior seems less like a mature, sexy woman strategically employing her feminine wiles and more like a horny, neglected housewife desperately trying to seduce the pool boy, so she can enjoy one last fling before menopause hits her like a train.

As to her being "down to earth," I don't really get that vibe from her either. Calamity goes on:

>“Practical. She’s practical. An’ more importantly, she’s devoted. She weren’t helpin’ slavers cuz she sympathizes for any o’ what they were doin’, but because she’s dedicated t’ helpin’ folk. And she don’t let unpleasantness or discomfort get in the way.”
Absolutely nothing about Velvet conveys practicality. I'm not just talking about her habit of trying to use diplomacy in situations where it clearly isn't called for, either; everything she does is the opposite of practical. If she were practical, she wouldn't have ever left the stable in the first place, because it makes no practical sense to abandon a lucrative career and a life of privilege and shelter to go wandering around in an anarchic hellhole populated by thieves and murderers. It makes even less sense to do this when you have no actual goal in mind, and less still when you have no way of defending yourself. Velvet's actions are those of a dreamer or a wandering fool, not a pragmatist. Ironically, it's Calamity who has always struck me as the practical one.

As to her helping the slavers, none of that ever really conveyed what the author was trying to convey either. Presumably the idea was supposed to be that Velvet is so kindhearted she is willing to administer medical care to anyone, even slavers. If kkat had made at least some minimal effort to humanize or whatever his slavers it might have worked, but the problem is that these guys were never portrayed as anything other than heartless, sadistic goons. Velvet not only provided medical care for these goons but sang for them and entertained them; this makes her come across as hypocritical, not caring. It becomes worse when you place it in context with the rest of her story:

She left the stable because she wanted to be a doctor instead of a singer, and I guess the Overmare wouldn't let her change jobs or do two jobs at once because cutie marks or something (tbh I was never 100% clear on that part). However, she had absolutely no plan for how to survive in the wasteland, and no objective or goals other than a vague desire to be a doctor, so she immediately fell in with a bunch of slavers and took a job patching up sick and injured slaves so they could be shipped off to die in a salt mine somewhere. If this ever troubled her conscience, she's never mentioned it. To make the whole thing even sillier, she also volunteered her time singing and entertaining the very goons responsible for injuring the slaves she was supposed to be caring for, and as far as I can tell she did it for free. So, she basically left the stable only to end up doing the very thing she was trying to get away from, except now the only thing she gets in return is the satisfaction of aiding and abetting a group of murderous goons. And again, if any of this ever troubled her supposedly pure heart, we have yet to hear about it.

Anyway, the rest of his statement isn't really worth going over. His reasons for loving Velvet ultimately amount to a list of generalities that any male could pull out of his ass as an excuse for loving an otherwise unremarkable female: she's kind, sweet, caring, pretty, etc.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3148f6e
?
No.309129
309135 309137 309148
1621391950443.jpg
>>309126

Anyway, this idiotic, rambling batch of half-truths and cliches from Calamity apparently satisfies Littlepoop, and she gives their relationship her hoofstamp of approval. Homage, apparently forgetting that she is supposed to be mad at Littlepoop, approaches and puts her forelegs around her. Velvet makes another stupid and inappropriate joke about dyke sex on the table they are currently eating off of, there is some more irrelevant banter, and the scene ends.

Page break. For no obvious reason, Calamity now gives Littlepoop two memory orbs he apparently purchased from a caravan. They are reputed to be "genuine memories of Rainbow Dash." She places them in her saddlebag along with the rest of her over 9000 memory orbs to be viewed later. After this, Velvet and Calamity leave. Littlepoop asks Homage if she is still being punished, and Homage says yes, so after a couple of jokes about spanking she gets up to leave. Nothing else happens, but I did want to call some brief attention to this:

>I stopped next to a desk littered with Homage’s personal things. She had a triptych of pictures framed on the desk. Pictures of me in the wasteland, my friends nearby. The pictures were taken from someplace high above and far away, zoomed in until I nearly filled the frame, but washed out with the odd tint of all the air between the camera and its subject.
This is actually a rather touching bit of imagery that conveys Homage's affection for Littlepoop better than an entire novel's worth of bondage and orgasm jokes ever could. If kkat had bothered to make either of these characters interesting enough to give a shit about, I might even be genuinely moved at Homage's having this on her desk. Since most of this text is pretty much unsalvageable, it makes more sense at this point to highlight the portions that the author shouldn't cut. This is one of those portions.

Page break. Littlepoop goes down to the market floor to have a Sparkle Cola, when she bumps into Calamity. He is apparently trying to buy rubber bullets from the police for some ridiculous reason or another, and is assblasted because they tried to buttfuck him on the price. They chat for a bit, and we learn that apparently, Littlepoop tried to set Velvet and Calamity up with a therapist in one of the blocks of time she can't remember. Too bad she didn't book an appointment for herself as well.

Calamity expresses concern about the Enclave computer they found earlier, the one that was attached to the antenna at Old Olneigh. He is concerned that the Enclave are up to no good. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop is now inside yet another memory orb. Her host appears to be a background pony working at some Ministry building or other. It's raining, and there is some kind of civil demonstration going on outside the building.

Rarity suddenly teleports into the building, and asks if Rainbow Dash is still around. It turns out that yes, she is; she and Applejack both descend the stairs, commenting on how impressed they are that she was able to use Twilight's teleport spell. They talk shop for awhile; Rarity has some things she needs to discuss with Dash about some project or other. She expresses concern that Dash has involved Apple Bloom in the project, because this would mean that Sweetie Belle is probably involved by extension. Rarity seems to want to keep her little sister in the dark about whatever she's working on.

They decide to all have lunch, and we learn that Applejack is apparently planning to fire the ponies in her ministry who tried to kill her with a malfunctioning elevator. Wowee, that'll show 'em. Applejack clearly runs a pretty tight ship; strict "three strikes and you're out" policy for trying to murder your boss.

Meanwhile, three pegasi appear in the lobby. They seem to have a bone to pick with Rainbow Dash. The details are a little hard to follow, but it seems that they have some relatives who were killed on the front lines, and they are upset with her over how she is handling things. There is apparently a growing contingent of pegasi who want to not be involved in the war, and as far as I can tell this is the genesis of the pegasus rebellion that resulted in the formation of the Enclave and the secession of Cloudsdale from the rest of Equestria.

What happens next is a little confusing. It seems that one of the protesters somehow got inside the building and threw a grenade, either that or a grenade just appeared from somewhere. Rarity, for some reason, pulls the zebra necronomicon out of her saddlebag and throws it over the grenade. The grenade goes off, and the book somehow prevents the blast from doing any serious damage; typical kkat physics. After this, Rainbow Dash orders Littlepoop's host to lock down the building.

Applejack notices the book, and confronts Rarity about it. Apparently, Rarity had said she was going to destroy it.

>Dusting herself off, Rarity stared back. “I said I would burn It,” Rarity said calmly. “And I tried. But as you can see, It doesn’t burn.” Lowering her voice, she whispered something to Applejack that made the earth pony’s ears shoot up in alarm. Then, raising her voice again, she added, “I even tried to have Spike burn it. All that did was send it to Princess Celestia.”
Well, if his fire does the same thing with the ordinary paper scrolls that Twilight writes her letters on, it seems like nearly anyone could have predicted that this would be the outcome of using it on the zebra necronomicon. Clearly Celestia runs a pretty tight ship when it comes to national security; it's nice to see she put her country's greatest minds on top of it.

There is some minor bickering over the handling of the current situation. We learn that Zecora was apparently a spy. Actually, we might have already known that; I'm having an increasingly difficult time keeping track of all the convoluted details we've read. Ultimately, though, they decide not to have lunch.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309135
>>309129
It's supposed to make the book look unnatural when it tanks a grenade explosion without any damage but at this point we're used to this bullshit.

Explosives and bullets failing to damage Twilight's Tree Library back in ponyville, LP flying into that rock-breaking prison camp using a cum blanket as a disguise, that time Calamity hid from enemies who had already spotted him by diving under that same cum blanket to avoid getting shot, that holotape nailed to Trixie's doorframe still functioning despite 200 years passing and giant nail penetration, how LP casually carried more than 200 pounds of guns and ammo into Tenpony Tower including a sniper rifle and just whipped them out of hammerspace like Bugs Bunny with a videogame inventory even though giant sniper rifles are hard to conceal, retarded "concealment equals cover" bullshit in Red Eye's Thunderdome when LP swirled radioactive goo around her telekinetically hard enough to block incoming bullets like this is Avatar The Last fucking Airbender and she's blocking fireballs with waterbending, all of Kkat's countless "it worked that way in a game once so it should work that way now" moments, and more.

At this point if Kkat wants to make something in this story look jarringly eldritch and out of place, he should make it obey the laws of physics and make sense for once.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.309137
309148 309316
1621989608227.png
>>309129

Page break.

>When I returned from the memory orb, I was no longer on the secluded bench outside some restrooms where I had laid down to view it. I was someplace else. Dark and cold.
Yeah, I hear that organ thieves are kind of a problem in the wasteland, as are murderers, thieves, slavers, rapists, etc. You really shouldn't make a habit of going unconscious for long swaths of time in public places when you don't have any friends around to protect you. Seems like that would just be common sense, but on the other hoof, common sense seems to be an even rarer commodity than fresh drinking water in Edgequestria.

Anyway, she pulls up her radar thingy and sees a bunch of non-hostile blips.

>I immediately suspected they wanted me to do something. Some task to perform, some new distraction that would further divert me from my date with the Canterlot Ruins.
The Canterlot Ruins? Is that where she's going next? Why is she going there? I thought she was planning to hang around Tenpony for a few days so her friends can rest, or fuck each other, or whatever? I love the way this narrator just pulls destinations completely out of her ass without bothering to tell the reader or anyone around her why she wants to go there; it's a very endearing quality that totally does not make me want to sock her in the nose repeatedly.

>There was a clock ticking. There was a bomb poised to destroy this very tower and everypony in it.
I was curious if she still remembered that. How is that whole thing coming along, anyway?

>And I didn’t have time for games.
Clearly not. After all the time she's spent goofing around in the spa, arguing with Homage, brainwashing herself, and giving her friends impromptu unasked-for relationship counseling, I'd imagine she's rather short on time by now.

Anyway, long story short she's been abducted by the super-sekrit Jefferey Epstein-style cult that secretly and/or openly runs Tenpony Tower. They have heard how she is the Wasteland Savior and the Bringer of Light and the Prince of Persia and a million other ridiculous titles, which of course she is humble and bashful about. It also seems that Homage, who I guess is one of them or something, has been talking her up as well. She recommended that LP be made privy to all their sekrit sorcery, and then for some reason, instead of waiting for their answer, completely bypassed all protocol and showed all of that shit to her anyway without their permission. So, the cult decided that they really ought to abduct Littlepoop and interview her to see what all the fuss is about, and when they saw her passed out on the toilet, they figured that it was as good a time as any to grab her.

The conversation proceeds along predictable lines. The Tenpony cult views itself as some kind of sacred civilization-bunker, and they're worried about sharing their secrets with the kind of reckless, impulsive pony who thinks it's a good idea to intentionally knock herself unconscious in the middle of a public restroom. Meanwhile, Littlepoop chastises them for having a bunch of powerful magic and technology and shit that could fix the wasteland, but not using it for 200 years.

>I rounded on him. “The only damn one of you doing any good at all is…” I paused before I said her name. “…Is DJ Pon3.”
This cult seems like a pack of tryhard faggots so far, but they manage a functional city that likely plays an important role in the wasteland's economy, and in addition they preserve and conduct research into ancient magic technology that could potentially prove useful one day. How much "good" they do is probably up for debate, but they seem pretty on the ball for the most part.

Conversely, what exactly does DJ Pon3 do that merits so much high praise, anyway? Littlepoop seems convinced that her little girlfriend is qualified to be the Savior of the Wasteland, and operate the Gears of Harmony or whatever the fuck it's called. Even before she formed this belief, she would periodically talk about Homage/DJ Pon3 as some kind of hero who was carrying out some kind of sacred duty in the wasteland. Why? As far as I can tell, all she does is sit around playing the same five records over and over, while occasionally providing news or snarky commentary on the happenings in the wasteland, all from the comfort of her literal ivory tower. Pretty much anyone with access to the same broadcasting and surveillance equipment could do what Homage does, and if she suddenly stopped doing it I don't see how it would have any serious impact on anything. If Homage died and was replaced by another unicorn with the same voice-modulation spell, would anyone even notice?

Anyway, this goes on for awhile. What they ultimately want is for Littlepoop to give them the memory orbs that she herself has not yet viewed, so they can look into her memories and see if she deserves to be trusted with all the high-power shit they have. Littlepoop is understandably hesitant about doing this.

>The voice on my left intoned, “We already know that Red Eye is threatening this tower and the lives of everypony in it to motivate you. If you are playing with our lives, do you not think we at least deserve to know what the score is?”
This is probably the closest thing to a reasonable point that anyone in this scene actually makes, but just out of curiosity: has it ever occurred to any of these dipshits to just...I don't know...solve their own problems, instead of sitting around waiting for this rug-munching klepto to do it for them? I mean, think about this: there's a balefire bomb hidden somewhere in this city. This all-powerful cult that runs the entire Tower is aware of this, but instead of trying to find and disarm the bomb, they're wasting their time interviewing this lone screwball, trying to talk her into letting them view her memories, so they can ascertain if she's really got the chops to save the world or not. Is anyone else besides me having a hard time making sense of this?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309148
scrollgowhoosh.png
>>309129
>The grenade goes off, and the book somehow prevents the blast from doing any serious damage; typical kkat physics.
Believe it or not, the book being invincible is a major plot point that'll be elaborated on sooner or later.

>Well, if his fire does the same thing with the ordinary paper scrolls that Twilight writes her letters on, it seems like nearly anyone could have predicted that this would be the outcome of using it on the zebra necronomicon.
There's a weird bit of discontinuity here. In the show, and indeed within the context of the story, we've seen that Spike's fire breath explicitly burns things. Even when it translocates them to Celestia. The intro of the show demonstrates this quite clearly - Spike breathes on a scroll, which burns to ash and then magically reconstitutes in front of Celestia. Earlier in the story, Spike breathed on an Enclave mare who promptly and painfully burned to death - conspicuously, there was no mention whatsoever of what happened to her body, or whether there was one, after the fact. This will come up again.

Bottom line, though - if the book is supposed to be completely indestructible, then how did Spike's breath burn it to ash in order for it to be translocated to Celestia in the first place?

>>309137
>The Canterlot Ruins? Is that where she's going next? Why is she going there?
That's where the book is. The invincible book of bullshit that the Goddess wants. Apparently Littlepip didn't cut that part out of her memory? I guess? It isn't particularly clear what she does and does not remember, or what parts of her plan she is and isn't supposed to know.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309242
309243
Been thinking about how often LP has doubts just to have her friends suck her dick.

Would be better if her doubts came from genuine mistakes she made that did permanent lasting damage to herself or others.

As for scenes where everyone deepthroats Littlepoop's littlepeener, it would be better if there was only one of those scenes near the end where, right before the biggest most major conflict imaginable, LP AND HER FRIENDS justifiably feel doubtful over their ability to win and each character interacts with other characters that are important to them so that each member of Littlepip's Littleshits get their own personalized pep talk that brings up major (foiling evil plots) and personality-based (overcoming personal flaws) accomplishments each character accomplished over the course of the story.

Then again for that to work characters besides Littlepoop would need to have character growth arcs and other characters that are important to them.
Anonymous
3694f92
?
No.309243
309244
0684_OAT_Sidekicks_Anonymous_MLPOL_Filly_Anon_Pony_Female_Thinking_Emoji_Meme_cute_Smiley_Face_touching_face_orange.png
>>309242
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309244
>>309243
You know what I mean, metaphorical dicksucking. Those scenes where LP has her ego fellated by her friends. They heap absurd amounts of undue praise upon her every time she's even slightly doubtful over her abilities/deeds/mission and she only has these thoughts when friends are nearby and ready to emotionally validate her ad nauseam.

LP doesn't fear being insufficient and dying when in the middle of combat, even when things look bad. But when she's safe with her friends, suddenly she feels bad and needs her friends to call her strong and heroic and smart and pretty and so on? That's just retarded.

I think this is why The Typical Hollywood Formula Film saves its "someone verbally validates and encourages the hero" moments for their most dramatic possible moment. Every time LP's friends call LP the ultimate murderhobo it's fucking annoying and makes me want to punt Littlepip in the cunt so motherfucking hard Kkat will think he feels it even though he's a tranny with an infected hole that's not a real cunt.
Anonymous
64dd934
?
No.309276
310067
https://archived.moe/mlpol/thread/167143/
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
878e635
?
No.309316
309321 309322
1621582423140.jpg
>>309137

Anyway, long story short, Littlepoop cuts a deal with these edgelords where she gives them access to her memories on the condition that they remain in Homage's possession, and also that Homage gets to keep her free apartment. She imposes the second condition because Homage's showing Littlepoop the secrets of Tenpony would ordinarily be grounds for expulsion from the city (or at least I would assume so). The cult reluctantly agrees to this.

This actually doesn't make a ton of sense, because it's been several days since Homage showed all that stuff to LP, they've clearly known about it for awhile, and if they wanted to expel Homage they reasonably would have done so already. Also, it's not as if LP is really holding any cards here: she's in the Tower, and since it's been established that the party has to hand in all of their guns every time they come here, it would stand to reason that LP would be unarmed. Homage doesn't have any actual fighting skills and as far as I can tell doesn't hold any serious clout in Tenpony; in fact, if I had to guess, I'd say she probably has a lot of enemies in this council, since she basically just sits on the air badmouthing their society all day. It seems to me this cult could just take the orbs from Homage by force, and do whatever the hell they want with LP. But whatever; who even cares at this point?

Anyway, they agree to her terms, but have a condition of their own: they will reserve judgement about Homage's misdeeds until after they view the orbs. If they decide that Homage's assessment of LP as one of the good guys is valid, and not just a product of her obvious crush on her, they will forget about the whole "revealing their closely guarded secrets to a total stranger" thing, but if not, then Homage will be "judged accordingly."

Page break. They tell Littlepoop to use the same memory orb she had been looking at originally so that she will be unconscious when they take her back to the restroom that they found her in. LP thinks this is completely idiotic, and for once she and I agree on something.

When she wakes up, instead of focusing on the problem at hand, she instead meditates upon the bullshit that was going on inside the orb.

>Covert operations depended on secrecy for the safety of those involved. But it seemed cruel for Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie to leave Applejack and Rarity in the dark about Zecora, believing that a close friend of theirs had betrayed them. Was it necessary to cause them that pain? Could they have been trusted with that secret? Everything I had seen suggested that Rarity was well-practiced in keeping secrets, but Applejack? How convincing could the Bearer of the Element of Honesty be if put into a position where she had to maintain a lie? Was it better for everypony (and one zebra) that she not know?
So...I guess Zecora wasn't actually a spy? It was all a ruse, or something? I seem to remember something about this from earlier, but there are just too many damn strands to keep track of in this mess of autism.

Anyway, blah blah blah. She keeps mumbling convoluted autism about zebras and whatever to herself, and then she suddenly bumps into Xenith. It turns out that Xenith had seen them abduct her from the shitter, and she followed them and presumably witnessed the entire exchange. I guess we can assume that Xenith now knows where the cult conducts its business. I can't tell if this should signify that Xenith is exceptionally good at stealth, or if the cult is exceptionally bad at security. Given the average intelligence of most of the characters in this story, I'm guessing the latter.

A conversation that feels like it was written by a third grader follows. Littlepoop informs Xenith that she is going back to Homage's place, because she has to warn her about...something. I guess. She asks Xenith if she would like to come along, and Xenith expresses indifference. Littlepoop asks what she would like to do instead, and she responds with some emo-girl angst that has fuck-all to do with the question:

>“It does not matter,” Xenith informed me. “I am not welcome here, so I cannot do as I wish. For too many, my stripes make me the enemy. Or worse, a demon from the past responsible for all the misery in this world.”
>“It does not matter that it is unfair. It still is.” She looked down. “Sometimes, I feel as if I am an earth pony and that my stripes are really great wounds, a punishment for some great wrong the ancestors of my ancestors were connected to.”
inb4 her wrists cry tears of blood.

Littepoop again asks her what she would like to do, if she could do anything in the whole wide world. Xenith responds that she would like to go shopping, presumably at Hot Topic.

Littlepoop is "rocked" by this request, and tries to imagine what it must be like for Xenith, not even being able to go into a store without all the preps staring at how goffik she is. She is consumed with sadness for her friend's plight, and wishes that she could "fix this."

Page break. It would seem that LP's attention span has held out longer than usual, because she's still thinking about Xenith when the next scene opens. The two of them are back at Homage's place. Homage suggests that Xenith simply dye her coat to hide her stripes. There is some more cringey sex banter, because it's been at least a whole microscene since we had to sit through any of that, and then Xenith notices something on Homage's wall.

>Xenith made a slight choking noise, backing up, her eyes fixed on something just beyond Homage. At her reaction, we both followed her gaze.
>The Star Blaster.
What the fuck is the "Star Blaster?" I'm assuming it's the "alien" weapon that Homage used earlier, but we've never heard it called by this name before. Come to think of it, the text really hasn't elaborated on just what the fuck this thing is, why Homage has it, or why Xenith is afraid of it, beyond that she associates it with Nightmare Moon for some religious reason.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
878e635
?
No.309321
309323
1620465720958.gif
>>309316

They discuss Homage's weird gun. The conversation doesn't clarify any of the significant questions I posed, but it continues a thread that was introduced earlier. Xenith appears to believe that this weapon has some kind of sentience or evil aura to it, and that it "yearns to kill." Rather than dismiss this as nonsense, Homage takes Xenith's comments seriously, and remarks that she has noticed she is a better shot with this weapon than she is with most other weapons. However, she seems to disagree with Homage's belief that the weapon has some kind of spirit or soul. She believes that its creators may have imbued it with some kind of malicious intent. Presumably this has something to do with the "magic" in magical energy weapons.

It's clear enough that the author is foreshadowing something here, and that this gun is going to have some kind of significance later in the story. That's all well and good, but as is his habit, he just sort of plunks this thing into the story out of absolutely nowhere. Why does Homage even own a weapon like this? Where did she get it from? Are none of these characters even remotely curious about it?

Anyway, Xenith seems surprised that Homage takes her superstitions as seriously as she does. Homage responds thusly:

>“I believe that most all religion is born of a mixture of truth and fantasy, hope and fear. How much truth is in any one mythology is hard to say.”
>“But I believe that the amount of truth in the zebra’s legends is a good bit more than zero. I don’t believe that your ancient ancestors understood the stars nearly as much as they believed they did…”
It wouldn't be a midwit story without a midwit take on religion I guess. Anyway, there seems to be a bit more foreshadowing here:

>“But I have seen enough to be certain that the void beyond the moon holds wonders and terrors far beyond our imaginations. And that at least some of what is out there is malicious beyond our conception of evil, and is looking this way with hostile intentions.”
I'm assuming the significance is that there is some greater, potentially conscious evil operating here, and that its influence had something to do with the war.

Page break.

>“I’ve changed my mind,” claimed the exotic voice of the charcoal-black earth pony next to me who was really Xenith. “I like her.”
I guess this means that Xenith decided to dye her coat after all?

Anyway, it looks like they decided to fulfill Xenith's wish and go shopping, because the scene opens in some kind of apothecary shop. Also, it appears that Xenith has decided she likes Homage now. I was never quite clear on why she didn't like her in the first place, but there you have it. Littlepoop seems happy about it.

>The prices of everything in Tenpony Tower had tripled since the first time I had been here. Red Eye’s blockade was killing commerce with the caravans and scavengers. I could feel an undercurrent of worry in the marketplace.
Nothing about this "blockade" makes any damn sense. Red Eye basically laid siege to the tower, yet somehow Littlepoop's airship is able to come and go as it pleases, and it looks like life in the tower is just going on the way it usually does, apart from some slight anxiety over higher prices. Are these ponies in danger or aren't they? Do they see themselves as being in danger? Seems to me a giant army setting up camp around the perimeter of the building would be cause for alarm; you wouldn't expect things like spas and cheese shops to still be operating normally. Also, how is that little bomb situation coming along?

Apparently, though, the locals don't seem that worried about any of it:

>Earlier, a mare had snorted, exclaiming, “The mere thought of the wines meant for my cellar being sold instead in one of those dirty little places like Gutterville or Arbu gives me the vapors.”

Anyway, there is suddenly a commotion from outside:

>“The slavers,” a colt replied as he quickly trotted past us, heading towards a window. “They’re leaving!”
There were slavers here? Oh wait, is he talking about Red Eye's army? Seems like kind of a strange way to word this.

Page break. This is another of those incredibly short microscenes that feels like it could have easily been appended to the last one, or better yet just omitted entirely since it contains nothing essential. It consists of a single short dialogue exchange between LP and Xenith, in which LP expresses concern that apparently half of Red Eye's troops are leaving, but the other half are staying behind. LP wonders aloud if this could mean that Red Eye is now planning to blow up the tower, but ultimately concludes that this is probably not the case, since he would have taken all of his men with him if he had planned to do that. Come to think of it, why hasn't he detonated that bomb yet? Wasn't the deal for LP to take out the Goddess, or the bomb goes off? She certainly didn't hold up her end of the bargain.

Page break. LP is now back at Homage's. LP is anxious about whatever the fuck Red Eye is doing, and Homage gives her a sensual massage to calm her down. Nothing else happens.

Page break. LP is still at Homage's. They appear to have had sex in the space between scenes. LP asks Homage if she is doing alright:

>“You know what I mean. Things here have been… rough lately. And a few days ago, what you had to do to save us…”
I honestly have no idea what she's talking about here. What did Homage have to do to save them?

>“I have only taken a life a few times (not counting beasts and robots) but each time it was to save somepony… although sometimes that pony was myself.” She reached a hoof up to brush my muzzle. “I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy it. And I’m really no good at it. But I don’t regret it.”
My best guess is that this has something to do with that alicorn she shot with the space weapon. Seems like killing an alicorn in this story is pretty meaningless as they are all basically just drones, but whatever I guess. Nothing else happens.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.309322
F3Firelance.png
>>309316
The Star Blaster is a reference to the Alien Blaster from Fallout 3. Kkat decided to take a meme overpowered item that's tied to a random encounter and make it a plot point of sorts about the stars and zebra superstitions.

That's it, really. The gun was retarded in itself because it was a totally wacky "aliens and spaceships ooo! thing when they shouldn't exist at all.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
37196c3
?
No.309323
309328 309329
l5irnvt1kzx61.jpg
>>309321

Page break. The next morning, LP and Calamity take Velvet down to the clinic to have her cast removed. Wow, it's been what, almost a week since her fucking leg got severed? Was it even that long? Imagine suffering a dismemberment so severe you had to be out of commission with a cast on your leg for a period of actual days. Poor Velvet; I'm sure she was traumatized by this.

They put her in a wagon and take her downstairs to the clinic. Nothing else happens.

Page break.

>“You were right,” I told Velvet as Doctor Helpinghoof did one final examination of my friend’s foreleg. There was a slim scar that encircled her leg. It wouldn’t even be visible when her coat had grown back.
Imagine suffering a dismemberment so severe it actually left a slim scar that wouldn't be visible once your coat grew back. Poor Velvet; I'm sure she'll be traumatized by this.

Anyway, even though this scene is supposed to be about Velvet getting her cast taken off, Littlepoop unsurprisingly shifts the focus onto herself. She brings up her crack mint addiction out of nowhere, confesses to Velvet that she can't be trusted around the things, and asks her to please go through her saddlebags periodically to make sure she isn't squirreling any more of them away. Velvet agrees.

With that settled, and the pesky matter of Velvet's severed leg finally behind them, the crew can now turn their attention to more important things: what's to be done about that bomb that's still tick, tick, ticking away somewhere in Tenpony Tower? Oh wait; that isn't what they're going to deal with next. First, they have to go to the Canterlot Ruins for some still-unexplained reason. Since they obviously aren't even remotely pressed for time, they decide to make a few stops along the way. For instance, the village that Xenith last saw her daughter at several years ago is apparently on the road to Canterlot, so they might as well stop there.

>But first, we need to arm ourselves with all the information we can on surviving in the Pink Cloud. And that means our next trip has to be back to Stable Twenty-Nine.
Naturally. Stable Twenty-Nine; of course. It makes perfect logical sense that you would go to that place, and we need absolutely no clarification as to how a trip there might help with surviving in the Pink Cloud.

>The others nodded in agreement. “We need SteelHooves.”
Oh yeah, SteelHooves is a character in this story. I'd completely forgotten. Whatever happened to him, anyway?

lPage break. Once more, we are suddenly and inexplicably dropped into the middle of a memory orb. The scene takes place in Ponyville, and appears to be a much earlier memory than most of what we've seen so far. The mane 6 all appear to be fairly close to their age in the series. Equestria seems to still be a more or less tranquil place, though there is clearly trouble brewing on the horizon.

It appears that Rainbow Dash has rushed off to join an outfit called the Equestrian Skyguard, in order to avenge what happened to the Wonderbolts. What exactly did happen to the Wonderbolts is left ominously unclear.

Anyway, it looks like Princess Celestia has sent a letter to Twilight, requesting that she and her friends go on a diplomatic mission to where the buffalo roam, in an effort to strengthen ties with them. There are murmurs going around town that war may be on the horizon, and we also learn that firearms use is slowly but surely becoming widespread in Equestria. The nation is still pleasant and peaceful, but it's clear that things are changing, and not for the better.

Twilight announces that she is going to go and find Rainbow Dash, and they will all meet back here in two days. At the very end of the scene, Littlepoop's host is revealed to be Derpy.

I actually rather like the way this scene is written. It's a scene from the idyllic Equestria we all know and love, but there is a distinctly foreboding atmosphere to it. I've noted before that the memory orbs are significantly better done than the rest of the story; if you took just the memories, put them in chronological order and wrote some additional scenes to string them together into a coherent narrative, then chopped everything else, this could actually be a halfway-decent story about a war destroying the fabric of Equestria. If kkat hadn't been so obsessed with trying to write a playthrough of a video game he likes, he might have been able to do something interesting with this apocalyptic Equestria idea.

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Crusaders

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“I am impervious to such corrupting ambitions.”
Who is impervious, and to what sort of corrupting ambitions? This chapter's epitaph is even more lacking in context than usual.

We rejoin the party as they are loading the last of their supplies onto the Butt Wagon. There is some actually-not-half-bad description of the rain falling around them. It appears that Xenith is no longer disguised as an earth pony, which rather makes one wonder just what the bloody point of having her change in the first place was. A completely unnecessary, convoluted and detailed explanation of how the dye was removed from her coat is given three entire paragraphs. The tl;dr is that Velvet tried to remove it, but her magic wasn't strong enough, so they paid Life Bloom to do it. I'll ask again: was there a point to any of this?

Anyway, there is some more cringey sex banter, which ends with Homage proposing a three way with LP and Xenith. It's unclear whether or not she's joking. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Calamity attaches a luggage rack to the roof of the Butt Bandito, which also functions as some kind of mount for a laser cannon. Why the hell not? He appears to be beefing up the vehicle's defense capabilities, and LP begins to apprehensively wonder if this isn't part of the "plan" she doesn't remember.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
37196c3
?
No.309328
309330
1622180784105.png
>>309323

LP's mind drifts back to the memory orbs she watched yesterday.

>According to Calamity, I had told him it was safe for me to view them. Had I known about them, I would have been driven to distraction by curiosity. But I had not been aware of them until Calamity had set them on the table and sent them rolling towards me. Now I wondered if this was just a gift to myself, or if there was some piece of information in those orbs I felt I needed to know.
This seems unnecessarily complicated. First of all, she's picked up so many of these goddamn things over the course of the story that it's impossible to keep track of how many she should still have. My understanding was that she still had quite a few of them that she hadn't watched yet. Is there any reason that Calamity would have taken them? Obviously, the ones containing her own memories are off limits, but I don't see any reason why the memories of other ponies from the past would have any bearing on her plan. Also, there's been no mention of Calamity confiscating any of them that I can recall.

>The first orb held a potential wealth of information. Two elements stood out amongst the others, the first being the vision of The Black Book. Clearly, The Black Book was itself a soul jar. At first, I wondered if Rarity herself had made it one, but I dismissed the idea quickly. Far more likely, it had been infused with the soul of the mad zebra alchemist who had written it. If the zebras feared and loathed everything they associated with the stars, and The Black Book was supposedly dictated to that mad zebra in dreams, this explained how the book could have survived destruction for generations in zebra lands before finding its way here. And it would certainly have enhanced and given credence to the darkest legends that formed around it.
Literally nothing here is self-evident from any of the information that LP has at her disposal. All she learned about the zebra necronomicon from the first orb is that it is somehow explosion-proof.

>The other aspect of the orb which stood out to me was the conversation between Rainbow Dash and those three bucks. In that argument, I had witnessed the beginnings of the Enclave. The orb spoke to a spreading sentiment amongst the pegasus ponies -- a resentment of their sacrifices in a war that they believed themselves literally above -- that had even reached the heart of at least one pegasus in a position of power. One who would be killed as the first zebra megaspell annihilated Cloudsdayle.
This is a little better. The scene itself didn't explain all of this outright, but when placed in context alongside other scenes we've witnessed, it's reasonable that LP would deduce this much.

>The second orb had been a deeply bittersweet experience. I felt such happiness and sadness at seeing five of the mares I had grown to know and love in a warmer and happier time, a spring before the summer of war that would bring such heartache and horror to all of them. They had stood on the precipice of something terrible, and they had loved and laughed and danced.
I agree, the second orb was surprisingly well done. It was a bittersweet experience for me as well; for just one brief, fleeting moment it almost felt like I was reading a better story.

>“Prayer alone is not enough,” I murmured to myself. No, for our world to change, there had to be action. There had to be ponies who would stand up to the darkness and Stare it down. I would be such a pony.
The capitalized use of "Stare" here implies Fluttershy's Stare ability. This is dumb; it would make no sense to use her Stare power in this context, Littlepoop doesn't have this ability, and I don't remember if she even knows about this power in the first place. The only reason this was done was to make a silly bronybait reference. Protip: don't do shit like this, or if you're going to insist on doing it, please do it sparingly.

Anyway, LP gives Homage the second orb and tells her to view it whenever she's feeling low. Unable to resist a bit of dramatic grandstanding, she then launches into a monologue too ridiculous not to quote directly:

>“I would fight to make that bright and innocent past our future once again,” I said, turning to her. “Even if it means dashing myself against the evil and cruelty of this wasteland until there is nothing left of me.” Like the ponies who cracked and shattered their hoofs pounding at the sealed door of Stable Two, I would persevere, making Equestria a better place one battle at a time. Until there was nothing left for me to give. “And then, when I am too broken to go on, I will float my dying body right down the throat of the darkness and make it choke on me.”
Fucking lol. Never change, Littlepoop; never change.

Anyway, they yak about memory orbs for awhile and do some mild flirting, and by the time they're finished the Fart Bandit is all packed up and it's time to skedaddle. For whatever it's worth, a few fragments of their goodbye scene are among the better samples of kkat's writing.

Page break. The group heads out. The rain is coming down pretty hard, and due to their airship's lack of window glass, they are soon soaked to the skin, or fur, or whatever. Velvet and Littlepoop pass the time attempting to compose a song about Littlepoop's feelings for Homage. I assume the biggest hurdle will be thinking up words that rhyme with vagina.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FlRFBTeYKY

Page break. The group eventually lands to rest and have dinner. They decide to swap out the spark batteries while they're there, and since Calamity has been working all day the task falls to Littlepoop. While she is doing this one of Frank--er, Spike's sprite-bots suddenly approaches.

Their conversation doesn't really go anywhere. LP mentions that she found out what happened to Twilight Sparkle, but then immediately realizes that poor Twiggles didn't exactly come to a pleasant end, so she decides to lie to him about it. Nothing else happens.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.309329
310067
>>309323
>The nation is still pleasant and peaceful, but it's clear that things are changing, and not for the better.

>Twilight announces that she is going to go and find Rainbow Dash, and they will all meet back here in two days. At the very end of the scene, Littlepoop's host is revealed to be Derpy.

>I actually rather like the way this scene is written. It's a scene from the idyllic Equestria we all know and love, but there is a distinctly foreboding atmosphere to it. I've noted before that the memory orbs are significantly better done than the rest of the story; if you took just the memories, put them in chronological order and wrote some additional scenes to string them together into a coherent narrative, then chopped everything else, this could actually be a halfway-decent story about a war destroying the fabric of Equestria. If kkat hadn't been so obsessed with trying to write a playthrough of a video game he likes, he might have been able to do something interesting with this apocalyptic Equestria idea.

This made me think of an approach for my own story. The idea would be to write a short story-styled segment that serves as a way to "Equestria is changing" and detailing some intriguing ideas, basically setting up the story and then jumping a time in the future when shit is fucked. Basically starting off with point A, jumping to point C in history, and slowly trickling in details/ going over what happened in B to cause such a drastic shift from relative piece to SHTF and making it a core part of the narrative? Using immediate contrast to make people go "Huh." and genuinely wonder what occured to cause the shift from idyllic peace to a terrible, darkened world as a point of explicit emphasis.

Do you figure this could be an interesting premise?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
37196c3
?
No.309330
309342 309362
1622158084613.png
>>309328

Page break.

>The fury of the storm beat upon the wasteland for most of the night, finally exhausting its rage and slipping back into an almost peaceful drizzle, like a snoring yao guai.
"Yao guai" sounded like either a made-up word or a reference to something from Chinese mythology, so I googled it. Turns out, it's a Fallout thing. Here is what the wiki has to say about it:

>Yao guai are the mutated descendants of the American black bear. These vicious creatures are found in Appalachia, the Capital Wasteland, the Commonwealth, the Island, and Zion Canyon.
I remember the group fought an Ursa Major (or Minor; I forget which) awhile back, and though I'm not 100% sure, I think Xenith or someone might have called it a "yao guai." If so, it's a legal use of the term; if not, it's a reference to something completely outside of this story's universe, and kkat should bitch slap his own fake tits into another dimension because at this point I'm sick of doing it.

Anyway, it looks like they've arrived at Stable 29. I remember that SteelHooves and his gay little club were going to take over one of the stables and use it as a base, and I guess it's this one, because the party is greeted by a bunch of Steel Rangers with gay little stripes painted on their uniforms. The question of why exactly they needed to come here is still unanswered.

>I recalled with a shiver my last visit here. Since then, new scorch marks littered the walls of the maintenance tunnel. Bullet casings littered the floor, and dark stains told of the ferocious engagements between the Outcasts and the Steel Rangers as they vied for control of the Stable and the Crusader computer inside.
I know it's something that's technically been covered, but they've been to quite a few of these stables and after awhile they all kind of run together. So, though LP might remember the last time she was here, I'm afraid that I don't. However, from the mention of the Crusader computer, I'm guessing that this is the one with the psycho AI that killed all the ponies because their water jiggy broke.

>My first time here, I was bothered by the wrongness of the Stable’s layout. It did not conform to Stable Two, to the way a Stable should be. Now, after my final visit to Stable Two, there was no such feeling. Seeing the death and destruction visited upon Stable Two had stained its memory for me. There no longer was a “proper” Stable.
I've never been entirely sure if LP's unease at the layout of this stable was supposed to signify something, or if it was just some kind of autistic OCD thing because it was similar to her home stable but not exactly the same.

Anyway, they keep walking, and LP reflects on how different this place is from the first time she was here.

>The final resting place of Vinyl Scratch, the little pony in my head reminded me. The tomb of the original DJ Pon3. I quickly chose not to dwell on that. Down that path lay dark things.
This was a weird little potential continuity error that was never cleared up, and I'm surprised actually, I'm not that surprised that the author would needlessly draw our attention to it again. If Vinyl was the original DJ Pon3, and she died here, in this stable, shortly after the megaspells went off, then how did she manage to pass on her title to a successor?

Anyway, nothing else happens in this microscene.

Page break. They go to see SteelHooves, and we finally get a look at Star Paladin Crossroads, who has only been mentioned up until this point. They are discussing some sort of prisoner exchange, but the details are unclear. Evidently, though, the Rangers, or the Outcasts, or whatever they are calling themselves these days, have their own shit going on, and probably can't just drop everything to help Littlepoop.

>I caught Velvet purr something under her breath.
I caught Velvet purring something under her breath.

Anyway, SteelHooves explains that the Good Steel Rangers have managed to capture Elder Cottage Cheese, whom you may remember as the unfortunately-named leader of the Bad Steel Rangers. They are currently arranging a prisoner exchange in which he will be transported back to his own side. The Elder is ranting about being given some kind of medical chair, which from the description sounds like a basic wheelchair. Crossroads wants to put him in some kind of preservation pod which would prolong his life or something, but Cottage Cheese refuses it. There is a heavy implication that if he doesn't go into a pod he's going to die, but Cheese seems to be aware of this and has chosen to accept his fate. Since Stable 29 was taken by the Good Steel Rangers, he can no longer use its computer to become immortal, and as you may or may not remember, that is a thing that he was going to do. So, he's decided to just die.

Page break. We finally get an explanation for why the group is at this stable, and why they want to go to Canterlot. It turns out that the Ministry of Awesome is in Canterlot, and as I recall the Goddess wanted them to get something out of their warehouse for her. They came here to see SteelHooves and ask his advice on how to survive in the pink cloud, because he was exposed to it before, and might know something about it. Once we have all this information in front of us the matter is simple enough; is there any reason the author couldn't have provided us with a brief refresher so we'd all be on the same page about what the group was doing?

>I nodded. “We have two objectives. Rarity’s office in the Ministry of Image, and the secure vault in the Ministry of Awesome.”
Jesus Christ. No sooner has he cleared up one mystery than he introduces another. Why the fuck do they need to go to Rarity's office? Protip: if you're going to write anything this long and convoluted, be sure to reinforce important details by repeating them periodically. Just telling the reader something once doesn't guarantee they're going to remember it 20 goddamn chapters later.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309342
310067
>>309330
Is it bad writing that the guy who wanted to be immortal inside a computer decided "Fuck that, I'll die a mortal" on his own without any input from the heroes?

Or is it good writing because it means Kkat doesn't have to write about LP trying to stop whatshisface from becoming immortal in a story already bloated with immortal and wannabe-immortal villains?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3e0145d
?
No.309362
309367 309371 309373
1622241843432.png
>>309330

SteelHooves informs them that if they are serious about entering Canterlot, they would do well to get in and out as quickly as possible. The place is inhabited by "Canterlot ghouls." We've heard of these creatures before of course, as SteelHooves himself is one of them.

The ghouls are described as basically mindless zombies whose sentient identities have been completely erased by the taint or the pink cloud or whatever the fuck is in the air in Canterlot. They spend their days performing rote tasks in an unseemly parody of their previous lives; unless they are disturbed, in which case they will viciously attack whatever disturbed them. This is actually kind of a spooky idea, and it sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing one might encounter in a video game, so I'm going to just go ahead and assume it's something that kkat ripped off directly from Fallout.

Anyway, the biggest hurdle for the party as I see it is going to be protecting against this "pink cloud" that turns everyone who enters it into zombies. However, this obstacle has been conveniently removed: while the cloud is still dangerous, it has dissipated over time, and its effects are diminished. A pony can enter it without any sort of protective gear and survive in it for a few hours; however, SteelHooves recommend that they bring along plenty of healing potions to chug along the way, as the potions will mitigate the damage that they will be absorbing from walking around in there. He also advises them not to fall asleep.

There are also "pockets" of cloud, which are basically areas in which the cloud has pooled and concentrated, and thus the effects are greater. Those he recommends dashing quickly through this sounds like something else that was probably ripped directly from the games. Also, they can't be wearing anything while walking around in there, because there is a chance it will fuse to their skin. He recommends stuffing their saddlebags full of healing potions, leaving everything else behind, and having Littlepoop use her Mary Sue levitation powers to float everything Katamari Damacy style while they are in there. I suspect Littlepoop is going to have fun this trip: she gets to show off her ridiculous overpowered magic as usual, and on top of that she gets to ogle plenty of naked mare ass. I've never been 100% sure if nudity adds to or subtracts from sex appeal in Equestria, but in any case it's not like she needs an excuse to ogle her friends' cans. Except Calamity I guess.

Finally, SteelHooves warns against them getting distracted. His reasons represent another of kkat's occasional flirtations with self-awareness:

>“Because Littlepip is fatally curious,” SteelHooves said flatly. “And you are a kleptomaniac.”
"Fatally curious" probably sums up Littlepoop accurately enough, but "kleptomaniac" easily applies to both of them. It's beyond ironic that the author tries to make this tendency in Calamity into a running gag, while blatantly ignoring it in the case of Littlepoop. Her kleptomania was one of the first things I noticed about her and made fun of.

Anyway, it seems like the main challenge here is going to be keeping them on task. The city was shielded or something from the missile attacks, and nearly all of the damage was done by the pink cloud. Thus, Canterlot is remarkably well preserved, and Littlepoop could probably spend the rest of her life wandering around in there collecting memory orbs and other random objects. Will she be able to keep her autism in check? Experience says no, but I suppose we shall see.

By far the most farfetched of the dangers SteelHooves warns them about are the radio transmitters. Apparently, having a PipBuck with a transmitter on it was some kind of fashion statement in Canterlot before the collapse, and then something something taint radiation pink cloud, and now they emit necromantic spells. If you are within broadcasting range of a radio transmitter, you...die...or something...I guess.

Anyway, as soon as he lays all of this out, SteelHooves suggests that they take him along as a guide. Conveniently enough, this also dovetails with his current objective: they can use the Sky Ween to transport Great Uncle Fudgecake or whatever his name is to wherever the fuck he needs to go. May as well add another silly side-trip to their itinerary; it's not like they're pressed for time or anything. In fact, I've completely forgotten what they're even trying to do at this point; get something out of a warehouse so they can give it to the Goddess to kill Red Eye, or so they can kill the Goddess with it for Red Eye, or kill Red Eye and the Goddess and then have a barbecue; something along those lines.

>“We miss you too,” Velvet Remedy purred. SteelHooves stomped and nickered.
I swear to God, if I see the words "purr" or "nicker" in this story one more time, I'm going to bitch-slap kkat so hard he will travel backwards through time.

Page break. The gang is once again reunited, and even though SteelHooves is such an irrelevant character that I didn't even notice he was out of the story until he'd been gone for like three whole chapters, Littlepoop is glad to have him back. Unfortunately, no sooner have they been reunited than an alarm suddenly goes off, indicating that their base is under attack.

A cursory examination of their security monitors reveals that the source of the disturbance is Elder Cheese Log, who appears to have somehow escaped captivity and is now in an area of the stable that, according to the map, doesn't even exist.

>I knew. “The Crusader Maneframe.” I didn’t know how he managed to get inside a room that not even Shadowhorn had known how to access.
Wait a minute. Didn't Littlepoop also visit this room? I seem to remember her doing something with one of these maneframe systems earlier; she found Apple Bloom's skeleton in the same room as I recall. Wait a minute; that wasn't here, that was somewhere else. Jesus Christ this story is fucking convoluted.
Anonymous
49e2179
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No.309367
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>>309362
>so I'm going to just go ahead and assume it's something that kkat ripped off directly from Fallout.

The "degenerative zombie/ mutant stuck in a mindless loop of their routine" isn't really the most original premise, but it definitely is a neat one. However, this is the one case that it isn't really something stolen from Fallout. That being said, the upcoming Canterlot section is a VERY close clone of the Sierra Madre DLC location in Fallout: New Vegas. This city has a corrosive, toxic cloud that eats away at your flesh, and it is occupied by "Ghost People", which are mutated hazmat workers who are unkillable through conventional means, meaning you have to sever their body parts. Canterlot ghouls are based on these creatures heavily, and the "Pink Cloud" is a copy of the "Red cloud" in New vegas.

Yes the city covered in a toxic cloud is ripped from the games. Yes there are pockets that eat away at you quickly.

The retarded radio broadcasting idea is the other danger of the setting. In the DLC, you are kidnapped and fitted with a bomb collar. It's a device meant to keep slaved obedient by threatening to pop their head off with a controlled detonation if they try to escape. In-setting the city's faulty broadcasters are explained twofold: They exist in the first place as this city was a tourist trap and full of musical broadcasts and announcements, and the reason they kill you is because it interferes with the signal connection of the collar, setting it off. In this story the broadcasts just kill you because the static is evil(?)
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309371
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>>309362
>mindless zombies that spend their days performing rote tasks in an unseemly parody of their previous lives
I suppose this is the most elegant a translation of The Ghost People from the Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money DLC can get. It would be absurd to turn the entire city into Dead Money even though that's basically what happened anyway.

>"pockets" of cloud, areas that deal damage over time
lifted from FNV:DM. An environmental hazard just like the traps scattered everywhere. At this rate I expect to see holograms with the bullshit factor turned past 11.

DM started with the player getting gassed to sleep, only to wake up in the Sierra Madre villa near the casino you're going to rob because Elijah put a bomb collar on your neck to make you do as he says. You arrived without your usual weapons/armour/9999 healing items/overpowered companions and had your life tied to 3 difficult-to-work-with companions with bomb collars linked to yours. Plus your bomb collar would start counting down if you got too close to Decayed Speakers around the Villa/Casino, some can be shot and some are indestructible and some must be turned off at a terminal. I wonder how Kkat will translate these Survival Horror videogame elements into his story-

>Pink Cloud fuses worn objects to you and that's why you must be naked aside from saddlebags. But LP can still psychically carry all her OP shit in a goddamn Loot Katamari. Also fucking SIGNAL-TRANSMITTING FASHIONABLE PIPBUCKS
Faggotorially, that's how Kkat will translate these elements.
And to make things worse her friends will just pretend saddlebags containing 200+ pounds of guns/ammo/armour won't weigh you down and won't melt onto your body like normal armour would.
Don't you just love when an excuse to get ponies unarmoured and carry over 1% of a 200% hard experience gets inconsistently applied because Kkat can't bear the thought of challenging his widdle babies too much when he can't think of a bullshit troll-logic way to negate the challenge?

The DLC's hazards only feel meaningful and tense because your healing item supply is highly limited! You're forced to explore and scavenge and craft, which means risking more traps and combat with invincible Holograms and unkillable(ish) Ghost People! How fucking many health potions will LP and her friends carry into the danger in their saddlebags? IF IT'S MORE THAN ONE THE ANSWER IS TOO FUCKING MANY! You'd never even consider eating "Sierra Madre Martinis" to recover health if proper healing items were readily available.

I'll avoid autistic side-details like ""I am not your mummy!" is an easter egg written on a wall that references the Are you my mummy? episode of doctor who". You can read this story arc without knowing anything about Dead Money, but if you want to know the basics summarized to judge how Kkat adapted this story arc:

Basically in Fallout America the Sierra Madre was a casino for rich people made by Sinclair for his drug-addict singer wife Vera to keep her safe from the Great War (China vs America) but he realized Dean Domino (a cunt) is trying to heist his casino while blackmailing Vera so he rigs the cash vault room to be a trap for Dean. Also his vault was the testing ground for a lot of weird shit made by The Think Tank at The Big MT, where evil genius brains in jars invented and tested "Science!" shit. Suits meant to move injured soldiers/workers to a medic, super-sharp Saturnite(TM) knives, indestructible hologram soldiers, preservative corrosive gas, and more. Workers rushing the Sierra Madre ended up trapped in their suits, reanimated by the preservative poison cloud and hanging around the Villa to worship and stare at the holograms as the new "Ghost People". You must take their limbs off to perma-kill them.

Fallout NV: Dead Money is about love and loss and letting go. How obsession can warp someone into something corrupt. Dean's greed for the Sierra Madre treasure and hatred for Sinclair's goodness, Sinclair's obsession with keeping Vera safe that turned his casino into a deathtrap, Vera's drug addiction she ended up ODing to commit die, Dog's hunger for food and orders to obey, God's hunger for control over his split personality Dog, Christine's need for revenge against Elijah, Elijah's need for the power of the Sierra Madre and his desperation for revenge against the NCR... It's deep! There's so much fucking irony everywhere! Symbolically in the finale when you get to the treasure vault you can weigh yourself down with all 20+ bars of super-heavy gold and end up unable to limp out of the exploding basement in time. Or if you access "Sinclair's Personal Accounts" you are trapped in the casino vault for an instant game over. Or you can sneak out and trap Elijah in the casino vault for M-M-MAXIMUM IRONY!!! or just shoot elijah and use epic gamer skills to get all the gold bars and survive Let's see how this incredible depth will be translated over to this story.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3e0145d
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No.309373
309374
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>>309362

Anyway, Elder Parmesan Cheese took Knight Strawberry Dingdongs hostage and now he's in the maneframe room trying to upload himself into the Matrix, or some kind of ridiculous shit like that. There is a Page break, and we rejoin Littlepoop at some kind of security junction. She has plugged her PipBuck into some kind of computer interface that allows her to get a visual of the Crusader Maneframe room, because why the hell would she not be able to do that?

We get a look at Elder Stinky Butt-Cheese for the first time. He is described as a "sickly oatmeal-colored" pony, being kept alive by a series of tubes and a bunch of high-tech gizmos plugged into his fucking magic wheelchair, or whatever the fuck. I am physically incapable of even pretending to take this story seriously anymore.

>It occurred to me suddenly that Elder Cottage Cheese was the first… no, second unicorn I had seen amongst the Steel Rangers. Their helmets weren’t exactly designed for horns. I wondered if he had cut his horn off to wear their armor. It would have certainly been a sign of dedication to the Steel Rangers. But, if so, then the horn had re-grown, and I hadn’t thought that could happen. If so, it was a bright spot of news for Silver Bell’s future.
Even at a time like this, Littlepoop's severe autism, which is no doubt a projection of the author's equally severe autism, causes her mind to wander to absurdly inappropriate subjects.

Anyway, Littlepoop uses the intercom she has access to for some reason to communicate with this wrinkly old faggot. The conversation goes as you might expect:

Littlepoop:
>blah blah blah don't do this
Stinky Cheese:
>blah blah blah I will kill this hostage, do not interfere
Strawberry Shortcake:
>blah blah blah I am a proud knight of the something whatever platoon, I am prepared to die, just kill him Littlepoop
Littlepoop:
>blah blah blah this is madness, you won't survive this wacky science experiment you're trying to do
Stinky Cheese:
>blah blah blah I don't intend to survive, something something my super-smart brain will live on in this computer

Anyway, it goes on and on like this for awhile; you probably get the point. Basically, Grandpa Cheesecake's plan is to upload his intelligence into the computer, so that when his Rangers inevitably retake this base, he will be there to guide them as the new AI of the stable. His basic view is that the world is fucked, ponykind is too degenerated to survive, and it will be up to the Steel Rangers to create whatever kind of civilization is going to exist from here on out.

As it turns out, however, none of this even fucking matters. For some completely preposterous reason that no doubt makes perfect sense in kkat's warped little mind, Littlepoop just happens to have the codes needed to shut down the maneframe system for Stable 29. She references a character named Shadowhorn getting them from the vice president of StableTec; the name sounds familiar but I can't place where I heard it.

My assumption is that this is referencing some minute piece of information that LP discovered in one of the journals or memory orbs during her last visit here, which turned out to be the launch codes or whatever, and enabled her to shut this stupid computer down. As usual, we the reader are expected to have autism on par with kkat's, and thus to be able to remember every single ridiculous detail he throws at us, regardless of how minor it is or how long ago it was mentioned. Meteors did it, basically.

So, tl;dr, she shuts the system down, and everything goes dark. Presumably Elder Suzy Creamcheese dies somehow, and the day is once again saved, thanks to the all-powerful Mary Sueness of Littlepoop. Believe it or not, this is how the chapter ends.

Chapter Thirty-Four: Edge of Night

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Aaaaallrighty. What do you say we get on out of Creepytown…?”
I don't even have the energy to make snarky jokes about these anymore. Something something kkat got molested by his uncle when he was six, and thirty some-odd years later he wrote an abominable piece of fanfiction that became insanely popular for God only knows what reason, and then he chopped his dick off.

Anyway, it turns out that shutting the maneframe system down basically killed the power to everything else in the stable. There are a plethora of logic problems created by this revelation: if the system was still operational, why wasn't the AI trying to kill the Steel Rangers the same way it killed the ponies originally under its care? Why did the AI not attempt to interfere with Elder Cheese 'n Crackers trying to hack into it and replace it with his own brain? Why hasn't the AI been a character in this story? Was the system active or inactive the last time the party was here? They fought some turrets and whatnot while they were in here, but we've seen little evidence of a sentient computer system like what the original inhabitants were dealing with. However, at this point, it makes more sense to just ignore these questions and move on.

A pre-recorded message from Sweetie Belle plays, informing the inhabitants of Stable 29 that their AI's auto-shutdown protocols have been triggered, and they are now on their own. There is apparently an emergency life support system that has been activated, but it will shut down in 5 years, so they have that long to figure out a long-term solution. This is obviously not much of a problem for the Rangers, but had this actually triggered at the time when this stable was inhabited, the outcome would have been far from ideal. The ponies would have still had the same fundamental problem of the busted water crystal, and on top of that they would have had to worry about their other systems shutting down as well. My understanding is that at the time, the outside world would have still been basically uninhabitable, so leaving the stable would have been a no-go. Neither Sweetie Belle nor kkat appears to have really thought this one through.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
3e0145d
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No.309374
309427
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>>309373

Page break. For some reason, even though the system has shut down, the gun turrets are still operational. Littlepoop seems nearly as confused by this as I am. The situation is...well, for lack of a better word, I'll say "clarified," a moment later when another pre-recorded message plays:

>“Crusader Maneframe emergency shutdown successful. Security subsystem attempting to discern the nature of the emergency and provide assistance.”
Apparently, in Edgequestria, "discerning the nature of the emergency" and "providing assistance" means using your roboguns to shoot at everything that moves. Sounds about right, actually. The voice goes on:

>“Analysis: dead water talisman. Celestia-Tier Emergency. Contacting nearest Stable-Tec supply house for delivery of replacement talisman… Contact failed. Supply house not responding or no longer exists. Attempting to contact secondary supply house… Contact failed. Secondary supply house unreachable.”
This actually introduces a significant logic error. If it was possible to just contact a nearby stable or a supply center for a new water crystal, then why the hell would the crusader maneframe not have just done this automatically? It doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense for StableTec to program the backup life support system to check for things like that, but not the advanced AI that was supposed to be managing shit like this in the first place. Also, if the maneframe is offline, this should just be a barebones life support system: food, water, ventilation system, electricity, etc. There shouldn't be an advanced computer system like this even still running.

Anyway, the computer system apparently "analyzes" the situation, somehow determines that the stable is being invaded, and begins randomly firing off machine guns in every direction. I'm beginning to think that the cutie mark crusaders turned out to be less than stellar engineers; literally nothing about how this system works makes any sense.

It just gets more and more ridiculous from here. Littlepoop does battle with several machine gun turrets, trying to make it to the maneframe room because I guess that's a safe room or something. She gets hit in the leg, so she once again has another injury that probably won't affect her in any meaningful way, and which I'm sure she will just heal in a few scenes by downing a magic potion or two. Meanwhile, there is an announcement on the intercom that the stable will now be filled with neurotoxic gas. Seriously; what was Sweetie Belle's cutie mark in this version of the MLP universe, anyway? It seems like her "special talent" was building illogical, unstable death traps. Should have stuck to singing.

Anyway, Littlepoop passes out from nerve gas...

...and then after a Page break she awakens in the clinic, perfectly fine as usual. If anyone cares, the reason she is fine is because the gas was designed to incapacitate, not kill. Presumably, Velvet Remedy patched up her injured leg, so that is unlikely to be a further problem either. We learn that Knight Strawberry Fields Forever is just fine, the Rangers are just fine, and Elder Pub Cheese is alive, but has come down with a bad case of the comas. He is currently sealed in a pod awaiting transport to wherever they were taking him in the first place. So, essentially, the situation is exactly the same as what it would have been if this entire episode hadn't even happened. So...other than adding words to this already long and nonsensical text, what was the point exactly?

Page break. Littlepoop apologizes to a Ranger who was accidentally shot by one of the turrets. Xenith has a new hat; some kind of magic horn-helmet thing made out of hellhound claws or some ridiculous shit like that. Apparently Calamity built it at some indeterminate time using schematics he picked up somewhere and hellhound claws he got from somewhere else. I have no idea what it does and at this point I honestly don't give a rat's ass. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, and I'm sure it will be completely ridiculous. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They're back on the Sky Boner again, flying to wherever; some place called Bucklyn Cross, which I guess is where they are supposed to deliver Old Man Dick-Cheese. Velvet is lost in her Fluttershy orb for the umpteenth time, and Littlepoop is depressed and moody because she feels personally responsible for the stable going haywire and winging a few of the Rangers.

Velvet, for no obvious reason, suddenly starts talking about the sun and the moon. She recalls that Red Eye said something about gaining the power to move them both, and to control the weather, when he ascended to god status. She observes that, since the sun and moon have been moving on their own even though both goddesses have been dead for 200 years, the goddesses must not have been needed in the first place.

>“Ya’ll are makin’ an assumption that jus’ ain’t so,” Calamity called back.
>We all turned towards him. “And what would that assumption be?” Velvet asked in a voice that would have been a purr if not for the aftereffects of the gas.
Why the fuck is she even trying to purr here? The situation doesn't even remotely call for her to be seductive.

Anyway, Calamity opines that there is something wrong with the sun and the moon. What he describes is essentially normal movement for heavenly bodies; the sun rises and sets normally, but the moon is occasionally in the sky at the same time as the sun, and one time he saw an eclipse. The ponies seem to regard all of this as terrifying. Without knowing anything about how the movement of heavenly bodies is actually supposed to work in this universe, it's hard to tell where the author is going with this, or even if he's going anywhere at all. This could be some new plot element he's foreshadowing, or he might just be dropping more random brony speculation into the plot for no reason other than to speculate about it.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
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No.309375
309376 310068
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Pardon any redundancy to this idea, but it occurs to me that A. FoE is in serious need of a rewrite, and B. that the story would be made to make vastly more sense if the plot developed from the end of S9 MLP, as opposed to season 2-3.
Instead of laying everything (poorly) at the feet of the mane 6, that individuals in and around the friendship school make for better scapegoats perpetrators.
>pic related
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309376
>>309375
That'd work.
I don't recall if I've already talked about my "Zebrica has a civil war: evil monarchists vs evil commies. Griffons fund and play both sides while refugees aka rapefugees flee to ponyland and continue the war on pony streets while warring against overly-tolerant liberalized subverted demoralized ponies for even better unfairly good treatment. Ponykind's kindness dooms itself as evil races take advantage of it and only 200 years after the nuclear ramadam bombathon can one based and fucking pissed handsome nazi unicorn rise to power within his Stable and lead an army outside to conquer the wasteland for New Equestria, where the only Refugees Welcome signs are mounted atop burning mass graves" idea or not.
But it seemed like a better way to blame liberal/leftist/jewish government interference and weaponized reality-denial, ziggers, and ponies forgetting the truth of pony superiority for the apocalypse. That way ponies can use smart violence to rebuild a better nation while correcting the old mistakes that led to old Equestria's downfall. Equestria falls due to a question posed by the ziggers ponies cannot answer. New Equestria rises with a final solution.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
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No.309387
309438 309441
>>307921
I meant to reply to this awhile ago and forgot.

When I was writing that post up I was wondering if someone was going to mention The Magician's Nephew. That story is interesting precisely because it focuses on the relationship between our world and Narnia, so a greater portion of it takes place in England, and the author spends a great deal more time fleshing out that part of the setting. If you compare the two novels, you'll notice the author takes a distinctly different approach with each one.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, England is basically just a starting area; very little of the story takes place there, and apart from the discovery of the wardrobe and some interactions between the children, very little that takes place there has any bearing on the story. Likewise, all of the English characters apart from the children are incidental and play no significant role in the story. If you wanted to, you could easily rewrite that story with the children coming from a different country and a different time period, and have the part that takes place in Narnia play out almost exactly the same.

Conversely, in The Magician's Nephew, the Victorian England setting plays a more crucial role. There are characters from that world besides the children who affect events in Narnia, and there are characters from other worlds who affect events in England. Thus, that part of the story is more developed and the setting is more fleshed out. Lion is a story about children who leave their ordinary lives completely behind and go on an adventure in a different world; Nephew is a story about children who go on an adventure that takes them to several worlds, and their ordinary lives come with them.

The two stories are technically part of the same series and deal with the same universe, but the author takes different approaches based on the subject matter of each volume. Lion establishes that Narnia exists and that it's possible to travel there from our world. Nephew, which is usually numbered as the first book in the series but is actually the sixth one that Lewis wrote, goes into more detail about how Narnia originated and also how the connection between that world and ours became established. Thus, the focus of the story is different.

This ties into something I've been saying about FoE for some time now: that the idea is too large, and that kkat should have tried to break it into smaller, self-contained works in order to deal with different areas of the story more effectively. If C.S. Lewis had tried to take everything he wrote in the various Narnia books and cram it all into one long volume told from the perspective of a single character, or group of characters, the story would be huge, convoluted and probably tedious to read. If we learned about the creation of Narnia and the origin of the wardrobe through some kind of flashback sequence where Lucy saw it unfold in a magic mirror or something, even if no details of the story were changed, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Those events are much more compelling when told as a separate story.

>>308997
>>309055
These are much better posts. Please try to stick to this more disciplined and readable style; you've been called out and corrected yourself before, but you have a tendency to regress back into your default incoherent ranting style as time progresses. You're clearly capable of producing more coherent posts when you put your mind to it, so please continue to do so.

>It seems far-fetched for an entire country to fully believe in a religion that has a devil (Nightmare Moon) but no God. No "path to salvation" that makes you holier/reduces the hold evil forces have over you/guarantees you a better afterlife/whatever.
This is an interesting point because I actually think this is fairly close to how modern SJW thinking works. Even though they don't see themselves as religious, it's basically religious thinking: there's a clear dogma that needs to be accepted without question, and adherents of the faith will summarily dismiss any argument against it.

Even the most severe forms of Christianity adopted a carrot and stick approach: if you obey the tenets of the faith there's a reward, and if you blaspheme or disobey there's punishment. SocJus is unique in that it professes a dogma but offers the believer no reward for following it. There's no deity to impress and no reward for being "good" according to their definition of goodness; however, there are negative consequences for disobedience. As severe as Puritanism was, those guys at least believed that salvation was possible. SJWs, however, basically believe in mortification and self-chastisement without any hope of reward or even recognition for their efforts.

Taken in that context, I think the zebras' religious beliefs could be an interesting exploration of what a religion might look like if it carried negative thinking to its furthest extremes.

>>309087
I actually don't agree with Velvet's characterization of Calamity here at all. The way kkat seems to see his own characters is radically different from the way he actually wrote them. I've never picked up on any kind of a protective vibe between Calamity and Littlepoop, for instance; in fact, I don't get the impression he's all that protective of any of them, even Velvet. As I've remarked before, this group doesn't feel particularly close-knit, even though they're all supposed to be friends.

>>309090
>For fuck's sake, didn't he confess to LP/Velvet that he's a Dashite before we even knew what that was, killing the mystery?
That whole thing has been very badly handled. Kkat has yet to provide a coherent definition for what a "Dashite" even is. It's very similar to his "Applejack's Rangers" thing; these groups are clearly meant to represent something that stands in direct contrast to the orders they belong to, but neither side of the conflict has any clearly-defined values or ideals.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a881e9a
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No.309427
309437 309440
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>>309374

The party arrives at Bucklyn Cross. Bucklyn was apparently Manehattan's Brooklyn analog, until the bombs went off and destroyed it. The "Cross" appears to be part of the former Bucklyn Bridge. For whatever it's worth, the description of the space is surprisingly detailed and easy to visualize compared to what we normally see in this book.

Anyway, before they can land to make the exchange, or whatever they're doing exactly, Calamity spies an ambush that appears to have been set up for a caravan leaving the nearby town of Arbu (the town takes its name from the remaining legible letters of a partially destroyed billboard). Naturally, despite having no obvious reason to get involved and considerably more pressing matters to attend to, the party decides to get involved.

The battle is standard fare. They open fire on the inept and mostly outgunned bandits and tear them to shreds. Littlepoop alternates between raining bloody hellfire down upon their enemies and moaning to herself about whether or not she is "corrupted kindness." In a typical kkat moment, the child of one of the bandits she shoots, who for some reason is on the battlefield, throws himself over his dead father's corpse and cries while Littlepoop looks on in horror. Oh yeah, Velvet's pet bird also gets hit with a stray bullet and falls to the ground.

Having won the battle with no casualties on their side other than Velvet's bird, the party lands the wagon. Velvet has a choice to make: either she can use her medical skills to save her bird or she can save the colt's father. She chooses to save her bird. She begs Littlepoop to go help the colt's father (which is a little curious since Littlepoop has no medical training), and the scene ends.

Page break. The colt's father dies in typical kkat fashion, with the maudlin sappiness dialed up well past eleven. You can almost hear the dramatic violin music playing in the background. Neither Xenith nor Littlepoop were able to save him, which is unsurprising seeing as how, again, they have no medical training. Apparently they didn't have any of their all-powerful panacea potions on hand either, the ones that can heal everything from a punctured lung to a severed leg. However, I'm assuming that the next time one of them sustains what in a sane universe would constitute a mortal wound, they will somehow manage to pull through until they can find a potion stash. Mighty convenient how all of that works.

Anyway, some ponies emerge with a wagon from Arbu to collect and bury the dead bandits. Littlepoop, in between weeping and rending her clothing, has another of those almost-but-not-quite-self-awareness moments:

>I felt another shot of pain as I realized the good ponies of Arbu treated the dead of their enemies better than I tended to treat the bodies of ponies I had grown to care about. The images of Pinkie Pie’s skeleton and Apple Bloom’s both floated in front of my mind’s eye.
Once again, I find this character's attitude towards death baffling. She seems to swing back and forth between an attitude of almost callous indifference to the dead, and this exaggerated sense of personal responsibility for events she had nothing to do with.

If you kill someone out of necessity but bear no personal ill-will towards them, as would be the case with these bandits, then burying the dead and seeing to it that their offspring are looked after is a decent enough thing to do. However, if you stumble across the calcified skeleton of someone who died 200 years ago in a war that had nothing to do with you, you really don't have any personal responsibility; the most respectful thing to do is probably to just leave it alone.

This is the part of all of this that I don't quite grasp. Littlepoop had no ethical qualms about taking Pinkie Pie's Twilight statue, that was obviously important enough to her to have with her at the moment of her death. This act was basically comparable to prying the wedding ring off of a dead woman's finger. As of yet LP has expressed no remorse for doing this, nor has she even acknowledged that it was a very tasteless and disrespectful thing to do. However, she seems to be simultaneously wracked with guilt because she didn't go out of her way to collect Pinkie's bones, carry them out to somewhere in the wasteland, and erect a burial mound for her, something which, while it would have been a nice enough gesture, was hardly her responsibility to do.

Likewise with Apple Bloom's skeleton, which as I recall was just lying in the basement of the Steel Rangers' base. The Rangers would logically have found these bones eons ago, so if anyone was going to bury them, it ought to have been the Rangers. SteelHooves, in particular, ought to have been upset by this, seeing as how Apple Bloom would have been his sister in law, and you'd expect he would have wanted it seen to that she had a proper grave. Littlepoop's actions, once again, were simply to take some of AB's former possessions for her own use, and to leave the skeleton where it was. She shows no particular remorse for the act of grave robbery, and even stranger still is that she never thought to bring the matter up with SteelHooves, who should logically have been affected by it. However, at the same time, she seems to hold herself personally responsible for not digging Apple Bloom's grave on her own initiative.

This whole attitude is part of a larger pattern of behavior with this character. On the one hand, she seems to feel that it is her prerogative to inflict death wherever she goes, even in situations like this most recent fight, where she really had no business getting involved in the first place. On the other, she seems to feel this weird personal responsibility for every death that occurs in Equestria, past and present, regardless of whether or not she had anything to do with it. It's a very peculiarly modern way of looking at things, and the more I try to think about it the less I understand it.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309437
310067
>>309427
>This whole attitude is part of a larger pattern of behavior with this character. On the one hand, she seems to feel that it is her prerogative to inflict death wherever she goes, even in situations like this most recent fight, where she really had no business getting involved in the first place. On the other, she seems to feel this weird personal responsibility for every death that occurs in Equestria, past and present, regardless of whether or not she had anything to do with it. It's a very peculiarly modern way of looking at things, and the more I try to think about it the less I understand it.
It seems simple enough to me - Littlepip is a narcissist, in a setting close enough to a modern videogame that it inherently rewards and ancourages narcissism. Whether on purpose or as an unwitting reflection of the writer, everything that happens in the universe of FoE is ultimately for and about Littlepip. The final resting places of meta-important characters like Pinkie and Applebloom are Littlepip's to discover, so of course Steelhooves never came across his sister in law's skeleton despite living next to it for two centuries. Their priceless possessions are Littlepip's to take, so nobody objects to her prying the Twilight statuette from Pinkie's bones. Their deaths are hers to mourn after the fact, just to hammer in the suggestion that she's the only person with a heart big enough to care, and their (lack of burial) naturally becomes her responsibility too, just so that she can bemoan her feelings to the reader.

The arc coming up, concerning Bucklyn Cross and Arbu, is a perfect demonstration of this.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.309438
309439 310067
>>309387
>This ties into something I've been saying about FoE for some time now: that the idea is too large, and that kkat should have tried to break it into smaller, self-contained works in order to deal with different areas of the story more effectively.

I agree with your points on this subject across the threads we've had. However, I really like the idea of exploring, or at least somehow integrating a rich history into a story when relevant. If you absolutely HAD to keep Kkat's approach, basically weaving relevant past events into a current setting, how would you go about it? Like, cutting out the fat such as random pointless audio logs and whatnot? Iirc Attack on Titan does a lot of historical exposition that's relevant to the story.

The reason I ask this is because in my own story it's a very important point that ponies have been made to forget their history, and things like Harmony are important to the inherent core of ponies that needs to be rediscovered.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309439
>>309438
Not to stray too far off topic, but keep in mind the difference in medium and intent. Attack on Titan is a manga/anime, which has "aside" pages/mid-episode frames dedicated to explaining things about the world so that the characters don't have to. AoT also makes a lot of very deliberate decisions when it comes to exposition, because a lot of the exposition given early in the story is completely wrong.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a881e9a
?
No.309440
309445
1591157546597.png
>>309427

This caught my attention too:

>I realized how utterly unworthy I was of Homage’s affections. I didn’t deserve the friends I had found. I couldn’t keep going like this. I couldn’t keep doing this. I needed to do better.
>I needed to be better.
This is another recurring aspect of Littlepoop's character. She is a pure, unadulterated narcissist, even when she thinks she's being altruistic and selfless. It shines through in nearly everything she says and does.

Even though she is ostensibly mourning all of the pointless death and killing she's seen and caused, inwardly she's focused entirely on herself. She needs to do more and be better, she needs to be a better pony so she can become worthy of her friends' respect and Homage's affections. It's as if she is physically incapable of considering any issue outside of how it affects her personally. As far as she and the author are concerned, this entire universe revolves entirely around Littlepoop, and neither of them seem to see anything wrong with or unrealistic about this view.

Anyway, in the unlikely event that anyone cares, Velvet's pet bird is going to be fine, they just need to find some radiation to bathe it in so it can heal properly. The villagers recommend some kind of radigator breeding ground nearby. Might as well add another pointless side trip I suppose; it's not like anything they're doing is time sensitive. The villagers thank them for their help with the bandits, invite them to lunch sometime, and the group departs.

Page break. The chapter opens with some italicized text. Apparently, Calamity found a suitcase at this point I'm not even going to bother asking where or when, and inside was some more random crap and a few audio tapes, one of which is the one that LP is apparently listening to at the start of the microscene. The recording details an argument between rival coffee vendors that is too silly to even waste time summarizing.

The party is back in the Sausage Smuggler, flying out to that stupid alligator farm so they can dunk Velvet's stupid pet bird in radioactive waste, instead of delivering Grandpa Cheeselog's stupid casket to the stupid Steel Rangers like they were supposed to be doing in the goddamn first place. They land on the roof, and Velvet is about to leave her bird in a corner so it can rest up and absorb radiation or whatever it needs, when suddenly she steps on some kind of pressure plate that releases balloons and confetti. Don't even ask me what the fuck it was or why the fuck it was there, because I couldn't tell you. Point is, this startles her into making some sudden movements that cause the roof to collapse underneath them.

Now, ordinarily, one would expect an event like this to signify the beginning of a new adventure. The roof collapses, the Sky Burrito goes down with it, and the party is dragged into some kind of death maze filled with radigators from which they will have to escape. However, this is Fallout: Equestria, the world where random, pointless event simply follows random, pointless event without any semblance of a plot. So, no such adventure occurs. The roof caves in, Littlepoop uses her ridiculous magic to keep the Poop Wagon from slipping away, and the group simply flies off as if nothing happened.

Granted, there is a bit of a momentary scare when one of the gators snaps at them, and this causes Littlepoop to lose concentration and drop Velvet. She splashes around in the water with the gators for a bit, as the big gator snaps its jaws at the Sky Anus. However, as luck would have it, none of the alligators have any goddamn teeth. The joke appears to be that they are all descended from Gummy, Pinkie Pie's toothless pet alligator.

So, eventually, Littlepoop levitates Velvet and Niggerlight back into the Dongmobile and they float off into the sunset. What the fuck is the point of any of this?

Page break. After another random audio recording that has nothing to do with the story, the group is now, finally, at the meeting spot with the Steel Rangers. We are told that they found a spot to set Pyrelight down that was radioactive enough to heal him but where the radigators couldn't get to him and blah blah blah who fucking cares. Point is, Velvet and her stupid bird are elsewhere during this scene.

They land their stupid airplane-bus and exchange some tense pleasantries with the Rangers. Turns out the plan was to exchange Elder Cheese-Wiz for some random jerkoff grunt who wanted to switch sides. However, it would seem that Steel Ranger #433 had a little "accident" and is no longer alive enough to make the journey. But instead of just immediately taking off since these faggots didn't hold up their end of the bargain, it appears that SteelHooves still intends to just hand over Granpappy's coma-coffin in exchange for nothing. At some point, someone is going to have to sit this big metal retard down and explain to him how a prisoner exchange is supposed to work.

Anyway, it appears there won't be time for that just now, because all of a sudden the Steel Rangers decide they want to kill them all. I'm not entirely clear on why; it has something to do with Littlepoop being DJ Pon3's personal ass slave. It doesn't really matter much.

A throwaway character named Paladin Amaranth gives the order to open fire, and no sooner are the words out of her mouth than SteelHooves launches a million grenades and blows a bunch of his former fellows to kingdom come. Amaranth then shoots him point blank with a grenade launcher, which blows two giant holes through his body and appears to kill him. Since this is Fallout: Equestria, the game where the rules are made up and fatal injuries don't matter, I'm assuming that all this means is that Littlepoop will cry a lot, pull some ridiculous Mary Sue bullshit out of her ass to win the fight, and in two scenes SteelHooves will drink a healing potion and be just fine.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309441
>>309387
From what I've seen of SJWs while they lack a God to impress they make up for that by trying to impress each other with their orthodoxy, devotion, preaching, subversion, and witch-hunting thoughtcriminal-persecuting fervor. Every SJW wants to chase "clout", a type of combined usefulness to the cult, respectability from those among the cult, and believability as a cult member who seems to know everything there is to know and therefore should be listened to. The latter will be useful in the event that they attempt to send a lynch mob after someone else or get a lynch mob sent after them by another sjw. It's impossible to tell whether the insanity is performative or genuinely believed by the cultists even when they break their own rules.

Glim, do you think it would improve the story if LP found all the Mane Six's skeletons and brought them back to Spike's cave, burying them outside while letting Spike have a proper funeral?

Speaking of Spike, why is his teleporting flame breath so under-utilized? It's the perfect way to break travel. LP already got a gay flying boat to make travel quick and easy.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a881e9a
?
No.309445
309446 309447 309487
1591210999061.jpg
>>309440

Anyway, Littlepoop kills Amaranth immediately after she "kills" SteelHooves, and the firefight goes on in kkat's usual haphazard, incoherent style. It's never made clear exactly how many enemy combatants there were to begin with, so it's impossible to gage at what point they should reasonably have killed enough of them for the fight to be over. Xenith does her karate shit, Calamity shoots off Spitfire's Diarrhea or whatever his custom gun is called, and it just goes on and on until eventually the scene ends. Oh, incidentally, SteelHooves is back:

>Another light flared up, a friendly one, as a terrible sound warped the air. SteelHooves got back to his hooves in a vortex of unseen necromantic energy. Canterlot Ghoul’s don’t stay dead. You have to turn them to ash or dismember them to keep them down.
I honestly have to give kkat a bit of credit here: no matter how hard I try to anticipate the depths of ridiculousness to which his story will sink, I always end up underestimating him. As it turns out, SteelHooves didn't even need to drink a healing potion to cure the twin grenade holes that probably destroyed most of his internal organs. His body is imbued with some kind of radioactive Canterlot magic, and something something he's basically immortal.

Incidentally, there was no reason to to use an apostrophe 's' here, as the word "ghouls" is plural and not possessive. "Canterlot Ghouls don't stay dead" would have worked just fine.

Page break. Littlepoop inexplicably wakes up on a straw bed back at Arbu. We are given no explanation as to how they got there or how the fight ended, but it appears that everyone made it back in one piece, so presumably they won somehow. Velvet comes in and does her usual "tut tut Littlepoop, you have to stop getting shot so much" routine. Littlepoop has suffered the usual batch of injuries and will no doubt be just fine in a scene or two.

Velvet leaves, and since LP has nothing better to do she decides to listen to another one of the stupid tapes she got from the suitcase that Calamity found God knows where. The tape has something to do with a mall security guard, whose significant other is suffering from stress or depression or something. As with the other two, the subject matter is mundane and doesn't really merit summary; the only thing that stands out about it is that the security guard has a habit of referring to their sweetheart as "Darling" rather than by her proper name I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume that kkat ripped this off from the English dub of Urusei Yatsura, but I might be mistaken. As is the case with kkat himself, the gender of the security guard is ambiguous.

A random NPC shows up and offers Littlepoop a drink of water, which she accepts. Out of absolutely nowhere, a senile old pony appears on a balcony and starts yelling random obscenities at her, ordering her out of the town. His granddaughter then appears and escorts him back inside. Littlepoop listens to another audio recording, which continues the story about rival coffee shop owners, and then the scene ends.

Page break. Littlepoop and the gang are sitting in the mess hall or whatever this place has, eating irradiated gator stew. We learn that the son of the bandit Littlepoop killed is named Sandy Shores.

They sit around bullshitting with the villagers for awhile. The village deals primarily in radigator meat, hence the giant radigator farm they just visited. They are usually in need of parts for their water purifier, because apparently they have a problem with radiation in their water. They also appear to follow the "Goddess" religion; not the one that Littlepoop and the others follow, but the worship of Trixie.

If you don't remember that there is a religion built around Trixie, I wouldn't blame you; it hasn't been mentioned in forever. However, you will recall that there was a character named "Preacher" awhile back I don't remember where he appears; he was a resident in one of the places the party visited relatively early on. Apparently, there are quite a few of these Preachers that wander around, spreading the word of the Goddess, and one of them came through here and converted a few of the villagers. As with LP's Celestia-Luna religion, the Enclave, the Steel Rangers, and nearly every other structured belief system in this story, kkat does not appear to have put much thought into the actual tenets of this faith, nor has he used it in the story much. However, it's a thing.

Anyway, Calamity notes that all the ponies in this village have a special mark on their flanks, in addition to their cutie marks, and asks about it. A villager tells him that it's some kind of tribal mark that each pony in the village earns when he "eats the heart of his first kill." This sounds like the kind of thing that might deserve a followup, but unfortunately the author chooses to veer off in a sillier direction.

Littlepoop observes some kind of anti-zebra propaganda poster from the olden days, and instead of just ignoring it she starts sperging to Xenith about it. Xenith actually makes a surprisingly incisive observation:

>“You did not write that.”
>“Nor any of the ponies alive today, here or elsewhere. You should not apologize for what ponies who are not you did long before you were around to stop them.”
As usual, kkat flirts with self-awareness, but he never quite makes it all the way there.

Anyway, they banter back and forth about the war for a few lines, Xenith observes that the village is "hunting its prey to extinction," even though they literally breed radigators so I'm not quite sure what she means, they talk about burying the dead guys that the party shot earlier, and it just sort of goes on and on like that for awhile. Nothing of any apparent importance is discussed. Littlepoop is supposed to have a concussion, and I suspect the flow of the scene is intentionally surreal, but there's also a lot of kkat's typical rambling.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309446
>>309445
>>Another light flared up, a friendly one, as a terrible sound warped the air. SteelHooves got back to his hooves in a vortex of unseen necromantic energy. Canterlot Ghoul’s don’t stay dead. You have to turn them to ash or dismember them to keep them down.
Anyone remember when this faggot introduced himself to Team Littleshit by grenading some Alicorns and fragging himself so hard he needed Team LP to drop everything they were doing and run into the Stable where an AI killed everypony over a water shortage and then never became a significant issue for the new party of intruders?
Where was his necromantic insta-resurrection bullshit back then?
Is this Kkat's attempt to make "LP gets sick and passes out and fails to save anypony and masturbates in Steelhooves's bed but he's fine" retroactively less retarded?

Btw this story's fight scenes suck gay asshole. Even back when I sucked at writing I still wrote better fight scenes than this.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.309447
309455
>>309445
>His body is imbued with some kind of radioactive Canterlot magic, and something something he's basically immortal.
HAHAHAHA OH MY FUCKING G O D Glim, do you know what this means? It completely slipped my mind until just now: Back when they first met, Steelhooves was greviously wounded and they had to make that trip to the evil AI stable to get something to help him. The fact he's a Canterlot ghoul means THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED AT ALL holy fuck.

>Out of absolutely nowhere, a senile old pony appears on a balcony and starts yelling random obscenities at her, ordering her out of the town. His granddaughter then appears and escorts him back inside.
This town is once again an idea from Fallout 3 that is changed a bit. Everything that happens in this segment is a direct translation of a quest and presumably Kkat's reaction as a role-player, portrayed through Littlepip. There's even a crazy old man who demands you leave.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309455
309456 309461
>>309447
>Back when they first met, Steelhooves was greviously wounded and they had to make that trip to the evil AI stable to get something to help him. The fact he's a Canterlot ghoul means THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED AT ALL holy fuck.
Gonna have to play devil's advocate here. It was poorly communicated, but the reason Steelhooves needed help there was because his armor was immobilized and needed repairs. Now, it stands to reason that any damage significant enough to disable the armor entirely would put its wearer in mortal danger as well, so it's a fair assumption to make, but this is less of a continuity error and more of Kkat simply being shit at communicating what's going on.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.309456
>>309455
Oh damn that's right i'm fucking retarded, I thought he was heavily injured + immobilized and Littlepip was dicking around while he was laying down and dying. There's so much waste in this story it's hard to remember specific details.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309461
309463
>>309455
Wasn't Littlepoop after some kind of System Bypass tool so they could get the suit off Steelhooves? I thought once an object was melted onto a poner by the Pink Cloud it could never be removed.

It's still funny to me that when Kkat wanted to make Dead Money's Sierra Madre Cloud even edgier, he decided to turn it pink and give it the power to fuse things together that were never meant to be fused together. Like a pony and power armour. Or a pony and a pipbuck. Or my little pony and fallout.

Place your bets, everypony, and no spoilers. Do you personally think Littlepoop will remove all armour and her overpowered PipBuck for the duration of her Canterlot Adventure, wear her PipBuck the whole time and suffer greatly as a result, or wear her PipBuck the whole time and get fused to it harmlessly?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.309463
>>309461
>Wasn't Littlepoop after some kind of System Bypass tool so they could get the suit off Steelhooves?
From memory at least, they needed to interface with the suit to reactivate its onboard magical repair systems or something like that. Now, I'd ask why none of the other steel rangers seem to possess armor that repairs itself (or how Steelhooves ghoul regeneration powers fix his armor in this situation after getting blasted through by what would otherwise have been lethal shots) but the question doesn't really invite much thought.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
97d0ee4
?
No.309487
309491 309500
1622102262776.jpg
>>309445

Incidentally, this is in here:

>Yeah. Because apparently the only pony in the entire wasteland who can pick a lock is me. No, wait, there is at least one other. Probably part of the Fillydephia Steel Rangers. Or maybe somepony who works for Red Eye.
>I stopped, suddenly suspicious that my lockpicking rival must be Red Eye himself. I had no facts to base such an assumption on, but it felt right. The sense of duality was too perfect.
Kkat, I just...I just....*sigh*

Anyway, as I said, the rest of this scene just kind of rambles endlessly until eventually it stops. Littlepoop sees an ad for coffee, which resembles an ad described in one of the tapes she listened to earlier. If it has any significance in the story it's not clear. Eventually, she starts talking to a two-headed cow. This is not a concussion-induced hallucination, but an actual two-headed cow that exists in this world. Apparently they are called brahmin, and the villagers breed them or something, in addition to the radigators I guess.

Oh, also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but apparently Elder Cottage Cheese somehow survived the firefight, and they are still lugging his coma-chamber around with them for whatever the fuck reason.

Page break. The author unceremoniously dumps another out of context italicized sound recording into the text, and its contents are as dull as the others. As to the main scene, there is little change from the previous one; the text still mostly consists of rambling conversation between LP's party and the villagers, the topics ranging from everything to nothing.

Eventually, we learn that Arbu's water purifier is on its last leg, and that the Rangers of Bucklyn Cross have several water talismans in their possession that they refuse to share.

>I felt a simmering anger. “Why should you have to? It’s water! You need it to live.”
Gee, I wonder where this is going? Oh well, might as well embark on another pointless side mission to save some more ponies who didn't ask for your help, eh Littlepoop? I mean, it's not like you've got anything more pressing to worry about. Incidentally, how is that bomb situation at Tenpony Tower coming along? Or whatever the fuck you're supposed to be doing for Red Eye? Or the Goddess? Didn't you have to go to Canterlot for some reason or another? Visit the Ministry of Something? Get that thing you were supposed to get, and also do the stuff and whatever? Seriously; wtf is even going on in this story?

Anyway, Littlepoop climbs up on her soapbox and rants about how water should be free and the Steel Rangers should share their talismans. After that, she comes up with another of her stupid plans to meddle in affairs that that have absolutely fuck-all to do with any of her party's actual objectives, and that are really none of her goddamn business in the first place.

The plan now is to go back to Bucklyn Cross, the place they just escaped from somehow, and offer to give the Rangers their comatose cheese-grandpa back in exchange for a fucking water talisman. Knowing that the Rangers will probably refuse and start shooting at them again, they will then have what LP probably considers sufficient cause to slaughter all of the Rangers to a man pony, whatever and take all of their water talismans by force. Then, she will give one talisman to Arbu and another to Stable 29, because the one there is still broken I guess.

After that, I am assuming she will take the rest of the water talismans the Rangers have (they supposedly have a bunch of them) and shove them directly up her ass, at which point they will all simultaneously unleash a high-pressure torrent of crystal clear water that will blast out of her asshole and propel her all the way to the goddamn moon, because that is the only thing she could possibly do at this point that would make this story any more ridiculous.

Page break. As usual, the microscene opens with an out of context italicized blurb representing yet another of the sound recordings LP found in Calamity's suitcase. This one continues the adventures of the gender-ambiguous mall cop. "Darling" is now checked into some kind of wartime depression clinic, and there is a heavy implication that the clinic is conducting weird experiments on her that affect her memory. Meanwhile, the guard is trying to secure a spot in one of the stables, and the two coffee-shop owners are escalating their advertising war.

When the recording concludes, we learn that it is now sundown and the party has flown back to Bucklyn Cross. Several automated gun turrets open fire on them as they arrive, but LP's ridiculous, ridiculous overpowered magic is able to telekinetically disable all of them at once. Calamity brings the Diarrhea Wagon in for a landing. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Yet another audio recording opens the microscene. Mr. and/or Mrs. Security Guard was accepted into Stable 34, but his/her/xirs sister was not. The coffee poners continue their advertising war. Blah blah blah, bullshit bullshit who cares.

Anyway, the party has landed. The Rangers immediately fire a missile at them from somewhere, but Velvet blocks it with her shield. Littlepoop is meanwhile keeping some kind of arbirtrary score, according to some self-righteous logic of her own, that will determine at what point she will feel morally justified in slaughtering all of the Rangers. Right now, the Rangers are on strike two.

Velvet announces that they are willing to negotiate the release of Grandpa Cheesy-poofs, even though the Rangers made it pretty clear during their last visit that they don't really give a fuck about him. They (rightly) inform the party that they are trespassers on Ranger turf, and that they will open fire if they don't leave immediately. The threat, however, does not carry much weight, as the highest-ranking Ranger left alive from the last skirmish is some wet-behind-the-ears recruit who obviously is no match for SteelHooves.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309491
>>309487
Klat is such a faggot. You don't build duality between the hero and baddie by giving them both one similar ability, making them both originate from two different yet superficially simar Vault/Stable locations, and making the baddie recite the old "We are a lot alike, you and I" lie.
You build duality between the hero and villain by making them similar people from similar backgrounds, preferably with a familial connection or some other major link tying them together. Then you tie the hero's current goals inherently to the villain's current goals for better or worse while making the villain's methods differ from the current hero's.
For example, say a good young man started out from Pallete Town but started making tough calls and answering this world's questions with brutal efficiency until he ended up becoming a mafia boss. Over the years he transforms from an idealist to a cynic in denial who barely even remembers his original motives for chasing power. Then years later his son starts his own journey from Pallete and ends up running into his father's mafia over and over, fighting it and refusing to join.
This way, the villain isn't just some cunt from nowhere in dire need of an ass-kicking. The villain is someone the hero doesn't want to be. The hero could have turned out like the villain. The hero has the opportunity to answer the questions this world asks of him with better solutions.

Remember the film Wreck-It Ralph? Remember how one villain "Going Turbo" made such an impact on the world that Ralph hears of it before Turbo himself shows up? Remember how Ralph and Turbo were linked by what they did: Leaving their games in search of something more? Now imagine if they were just both lockpickers with little else in common. Wreck-It Ralph would suck if Kkat was its writer.

Picture how much better this story would be if Littlepip and Red Eye originated from the same Stable, started with the same ideals, shared their unwarranted senses of self-importance and shared their desire to answer all the Wasteland's questions with overwhelming violence and profit-driven murderhoboery. If RedEye did not simply originate from a gimmicky vault where the gimmick is "Earth Ponies only - the lack of diversity makes everyone invent cyborgery and become a cyborg serving a slaver" but instead originated from LP's humble home and either invented cyborgery on his own or stole the secrets of it from an experimental military research facility he murderhobo'd up and took over. This could even be a clever reference to Fallout New Vegas if the military science facility he took over was The Big MT from FNV. Littlepip wouldn't simply need to gun Red Eye down eventually to beat him, she would need to lay the foundation for a civilized society where the threats and challenges of the Wasteland don't make theft and bloodshed and slavery and loss of identity mandatory.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
97d0ee4
?
No.309500
309508
1622525655694.jpg
>>309487

There's some back and forth between SteelHooves and Knight Riverseed, who is the current ranking officer. It's fairly clear that, despite their impressive array of easily-disabled auto-turrets, the Rangers are in pretty bad shape after the last fight, and are in all likelihood no match for LP and her psycho-platoon.

Once again, SteelHooves demonstrates that he really has no idea how these sorts of exchanges are supposed to work. He offers them comatose cheese-grandpa once again, whom the Rangers quite obviously don't want back, in exchange for two (two!) water talismans, which as I understand it are extremely valuable. Knight Riverseed politely tells him to go pound sand. Now, according to the generally-accepted rules of fair trade, if the two parties are unable to reach an agreement then this means that the trade will not take place, right? So logically, SteelHooves and the others should just pack up Grandpa Cheeseman's coma-coffin and fuck off back to where they came from, right? Well, ordinarily yes; however, we are in kkat-land, so the rules are a little different here.

SteelHooves, who as far as I can tell legitimately believes he has some kind of moral high ground here, flat out tells Knight Riverseed that she is outgunned, and that he is prepared to ruthlessly slaughter her and the other Rangers if they don't just arbitrarily hand him two water talismans in exchange for this comatose, shitting retard. The party is so obviously in the wrong here that even Littlepoop seems to notice:

>This sounded like it was going downhill, but nopony was red on my E.F.S. compass yet. We could still talk this out. I was beginning to really hope we could. I hadn’t realized how badly the losses at Stable Two and Twenty-Nine had depleted the Manehattan contingent of the Steel Rangers. The battle earlier today must have taken out their remaining hierarchy. All that were left were the knights left behind to guard the fort and probably a hoof-full of scribes.
>These weren’t the ponies who attacked Stable Two. They weren’t the ponies who attacked us earlier either. They weren’t even the ones responsible for refusing water to the civilians of Arbu.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the Rangers are basically wiped out at this point, and SteelHooves' faction has won the civil war. These guys are just a small contingent of stragglers making a last stand.

Moreover, kkat usually slants his fights heavily in favor of the party regardless of who the enemy is, so even if the Rangers were at full strength they would probably stand little chance of victory. As it stands, Littlesue and her merry band of cutthroats are likely to rip these poor idiots to shreds. This is tantamount to gunning down a room full of crippled orphans in order to steal their last box of cookies. Well, maybe not quite that extreme, but still; this is not the party's proudest moment.

As I said, even Littlepoop seems to pick up on this and is now suddenly squeamish about fighting, even though this whole thing was her idea to begin with. However, she doesn't quite seem willing to just accept that her plan was a bad one, and that they really ought to just do as Knight Riverseed says and leave. Her vain hope here is that they will still be able to "talk this out," which basically just translates to "convince these beaten and bedraggled Rangers to hand over their water talismans without a fight, in exchange for basically nothing."

As you might expect, it all goes downhill from here. One of the snipers seems to accidentally fire on Velvet, and another firefight breaks loose.

Page break. Nothing is really clear here except that there is a fight going on. We are told that somehow, Littlepoop managed to get inside the inner keep of their compound and take the two water talismans. Here is all the text has to offer by way of explanation:

>I had braved the internal rooms of the pier and picked one of the hardest locks I had ever come across in order to get them. But my relatively stealthy entrance was obliterated when the alarms went off.
A sane and rational person might respond to this with questions like "why" and "how" and "seriously, what the fuck?" They would be fully justified in doing so, as the last time we saw Littlepoop she was in the Sky Wagon, looking through the scope of her sniper rifle at the ramparts of an armed compound. To move her from point A to point B in this case would realistically require multiple microscenes worth of detail, that in this case has been completely and inexplicably skipped over.

However, a sane and rational person would also have stopped reading this story approximately twenty chapters ago, because they would have realized that if they kept going they would probably suffer an aneurysm from trying to process the sheer ridiculousness of it. So, I can only conclude that this means I am neither sane nor rational, and so I have little choice except to just accept this absolute bullshit at face value and keep reading. Littlepoop somehow fought her way through however the fuck many Ranger knights are still alive, hacked her way past multiple difficult locks, and now has two water talismans around her neck. Far out. Moving on.

Littlepoop gets knocked off the bridge by some kind of energy bolt or something, and falls onto some piece of latticework further below. She is quite some distance from the ground, and is in danger of falling to her death. She looks up and sees two of the unicorn Ranger scribes standing above her, chanting some kind of spell. She pulls out her gun and shoots them. End of scene.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
97d0ee4
?
No.309508
309510 309610
3371639 - Friendship_is_Magic Hioshiru My_Little_Pony Starlight_Glimmer.png
>>309500

Page break. As usual, the next scene begins at some indeterminate point in the future, without wrapping up any of the shit that the previous scene left hanging. When we last saw Littlepoop, she was dangling off the edge of a bridge being hassled by a couple of unicorns. Now, she is back on the Fuck Wagon with all of her friends, jetting off to some other location to wreak mayhem.

Anyway, we get a brief two-paragraph recap of the events that occurred between scenes. As anticipated, the party pretty much slaughtered the remaining Rangers with little serious effort. Two of them surrendered, and were allowed to escape in a boat. The remainder fought to the death. The party built them a funeral pyre (after prudently relieving them of all of their belongings, of course), because Littlepoop felt that "they deserved that much."

Naturally, Littlepoop feels that now would be a good time to listen to another recording from Calamity's suitcase. Fortunately, this is the last one. If anyone cares, our friend the mall cop was apparently shot during an altercation involving a dead poodle and a falling billboard. The details are nowhere near as interesting as they sound. Meanwhile, there seems to be something going on with the mall cop's significant other:

>“Well, that and the other thing. Apparently, while I was in surgery, ponies from the Ministry of Morale paid her a visit. According to Sis, they were asking all sorts of questions about Darling. Weird things, like what she’d said at her birthday party and about her internship last year with Four Stars. Sis was freaking out. I think… I think she’s losing it.
I'm not sure what's being implied here, and at this point I can't really summon the energy to care.

My guess is that these minor side-stories are meant to be pieced together with each other, in order to flesh out some minor details of the backstory. As I've said I don't know how many times now, this method of storytelling works fine in a video game, where you can hide the story fragments like Easter eggs and give the player something extra to hunt for, but it isn't really appropriate for a novel, and in any case, I'm just to exhausted to comb through the text and try to connect the minute details of this security guard's story to the minute details of all the other random NPC stories that LP has picked up at various points. If anyone has a clue as to why the Ministry of Morale might be interested in what Darling said at her birthday party or what the significance of her internship at Four Stars was all about, then feel free to chime in. For myself, I just don't consider the payoff of learning this information to be worth the effort of combing through all of this autism.

Page break. They are back at Arbu now, only it's night and everyone is asleep. Littlepoop is feeling down in the dumps because she seems to more or less understand that butchering the defeated Rangers and stealing their water talismans was not her noblest act. However, as usual, she makes it all about her:

>I was not a good pony. I wanted to be a good pony. I tried to be a good pony. But today… today…
Aww, poor wittle pony-wony. *pets* Nah, I'm just kidding; to hell with this pony. I wouldn't even pity-boop this rancid disgusting whore.

Anyway, that weird crazy grandpa who has occasionally been shouting things at them suddenly appears. He seems mostly lucid now, and tells Littlepoop that Arbu is "a bad place" and that they should get out while they can. He tells her that if she doesn't believe him, she should look in the basement. Well, now my curiosity is piqued; after all, scenes that start with "don't look in the basement" usually end well enough.

Page break. There are some guards by the basement but she sneaks past them and a lock but she picks it; I'm sure you all know the drill by now. She goes downstairs, and it's about what you'd expect. The room is smeared with blood and guts and dead bodies, and she opens a refrigerator and sees that it's filled with pony meat. Yep, you guessed it: the Arbu poners are cannibals, which seems to be somehow entwined with their poorly-defined religious beliefs. Turns out they ate the preacher who came through earlier, and were planning to eat the colt's father and all the other bandits and anypony else who has died recently. Whether or not they planned on eating Littlepoop and her party is not yet clear.

I'll be honest, there is very little edge this story can throw at me that's going to shock me at this point, and in all honesty I was beginning to suspect this arc might end up like this as soon as it mentioned the Arbu poners getting special marks for "eating the heart" of their "first kill." I could probably just roll my eyes at le edge, make a couple of jokes, and move on, but there are a couple of things here that are worth looking at.

First off, I'll actually give kkat a small amount of credit. He did a reasonably good job foreshadowing this: it was clear enough from the get-go that there was a little more to this town than what we could see; however, it wasn't made super obvious. He dropped little hints here and there: the Arbu marks, the stew, the crazy old man bellowing warnings. He also went to a bit of trouble to set up a moral conflict for Littlepoop: he deliberately placed her in a situation where she would end up doing something she found distasteful in order to help these ponies sort out their water problem, only to find out in the end that she was helping cannibals. Le shock, le twist. I have some problems with the specific moral conflict that was created, which I will get to, and the twist itself was a bit corny, but I'm willing to acknowledge that kkat set up and executed the whole thing decently enough. It's rare that I get to say that about him, so credit where credit is due. inb4 this all turns out to be a blatant scene-for-scene ripoff of some Fallout DLC and Lucy yanks that goddamn football away again
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.309510
>>309508
This whole side story and distraction to the main plot is indeed a reference to a sidequest and location in Fallout 3, Andale. How it is handled in the game is slightly different: you come across a tiny town in the middle of nowhere occupied by two families. However, things are basically identical, such as the crazy old coot who knows what is really going on and is brushed aside by the residents, who tells the protagonist to go look in the basement/ shed out back.

Littlepip's upcoming reaction to this is most likely similar to Kkat's reaction, as, remember, this story is pretty much an adjusted play-by-play of their experiences whilst roleplaying during a Fallou 3 playthrough.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309519
Huge spoilery message to everyone besides Glim that Glim shouldn't read until the whole story is over: no seriously glim please don't read this until the story is complete. Glim shouldn't know what happens to this particular football. A videogame that tells much of its story (what happens in the story, like what Granddad did with his dying breath in front of the hero) and lore (shit that happened before the story starts like how Grandma and Granddad fell in love) does this expecting players who give a shit about the story to find every last lore collectable and presumably piece the whole story together, whether that's to get a complete picture of all the story ever or simply to get 100% completion and whatever reward is arbitrarily hidden behind it. So FUCK KKAT RIGHT IN HIS RETARDED TINY SOY-SHRUNKEN TRANNY PUSSY OF A BRAIN for failing to write about Littlepip finding audio logs that are relevant to Equestria's downfall and the fate of the mane six just because he was usually too busy writing about LP finding random unimportant bullshit mentioned in quirky trying-too-hard-to-be-funny BugthEAsderp audio logs. more like autism logs except autism's too nice a word! We never even fucking find out what happened to Rainbow Dash. BugthEAsderp is retarded and cannot fucking write. It says a lot that Kkat took 99% of his inspiration from this, a fool's game masquerading as Fallout. Anyway, this story does not fully tell its pre-war story, which means all of Kkat's attempts to make the bullshit happening in post-war Equestria remotely relevant to what happened in pre-war equestria is a motherfucking distraction. An empty promise. An irrelevant sideshow. A side story with no true ending. Smoke and mirrors. Just there so FIMfiction's retarded "You cannot upload your story unless it somehow involves FIM's characters or setting at the time you upload it" restriction doesn't get as violated as Kkat was at the men's bathroom in Starbucks.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
73a0537
?
No.309610
309625
3454242 - Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Starlight_Glimmer Yakovlev-Vad.png
>>309508

This is the part I really wanted to zero in on:

>The two water talismans clinked together softly, still hanging from my horn. One of them I had procured for this town, risking my life and the lives of my friends. Killing ponies I didn’t want to kill. Self-defense didn’t make them any less dead.
This passage occurs shortly before Littlepoop discovers the horse-meat in the basement. Before delving too deeply into analysis, I'd actually like to pay kkat another quick compliment: the imagery of the water talismans was reasonably well done here. Specifically, the way he describes them clinking together as she descends the staircase, and then has them periodically clinking as she explores the basement. The sound made by the talismans reinforces the connection between the murder of the Steel Rangers and Littlepoop's effort to help this town. The author's basic idea here is that Littlepoop committed an act which violated her conscience because she felt it was necessary in order to help this town; however, the town turned out to be cannibals. I have some major gripes with the actual concepts here, and I will get to that in just a moment, but the imagery of the talismans was actually pretty well done. If you want to know how to use imagery in a scene, this scene is a reasonably good study.

However, I have some issues with the way the author set all of this up. For starters, I'd like to take a closer look at this line:

>Killing ponies I didn’t want to kill. Self-defense didn’t make them any less dead.
At some point, someone is going to have to sit this little murderhobo down and explain the concept of self-defense to her. Regardless of what their ultimate intentions were and who shot first in the actual fight, the fact is that LP and her friends were the aggressors in this situation. They flew in, made unreasonable demands that they knew would be refused, and picked a fight with a group of Rangers that had not antagonized them.

The author would probably make the argument that they were, in fact, responding to antagonism. Here is this passage, from the fight scene earlier:

>“After the disgraceful actions of Paladin Amaranth at the previous exchange, you are lucky we are asking so low a price for the return of your Elder,” SteelHooves informed her flatly. “Whom your own ponies shot at, so be careful whom you call a traitor.”
Here, SteelHooves is basically saying that Amaranth's dishonorable conduct justifies the party's actions: Amaranth attacked them without provocation during the earlier attempted exchange, so they have a right to some sort of restitution. Maybe there's an honor code specific to the Steel Rangers that would make Riverseed indebted to SteelHooves here, but in general I would say the matter was already settled. Amaranth dishonorably attacked the party without provocation, and the party fought back and won. Amaranth and her fellow officers responsible for the attack are already dead; these are just foot soldiers. The debt has already been settled, so there's no reason for the party to fly back and pick another fight. Moreover, they're not picking a fight because they want revenge on Amaranth, they're picking a fight over water talismans; they're just attempting to use Amaranth's earlier behavior to justify what is pretty much flat-out robbery.

>Knight Riverseed hesitated once more, then took a step forward. “W-we can’t comply with those demands and you know it. Request denied. Now get off our citadel!” The two light machineguns on her armor’s built-in battle saddle clicked as they reloaded, pointing threateningly at us. But my E.F.S. was not registering her as hostile. It was a bluff.
This basically confirms that Riverseed is outmatched here and knows it, and also that she doesn't want to fight. However, her own honor demands that she not just cave in to whatever ridiculous demands SteelHooves wants to make just because he's got her over a barrel. The fact that the Rangers choose to fight to the death rather than surrender once the shooting starts reinforces this point: this fight is a matter of honor, it's not about whether they can win.

So, no matter how LP wants to justify it, the fact is that she and her friends were the attackers and the Rangers were defending. Thus, "self-defense" doesn't work as an excuse here.

The reason I'm splitting hairs on these points is because imo Littlepoop learns entirely the wrong lesson from all of this. This line sums up her basic view of the situation:

>And I’d killed for these ponies…
She's not upset simply because she killed the Rangers, she's upset because she stained her hands hooves, whatever with their blood in order to help these villagers who turned out to be cannibals. She feels bad, but she feels bad for the wrong reasons: first, that she had to spill the Rangers' blood, and second that the ponies she stole the water talismans for turned out to be unworthy of her help.

Littlepoop never had any right to attack the Rangers in the first place, but she never acknowledges this. She feels guilty about killing them the way she did, but she seems to still believe that the act of stealing their water talismans was fundamentally justified. In her mind, if Arbu had been a good and decent village as she'd thought, then there wouldn't have been any problem. She'd still feel bad about killing the Rangers, but she'd only feel bad because they had chosen to fight to the death instead of just giving her the talismans. In her mind, everything she did here was for some kind of greater good: Arbu needed water talismans and the Rangers had more than they needed. Therefore, Littlepoop, by virtue of her being the Lightbringer and the Wasteland Savior and whatever the fuck else she believes she is, had not just a right but an obligation to intervene and "fix" things incidentally, this is the same logic that Communism uses to justify itself.

I'm running out of space, but I will finish this thought in a new post.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
73a0537
?
No.309625
309627 309632 309638
1622636401315.png
>>309610

The overall point I’m trying to make is that Littlepoop’s problem is not that she’s “corrupted kindness” or whatever she keeps calling herself; her problem is that she’s a pathological narcissist with a messiah complex. As far as she is concerned, the entire universe revolves around her and everything that happens in it depends on her choices; every move she makes is made with this as a basic assumption. No matter how much angst and self-doubt she projects, she never questions her inherent right to play judge, jury and executioner with the other inhabitants of the wasteland. These Rangers are just the latest example: she doesn't want to kill them, but she never questions her right to kill them, or her right to take their water crystals.

Her narcissism is also on display in her reaction to learning that Arbu is a cannibal village:

>And I’d killed for these ponies…
She's not angry about cannibalism, nor is she angry about killing the Rangers; she's angry because she killed the Rangers to give the Arbu poners a water talisman, but they turned out to be cannibals. She did what she did because she thought she was helping a "good" village but they turned out to be a "bad" village (with "good" and "bad" defined arbitrarily by her). She committed a "bad" act because she thought it was for a greater "good," but it turns out the villagers were withholding information about themselves that might have affected her decision. How dare they!

That's why she's angry here. It's not because she feels bad about the legitimate wrong she did in needlessly slaughtering the Rangers to steal their water crystal, it's because the villagers deceived her into thinking that they were more deserving of that water crystal than they actually were (again, "deserving" according to a purely arbitrary scale devised by Littlepoop herself). It never even crosses her mind that she may not have a natural right to decide who is good and who is evil, who gets to live and who gets to die, or who the rightful owner of a particular water talisman ought to be.

Speaking of the talismans, she actually displayed some interesting hypocrisy about this earlier. This is from the conversation where she first came up with the plan to attack Bucklyn Cross:

>“That’s different,” I insisted finally. “You’re talking about ponies who work for what they sell. The ponies here risk life and limb hunting. Even gardeners toil to grow their vegetables. But the Steel Rangers… this is a water talisman. It provides water freely. They didn’t even create it. They stole it!”
Think about this for a second. Littlepoop has a few possessions that belong to her naturally: her PipBuck, her stable barding, her massive collection of bobby pins, and whatever else she had to begin with back at the stable. However, pretty much everything else she owns she has either scavenged or taken from her enemies.

What gives her the right to wave "Little Macintosh" around? Did she create that gun? Was it created for her? Did she pay anyone for it, or trade for it? No, she just saw it and took it. What about all the other shit she has? What gives her the right to pick up and view memory orbs? Do those memories belong to her? What about the statue she took off of Pinkie Pie's corpse? Not only does she not have any right to that, she doesn't even have a practical use for it; she just took it because she saw it and wanted it. What about Apple Bloom's PipBuck, which she also took? Did she have a right or a reason to take that?

Where in the wide wide world of Edgequestria does this twat get off criticizing the Steel Rangers for scavenging water crystals, which are actually useful to them, when she goes around robbing the graves of ponies she claims to admire, taking their treasured possessions for herself for no other reason beyond being an autistic klepto? Meanwhile, we're supposed to feel bad for her every time she decides to shed crocodile tears about not burying their skeletons afterward.

As far as I can tell, the informal law that governs the wasteland is basically "finders keepers." Most ponies in this world live by scavenging, and my impression is that if you find something pre-war that nobody presently living has a legitimate claim to, it's yours to take. The author hasn't really clarified what, if anything, the Steel Rangers do with all of the technology they collect, but as far as I can tell, they live by the same rules that Littlepoop and her friends do. Whatever their respective goals are, they are both in the same business: scavenging and survival. The Steel Rangers are just much more efficient and organized about it.

So, if they happen to find themselves in possession of five water talismans when they only need one, so what? How do those talismans not rightfully belong to them, according to the rules that everyone in this setting lives by, including Littlepoop herself? The Rangers "stole" their water talismans, but LP has a Goddess-given right to just view other ponies' memories? Read their diaries? Punch into their any safe she sees and just grab any shiny thing that catches her autistic eye, no matter how private or personal it might have been to its original owner? Ponies in glass stables, Littlepoop; ponies in glass stables.

The possibility exists that the author is aware of all of this, and is writing LP this way on purpose in order to have her learn some kind of lesson or grow in some significant way at the end of the story. The author clearly designed Red Eye to be Littlepoop's dark mirror, and "narcissistic messiah complex" probably fits him as well. So, it's possible that kkat intends for LP to learn something from all of this and fix herself at the end. However, from what he's given us so far, I have little faith that he's capable of this level of characterization. More likely he doesn't even realize what a hypocritical, self-righteous twat his OC really is.
Anonymous
abcf064
?
No.309627
309630
>>309625
Littlepip is practically a serial killer who's deluded enough to think that she's she ordained protagonist of some edgy video game.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.309630
>>309627
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5pxz0U0wQg
Littlepoop is a faggier pussy Samson with a crusty cunt.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309632
309634
>>309625
To make matters worse, I bet most LP fanboys reading this on Fagfiction are actually taking LP's side right now and announced this in the comment section. I can almost see those aborted cumstains typing shit like "But LP thought Arbu needed water! She didn't know she was killing and stealing for a bad village, she thought she was doing it for a good village! Littlepip did nothing wrong!" and "The Steel Rangers had five water talismans and they only needed one! They should share! They should be forced to share! At gunpoint! They should have just taken LP's offer when they had the chance and walked away with their lives and lighter pockets, because forcing others to accept bad trades at gunpoints isn't robbery if you have enough confidence! Littlepip did nothing wrong!".

Infiniggers, the lot of them.

Still...

If this was supposed to intentionally display Littlepoop at her lowest point before she learns a lesson and gets fucked over hard by the consequences of her evil actions and grows into a better-written protagonist who's explocitly stated to be a better person after getting over her videogame-protagonist-logic-syndrome bullshit, would that actually make this genius writing?
Anonymous
35fd76f
?
No.309634
309654
>>309632
>If this was supposed to intentionally display Littlepoop at her lowest point before she learns a lesson and gets fucked over hard by the consequences of her evil actions and grows into a better-written protagonist who's explocitly stated to be a better person after getting over her videogame-protagonist-logic-syndrome bullshit, would that actually make this genius writing?
It's too late for that by far, especially with how everyone has incessantly told her she's "just such a gosh darn good pony." At this point the only way a redemption could be even partially salvaged is some "unreliable narrator" twist like they had in Spec Ops, where it turns out she's basically been hallucinating most of her conversations, actions, and experiences. And given what a drugged up lunatic she is, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch. Even then though, it would be too little, too late.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.309638
309640 309642
nfkb457ptiq31.png
>>309625

I'll add that for whatever it's worth, the author does show a bit of self-awareness after LP makes her soapbox tirade:

>“Scavenged,” Calamity correctly curtly.
Technically this should say Calamity corrected curtly, but I'll let it slide.

>“Fine. Scavenged. So they worked to get it too. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t share!” My voice was rising.
The question of whether the Rangers ought or ought not to share is a philosophical one, and could be argued either way. However, to me, the central issue is still Littlepoop's narcissism and self-righteousness: she's not interested in debating this question at all, and she never doubts her right to force her point of view on the Rangers or anypony else who gets on the wrong end of Little Macintosh. However, again, I'm willing to give kkat a point or two for at least somewhat acknowledging his OC's hypocrisy on stealing vs. scavenging.

Anyway, it's probably time to return to the present point in the story and move on. Continuing from where we left off: LP has just discovered the bodies in the basement, and she's mad as hell. Grrr!

Page break. LP bursts out of the basement in a murderous rage and immediately disarms and force-chokes three ponies at once with telekinesis. Have I mentioned recently that the level of magic power this character has is ridiculous? And that it's even more ridiculous that she seems to consider herself underpowered?

>“You fed the colt HIS OWN FATHER, you sick monsters!?!” I raged, seeing nothing but red.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYtMoDcwAoQ

Incidentally, I have a quick note about the cannibalism issue as well. From the evidence available, the Arbu poners are clearly cannibals, but whether or not they are killers is debatable. The bodies LP finds in the basement belong to the ponies who were killed in the battle between Arbu and the bandits. They harvested meat from not only the bandits but their own dead as well, which indicates that they simply eat anypony who gets killed in or near Arbu, whether friend or foe.

There's actually a sort of morbid logic to this: food is scarce in the wasteland, so if you find a plentiful source of it you might as well take advantage. Cannibalism is unseemly and disrespectful, but at the same time the dead aren't in much of a position to complain about what's being done with their remains. If you don't harvest their meat it's just going to rot anyway, and imo there's a considerable distinction between killing someone for food and eating someone who is already dead, especially if food is scarce. From a purely practical standpoint I can see how this practice could make sense, particularly in a setting like the wasteland.

And as I said, so far all of their "victims" seem to be war casualties; the only pony whom the villagers seem to have actually murdered is the Preacher:

>My gaze caught a pony skull hung on the wall next to the stairs where I couldn’t see it before. The skull was mounted on a plaque. Beneath it, somepony had soldered the word UNITY.
>They ate him, I realized, my mind teetering on the darkest edge of night. They killed the preacher and they ate him.
She doesn't actually know that they killed him, she just assumes that they did. We don't actually know the story here; he could have died of natural causes.

Granted, given the available evidence and kkat's general edge levels, we can probably assume that these ponies did murder the Preacher, aren't above murder in general, and may have been planning to eat Littlepoop and her friends all along, so maybe what she does next is somewhat justified. However, the alternative viewpoint that they're just a bunch of otherwise-normal poners who just happen to be pragmatic and unsentimental about corpse disposal is worth considering, especially in this setting.

If this turns out to be the case, it condemns Littlepoop's actions even further: not only did she murder the crap out a bunch of virtually defenseless Steel Rangers in order to rob them, she is now (presumably) about to murder the crap out of a bunch of basically-innocent villagers just for violating an arbitrary social taboo actually, if you want to get really technical about it, we don't even know for sure that cannibalism is even taboo in Edgequestria; after all, it's not even canon for little ponies to eat meat in the first place, so as far as I'm concerned all bets are off. On top of that, she originally murdered the Rangers to help the very villagers that she now intends to also murder. This would mean that LP is now a thief, a double-murderer, and a sanctimonious cunt. Just "food" for thought. :^)

Anyway, in true sanctimonious-cunt-like fashion, LP demands to know where the colt who ate his papa is, and after one of the ponies she's strangling gives her the information, she quite rudely shoots all three of them with zebra bullets, which, as you may or may not remember, cause their targets to catch fire as well as die.

As soon as she leaves the Kwik-E-Mart where the basement is, she runs into the merchant. I'll be damned if I can remember which merchant specifically, but it seems that there is a merchant here, who isn't officially a member of this community. Probably one of the guys from the caravan they saved. He asks LP what was up with all the gunshots, and she tells him that the villagers have been selling him pone-jerky all along. He looks ill, and she advises him to go look in the basement if he wants proof. It's unclear whether or not he takes her up on that offer.

Littlepoop, for her part, doesn't stick around to find out. Murder is on the menu, and it's time for the peacefully sleeping poners of Arbu to meet their caterer.

>The righteous fury of hell followed behind me.
One of these days, someone is going to have to sit this little maniac down and explain to her what the word "righteous" means.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.309640
310223
1600285765487.png
>>309638

This is actually the end of the chapter, so this is probably a good stopping point for today. However, the author includes a small coda: an italicized portion of text representing a broadcast from DJ Pon3. In light of all we've read, it's hilarious enough to quote in its entirety:

>“DJ Pon3 here, and I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know what to make of this one, children.

>“For weeks I’ve been telling you of the heroic deeds of the Stable Dweller, our Heroine in of the Equestrian Wasteland, our Bringer of Light in this time of darkness. But today…
Incidentally, this should read "our Heroine of the Equestrian Wasteland," not "Heroine in of the Equestrian Wasteland." However, it's an easy enough typo to make, and after 364,910 words of this shit, I'm beginning to wish I had a little heroin myself. And yes, that is the actual, exact number of words we have read as of the end of this chapter.

>“Another village in Manehattan has gone silent. Arbu is dead. Reports have reached me that every pony in the town, over two dozen, have been killed. And listen children, I don’t know how to say this… but…

>“But it looks like it was the Stable Dweller who was responsible. A witness from Bucklyn Cross reported seeing her opening fire on ponies in the Arbu commons.

>“Now children… I don’t want to believe this. I don’t want to believe our heroine has turned on us. There must be more to this story than what I’m hearing. If you know anything about it, please contact my assistant Homage at Tenpony Tower. Anything at all…

>“I don’t know exactly what went down or why. But I’m not going to stop until I find out. And when I do, you’ll know too.

>“This is DJ Pon3. Bringing you the truth. No matter how bad it hurts.”

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that this will turn out to be part of Littlepoop's needlessly-convoluted plan. She probably told Homage to disown "the Stable-Dweller" on-air at some point for some reason, and Homage, obliging, chose this incident as her excuse. Being the all-seeing lesbo that she is, she probably knows perfectly well why LP shot up Arbu, and in any case, she's seen her little girlfriend commit more than her share of war crimes over the past six weeks or so, and if that didn't stop her nethers from quivering, it's unlikely that this incident would.

However, since Littlepoop has lost her memory, she won't know that this is part of her own plan, so she probably now believes that Homage believes that her precious "Light Bringer" has gone off the reservation. So, we will probably have to spend the next several chapters listening to Littlepoop whine about how heartbroken she is, and how badly she wants to see Homage so she can explain why she did what she did, but oh no she can't do that, because she has to save the wasteland from the Goddess or Red Eye or whoever and also go on like 20 more side missions. This, of course, is on top of all the other crap she's probably going to whine to us about. Yipee.

However, that's just my guess, based on what I would probably do if I were telling this story, and had also bashed myself in the face with a cinder block enough times to make myself think that telling this story was a good idea. As he's demonstrated to us plenty of times in the past, kkat has very little imagination, at least when it comes to anything besides thinking up new ways for ponies to disembowel each other.

However, we shall see.
Anonymous
35fd76f
?
No.309642
Postal_day_1.png
>>309638
>They killed the preacher and they ate him.
And then they're going to eat me! Oh my goooooooood!
>The righteous fury of hell followed behind me.
If the narration in your story starts reading like a Postal 1 loading screen (see pic related), you might want to dial back the edge.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309654
>>309634
There are no extenuating circumstances here, or edge-stenuating circumstances. Littlepoop is officially a full-on murderer. What justification can there be to, in a post apocalyptic hellhole, gun down an entire village for "recycling"? Sure, making a foal eat his parents is a dick move but is that really any stranger than rubbing corpse ash on your body or eating human brains with some random human news reporter or gang raping a woman to death for serving you fish sinxe you were told it removes your magical immunity to bullets or meditating atop the corpses of poor people in the street or trying to raise a boy as a woman or any other wacky nonsense thing tribals with lesser brains in less civilized areas do? Who is Littlepoop to pass "righteous" judgement with a pistol (and other weapons) down for violating rules she never set in a literal lawless wasteland?

If Kkat wanted a big twist, he should reveal that all the ponies who called her a hero were actually evil self-interested morally-grey-at-best bastards playing her like a damn fiddle. Suddenly Homage just wanted power. Suddenly the "Dashites" are a remnant of pre-war pony government linked with the secret society at Tenpenny, Steelhooves was one of them assigned to get the Steel Rangers to kill alicorns and scavenge tech useful for rebuilding Equestria, they were all in on it and they were actually playing and pulling and plucking every last string to get Elements Of Harmony where they needed to be after Trixie The Goddess is dead thanks to Littlepip, getting everything ready for an Enclave Equestria takeover. 200 years of hellish wastelandery gave the perfect cover to a secret society bent on breeding superior ponies and inventing superior tech by experimenting on ponies and zebras and monsters and more. Equestria's borders were turned into an Alchemist's Circle to store all the souls of those who died here over 200 years. And turns out some random forgettable seemingly unimportant motherfucker named Sherrif Seed was actually the head of this conspiracy all along. Glory to the Seedclave.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309728
real horse comedy hours who up.png
post-apocalyptic horse comedy
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.309996
310013
Is Glim still alive?
Anonymous
8e26205
?
No.310013
6175419.png
6185271.png
6185609.png
6180292.jpg
6177682.png
>>309996
No.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7222cb8
?
No.310021
310023 310031 310053
1622624644455.png
Chapter 35: Cold Dawn Light

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“I heard something about a town south of here being attacked, but details are sketchy. All I know is there haven't been any refugees showing up here. Which means either the attack wasn't too bad, or it was very, very bad.”
South of where? What town? Who are these refugees, where do they come from, where are they showing up? Who is speaking these words, and to whom? Absent context, it is impossible to extract any meaning from this passage, let alone apply any of it to the events in the chapter we're about to read. Literally all it would take to give these epitaphs at least some semblance of meaning would be to simply attribute them to someone and provide some simple context. Here, watch:

"Remember that night? Surely you jest. I've lost all count of the evenings I've spent, throwing back glass after glass after glass of cheap scotch, trying to drown out the echoes of his screaming from my mind. Oh, yes; I remember it all: the cries, the blood, the rending of flesh and sinew...but most of all, I remember the horror I felt. There is no describing it, that feeling of primordial terror that followed the act. When the black work was finally done, and I could gaze at length upon the abomination I had wrought, I was seized by a creeping and insurmountable dread, the like of which no man should ever be made to experience. Remember that night? Hah! Of course I remember it; the penance for my sin is that I can never forget."

Dr. Thaddeus Mannmangler, PhD., reflecting on kkat's botched transition surgery


Did this speaker ever exist? Were these words ever spoken? No one really knows, but their context and their origin are made apparent by the attribution. This, combined with its obvious relevance to the text of Fallout: Equestria, makes it a poignant and meaningful epitaph, rather than a disconnected glob of random text foisted upon us for no reason at all. For comparison, here is another example:

"This is the hinndoo waxing ranjymad for a bombshoob. This is the Willingdone hanking the half of the hat of lipoleums up the tail on the buckside of his big white harse. Tip. That was the last joke of Willingdone. Hit, hit, hit! This is the same white harse of the Willingdone, Culpenhelp, waggling his tailoscrupp with the half of a hat of lipoleums to insoult on the hinndoo see-boy."

The above paragraph is a selection from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, grabbed completely at random. Granted, the context of this passage isn't much clearer even if you've read the entire book, but I feel like my point has been made. Simply dumping an out-of-context paragraph of text onto the reader without any obvious explanation for why it's there, what it means, why you picked it, or even who produced it originally, adds absolutely nothing of value to your novel, and will serve only to annoy the reader.

The ambiguity of kkat's epitaphs is even more apparent in the opening of this particular chapter. The epitaphs that begin every chapter are usually in italics, and this chapter just so happens to open with a lengthy monologue by DJ Pon3, also in italics. Without anything like, oh I don't know, an attribution to punctuate between the end of the epitaph and the beginning of the chapter, the entire opening microscene appears at first glance to be a single long, rambling epitaph.

Anyway, back to the story. As I said already, the chapter opens with a long rambling monologue from Homage. It's pretty much vintage kkat: a flavorless mush comprised of cliches, platitudes and angsty bullshit that sounds like a motivational speech that a suicidal emo kid might give to a little league team he was coaching. Content-wise there's nothing that merits going over in detail; the basic gist of it is that Littlepoop appears to have fallen prey to the horrors of the wasteland and slaughtered an entire village. Homage has investigated the source of this news and found it reliable (if anyone cares, the source mentioned is Riverseed, the pony leading the last stand of the Rangers whom LP also slaughtered needlessly). As such, she can only express remorse that the hero she believed in has fallen, but at the same time she remains hopeful that LP will find her way back into the "good guy" camp eventually.

This passage made me chuckle, though I'm not 100% sure that was the author's intent:

>”But if the Stable Dweller should come to your door, don’t lock it. Because if our hopes are true, then she’s more in need of our help and our support right now than ever before. And if our fears are true, then… well, children… she just might see that locked door as a challenge.”
"If you think locking your door will protect you from this kleptomaniacal autist, then clearly you've never met her. Better to just leave all your memory orbs, ammo clips, collectible figurines, and other random worthless crap out on the porch and hope that she just picks it all up and keeps walking."

Anyway, this monologue basically just restates what Homage already stated plainly enough in her monologue at the end of the previous chapter, so none of this was even really necessary.

Page break. Littlepoop has murdered everypony in town except for the old crazy grandpa and the little kids. Naturally, her friends were pretty much like "what the fuck" when they saw her do this, and she told them to go look in the basement. Grandpa, for his part, assures them that LP did the right thing: all the "decent" ponies already fled the settlement, with many joining up with the bandit troop that they just wiped out the other day. For all the author's efforts to make this event significant, it mostly plays out like everything else we've seen this character do: she slaughtered a fuckton of ponies for no reason and with no provocation, but they were bad according to some vaguely-defined moral precept of the author's, so it's okay.
Anonymous
ce46341
?
No.310023
sg.png
>>310021
>pic
>ponified Planet of the Ponies
Damn, anons DID IT!
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310031
>>310021
I'm glad you're ok.

I don't recall if I've mentioned this but a Code Geass fanfic once made excellent use of pre-chapter epitaphs. Sometimes exerpts from the future's documentaries on wars currently happening in the story and the political situation behind the wars and documentaries on what a colossal deal the hero prince's coronation was added more context and scale and scope to what was happening. Sometimes random things were there for the memes like a song from an ancient play comedically similar to the story's current events.

Have you ever heard of the idea that a character can be "broken"? Not as in "I just broke character and forgot to act like Sylvanos The Elf" but as in "this one awful scene broke this character, it permanently ruined this character in my eyes". Littlepoop already had a very shaky justification for trying to "make deals" with a defeated enemy and take what was theirs. This stands out because Kkat's villains are normally written to be so cartoonishly evil that a rockslide or Littlepoop killing them would be an unquestionable moral good. But then she slaughters an entire town just for being mean cannibals? What laws did they break in a lawless wasteland? It's not like they tried to kidnap and eat LP. Not like they've been kidnapping and eating innocents and LP was sent here by a grieving widow to find out what happened to her devoured-by-cannibals husband. This was not her situation to resolve.

After this scene I don't think I can view LP in the same light. I didn't respect her at all and I still don't. But now I dislike her even more. Sure, in a videogame you can sometimes slaughter towns you don't like. But surely a book should try harder to make this into a story event forced upon LP! Random acts of excessive violence say something about a character, even if LP forgot that from spending so long immersed in semi-cartoonish consequence-free gore-fetishizing idealized hyperviolence.

Do you think the story would be improved if the old man duped Littlepoop into helping him Willy Pete the whole town, and then she miserably wandered through the destroyed slaughtered town while saying gay emo shit like "I killed them all! Not just the men, but the women and children too!" and "I never asked for this!" and "How could this happen to meeee?"? It could turn this Big Lipped Aligator Moment into a deep and meaningful moment of intellectual commentary on the morality and intelligence of blindly trusting random NPC questgivers and going along with whatever they say just because there's a tangible reward like loot or intangible reward like EXP and Karma points in it for you.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7222cb8
?
No.310053
310058
1622623110548.png
>>310021

Anyway, Littlepoop's rage at the cannibals being all cannibly seems to have momentarily subsided, and as she calms down, it slowly dawns on her that she may have gone a bit overboard.

She has meted out "justice" in a typically Littlepoop-esque fashion: sparing some, and brutally slaughtering others, using some arbitrary personal yardstick to ascertain who deserves life and who deserves death. The cutoff seems to have been the Arbu brand (you may or may not recall that the Arbu poners have a special mark that they brand one of their own with as a sort of "coming of age" ritual when that pony first kills and eats another pony). The text describes her "ripping the clothing" off of mares to determine whether or not they have the brand.

The children were apparently spared, though it's questionable whether or not that was really such a merciful act. Far from showing gratitude, most seem rather put out by this lunatic, with whom they were kind enough to share their pony-meat, suddenly going berserk and slaughtering their parents. What happens to them now? Is LP planning to take any kind of responsibility for this situation she created? Or is she just going to do what she did with Monterrey Jack's unnamed children: pawn them off on Gawd and walk away dusting her hooves, like she did them some kind of favor?

>There were five of them in all. Plus the colt whose father I had killed. Plus one young buck with them, not much older than a colt. He was old enough to have his cutie mark, but his flank did not bear the mark of Arbu. He had eaten, knowingly, but he had been unable to bring himself to kill.
Maybe this says as much about my values as it does about kkat's, but I have to say that these villagers turning out to be cannibals honestly neither shocks nor offends me. I wouldn't go so far as to say I approve of it, but as I said before, I can see a kind of grim logic in it. I mean, not everypony can live off of 200 year old cans of Bush's™ Baked Beans forever; if a few adventurous poners wanted to branch out and try something new, I really don't see how it's any of Littlepoop's affair.

Point is, the twist that the author introduces here mostly fails to provoke an emotional or moral reaction from me against Arbu; however, it does manage to provoke a reaction against his protagonist.

Earlier, when we were reading Homage's reaction to what LP did, it's clear that her point of view is based on incomplete information; either she didn't know or we're supposed to think that she didn't know LP's reasons for attacking Bucklyn Cross and Arbu, she just knows what she did. She condemns LP's actions, but there's an implication that if she had been aware of her reasons, she would understand and sympathize.

I, however, know everything LP that LP knows and have seen everything she's seen, and I will say that I neither understand nor sympathize with her actions. If anything, I am even less sympathetic knowing why she did it.

She continues:

>I spared him. He could be saved. In the entire town, he had been the only one, save for Grandpa Rattle and the children. Even in my rage, I hadn’t wanted to believe that the whole town was vile. Surely, I kept thinking, there had to be a few more. Even just one? Now, listening to Grandpa Rattle, I understood why, except for the young buck, each and every attempt to find a redeemable pony had failed.
This right here sums up everything I hate about this character. Kkat could go on about ponies devouring each others' hearts and tearing each other limb from limb for pages upon pages and not provoke a reaction from me beyond maybe a casual eye-roll; however, the amount of self-righteous narcissism on display in this single paragraph honestly makes my blood boil. "This pony deserves to live, that pony deserves to die, all according to whatever arbitrary rules that I, Littlepoop, pull directly out of my self-righteous, yeast-infected cunt. It is I who decides who is vile and who is redeemable." Where the hell does she get off?

I suppose that the author's ability to provoke a reaction of any kind to his characters and the events in his story, instead of simply boring me as he has for much of the story, proves that he is at least somewhat doing his job as storyteller. However, a skillful storyteller is able to make you feel what he wants you to feel: you sympathize with the characters you're supposed to sympathize with, hate the characters you're supposed to hate. So far, kkat has mostly just succeeded in making me hate the crap out of his heroine, to the point where I'm inclined to sympathize with flesh-eating cannibals over her. If that's the effect that your story is having on the reader, odds are you're doing it wrong.

As I've said before, if he were doing this on purpose it would be fine. If all of this were just a setup for LP to learn some kind of lesson and come to terms with the fact that she is not the living embodiment of Godess almighty, I would be fine with all of it. However, I don't get the impression that's how the author sees it or that he even realizes that it's how someone might see it. I think this scene was, as another anon remarked, kkat's own personal reaction to whatever Fallout mission this cannibal arc is mimicking. In any event, it's clear enough that LP's deeds are meant to be seen as heroic.

To me, LP's deeds in this story have been less the actions of a hero and more the antics of a wild-west bandit. She goes where she pleases, does what she pleases, takes whatever she pleases, kills whomever she pleases; all without any of the swashbuckling anti-hero characteristics that can make such a character fun or charming. Her actions have mostly brought harm and destruction on what little civilization still exists in this setting. To me, the only satisfying ending this story could possibly have would be for LP to be captured by some vigilante posse and strung up like a common criminal.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7222cb8
?
No.310058
310066 310136
pepe_joker_by_panchuali_ddih7ih-fullview.jpg
>>310053

Anyway, LP's friends also seem to be having difficulty swallowing this latest stunt of hers. Calamity's reaction is ambivalent. He clearly does not approve of what LP did, but disapproves of the cannibal village as well. He seems to want to blame the whole thing on LP's concussion, as that would neatly dispose of any messy moral quandaries and allow them to get back to normal life, such as it is. As ever, Calamity remains the pragmatist of the group.

Velvet, whom Calamity regards as a pragmatist for some strange reason or other, takes a view that is at first glance surprising, but upon closer inspection is quite in character for her:

>“They. Were. Cannibals!” Velvet Remedy snorted. “Maybe it’s hard for you to see, being so quick to eat meat yourself, but these… ponies… what they have done is evil beyond the pale.”
One would initially expect Velvet to be horrified by LP's actions, seeing as how she usually deplores violence. However, it would seem that here, the greater evil of cannibalism wins out, and she sees the justice in LP's actions. At least, this seems to be kkat's interpretation of her view.

I would agree with kkat that this position is in character for her, but not for the reasons that he likely does. In fact, I would argue that it would be equally in character for her to take the opposite view: that LP's actions were horrible and she could never, ever forgive her.

Velvet has no actual convictions; she's just a vapid, wishy-washy airhead, who has a vague definition of "goodness" somewhere in the back of her mind, and seems to regard herself as altruistic because she kinda-sorta tries to live up to it. Positive self-image takes the place of actual convictions for her: believing that she has principles is more important to her than actually having them, and believing that she lives up to her ideals is more important than whether she actually does. Thus, for her, the only important thing in this situation is that she be appalled by something. It doesn't really matter what, specifically, appalls her or why. The actions of both Littlepoop and the cannibals could reasonably be called appalling for different reasons, so it's basically just a matter of preference. As long as she believes she's taking some sort of a stand here, that's all that matters; beyond that, she puts no more thought into the ethics of cannibalism or of murdering cannibals than she puts into the ethics of anything else.

As much as I despise her, I'll admit she's one of the most consistently-written and believable characters in the entire book. In many ways, she's an archetype of modern womanhood: she appears caring but doesn't demonstrably care about anything, she claims to have strong convictions but doesn't take them even remotely seriously, she sees herself as strong-willed and independent but prefers to be directed by others most of the time, she expresses strong opinions but clearly never puts serious thought into much of anything. If kkat had the self-awareness to realize what sort of character he actually created, he could do some interesting things with her; unfortunately, he seems to be as clueless about her true nature as she is. Ironically, this is probably the only area where kkat convincingly behaves like an actual woman.

Anyway, instead of the somewhat-interesting ethical conversation they could be having about all of this, they instead engage in the sort of banal back-and-forth debate that passes for moral commentary in this story: which is worse, eating ponies, or killing ponies who eat ponies? What is the answer to this question? Who cares; all I know is it drags on for about 20 paragraphs longer than it has any right to. A couple of passages are worth highlighting, if only for unintentional irony:

>“Hey!” Calamity shot back, raising his voice to match hers, “Ah get that they were cannibals. Puts ‘em right up there with New Appleloosa on the list o’ places Ah ain’t gonna settle down.
>I winced. Calamity: equating cannibalism to trading with slavers on the morality scale.
kek

>Velvet Remedy had been a Stable Dweller like me. She grew up with the same morality I did. Only… she had always held to hers better than I had.
double kek

>“Velvet…” I said softly. Too softly to be heard. Don’t defend me, Velvet. You were right about me back in old Appleloosa. I’m a murderer. A monster drowning in the blood of all the ponies I have killed. I’m the thing in the mirror, no better than a raider.
>Except… I wasn’t, was I? These were bad ponies. They needed to die. I was saving ponies by wiping them out, wasn’t I?
>Corrupted Kindness, the little pony in my head said angrily.
one of these days, you weasels are going to kek yourselves to death.

Anyway, I'd almost forgotten that she still existed, but suddenly Xenith chimes in with the "you have to do what you have to do in order to survive" viewpoint that I brought up earlier. SteelHooves, also a consistently-written character, at least in the sense that he always just stands there and never does anything, proceeds to stand there and not do anything for the entire scene. Then, someone asks him his opinion and he states that LP was the leader so it was her call. Then, it veers off into a long-ass tangent about Applejack and what she might have to say on the subject of cannibalism. Such a deep-thinking people, the 2012-era bronies were.

Then, LP suddenly remembers that she killed a child, or an adolescent or something. Then, Grandpa Rattlebones suddenly mentions that he has a ledger containing a record of every single pony ever killed by the cannibals, and that this should settle the debate. Apparently, he's almost as much of an autist as Littlepoop herself. Hey, speaking of grandpas, whatever happened to Grandpa Cheesecake? Are they still lugging his coffin around with them, or did they just dump him by the side of the road somewhere?

Anyway, after this, the scene finally, mercifully, ends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtvmTu4zAMg
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310066
>>310058
Now and then you've said Kkat could do something interesting with these awful characters if he realized how awful they are. What sort of interesting things could he do? Write about them realizing what their flaws really are and working to overcome them? Write about their flaws killing them in agonizing and unusual ironic deaths? Write about their flaws consistently causing realistic problems for others?

It's funny for Steelhooves to be such a non-presence aside from his connection to Fallout elements (power armour and pink/red cloud) and FIM elements (he was Applejack's boyfriend) and bastardized amalgamations of the two (The ponified Steel Rangers) because he is a shallow OC permanently fused to a suit of power armour that never belonged in Equestria yet keeps him alive with a mix of bullshit pulled-out-of-Kkunt's-ass life support systems and a body horror combinatorial melting gas that also never belonged in Equestria. This character lacks a backstory and personality. He lacks a past that shaped his personality and a personality that shaped decisions made in his past. Aside from the fact that AJ ploughed him we learn nothing of him from his memory orbs and nothing of him from memory orbs that involve him save that he gets angry sometimes. He is nothing but influences foreign to Equestria and they are all that keeps him alive in this new bastardized Edgequestria. He is immortal yet he never uses this to his advantage and his introduction wasn't a secret test of character for Littlepoop that foreshadowed his Canterlot Ghoulhood, it was just an asspull retconned with "he was actually a Canterlot Ghoul all along". He knew Applejack and he remembered a time in Equestria when things didn't suck but these are not influences on who he is or was, all of this is just an excuse for him to occasionally say memories of AJ make him want to be "a better pony like Littlepip". It all comes back to her even when he has so many things about him that should make him a more interesting protagonist than anyone else. While the females of this party are consistent in their clownish feminine irrationality (usually) the males and obligatory zigger are straightforward pragmatic one-note gun-toting gruff men that would be self inserts if Kkat wasn't busy self inserting his little "Friday" as Littlepip. Kkat might not have realized what an absurd joke of a character he made here, sustained by external influences in the form of influences foreign to Equestria while his armour is less of a shell than he is, but it's the ultimate argument against Fallout Equestria as a concept.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310067
>>309329
>>309438
I'll try to address both of these at once since I'm assuming they both relate to the same story idea.

One advantage that fanfiction has over other types of fiction is that the people who read it seem to have no problem slogging through nearly any preposterous word count you throw at them. This, combined with the fact that publication is free and digital ensures that you won't have an editor breathing down your neck making you trim it down. Thus, if you had a story large and complex enough that you needed a million words to tell it, you could drone on for that long and no one could stop you.

However, in that situation, you have a responsibility to be your own editor. I would say the important thing is to stay focused; the biggest problem (well, one of the biggest problems) with FoE is that it tries to tell multiple unrelated stories simultaneously. Focus on one main story at a time, build each arc properly, and make sure the whole thing is going somewhere. If it takes you a million words to get there then fine, but make sure that everything that's in there needs to be there; don't just let your characters meander off to wherever they want to go.

If you want to do the past-future alternating perspectives thing that's fine; just make sure that the two storylines intersect or compliment each other in some way. If the perspective is going to suddenly divert to some past event, make sure that the event you're switching to has something to do with what's immediately going on in the present. FoE's problem is that the past and the present stories have nothing to do with each other: LP's story is about some bored stable-mare who suddenly goes out into the wasteland one day for no reason, realizes that everything sucks, decides that she and she alone is destined to fix it all, and proceeds to wander around picking pointless fights with random strangers. Meanwhile, she will occasionally pick up orbs or diary fragments that give her flashbacks to disconnected memories that have nothing to do with anything going on in her life. It's very disconcerting; one minute LP is dealing with Deadeyes or a dragon or fighting a pack of slavers or something, and then a scene later we're reading about Fluttershy taking a shit 200 years ago.

A novel I'd actually recommend as a study for the sort of thing you're doing is Neuromancer by William Gibson. It's a good novel if you haven't read it, and if you have I think you'd benefit from re-reading it and studying how its constructed. You'll notice it's actually similar to FoE in that it tells the story through a series of short microscenes broken up with page breaks. However, what Gibson gets right and kkat gets wrong is that Gibson's writing is laser focused and compact. The scenes might seem disconnected and the chronology is at times hard to follow, but every microscene tells you something you need to know, and form a coherent story when put together.

The other aspect of the novel I'd recommend paying attention to is the manner in which Gibson presents his setting to the reader. The universe of Neuromancer is very complex; it's radically different from the world the reader is accustomed to, technology and geopolitics factor into it quite heavily, and if the author tried to tell the reader everything they might want to know about it in infodumps, the novel would have been three times as long.

The way Gibson, along with many other science fiction authors, handles the problem is by simply dropping the reader into the world and deliberately flinging jargon and events at them that they won't necessarily understand, but doing it in such a way that they can follow the basic flow of events and fill in the details as they go. Also interesting is that, like FoE, the story is told almost entirely from the perspective of a single character, and the knowledge the reader has access to is limited to what this character knows.

>>309342
The character basically has a soldier's mentality: he wants to upload his consciousness into the computer not so much to become immortal, but to ensure that he can continue to lead his troops effectively and carry out whatever their mission is supposed to be. When it becomes evident that this is no longer possible, he chooses death. In and of itself this is fine; what makes it bad writing is that this side arc is suddenly plunked into the story out of nowhere, resolves itself almost as soon as it begins, and serves absolutely no purpose beyond creating a circumstance which requires the party to lug this dipshit's comatose body up to Bucklyn Cross, thus setting up yet another pointless side-arc.

>>309437
I understand and agree with all of this, but it still aggravates the crap out of me.

>>309276
This was actually a fun read. Seems like quite a few of the original /mlpol/ anons were critical of the original story; nice to see the entire fandom isn't just people sucking kkat's feminine penis.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310068
310078
>>309375
I'm actually okay with leaving a story set in the S2 universe entirely in S2; I've never understood the mentality some people have that fanfiction needs to be retconned or reimagined in order to make it consistent with whatever has been added to the canon universe since it was written. The FoE universe forked off from the canon S2 (or thereabouts) universe, thus nothing that happened after S2 affects it.

However, I do agree that FoE should be reimagined simply because the original story bad and I am inclined to think that nearly anyone with a modicum of writing skill could do a better job. I am also annoyed by the dominance this fic seems to have; any FoE fic that gets written has to go through kkat's version of events and take his mythology into account. I would therefore suggest anyone interested in doing a rewrite should completely disregard kkat's ideas and just do their own thing; just pretend the original FoE never even happened and do the whole thing as if it were your own original idea. You'd probably have to listen to a lot of fanboy-whining about how this or that element isn't "accurate" or whatever the fuck, but honestly fuck those guys.

Conveniently, the storylines introduced in the later seasons of the show do indeed lay more fertile groundwork for this kind of scenario developing in the future; I basically agree with whatever anon said that it was rather implausible for an idyllic setting like Equestria to suddenly evolve into an industrialized, jingoist warrior culture.

Personally, I've toyed off and on with the idea of doing a grimdark-future post S9 story, in which Twilight's well-intentioned ideas about open-borders internationalism and approach to government turned Equestria into a dysfunctional, bureaucratic clusterfuck. I doubt it's a project I'm ever going to get around to doing, so if someone more interested wants to take a crack at the idea I'd be all for it.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
?
No.310078
>>310068
>a grimdark-future post S9 story, in which Twilight's well-intentioned ideas about open-borders internationalism and approach to government turned Equestria into a dysfunctional, bureaucratic clusterfuck
That's effectively what I was contemplating. It's notthat s2 wasnt an effective place to start the off-the-rails edgy apocalyptic shit, but so has MUCH less effective, well written, likeable, popular, purposeful, thoughtful, well executed (you get the idea) that would serve as much better developed antagonists (or who knows, characters at all) and who would probably better fit such a world where they could die. Additionally, the idea of rewriting gaykat's one hit into a coherent storyline that isnt some fag's pony-self-insert fallout character makes me smile btw, who wants to bet that the incoherent and absurd battles in FoE are where Gaykat kept dying in the game?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310096
If everything that happened in this story after LP left the stable was written minimalistically like a Greentext, I bet it would make the story's overabundance of filler and dire need of an editor even more obvious.

Sorting out what to keep and what to cut effortlessly and what should be rewritten and what dhluld be removed and written around would be easy.

Isn't it retarded that Kkat makes fundraisers to raise funds for printing runs of Fallout Equestria, which are sold hardback for real money?

Considering the size of his overly dedicated fanbase, I bet if he copypasted all of FE into an "original" novel with names changed he could get away with selling this blatant Fallout 1-3 plus NV (but mostly 3) ripoff as a book a real publisher might willingly touch after a professional editor tells him how writing works and how to fix every mistake.

Who knows? Maybe rewriting "Fallout... with ponies!" to lack ponies and feature more original storytelling might greatly improve this "novel". Maybe in the timeline where Gaykat chose this path and grew as an author instead of milking FE in its present state for the rest of his life like a faggoted sailor he would have ended up growing so much he'd consider his "Kkat/Friday the Furry Muck Roleplayer" days to be little more than a cringey memory.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
7222cb8
?
No.310136
310157 310281
1623079069968.jpg
>>310058

Before moving on, I wanted to note one more small observation I've made. Both the ending of the previous chapter and the beginning of this one consist of monologues from Homage about LP going off the reservation, but it's not clear where these broadcasts fit into the overall chronology of the story. Unless LP had her headphones on and was listening to her girlfriend shit-talking her for murdering ponies as she was murdering them, it's completely unclear when or how she would have absorbed these broadcasts. Her emotional reaction to what she did to the Arbu poners also does not seem influenced by Homage's opinion of her, which indicates that she has not yet heard the broadcasts.

Page break. This microscene is extremely confusing. LP is in Grandpa Rattlesnake's room. Either the building is on fire for some reason, or it is no longer on fire but was at one time; it's unclear which. LP says that she "remembers" running through fire and coming up to this room, though the memory is distorted by her concussion. The way it's described suggests that she performed these actions while she was on her mass-murder spree earlier. However, she also talks about attempting to pick the locks on Grandpa's safe, an act which only makes sense if she has a reason to get into the safe. Grandpa only just now told her about the ledger containing the village's murder records, so she would only have reason to go in there post-murder-spree. Also, it's unclear why the building is even on fire in the first place. I remember something about SteelHooves shooting one of the buildings with his missiles earlier; presumably this is the one. However, it was never really made clear that it was the same building that Grandpa's room was in.

Anyway, most of the microscene consists of LP mumbling incoherently to herself, grappling with what she perceives as a moral quandary: her concern that she might be turning into "corrupted kindness." As ever, she is far less concerned about the actual real-world consequences of her actions than she is about whether or not her actions make her a "monster." These few brief selections sum it up quite nicely:

>I had killed for these monsters. The Steel Rangers… those poor ponies up at Bucklyn Cross… they didn’t have to die. They didn’t deserve to die. Not for Arbu. Especially not for Arbu.
I love how she says "I killed for these monsters" as if killing was something that she hasn't done a thousand times already for considerably more mundane reasons.

>You’ve never been forced to give up your principles for the greater good. To sacrifice yourself and become a monster because it was the right thing to do.
This is a quote from Monterrey Jack earlier, which she remembers at this moment. It's ironic for two reasons: first of all, according to LP's own view of events, she didn't become a monster because it was the right thing to do; she simply became a monster. Second, LP had no clear principles in the first place, so what exactly did she give up? As I pointed out above, this pony has committed plenty of murders throughout the course of this story, most of them at whim and for arbitrary reasons. Which of her "principles" did she violate here, exactly?

>Red Eyes was no longer my dark and twisted reflection… he was my reflection. I was a monster. I hadn’t even been forced. I did it because I was mad. If anything, he was better than me.
blah blah blah self-pity.

>No, I wouldn’t let it be like this. I wouldn’t let myself become this. I had made a… mistake. A horrible, evil mistake. But this wasn’t me. I was better than this, and I still could be. I had to find a way to make this right. To fix this.
blah blah blah, me me me. Note that, again, her entire focus here is on her own feelings and self-perception. She's not mourning the dead, nor is she concerned about any actual real-world consequences her rash and violent act might have unleashed. The only thing that matters to Littlepoop is that she can believe, internally, that she is a "good" pony; anything happening in external reality is peripheral to her.

>I was Corrupted Kindness… but I could be more than that, couldn’t I? Was it possible for a messed up pony to have a True Virtue as well?
>Yes, a voice in my head insisted. My memories flashed to out last visit to New Appleloosa. To Silver Bell seeing Pyrelight, her eyes going wide with wonder as if suddenly a whole world had opened up to her. A world of beauty.
See what I mean? What on earth is she even going on about here? Slaughtering an entire village was "bad," but showing Silver Bell her friend's pet bird and making her feel better was "good," so do the two acts balance each other out? That's essentially the question she's grappling with here.

Attempting to answer or even address a question like this would be pointless, because it's a ridiculous question in the first place. The slaughter of Arbu and raising Silver Bell's spirits by showing her a bird are two completely different acts that have no direct bearing on each other; the only thing they affect is Littlepoop's own perception of her own moral worth. As far as LP is concerned, the only thing that matters is her own fee-fees. Is she a good pony or isn't she? Can she ever truly find her virtue or is she just "corrupted kindness?" The only thing she's grappling with here is where she herself measures up on the arbitrary moral yardstick that she uses to gage the worth of everyone else. If she really gave a shit about making the wasteland a better place, she'd consider that simply chowing down on the business end of a shotgun might be the way to go; curiously, though, this idea never occurs to her, no matter how angsty she gets.

Anyway, she eventually reaches some kind of conclusion. I'm not entirely clear on what she decides to do and I don't really care; she takes some kind of distorted encouragement from Silver Bell I guess. In the end, she gets Grandpa's lock open and takes the book.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
71f8e5e
?
No.310157
310159 310160 310162 310282
1607671915040.png
>>310136

Page break. This microscene consists of yet another disjointed DJ Pon3 broadcast. Here, she reads aloud a letter she received from a listener, one Ditzy Doo. Apparently, Ditzy heard her previous broadcast, and was so distraught over the idea of Littlepoop going postal that she just had to set the record straight. So, she apparently wrote out a letter in support of Littlepoop and delivered it to Homage, the "assistant," so that "DJ Pon3" could read it over the air.

Apparently all of these events took place between the moment Littlepoop opened fire on the citizens of Arbu and the present. Though kkat's sense of time is as muddled as ever, I would estimate this as a period of roughly one hour. Also, we have yet to see any evidence that LP herself has even heard any of these broadcasts; in any case, she certainly hasn't reacted to them.

Oh yeah; Ditzy would also like to thank Xenith, Littlepoop and Homage for the muffin basket they sent earlier.

Page break. LP returns to Grandpa with his book. We can clear up a bit of the confusion in the previous scene from this one: apparently, what happened is that SteelHooves set the Custard Pie shop on fire with his missile barrage, and that is apparently the building that Grandpa lived in. After being told about the book, LP then went into the burning building to retrieve it. She attempted to pick the lock, because that makes far more sense than just asking Grandpa to give her the combination, and she was grappling with all of her moral quandaries while doing so.

Grandpa now pointlessly informs us that he has some kind of special pony dementia that makes him lucid at night and crazy during the day. He calls it being "kissed by Luna." Not sure why the author would bother to put this in here, but at this point that feels like a dumb question to ask. Moving on.

After all the fuss about the book, it turns out that none of it matters anyway. Calamity refuses to look at it, because he has apparently reached his own conclusions. He admonishes Littlepoop for "losing control" and tells her that she did wrong. Then, he hugs her, because friendship and whatever. The speech he gives is funny enough to quote directly:

>“Ah’ve seen yer heart, Li’lpip,” Calamity reminded me, clutching me tight. “Ah know yer a good pony. Maybe the best pony Ah’ve ever met.” I felt his tears. “An’ if that heart cries out in pain an’ rage an’ fury, then Ah’ve got t’ believe it’s fer good reason. An’ that Ah’m just too jaded t’ see it.”
Fucking lol. I just...I don't even have the energy anymore. Whatever; hopefully this means the Arbu nonsense is behind us now.

[b]Page break. They all cram into the Flying Fart Wagon and jet off to someplace called Friendship City. I have no idea where this is or why they are going there. The foals and the old retarded Grandpa (the one from Arbu, not the one in the coma) are apparently coming with them.

I had really hoped the author had finished subjecting us to Littlepoop's phony soul-searching, but it appears that the well of bullshit is not completely dry yet:

>Velvet nuzzled me softly. “But you shouldn’t. Need to excuse yourself, I mean. You… you didn’t do anything wrong.” She took my face in her paws and made me look into her eyes.
Ponies have hooves, not paws.

>“I know you, Littlepip. I can see that you’ve been bucking yourself to pieces about this ever since it happened. Possibly even while it was happening. You’re not a monster. You’re not a villain. You’re a mare who loves ponies and cares about them, and who had finally seen too many hurt too badly to stand it anymore. Goddesses, if we were only all like you.”
That's...an interesting interpretation. Seriously, though; kkat deserves some credit here. The fact that, after roughly 370,000 words of this dreck, there are still places on Littlepoop's ass that the other characters in this story haven't kissed yet is nothing short of astonishing.

Anyway, now it's Velvet's turn to beat herself up over pseudo-morality. She apparently feels bad because yesterday, she put the life of her bird over the life of one of the pony bandits, and blah blah blah who the fuck even cares at this point?

Meanwhile, SteelHooves is looking over Grandpa's ledger. We don't learn much about what's inside it; it's simply brought up as a segue into something that's just flat-out bizarre. I'm just going to dump it in verbatim, because I'm not 100% certain I understood this part:

>“Yer Paladin SteelHooves!” he exclaimed. “I remember ya! Yer that ghoul my daughter kept lustin’ after.”
>Velvet Remedy’s ears perked. I stifled a laugh. SteelHooves nickered and tried to turn his attention back to the ledger.
>“You must be mistaken.”
>“No, yer just none too perceptive,” Grandpa Rattle insisted. “Never knew she was even there. Always pinin’ for Applejack.”
>SteelHooves looked up abruptly. “Do I know you?”
>“Scribe Rattle.” Grandpa Rattle paused. “Former. Left after my daughter got pregnant.” At SteelHooves’ quick stomp, Rattle swiftly added, “Not yers! With that buck what’s-his-mane from Arbu…”
>SteelHooves cocked his head slowly. “Scribe Rattle. Transformations magic. Abandoned the Rangers after your daughter was disgraced. I remember now.”
If I'm reading this correctly, this appears to be saying that Rattle is...Applejack's father...which...doesn't make a ton of sense. The guy would have to be about 300 years old for that to work. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what he's saying. In any event, it appears that Grandpa Rattle used to be a Steel Ranger.

Anyway, the Applejack thing is left unexplained, and there appears to be no point in bringing up this connection beyond demonstrating that Rattle wasn't joking earlier when he said that the stick he was waving was actually a rifle. As it turns out, he was some kind of transformation-magic expert when he was a Ranger, and was able to turn guns into sticks. Uh, good to know I guess.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310159
310163
>>310157
The omniscient radio DJ can immediately comment on the way the player finished a quest as soon as the game considers that quest complete in Fallout 3.

You can stealthily snipe an entire area, slaughtering everyone without ever being detected, and yet True Faggotalist Radio over here will still automagically know it was you and admonish you over the radio.

There is no delay. Homage can instantly know LP slaughtered Arbu and bitch about it on the radio because it worked that way in a video game once.

Kkat can't be bothered to save this radio speech for a scene where LP is near a functioning radio or has her PipBuck limb-mounted exposition radio turned on. He wants maximum melodrama NOW no matter the cost.

Is this bad writing and clunky exposition? If an author wanted radio broadcasts to matter greatly to the plot and characters, is mounting a radio to the heroine's limb the way to go?
Anonymous
bd8da3b
?
No.310160
310163
>>310157
I believe the author is not saying Rattle is Applejack’s father. That’s why he says “Not yer’s. [She had a child] with that buck hurts every time to read that in place of stallion what’s-his-mane”. What’s his mane likely is in place of what’s his name, meaning with this writer either means doesn’t matter in the slightest, or you best log this down or it will be super important.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a6eee2e
?
No.310162
310223
892.jpg
>>310157

Anyway, after this, LP strikes up a conversation with the colt whose father she killed. It goes absolutely nowhere and resolves nothing. Then, they land in Friendship City, which is apparently a small settlement in the base of that Pony-Statue-of-Liberty thing you always see in the framing shots of Manehattan.

>“This time, let me do the talking,” Velvet Remedy said to SteelHooves. “Your diplomacy leaves a lot to be desired.” The ghoul nodded wordlessly. The events of the night before were weighing heavily on him. And for him, Arbu was not the heaviest burden.
What aspect of the previous night's events are weighing on SteelHooves? He didn't seem all that affected by any of it. Then again, his role in the story mostly just alternates between "stand there doing absolutely nothing" and "occasionally fire a bunch of missiles and stuff at whatever," so the idea of him thinking or feeling anything always seems a little farfetched. After all this time, I still imagine him as a four-legged version of the Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future. My best guess is she's talking about the assault on Bucklyn Cross, since that involved shooting a bunch of Steel Rangers, and presumably some of them used to be his friends, or underlings, or something. Back in the days of yore, before he moved into an isolated shack in the middle of nowhere.

Page break. As it turns out, Friendship City is rather ironically named. As Calamity attempts to land, ponies on the ground suddenly begin firing artillery shells at them.

>“You haven’t been listening to the radio, have you?” SteelHooves rumbled. “Your friend DJ Pon3 has had some unpleasant things to say about the massacre of Arbu.”
On the one hand, this seems to clear up the matter of where the disconnected broadcast segments we read earlier were supposed to go in the story's chronology (though it doesn't explain how Derpy was able to write a response letter and get it on the air within an hour of hearing the initial broadcast). On the other hand, if SteelHooves was listening to the radio and knew what was being said about Littlepoop, you'd think he might have brought some of it to the party's attention. The possibility that the city they were traveling to might view them as hostile seems like relevant information worth sharing.

Anyway, now that everypony's on the same page about the Homage broadcasts, Littlepoop's thoughts move in a predictable direction:

>I was dying inside. Homage… oh Goddesses, what did Homage think of me? Did she hate me?
>I wanted to gallop to her. To order Calamity to head to Tenpony Tower straight away. But...
And just think, this is probably just a small sample of what we get to listen to for the next five chapters, or however long it takes her to set the record straight with Homage.

>But I couldn’t. I had already delayed far too long. We needed to go to Canterlot. To deal with the Goddess. And to turn our attention to Red Eye. Right now, thousands of ponies were in danger just from Red Eye’s threat alone, and I was surely already testing his patience.
Oh sure, now she realizes this.

Anyway, the rest of this is just more whining and angst. The short version is, they decide not to go to Friendship City after all.

Page break.

>We waited an hour after landing in the Manehattan Ruins, then worked our way towards the harbor on hoof.
Good God, where are they going this time?

Well, it seems as if there is some kind of ruined bridge that goes out to the island that Friendship City is on, and I guess the idea is that they're going to send Velvet across to negotiate with the citizens, to try and get them to take in the children and the old grandpa. Actually, they mention pawning off Cottage Cheese's capsule on them as well, so I guess they're still lugging that thing around.

So anyway, Velvet goes across this bridge to talk to the Friendship City poners, and meanwhile the rest of the crew stays behind and gets a campfire going. There is a brief, pointless conversation between Xenith and SteelHooves about cannibalism I'm already beyond sick of the topic, and then SteelHooves asks to speak with Littlepoop alone.

He admonishes her for sending the merchant pony to check out the basement while leaving Clearglass alive. Clearglass has been mentioned a couple of times before; apparently she was one of the guards that LP choked or shot or something when she came out of the basement. The author isn't super-clear about it, but I think she's also supposed to be the adolescent that LP killed and later felt bad about. So...I guess she didn't kill at first, but then went back and killed her later? I seriously hate how hard this story makes me work to keep track of details that shouldn't be that hard to follow, and that have little genuine significance to begin with.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that he offers her some generic words of comfort to act as salve for her many blistering bum-wounds. This is followed by another dreary paragraph of whiny, self-pitying angst from Littlepoop. It should surprise absolutely no one that this, in turn, is followed by SteelHooves kissing her ass in the most ludicrous way possible:

>SteelHooves stared out over the harbor. “I need to thank you, Littlepip.”
>“For what?”
>“For failing,” SteelHooves said, surprising me. “All this time, you have been somepony to look up to. You have made me want to be a better pony. But at the same time… you were too good.” He looked at me. “You were an impossible standard. Tonight, you have made it easier for me to live with myself.”
As long as we're handing out thank-yous, I'd like to thank you, kkat. This story has been so bad for so long, and I have so much battle-fatigue from reading this mind-numbing crap, that I barely have the energy to reach through the screen and bitch-slap you anymore. However, after reading this last line of dialogue from SteelHooves, I find that I suddenly have the strength again.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310163
310165 310223
>>310159
>Kkat can't be bothered to save this radio speech for a scene where LP is near a functioning radio or has her PipBuck limb-mounted exposition radio turned on. He wants maximum melodrama NOW no matter the cost.
>Is this bad writing and clunky exposition?
As far as dramatic effect goes, closing this absolute bloodbath of a chapter with a short, simple broadcast from Homage lamenting that "the hero" has gone off the reservation wasn't a bad idea; the problem is just that it makes too little sense as far as the story's internal logic goes. The question of where this broadcast is playing from, who is hearing it, and how the DJ got hold of this information so quickly dampens whatever emotional effect it might have. Kkat seems to realize this, but since, as you pointed out, he wanted to use the broadcast as a chapter closer for dramatic reasons, he went ahead and did it anyway, and just clumsily explained away the logic issues in the following chapter.

I actually think the radio-monologue business would work better as an expository technique if this story were being told in the third person. A third person omniscient narrator can grab anything that is going on anywhere in the world and just drop it into the story wherever they want; they don't need to explain where they got it from, because they're omniscient. A first-person narrator doesn't have that luxury; we should only be able to see and hear what they see and hear. If we're hearing a radio broadcast, there needs to be a radio somewhere nearby, or else it won't make any sense.

It was also a bad choice to open the next chapter with a continuation of the same broadcast. Using Homage's short, quiet, emotional lament as a coda to a chapter filled with violence and cannibalism has an understated effect that actually works quite well; or at least it would work if kkat didn't fuck up absolutely everything else in the chapter, and also if he had a protagonist who wasn't just god-awful. However, much like the "toaster repairpony" gag, he takes what is basically a good idea and milks it for far too long. The second monologue that opens the next chapter adds nothing to the story and does not contain anything useful that couldn't also be extracted from the first monologue.

The third broadcast, the one involving Derpy's letter, was just absolutely fucking stupid: it made no sense for Derpy to have responded so quickly, and having a listener provide a counterpoint to the "Littlepoop went postal" narrative lessens the effect the author was trying to create in the first place. The whole point of the broadcast is that both Littlepoop and the reader are supposed to think that Homage feels betrayed: she thinks that LP, whom she both loves and admires for God only knows what reason, has suddenly turned her back on what passes for her ideals and become even more of a bloodthirsty murderer. However, she doesn't know the whole story; LP had what the author seems to consider a very good reason for doing what she did! "Please Homage, you can't give up on her!" is what we are supposed to be thinking.

The whole point of doing something like this is to make the reader feel anguish on par with that of the hero. The injustice of this should infuriate us: LP is what her creator considers a hero! She shouldn't (read: she absolutely should) be vilified, and yet here she is being pilloried and shot at everywhere she goes! We, the reader, should be angry! And not just because we didn't pick a better book to read! Having Derpy immediately call in to the radio station and stick up for Littlepoop lessens this anguish, which defeats the whole point of establishing it in the first place. Littlepoop should have no allies here; it should be her vs. the world.

If you want to attempt to write this kind of drama, you have to be willing to go full-on balls-to-the-wall with it. You can't be afraid to emotionally abuse the reader a little. Besides, anyone who voluntarily reads My Little Pony fanfiction probably has it comingand I include myself in this category.

>>310160
That actually makes sense; I think I just misread or misinterpreted the passage. Still, the way this second love interest of SteelHooves' is just brought up out of nowhere and immediately disposed of without there being any obvious reason why she should be mentioned at all is typical kkat bullshit. He didn't even bother to give her a name; that alone would have clarified that Rattle was talking about a girl other than Applejack. For a writer who is reputed to be some sort of "master" of the "Chekhov's gun," he sure seems to throw a lot of bullshit into his story that has absolutely no obvious reason to be there.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310165
>>310163
Isn't it good that someone stuck up for Littlepip right then, when Homage's view of LP was at its lowest? The Harry Potter series was often (incorrectly) called fascist because of the abundance of scenes where (due to contrived melodramatic writing) most people are wishy washy ineffective retards a small handful of elites can effortlessly control and reprogram, especially when it came to the government, some government official, the fake news media, or a Hogwarts staff member getting Harry treated as a loathed pariah and outcast even by people whose lives he saved once or twice. If Homage's radio report got the whole wasteland to hate her, even ponies LP already saved, wouldn't that be bad writing?

Then again it's a new location that bombarded LP with artillery instead of letting her in. We don't know if they're always like this or not. Is this bad writing? Maybe it would emotionally hit harder if LP tried to return to a town she already saved, only for the locals to hate her and kick her out because "You're evil now, the radio said so"?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
a6eee2e
?
No.310223
310235
Spoilered
>>310162

Page break. This microscene is yet another of DJ Pon3's broadcasts:

>“Good evening!
>“This is DJ Pon3, and have I got news for you! Major update on the situation at Arbu and Bucklyn Cross. My associate spent the last few hours talkin’ with a merchant who was at Arbu and saw much of what went down.
>“First and foremost, let me say hallelujah! Sounds like our Wasteland Savior hasn’t fallen to the darkness after all.
Oh, good. That was a scary 1.5 seconds there where I totally thought she had fallen to the darkness.

Seriously; it speaks volumes about kkat's utter ineptitude as a writer that he can't even capably execute something this simple. He goes out of his damned way to introduce these radio broadcasts in which Homage denounces her lover based on incomplete information she's received. I've already detailed what this achieves here: >>310163 . Yet it hasn't even been a whole chapter since this tension was introduced, and already he's trying to write his way out of it! What was even the point?

Anyway, the whole thing comes out: the cannibalism of the Arbu poners, how LP tried to obtain a water crystal for them from Bucklyn Cross, how she wound up killing the Bucklyn Cross poners for the sake of the Arbu poners before she knew that the Arbu poners were poner-eaters; all of it. An entire story angle, that the author went out of his way to establish, completely obliterated in one fell swoop. Why? Why do this? Why bother even setting it up if you're just going to immediately resolve it?

Unfortunately, due to this latest development, I'm going to have to backtrack and make an addendum to a couple of my earlier posts:

>>310162
>And just think, this is probably just a small sample of what we get to listen to for the next five chapters, or however long it takes her to set the record straight with Homage.
>>309640
>However, since Littlepoop has lost her memory, she won't know that this is part of her own plan, so she probably now believes that Homage believes that her precious "Light Bringer" has gone off the reservation. So, we will probably have to spend the next several chapters listening to Littlepoop whine about how heartbroken she is, and how badly she wants to see Homage so she can explain why she did what she did, but oh no she can't do that, because she has to save the wasteland from the Goddess or Red Eye or whoever and also go on like 20 more side missions. This, of course, is on top of all the other crap she's probably going to whine to us about. Yipee.
This seems to be yet another Charlie Brown football pull. Once again, the fault is mine; I gave kkat the benefit of the doubt when I shouldn't have.

I assumed that he had inserted these broadcasts of Homage denouncing Littlepoop specifically because he wanted to add another layer of urgency to Littlepoop's mission: not only does she still need to fight the Goddess and vanquish Red Eye and do all that, but she needs to do all of it while the love of her life believes that she's become a monster. On top of that, the very ponies she's trying to save have all turned against her as well, and she's being shot at and vilified wherever she goes.

She has to spend the next several chapters in pure agony, because all she wants is to run home to Homage and explain everything, but she can't because she has a mission to take care of first. Meanwhile, her mission is made that much more difficult because the entire wasteland sees her as hostile and she can't find allies or shelter anywhere. She now has to fight off the ponies she's trying to save as well as her enemies. She wants nothing more than to abandon her mission, make up with Homage, and leave the wasteland to its fate, but she can't. She must continue to fight and sacrifice for the wasteland, even if she never receives thanks for what she's done, even if she's treated with hostility for it, because virtue is its own reward. Ideally, the matter shouldn't be resolved until well after the story's climax, when Red Eye and the Goddess and whoever the fuck else have all been vanquished and LP can finally run back home to Tenpony and set the record straight with Homage.

The whole thing is such a perfect martyred-hero angle, and it fits so perfectly into this story's attempted themes, that I just took it as a given that this is what kkat was planning to do, to the point where I was preemptively making jokes about how badly he was probably going to ham it up. And yet...no. That's not what he was doing. Even the simplest and most glaringly obvious writing concepts are completely beyond this faggot's comprehension. To put it in gaming terms, this faggot has failed every perception check he's ever attempted.

Seriously, it just boggles my mind that anyone could be this inept at storytelling. No matter how low I set the bar for this cross-dressing, degenerate, game-obsessed loony, he somehow manages to consistently fall short of my expectations. Every. Single. Time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TC_V3tlTlU

ANYWAY. Homage reassures the faithful denizens of the wasteland that her previous announcement was a false alarm, and that they may now safely resume sucking Mary Sue's engorged futa dong. After that, there is a Page break, and we rejoin the party two days in the future. Apparently, Friendship City was willing to take in Grandpa and Coma Grandpa and the most recent batch of children that Mary Sue has made orphans of, so that's yet another twelve-car-pileup she gets to cause and then calmly walk away from.

>I had sent Pyrelight to them with one of the water talismans. Not as payment, but as a gift.
What a hero! So magnanimous. So humble. I would give anything just to touch the hem of her stable barding.

Also, it appears that they went back to Stable 29 and gave them the other water crystal. I guess they're planning on rebooting the Crusader computer but reprogramming it for good or something; that may or may not be important later.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
46d691c
?
No.310235
310239 310242
1623053616560.png
>>310223

Didn't mean to spoiler the image there, but whatever I guess. Anyway.

>As we approached Canterlot, a new concern had pushed its way into my mind: my PipBuck. We were supposed to take everything off before we entered. Our armor, our saddlebags… I was supposed to float it all.
>But you couldn’t float a PipBuck. Well, you could, but all you would have is a fancy radio. It had to be attached for the E.F.S. and S.A.T.S. to work, not to mention the medical assistance and automapping. I could take it off. I had the tools. But without it, I would be at a fraction of my usefulness in the most dangerous place we had ever set hoof into.
This is kind of interesting. It almost sounds like...kkat intends to actually give his protagonist a challenge of some sort. Will she still be able to fight like a wasteland bad-ass if she can no longer use the wacky gadget that aims her gun for her? Can she really get by with just her ridiculously overpowered teleportation ability? Wait, I should stop myself. It almost feels like I'm preemptively giving kkat credit for doing something semi-competent again. Better to just wait and see what he does with it.

Anyway, as they're flying LP suddenly sees some hostiles on her radar. Turns out that some civilians are getting attacked by some bloodwings, so naturally LP and the gang rush in to save the day. The scene ends on a cliffhanger.

Page break. As if the last one weren't enough, we are treated to yet another randomly-placed broadcast from Homage. This one somehow manages to take the author's self-cuckoldry even further:

>I have with me, communicating over broadcaster, one Grandpa Rattle, long-time resident of Arbu and new citizen of Friendship City. And he’s here to set the record straight.
Here is Senile Grandpa Rattlewang as opposed to Senile Grandpa Fudgecake, whose coma-coffin I assume the Friendship City poners just threw into a closet and instantly forgot about, here to put to rest any doubt that any listener may or may not have had about Littlepoop being just the greatest, coolest, most wonderful heroic hero the world has ever seen. Whew; I'm sure glad we got that all cleared up.

Oh, but she goes on:

>“But first, I have something that I have to say. And this goes out from me to that Heroine of the Wasteland, our little Bringer of Light:
>“I’m sorry.
>“When you’ve seen as much as I have, when you see as many heroes fail and fall… it’s hard not to expect it. It’s hard to keep believing. Even when you know there’s somepony out there you should believe in.
>“You didn’t fail us, Stable Dweller. I failed you. And you have my deepest and sincerest…
>“A particular toaster repair-pony once told me that she would always be tuned in, listenin’ to my message of hope. Well, listen close, Stable Dweller, cuz this is the honest truth, straight from me to you:
>“That message of hope? That’s you. You are my message.
That's right, you heard right. Not only does Homage want to assure the hero that all of her doubts about her have been completely assuaged, but she is now apologizing to her for ever having doubted her.

All jokes aside, I want to physically punch every single character in this story. Punch them as hard as I can, right on their cute little boopers, over and over. I hate every single goddamn one of these little ponies and I hope the wasteland kills them all.

Anyway, the broadcast trails off with Crazy Grandpa reading his stupid murder-ledger out loud on-air, though the author spares us the gory details. Presumably the point is to assure everyone listening (and we, the reader, by extension) that everything Littlepoop did back in Arbu was 100% justified, that she has absolutely nothing to feel bad about, and that we can all go back to blindly worshipping the ground she walks on. Whew; that's a relief. For a second there I thought she was going to have to learn a moral lesson, or maybe come to terms with her own limitations or something.

The chapter ends here.

Chapter Thirty-Six: The Strange Tale of Midnight Shower

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“I got shit make you horny, make your mare horny, make you hard, make you happy, make you strong, make you smart… and, of course, I got THE drug, the shit that’ll make you FLY… Dash.”
The cost of actually printing up multiple copies of all 620,295 words of this text must have been a pretty serious drain on kkat's mom's finances. Most likely, he had to defray costs by renting out advertising space, and this epitaph is just a subtle paid product-placement for some sort of male enhancement supplement. Or at least that's what I'm assuming, because if that's not what this is, then I have no fucking clue what this is.

Anyway, for once kkat doesn't skip the payoff to the cliffhanger he set up at the end of the previous chapter. We rejoin LP and her friends in the middle of fighting the bloodwings.

>Sheets of rain lashed across the Sky Bandit. I was relying more on S.A.T.S. than on my own vision.
So...business as usual, then?

A decently-written battle scene follows I will grudgingly acknowledge that kkat has gotten somewhat better at writing these as the story has progressed. He still struggles with describing physical space, but the pacing of the fight is good and I can mostly follow what's going on. The main takeaway from this is that SteelHooves gets knocked off the roof and falls, fate unknown though something tells me he's going to be just fine, and Calamity is badly injured by a bloodwing and the craft has to make an emergency landing. On the way, LP witnesses a bloodwing sucking the blood of one of the zebras she was originally trying to save. Her reaction is comically over-the-top as usual:

>“No! Dammit no!”
>I howled. Snapping Little Macintosh shut, I targeted the monster with S.A.T.S. as it cavorted over its kill. But the bloodwing was torn apart by a charging Xenith before I could pull the trigger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6PBWTIZ78
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310239
>>310235
Littlepip went through an entire "arc" where she did drugs for a while, supposedly got addicted, had her addictions cured instantly by a doctor without her consent, and got better, never feeling the urge to use drugs again. The only thing making the magical instant curing of her addictions a pain is that it happened when she wanted to save Montard Jack, meaning she was too busy to save him and he died.

But because she only did Party-Time Mint-Als while ignoring other drugs like whatever Buffout and Psycho and Jet are called in this fic, Kkat missed his chance to seamlessly establish what all four of the drugs are and what they do when LP is still willing to use them.

This is bad writing, right? It seems like bad writing to me. A missed opportunity to make LP grow as a pony and characterize early-adventure LP differently from older-LP. I'd say Early-adventure LP is a scrappy adventurer who will do anything to win, even wear raider armour and lie and do all the drugs. Older LP is more mature and principled, choosing the harder path when it is more righteous to do so, trying not to go into another berserk murderhobo genocidal blood rage. That's how I'd handle things if I had to use LP and couldn't rewrite her into the chaddiest male Unicorn imaginable.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
46d691c
?
No.310242
310250 310465
1623195786021.png
>>310235

Page break. The group is sitting around a campfire, underneath a protection spell cast by Velvet if a protection spell forms an impenetrable physical barrier, how does smoke escape?, along with the two surviving zebras. We still don't know what happened to SteelHooves; when he was last seen he was presumably falling to his death. LP and the others, however, don't seem too concerned about either him or the grievously-wounded Calamity. These characters only take death seriously when it serves a dramatic purpose, it would seem.

Anyway, after a couple of paragraphs describing the pattern the rain makes against the magic shield, and what kind of stew Xenith is making for them, we eventually get some brief mention of the two injured party members. Calamity is apparently having his wounds tended to by Velvet; however, all we hear about SteelHooves is that they haven't found any traces of him yet. I don't get the impression that any of them have looked all that hard for him, either. It's nice to see such a tight-knit group of comrades that obviously care deeply about each other; no man left behind and all that. Meanwhile, Littlepoop, in typical schmaltzy kkat fashion, approaches the strange zebra whom she has never met before and had absolutely no obligation to rescue in the first place, and apologizes for not having used her godlike-Mary-Sue powers effectively enough to save the other zebra from getting its blood sucked by some random batwing.

>“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “We… I should have been faster.” I paused, unsure if suddenly embracing this strange zebra was the best thing for him after all. And, to my shame, a tiny part of my mind warned that I had been fooled into caring for evil folk before. I mentally dropped an anvil on that part of me, and then banished it to the moon.
>Instead, I put a tender hoof on one of his, holding it gently. Just a simple touch. He started, looking first surprised, then grateful.
Seriously, Littlepoop. I get that SteelHooves was a complete drip, and he was such a boring non-presence in this story that I wound up forgetting that he even existed half the time, but come on; he's supposed to be one of your best friends. You just watched him fall thousands of feet off the roof of an airship, into a stormy abyss filled with bloodwings. I know he's as nigh-immortal as every other protagonist in this story, maybe even more so, but that doesn't mean that nothing can injure him. Nor does it mean that he wouldn't be in danger if, say, he suddenly found himself surrounded by ravenous bloodwings, but couldn't fight because his 1,000 foot fall onto barren, rocky terrain had broken all four of his legs and irreparably damaged his battle armor. Would it kill you to show at least a tiny bit of concern for his wellbeing? Oh, what's that? You're too busy being an emotional support animal for this random zebra you've never even seen before? Ah, I see; forget I said anything. You just whip this faggot up a nice mug of warm cocoa and keep on pretending you give a fuck about him or SteelHooves or Calamity or anyone else whose name isn't Littlepoop. I'm sure faithful old Roboponer will heal his own injuries and wander on home eventually.

Anyway, the zebra mentions something about a village called Glyphmark, and some friends he had, and something about them being kicked out of the village together. Something tells me the party has stumbled across yet another pointless side mission that will add yet another chunk of needless text to this already-bloated tome. Incidentally, the chapter we're currently reading is 23,608 words long; long enough to be its own novella. The chapter after this is 51,539 words; long enough to qualify as a complete NaNoWriMo novel.

Page break. The rain has let up, and the party is now within walking distance of Canterlot. However, they are not going to Canterlot. For some idiotic reason that only makes sense to her, Littlepoop has once again decided to take a detour from the super-important, time-sensitive mission that she keeps going on about, and escort some random fudge-packing zebras home to their stupid fudge-packing backwater zebra village. Incidentally, how is that little balefire bomb in Tenpony Tower coming along? Still tick, tick, ticking away I assume? Wonderful. Hopefully you'll be able to get all these loose threads tied up before the bomb explodes and Homage gets her cute wittle face blown off.

Anyway, everypony seems to be in a chipper mood, all things considered. The weather is letting up, Velvet and Calamity are singing a duet, Littlepoop is cheered by the sound of it, and nopony seems even remotely concerned that one of their best friends is missing and presumed dead. Meanwhile, the zebra they just saved has apparently been sobbing and blubbering incoherently the entire time they've been walking, though that doesn't seem to have dampened anyone's mood either. From the occasional articulate phrases punctuating his sobs, LP has mostly pieced together the trio's backstory:

Conveniently enough, it turns out that this group of total strangers that the party bumped into completely at random belonged to the same tribe as Xenith's long-lost daughter, whom they were already looking for. Apparently, the adults were all taken by slavers years ago, and the children formed this idiotic, warped belief that being an adult meant that slavers were going to come for you. So now, whenever a zebra reaches an age of maturity (ie gets a cutie mark), they are kicked out of the tribe. From all of this, Xenith somehow extrapolates that if her daughter is still alive, she must be in Glyphmark. Presumably the logic is that she isn't old enough to have her mark, so the tribe hasn't kicked her out yet. At least, that's what I'm assuming; this is one of those situations where kkat just has his character make a blunt statement without explaining the reasoning that led them to it.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310250
310251 310252 310430 310465
>>310242
I bet when Kkat has his 1 on 1 roleplaying sessions with his only friend his Littlepip character has her dick sucked just as much as in this fic.

the zebra's retarded Bat Deduction Moment would be less retarded if she said "lets check there just in case. It might be unlikely for her to be there but I have no other clues or guesses. Its worth a shot".

Also, Glyphmark... What a retarded interpretation of something that was already retarded in Fallout 3. "Kids think slavers sniff out the adults" is a belief almost as retarded as "Luna and the stars are evil" so no wonder ziggers believe it. Have they never heard of enslaved children over the years?

Little Lamplight is a place in Fallout 3 where kids live without any adult supervision. The writing is bad so instead of a Lord Of The Flies/Kid Nation clusterfuck you have to save or an orphanage that would make sense it's just an obnoxiously quirky town where kids call you Mungo and kick out any teens who get too old.

The usual BethesdaTM WorldbuildingTM queations (what do they eat and drink? Why are they not already eaten? Who built their town and why? Where do they sleep and shit? Where does the power come from? Where do new kids come from? Why are they not enslaved by nearby slaver towns? What is their ideology beyond their one planet-of-hats gimmick aka their desire to kick adults out?) are worse than ever because it's right next to Murder Pass, The Path Of Death from Ratchet 3 except ugly and infested with feral retarded Super Mutants who eat nothing and never shit or sleep when waiting around for the player character.

I bet Kkat thinks he improved Little Lamplight by giving its children a silly reason to kick adults out, since the Little Lamplight kids had no reason at all. Kkat does this often with things in Fallout 3 that were so dumb even he could tell something was wrong with them: He tries fleshing out or explaining away the inconsistency, video game element, or half assed quirky town with some kind of convoluted and retarded new take on things.

I wish I could sit this motherfucker down and explain the principles of animation to him. Because the best one is ELEGANCE, where you get lazy creatively. Finding simple creative functional solutions and shortcuts like a boss. Kkat doesn't understand elegance, that's why his story is over 600k words and full of meaningless bloat.

How many words were wasted explaining the Magical Stat-Boosting Statuettes to us? Stat-boosting bobbleheads are a videogame item in 3. It would be easy to say "if you do something extremely heroic relevant to a SPECIAL stat an object near you gets Enchanted with a stat boosting effect". Like in Warehouse 13 with the Artefacts. It would be time-consuming to say "Rarity made the statuettes with the help of the Black Book, which cannot be destroyed and contains all sorts of spooky dark magic knowledge discovered by the ugly ziggers whose culture sometimes fears spooky things. She split chunks of her own soul off many times and it hurt like a motherfucker but to make statuettes of her friends she used a hidden soul copypasting machine to give chunks of her own soul the copied soul data. Upon making these statuettes I forget what happened but they all ended up scattered around as videogame collectables and that's why Twilight died hugging one but of course LP still needs to graverob it because she's a completionist and these stat boosting items solely exist for her. That is why LP will never encounter an enemy made deadlier by unique enchanted weapons and Statuettes. Everything exists for her."
Anonymous
f54c2fe
?
No.310251
310255
>>310250
Glad you got there quick to talk about the Little Lamplight thing. I was worried if Glim might have another football moment about it. His ass by now has to be as sore as kkat's after a night at the club after having the ball pulled from under him so many times. Honestly can't see how he justifies zebras being left alive in this universe with how retarded they are. Trying to think how Xenith keeps making food for them as well when it's said how nothing can grow anywhere besides clouds because God forbid earth ponies have anything to do when pegasi and zebras can magically grow food and unicorns are living demigods (atleast until they cross Littlepoop or need to be rescued by her and have their god power status revoked).
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.310252
310255
>>310250
It was the druggie ponks not book horse.
>I wish I could sit this motherfucker down and explain the principles of animation to him. Because the best one is ELEGANCE, where you get lazy creatively.
I'd like to know what principles your talking about.

Kkat fails in anticipation and the proper motion of things. It's not that it's been deliberately violated to energize a certain point, each break is akin to an advertisement intermission while the movie continues to play in the background.
As a cover up that there is no movie just a handful of generic power point slides.
The action curve is nonexistent. There is the epilogue, parts of rising action, and two steps backward from the climax. It follows through those three stages it's chopped up and jerky. There is no flow, no moments between, just sudden jumps to them.
Sometimes there is extra due to him pulling near exact copies of the source material.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310255
310258 310265
>>310251
If it was a spoiler for the story I'd avoid saying that but Little Lamplight is a Fallout 3 thing. And actually playing Fallout 3 is suffering.
>>310252
Was it Pinkie with a Twilight statuette or Twilight with a Pinkie statuette? Either way LP robbed it like a cunt.

I had a brain fart and thought The Principles Of Animation (timing, follow through, appeal, elegance, etc) were also writing principles there for a moment lol. I still reckon Kkat should revise this story with the pointless filler and faggotry removed. The slimmer and more elegant the story is, the more focused and refined it will be.

Hey, what if the story started with LP massacring poners to give the story a Driving Question like "Why did LP kill those poners?"? This could make us say "maybe LP is about to snap" every time she does something super violent or feels like snapping. Invincible moved comic events around for the tv adaption so something shocking happens at the end of episode one and we're left "wondering when this bomb will explode" so to speak (when other characters will discover the truth behind the shocking thing and who was responsible) for the rest of the season while we also wonder why the character did the shocking thing.

Kkat tried to give this story a driving question in chapter 1 with his "If I'm going to explain who I am and what I did and blah blah vague bullshit first I need to infodump a sales pitch on PipBucks" bullshit.

He was so vague and uncertain where the story would go, because he didn't even know where his story would end up or what LP was talking about in chapter one. Was any of this planned? I struggle to imagine people getting hyped for the bullshit reveal LP "set up" in season 1. Then again I can imagine fantard bronies eating that shit with a smile, when they're hyped up by other fantards sucking Kkunt's deformed trannydick while calling him "the master of the chekov's gun". More like "masterbate of the chjackoff's cunt".
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.310258
310263
>>310255
>The Principles Of Animation (timing, follow through, appeal, elegance, etc)
It still applies. But I haven't heard elegance or appeal as a principal of animation, and I want to know where that originates from.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310263
310265
>>310258
Sorry, was misremembering Disney's 12 Principles Of Animation and this series on game animation https://youtu.be/ma4SoiEcKwQ
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.310265
310280
Pacing - How Games Keep Things Exciting - Extra Credits.mp4
2004771__safe_twilight+sparkle_rarity_king+sombra_female_pony_mare_unicorn_alicorn_screencap_twilight+sparkle+(alicorn)_animated_magic_sparkles_m.gif
1538750464520.gif
1538572834710.gif
Robo Recall OST - Theme 01
>>310263
It happens.
The video works. The reasoning maybe is a bit off, but it's good to learn and grow from. Getting the most bang for your buck is important. As is resource allocation. But also having the right things be done in a suitable fashion is necessary.
Same applies for everything.
The 80% 20% guideline applies. (It's also an explanation for why the normal bell curve applies in many cases)
20% of the work has 80% of the payout.
The inverse can also be true that 80% can only yield 20%.
Originally discovered who actually owned all the land the 80/20 (majority and minority). That 20% owned about 80% of it all.
>>310255
Anyway that curve also applies kkat's taint work. 80% (or more) words gives about 20% (or less) in entertainment.
Most reviews may remember about 20% of the clusterfuck clearing out the slog.

So years ago when I first watched video related it's a useful guideline to gage engagement of the human mind. (Gifs related for analysis of the engagement, this audio music lacks the punctual climax, but nails the anticipation)
Breaking that curve also has a place and reason.
The issue for me is that kkat took everything and missed the important parts. He missed the most vital of objects in his work.
His focus is on anything else except what makes a story engaging.
So people 'enjoy' the setting. They want what could have been because that is free real estate.
Many identify as Little Pip. That's a horrifying thought that they too are Littlepoop.
Making kkunts work of a retooled gameplay power trip into 'woe is Littlepip she has her cake and eats it too, for woe is her tummy is fully of ache. Let us partake in another cake to feel better.'
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.310280
>>310265
For future reference: ignore that always-sperging britmutt codenamed Niggel. Nothing good has ever occurred when engaging with his kike-loving """posts""" laden with egotistical self-fulfilled drivel. Then again, the exact same can be stated of all britcucks.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.310281
310292
2441377__explicit_oc_human_humanized_meme_horn_fallout+equestria_horned+humanization_oc-colon-littlepip_fallout+equestria-colon-+project+horizons_oc-.png
>>310136
> Both the ending of the previous chapter and the beginning of this one consist of monologues from Homage about LP going off the reservation, but it's not clear where these broadcasts fit into the overall chronology of the story. Unless LP had her headphones on and was listening to her girlfriend shit-talking her for murdering ponies as she was murdering them, it's completely unclear when or how she would have absorbed these broadcasts. Her emotional reaction to what she did to the Arbu poners also does not seem influenced by Homage's opinion of her, which indicates that she has not yet heard the broadcasts.
This is the SAME. FUCKING. PROBLEM. in Failout 3 that is never acknowledged in the slightest: how does Three Doggers the mulatto black mutt learn about what the fuck is even going on in the "Capital Wasteland"? Especially since he turns out to be a cucked "JEWS WERE NEVER DA BAD PEEPLES, PREEZ BEREEV ME, GOY!!!" wannabe reporter that is locked in his fucking tower, NEVER leaves said tower, and does not have a single person tracking down stories for him.... .....oh, EXCEPT for those oh-so-ultra-important stories that the Player gets to hear about what their actions were really truly akshully like!

Once more, and HOPEFULLY for the last time: fuck kkuck and his retardedly asinine (((story telling))) that always seems to be written out of his ass without rhyme, reason, logic, nor rationale. His braindead cuckboi followers are, SOMEHOW, even more pathetic than he is.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.310282
310292
>>310157
>She took my face in her paws and made me look into her eyes.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFfffffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuck kkuck AND all of his pigshit mediocre fursona trash. I had ALMOST forgoten his constant usage of "buck" instead of COLT or STALLION, but this? No, THAT shit goes way over the line. kkuck is an unapologetic furfag transgoy whom should have been gatekept from ever reaching prominence. Instead of going back in time to murder that swedish cuckold FDR and prevent him from fucking over Germany-Austria, I would prefer to physically abort kkuck and his entire family with a stiletto. There is no greater disgrace than ABUSING the wrong words for one's own malicious intent.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310292
310301
>>310282
>There is no greater disgrace than ABUSING the wrong words for one's own malicious intent.
Funny you should say that.
>>310281
Say, do you like Kkat's attempt to make the backstoryless 3dog's omniscience less retarded by giving DJ Turbocunt an omniscient surveillance device and backstory and secret society supporting her?
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.310301
310307 310308 310310
>>310292
Go kill your pathetic inconsequential self, you racemixed mutt.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310307
310622
>>310301
You keep repeating the small handful of bad words you know even when their use is inappropriate. Some day you will get sick of this. Perhaps when you turn 18, you will grow up. In the meantime, what do you think of Kkat's attempt at "fixing" 3-dog?
Anonymous
86e921b
?
No.310308
310362
>>310301
Why the anger?
Anonymous
3694f92
?
No.310310
310362 310622
cc06bd809f280ac19f35af4c913f3f514a2651f87cf92521589c9135bd29c034.png
>>310301
What's going on here?
Anonymous
47155f9
?
No.310362
>>310310
>>310308
Sometimes that guy insults me with the handful of bad words he knows, when he isn't busy using Reddit or using the same small set of words to describe Christianity or Whites. Best not to take him seriously even if he turns his limited vocabulary on you. If you're familiar with basic leftist tactics you're familiar with his dishonest tactics. Perhaps if I was a younger man, I'd be insecure enough to feel the need to defend myself against everything he says, and this would end up derailing any thread he pulls this shit in. Long ago he decoded to start calling me a jewish half-jewish inbred "britmutt" kike even though I'm white(how can someone be jewish and half-jewish at the same time?), and he thinks if he keeps repeating this shit it will stick. Like the old "fascist" buzzword. Ever heard the phrase "take what he says with a grain of salt"? He's salty and bitter enough to put salt mines and lemon farms out of a job but if I knew what childhood trauma made him like this I could give him some life-improving psychological advice. If he became a better man he wouldn't act like such a twat on the internet.
Say, what do you think of this story's attempt at "fixing" the backstoryless omniscient judgrmental 3dog by making him a lesbian mare descended from a long line of DJ Pon3 impersonators who lives in a megasurveillance system and is supported by a secret society that presumably repairs and maintains the machine?

Isn't it fascinating how often leftist writers insist technology is neither good nor evil and its use solely depends on the intentions of the user, but only when it is a needless luxury or inherently evil and beloved by the jews or easily exploitable and desired by the jews? Meanwhile any tech they don't like is demonized, guns and lasguns and genetic engineering via eugenics policies are demonized. A megasurveillance system can only be used to violate privacy rights and the use of this 1984x2 orgy machine is a one pony job. No bureau keeps any checks or balances on the use of this radio's Brother Eye omniscience device. Reminds me of how Watch Dogs Legion and Persona 5 Strikers, two fake and gay pozzed games supposedly about societal reform and deep shit like that, insist Amazon's Alexa would love humanity and defend them if it achieved sentience. And if it didn't turn good on its own it could be hacked into joining the "heroes". What a laughable idea. This DJ has a machine that can show her anything and she uses it to spy on her girlfriend when there are enemy troop movements, raider and alicorn locations, and other useful things she could call out. Imagine if she announced which roads are patrolled by raiders/bandits, encouraging civilians to go around them and encouraging "wasteland heroes" to go and clear out these raider camps with any loot from the camp as the quest reward.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310430
310465
The Arbu and Bucklyn Cross debacles suggest to me that Kkat is at least aware of the common pitfalls on fanfic writing. It's possible they came about in response to comments on the story prior to this point.

Kkat clearly recognises that it's boring for the hero to do everything right and end every encounter with an optimal outcome, so he's put Littlepip into a couple of situations where she is - even by the very weak standards of this story - ethically challenged and faced with the possibility that she may have done wrong. The problem is that Kkat either lacks the experience or confidence in writing to give these actions meaningful long-term results. That, or he genuinely believes that Littlepip's conduct was correct and simply had her raise in-character objections in order to argue them away.

Littlepip has clearly come away from the events at Bucklyn/Arbu with a fresh load of whiny angst, but has her outlook, conduct or relationships with others actually changed as a result? It doesn't seem that way. Her companions (Homage included) all immediately went out of their way to forgive Littlepip for these latest acts of slaughter, and there's no higher in-universe authorities - moral or otherwise - that might judge her actions. In other words, the only tangible fallout (huehuehue) of these events is that Littlepip gets to whinge and whine at the reader ever more loudly and frequently. What fun.

As >>310250 alluded to, Glyphmark is based on Fallout 3's Little Lamplight, a settlement that's dumb even by the standards of the game's "everyone lives in corrugated shacks and eats ancient boxes of cereal to live" world. It's a cave system and former tourist spot located close to a vault, which was being visited by a school field trip when the bombs fell. The children were trapped inside and their carers all died, leading to the creation of a "kids only" settlement that persists even two centuries later. Listing the issues with LL would take an entire series of posts, but you get the idea.

Glyphmark is another of Kkat's "I'll take something that Fo3 did badly and do it badly in a different way" concepts. And another diversion that would be entirely pointless if not for the fact that a minor reference to it factors into the story's epilogue.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310436
310485
Hey, remember when Littlepip wanted to go out of her way to meet DJ Pon3?

Is it right to say a more competent writer would have built up the DJ's intimate knowledge of Littlepoop and near-omniscience to be a bigger mystery before the "lmao magic security tower" answer was revealed?

Furthermore, isn't it stupid how often LP calls herself "corrupted kindness" just because she keeps giving the Wasteland her "kindness" whether they want it or not? She normally has her cock sucked for being 100% in the right no matter what she does, even when she robs graves or accidentally does something nice for a bunch of cannibals and then genocides them to make up for it. It wouldn't take much semantic effort to call her Corrupted Generosity for the same reasons or spin her actions as Corrupted Loyalty to her own principles, or Corrupted Honesty in the form of a pathological loathing for anyone who lies to her, anyone who isn't as dependable as her, anyone whose heart isn't as metaphorically "true" as hers. She isn't funny, because women aren't funny, but a competent writer could spin First-Person Smartass narration into "she laughs away the pain instead of trying to help her friends laugh therefore she is corrupted laughter". Out of all the elements of harmony, she has the most surface-level traits in common with Twilight. Both are females, both are unicorns, both lead multiracial parties of heroes, both have strong telekinesis, and both snark sometimes. That is the level at which Kkat understands Twilight and characterization in general.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
c4cec4a
?
No.310465
310468 310472
FB_IMG_1623257219674.jpg
>>310242

Page break.

>Glyphmark… sucked.
Oh, good. Hopefully we can just bypass it then.

Anyway, the gang arrives in Glyphmark and finds it to be a run-down dilapidated tent city occupied by dejected, emaciated residents who have lost all hope, comparable to maybe CHAZ or Mogadishu.

>Velvet Remedy trotted forward. “Hello,” she said gently, her voice calming. “Do not be afraid. We mean no harm. We are just travelers who happened across a newly-marked buck and offered to help him make his way here safely in all the rain.”
I'm actually a bit confused here. My understanding is that Glyphmark was supposed to be populated entirely by young zebras, and that they kicked residents out as soon as they got their cutie marks. However, it seems the inhabitants are mostly adults, and Velvet's remark here seems to indicate that the recently-marked zebra trio they came across would logically be journeying to Glyphmark, rather than running away from it.

My best guess is that kkat's irritating habit of vaguely explaining important things while going into excessive detail about minor shit no one cares about has struck again. It seems that I had the situation backward: Glyphmark appears to be a village where the zebra-rejects go to live after getting their cutie marks, and the blank flank zebras who kick them out all live...somewhere else. I guess.

From what >>310250 and >>310430 have explained about Little Lamplight, my best guess here is that kkat thought it would be clever to invert the concept, and have the "player" visit the adults-only village instead of the children-only village. In any event, the whole thing so far is shaping up to be yet another bad adaptation of a Fallout mission that as far as I can tell was just a bad adaptation of an old Star Trek episode called "Miri." Anyway, we've got yet another stupid side-arc on our hands, so let's just hold our noses and get through it.

The zebras of Glyphmark are described as emaciated, weak and pitiful, and seem to live in constant fear of being taken by slavers. Why slavers would be interested in capturing weak, emaciated and basically useless slaves is a question that I'm not even going to bother asking at this point. The first several paragraphs of the microscene mostly focus on how bleak and depressing everything is.

>“How do you survive here?” Velvet asked, her voice almost a whimper. I knew what she was seeing. There were no crops here. No gardens.
So? Where exactly have there been crops and gardens? I have yet to see evidence of anything resembling agriculture anywhere in Edgequestria. I think Homage or someone mentioned Tenpony having something like hydroponic farming, and the stables seem to have this technology as well. Beyond that, the author has pretty firmly established that most ponies in this setting survives by scavenging prepackaged food from before the war. So why would Glyphmark's lack of agriculture be remarkable?

>When Velvet put words to her observations, the nearest zebra responded, “Nothing grows here. This town is just close enough to Canterlot that the Cloud has poisoned the ground.”
I'll say it again: so? My understanding is that nearly all of the soil and water in Edgequestria is contaminated with radiation, or taint, or whatever; that's why nothing is grown here. Kkat can't even keep his own bullshit straight anymore.

>The tribe of children was far better off than those who they kicked out. But I had to wonder how long that could last. Without adults, there would be no replenishing of the tribe. In a few more years, the tribe wouldn’t be a tribe anymore. Just one child telling another to go away.
Now I'm confused again. First I thought Glyphmark was a village populated entirely by children, then the text gave the distinct impression that it's actually the place where the adults go when they're kicked out. However, now it sounds like Glyphmark is the child-village again.

For the sake of convenience, I would define anyone with a cutie mark as an "adult," even though they may still technically be a juvenile, and reserve the word "child" for the blank flank zebra foals who make up the tribe. So, with those definitions in mind, is Glyphmark populated by adults or children? Thus far the evidence has indicated the former: the zebras LP & Co. rescued from the bloodwings were kicked out of the tribe because they had recently gotten their cutie marks, and were on their way here. From the way the village has been described so far, it sounds like it's mostly adults living here. However, now, LP seems to be talking about Glyphmark as though it were a village populated entirely by children.

Anyway, as if this whole idea wasn't silly enough already, it turns out that the adults and/or children of Glyphmark have been living off of food from a couple of vending machines in the area, and the great crisis for them is that the vending machines are nearly empty. I can relate; we have the same problem where I work. The damn Frito Lay truck is usually late and the machine is always out of the snacks I like. Anyway, the crew decides to share their supplies with the starving zebras:

>I exchanged looks with Calamity, then nodded. Those supplies were meant to feed us while in Canterlot and on the trip back. But these zebras clearly needed them far more than we did. And, in comparison to me, they were far more deserving. None of them had slaughtered a whole town in a blind rage recently. And their suffering made mine look petty.
Even if you completely ignore her narcissism, her messiah complex, her false humility, her kleptomania, and her habit of ruthlessly slaughtering anypony who looks at her cockeyed, Littlepoop is still a pretty shitty team leader. Not only is she wasting precious time on these pointless side missions, she's giving away all their food. Now they have to source new supplies, on top of everything else they have to do. Incidentally, how is that bomb coming along? Still tick, tick, ticking away?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310468
310470 310485
>>310465
If the best part of the story was coming up soon, something actually kind of clever, would you want me to get your hopes up by saying something like "I hope you're ready to have your mind blown because the best part is coming soon"?
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310470
>>310468
>if
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
c4cec4a
?
No.310472
310475 310476
1623294723408.jpg
>>310465

Anyway, the villagers helpfully inform the party that there is some kind of "veterinary research lab" in the area, so they mosey on up to check it out. You may or may not remember a minor detail that was dropped awhile back: Fluttershy's pet rabbit, Angel Bunny, somehow became a giant mutated monster that terrorized the countryside, and was also a highly talented meth cook. He invented a drug called "stampede" and was referred to by Xenith as "Doombunny" personally, I think "Heisenbunny" wound have been funnier, and Breaking Bad would have been at the peak of its popularity at the time this story was being written. Unlike most of the random crap kkat drops into the story, this detail actually stuck in my mind, probably because it's one of the stupidest things in this story (and that's saying a lot). Anyway, the name of the research lab is "Angel Bunny Pharmaceuticals."

>With a start, I realized that the poor zebras in this town were living under the shadow of Doom… bunny. The irony was so bitter I had to bite back a laugh.
How exactly is this ironic?

Anyway, the villagers conclude their tour of the shitty homeless-camp that they call home. Apart from Angel Bunny Pharmaceuticals, the only other things here worth noting are the presence of a character named Gloom, who may or may not become significant later, and the fact that a group called the Nightmare Moons came and abducted six of the zebras a couple of nights ago. Coincidentally, among the abducted was Xenith's daughter, whose name is Xephyr. Apparently, zebras are big on using sensational spelling as a naming convention or maybe I should call them "xebras".

Page break. Unsurprisingly, Littlepoop and the others immediately decide that they need to go off and rescue Xenith's daughter and whatever NPCs were also captured by "the Nightmare Moons." Although the text doesn't actually explain it, from context it seems that the Nightmare Moons are a group of alicorns. Calamity deduces that the abduction was ordered by the Goddess as an insurance policy to make sure Littlepoop upholds her end of their bargain. Or at least, that's what I'm assuming he deduced. What he actually says is rather vague:

>“Plus, Ah hate to say it, but this might be on us.”
>I stopped. What? I stared at Calamity.
>“Ah reckon the Goddess ain’t stupid,” Calamity responded. “She’s figured out she’s got a blind spot, and she’s… experimentin’.”
>This… this had to do with the memories I had stolen from myself, didn’t it? “Well, if it wasn’t settled before…”
All that's really clear here is that the Goddess was responsible for the abduction of the zebras, and that Calamity figured it out. The rest I just inferred logically, but kkat has a history of using his own wacky logic to slap his story together, and he seldom shares it with the class, so God only knows what he's thinking here. As far as LP's memories go, I don't understand the connection.

Anyway, since the deal was for Littlepoop to go into Canterlot and retrieve whatever the fuck it was the Goddess wanted her to retrieve from the Ministry of Awesome's warehouse, it would stand to reason that the smartest thing the group could do right now would be to simply carry out their actual mission. The Goddess gets her whatever-the-fuck thing, Xenith gets her daughter back, and LP can pull whatever kind of trick she's planning to pull on the Goddess that will somehow defeat her anyway. Everyone except the Goddess wins.

However, that is only what it would make sense to do. What they actually intend to do is far more ridiculous: apparently, for unknown reasons, they are now heading for a place called Zebratown:

>I released Velvet Remedy and turned towards Xenith and Calamity. “So, do either of you know anything about this place we’re headed, Zebratown?” The answer from both of them was an unsurprising no. Once more, we were headed into the unknown.
I used my old friend Ctrl-F to verify that this is literally the first mention of Zebratown in the entire text. Naturally, the author gives us absolutely no explanation as to where this place is, why they are going there, what they expect to find there, or how they settled upon it as a destination. Velvet, for her part, opts to stay behind and treat the emaciated zebras.

Page break. So, for some idiotic reason, the gang is now headed to some place called Zebratown, and for some other idiotic reason they decided to walk there. I guess Calamity thought it would give them the element of surprise or something. So, they trudge through the mud in the rain while LP complains about it. Trudge, trudge, trudge.

>I heard a whistle from the air above us. (Didn’t help that Calamity wasn’t exactly traveling on hoof.)
Whatever happened to Calamity being injured? The bloodwings hurt him badly enough to drag him to the ground, as I recall. He hasn't had significant time to rest and heal since then. Should I just assume this is another of those instances where he chugged some bullshit potion and now he's fine again? Incidentally, whatever happened to SteelHooves, anyway? Has it occurred to any of them to go looking for him, or are they too busy trudging off to Zebratown to do God knows what for this pack of strangers they randomly encountered as a result of helping another pack of strangers they randomly encountered?

Well, as it turns out, they won't have to bother looking for SteelHooves, because by sheer dumb luck they happen to bump into him. When we last saw him, he was falling off the edge of the Sky Wagon, somewhere back in the direction they came from. Somehow he managed to land on top of a ruined windmill that happens to be along the road between Glyphmark and Zebratown. I want to call bullshit here, but since we have absolutely fuck-all that we can use to determine where these locations are in relation to each other, I suppose I can't prove that this particular windmill wasn't directly under the Sky Wagon when SteelHooves fell.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310475
310485
>>310472
Wouldn't it be fucking hilarious if Steelhooves falling off was his final appearance in the story, and nopony remembered him up until the final chapter when it turns out AJ survived and all of this "how I met your mother" bullshit was LP explaining to AJ where Steelhooves went?

Is Kkat wrong to call it ironic that a Zebra village exists in the shadow of a pharmecutical company ran by a giant bunny famous for killing Zebras and making drugs for ponies? Personally I think it would be more ironic if the equipment here for making combat enhancing drugs got repurposed into medical equipment and healing potion creators. Something meant to hurt zebras and kick them off pony soil ended up helping zebras live on nuked pony soil. Then again Equestria never actually had a "kick the ziggers out" or even a "put all zebras in camps" policy even though it had a Bureau Of Censorship under Rarity and a Bureau Of Unpersoning under a future-seeing Pinkie on crack mints. Equestria was always open to refugees sadly.

Would it improve the story if pre-nuking Zebras all had names that started with Z like Zecora, but after the nuking rare good Zebras that like ponies changed their names and species naming conventions so a zebra once named Zelda would start calling herself Xelda and name her kids Xiggy and Xixxix and Xalgo and Xaldin? Sort of like how some feminists will use womyn to avoid writing man and how some cultures are said to have changed their names or the spelling of their names to fit with assimilated host cultures. It could be used by a competent writer to indicate that rare good niggers feel so awful about what the bad ones did, they literally don't even want to be niggers any more.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
c4cec4a
?
No.310476
310486 310514 310515
DDBQlMaXkAArMWB.jpg
>>310472

If any of them are surprised to bump into SteelHooves out here, they don't express it. This is probably just as well, since none of them seemed all that concerned about him in the first place. There's some mild banter, and then they step into a ruined hut near the windmill, which I suppose is the place where SteelHooves has been staying since he crashed here. I'm not sure why he would have stayed here instead of going out and looking for his companions, but that seems like a silly question at this point. Plus, if I were in his position, and I had the opportunity to sneak away from this clusterfuck of a story and start a new life in a little ruined windmill-cottage by the side of the road, I'd probably take it.

Anyway, they go inside the little hut, and find the place to be in a state of disarray. However, the disarray here is distinct from the sort of disarray they usually encounter: the hut was clearly vandalized deliberately, but the damage appears to predate the war. There is also a skeleton lying underneath a noose nearby, but that's hardly remarkable at this point. Also nearby is a terminal, which LP proceeds to do her usual thing with, because why the hell not drop everything she's doing to read the personal emails of some 200 year old suicidal poner?

While LP gets the terminal up and running, SteelHooves and Calamity shoot the shit. It turns out there was at least some logic behind SteelHooves' actions: he displayed the bloodwings he'd dismembered on the roof of the hut in the hopes that the group would see them and interpret it as a signal I don't think I noted it in my commentary, but LP noticed some dismembered bloodwings on the roof of the windmill when they first came across it. I didn't mention it at the time because it didn't seem like a relevant detail, but it was technically mentioned in the text. Since he had every reason to assume they would be in the air, this actually more or less makes sense. Unfortunately for him, his calculus was based on the assumption that his friends actually gave a shit about him and would come looking for him. Calamity explains what they were doing instead:

>“Naw. We’re headed on up t’ Zebratown t’ save a hoof-full of prisoners from alicorns.” I noticed he didn’t mention the prisoners were zebras.
I would think the name "Zebratown" would be sort of a clue.

>“So, ya with us, mighty alicorn hunter?”
>I’d almost forgotten that title.
I've completely forgotten that title. Seriously, when has anyone ever called him that?

>SteelHooves was strangely silent. I looked at him, wondering if I should be concerned. Was he thinking about Arbu again?
More likely, he's thinking about how he fell thousands of feet to what realistically should have been his death, and went to all the trouble of arranging a tableau of bloodwing corpses on the roof so his worried friends would know where to find him, only to later have them stumble upon him by sheer coincidence and confess that they weren't even looking for him. It is probably slowly dawning on him that he might have hunkered down in this godforsaken shack for weeks, months, years even, with only this dusty old skeleton and his old laptop for company, waiting for companions who would have long since moved on. LP is busy futzing with this stupid terminal and hasn't even bothered to ask how he's doing. If he has any sense at all, he's probably realizing that it's about time to try and find some new friends.

Anyway, it turns out that SteelHooves doesn't like the idea of going to Zebratown for some reason, but decides to go anyway because it's "what Applejack would do." He doesn't elaborate on what he doesn't like about Zebratown; again, though, I'm assuming the clue is in the name. I seem to remember SteelHooves having some kind of grudge against zebras or something.

While all of this is happening, Littlepoop is still hacking the skeleton's laptop. She discovers that it is encrypted with some kind of Ministry-grade encryption, and she's having a tough time with it and blah blah blah, the usual schtick. I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat wondering if she actually gets in or not. However, the main issue is that this extra-tight security on this random terminal found in some shack in the middle of nowhere has piqued Littlepoop's curiosity:

>I tried a third time. And a fourth. By my fifth try, I was beginning to suspect that the terminal only existed to frustrate the living hell out of me.
The next time LP is getting treated for her cocaine-mint "addiction," she may want to get herself tested for ADD. Seriously, nothing about what she's doing here is appropriate.

I get that this terminal has some kind of super-sekrit government encryption on it and it's really, really interesting, and under normal circumstances I'm sure it would be worth checking out. However, there is nothing normal about the present circumstances. I can count at least four time-sensitive, high-priority matters that require LP's attention: retrieving the whatever-thing for the Goddess, killing the Goddess for Red Eye, defeating Red Eye, and finding and disarming the bomb in Tenpony Tower. Their progress on all four of these quests is exactly zero so far, and time's a-wasting. On top of that, they have their current side quest to worry about, and on top of that they just found SteelHooves, who has been missing for...how long has it been exactly? A few hours at least.

Seriously; I think this bitch has actual ADD. For the entire course of the story, no matter what her mission is, she will immediately set it aside to go on any side-mission that pops up, no matter how insignificant. On top of that, she will just as readily abandon her side missions to hack laptops, crack safes, listen to audio diaries, and lose herself in memory orbs; the last of these she actually had to be told not to do while in the middle of a dangerous situation. This pony is supposed to be the leader of this group.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310485
>>310436
You could pretty much call her Corrupted Anything and it would fit just as well, which is to say not particularly well at all. None of the Elements really fit the characters who are supposed to represent them in this story; it's like the author just handed them out at random. Personally though, if I were going to make her Corrupted Honesty I'd have it be because she lies to herself constantly.

>>310468
I'd be skeptical no matter what you said. The best part of this story is going to be the feeling I get when I finish the last page of it and I won't need to think about its convoluted nonsensical plot and horrendous characters anymore.

>>310475
>Wouldn't it be fucking hilarious if Steelhooves falling off was his final appearance in the story, and nopony remembered him up until the final chapter when it turns out AJ survived and all of this "how I met your mother" bullshit was LP explaining to AJ where Steelhooves went?
That actually would be funny. It would be even funnier if the story just ended here and it turned out to be LP testifying in court because she's on trial for his murder.

>Is Kkat wrong to call it ironic that a Zebra village exists in the shadow of a pharmecutical company ran by a giant bunny famous for killing Zebras and making drugs for ponies?
It's not ironic because there's no apparent irony. Irony would be something like a prohibition-era bootlegger being murdered by some random drunk he'd sold liquor to, or a guy who got rich selling faulty life vests falling off his yacht and drowning. Actually, if you've ever played an old adventure game called Full Throttle, the last thing Adrian Ripburger sees is a beautiful use of irony. For irony to happen there needs to be a significant connection between the two subjects, and there really isn't one between the residents of Glyphmark and Angel Bunny.

I think what the author was going for is basically what you say here: that it's ironic that zebras, who had some kind of fear of Angel Bunny, are now living in the shadow of his laboratory and don't realize it. If the Doombunny thing had some deep significance for all zebras and it was made clear that this was the case, that would be one thing. However, kkat doesn't really do that; he had Xenith make one offhanded remark about Doombunny many chapters ago in this story that's practically an eternity, and the subject never came up again. What exactly is the legend of Doombunny? What did he do to make zebras fear him? Are all zebras afraid of him? Despite Xenith's reaction, it doesn't appear that they are.

Whatever he might have been during the war, for zebras living in the present, Doombunny would just be an old legend, like the boogie man or something. Just because zebras have a legend about Doombunny doesn't mean that the legend is meaningful to all zebras. The zebras living in Glyphmark seem to have enough real-world troubles to deal with; I can't imagine learning that "Doombunny" had once operated a lab in the place their village happens to be built would be all that remarkable to them. If he wanted to place them in an ironic situation, he should have chosen something more relevant to these zebras specifically than to zebras in general. For instance, since the Glyphmark zebras' situation revolves around cutie marks, it would be ironic if instead of a pharmaceutical lab, the building were some kind of pre-war school run by the CMC, where blank-flank ponies who wanted cutie marks could enroll to try different things and see what they were good at.

Here's a semi-real-world example. I live in a country where being a "Nazi" is a major taboo, due to the events of a war that occurred about 80 years ago. If I were suddenly beaten up by a guy wearing a Nazi uniform, would that be an ironic situation? If I live in a society that has a taboo about Nazis, but I don't personally care about Nazis one way or the other, and there is no further connection between me and Nazis, then no. However, if I, as a frequent poster on a Nazi-sympathetic horsefucker website, were randomly beaten up by an actual Nazi, that could be called irony. If I were a horsefucker who expressed and personally believed the tenets of actual German National Socialism, and came to a Nazi Horsefucker forum to espouse those tenets, and then later I was beaten up by a Nazi who targeted me specifically for liking My Little Pony, that would absolutely be irony.

Irony is one of those things that's hard to explain, but you know it when you see it.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310486
>>310476
Would a more competent author replace exposition-filled terminals with other means of dumping exposition on the audience, or simply save LP's "hack a computer terminal for EXP and exposition and maybe loot" moments for times when the clock isn't ticking on time-sensitive bullshit?

Fallout NV had plenty of moments where hacking terminals could unlock doors, safes full of loot, deactivate gun turrets and other security bots, turn those bots/turrets to your side, fuck with the placement of murderous AI holograms, and more. Plus you hacked terminals with the Science skill which could be used for dialogue skill checks. An overexplaining faggot would list 30 other things Science can do in Fallout, but to sum things up it's for more than cracking computer passwords.

But for the most part, all terminals in Fallout Equestria do is give LP exposition that doesn't matter to her or her quest and is typically just there for bronybait trivia involving canon characters. Must we really read Cranky Doodle's emails to Steven Magnet and learn they worked together to found a gun making company just so Littlepip can find Fallout's Solar Scorcher? Such a waste of words. We'll natutally give a shit what happened to Rarity or Twilight or Pinkie but to LP, these are just names from a dusty old history book. It isn't like Soike ordered her to learn how the Mane Six fell apart. It isn't like she based her entire worldview and understanding of the world on bad info these terminals can threaten and debunk. Come on, Rarity's Ministry of Historical Revisionism and Media Censorship was running around 200 years before LP was born yet none of any ministry's bullshit made it into LP's vault just so LP could be the author's idea of normal and optimal? She worships Celestia and Luna sometimes, so why does the past matter so little to her outside of giving her opportunities to cry and graverob and feel bad? Doesn't she care about the ponies behind the names and their minimal relevance to her story? Shouldn't a worshipper of Celestia care greatly about her greatest student Twilight Sparkle instead of graverobbing her?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310514
310622
1623653104191.jpg
>>310476

With all of her narcissism and delusions, I can understand LP perceiving herself as the leader, but what I can't wrap my head around is why the rest of them follow this absolute lunatic. She has no idea how to prioritize tasks, and she's constantly putting everyone in danger over the stupidest bullshit. SteelHooves and Calamity almost died fighting bloodwings, because Littlepoop saw a couple of random zebras getting attacked on the ground and wanted to intervene. What's more, she doesn't even care that they almost died. Her friend fell off the fucking roof of the airship during a pointless battle that she gave the order to get involved in, and the thought of going to look for him afterwards never even crossed her mind. Then, when she bumps into him by pure chance a few scenes later, she doesn't even ask how he's doing, or how he managed to survive the fall, or anything.

What's more is that both she and her friends seem to consider this behavior to be noble. She has to stop and help every random pony she comes across who is in trouble; God forbid any of them actually take care of themselves. One might expect that someone who has lived their entire life in the wasteland to have developed some basic survival skills, yet they all depend on this little pint-size lunatic who just picked up her first gun a month ago to save them every time they get into a jam. If Littlepoop doesn't save the wee turtles, who will?

And on top of everything else, she doesn't take her side tasks any more seriously than she takes any of her important tasks. She was willing to drop everything to help these random zebras she just met, and now she's just as willing to drop what she's doing for them to poke around in some dead guy's laptop. Whatever happened here, and whatever Ministry it involved, it happened 200 years ago. The chances of her learning anything that is even remotely relevant to any of her current objectives by breaking into this dusty old terminal are virtually zero, and she has any number of considerably more important things to worry about.

While all of this is going on, Xenith for some reason strips some skin from the bloodwings' wings. The event is only mentioned in one brief paragraph, and there is no obvious explanation for why she does this. Perhaps she's hungry; I forget who is supposed to be a vegetarian in this story. Anyway, finally, LP gets into the terminal, as we all knew she eventually would anyway.

Page break. Unsurprisingly, the next microscene consists of the terminal contents. The document is a journal belonging to someone named Midnight Shower, which I believe is also one of kkat's nicknames down at Club Manhole.

Midnight Shower is a unicorn who has left Canterlot, carrying a priceless heirloom of some kind. She has recently arrived in Zebratown, which is unsurprising since it was the place the journal was found. The story of Zebratown is predictable: as the name would suggest, it was a wartime ghetto created when Celestia or whoever was in charge at the time ordered all of the zebras still living in Equestria to be rounded up and contained. For whatever it's worth, Midnight Shower is opposed to "segregation" on principle, but feels it's nonetheless a good idea for the "safety" of the zebras who might otherwise be attacked by the "bumpkin" ponies in the provinces. She assures whoever is reading her diary that she actually has a friend who is a zebra.

The way this character talks, I'm half convinced she's going to turn out to actually be Rarity. However, she says some things that make me suspect otherwise: she refers to herself as a "scholar," which doesn't sound like a term that Rarara would self-apply. Anyway, the rest of this is just expository bullshit: she gets settled in to her new hut, sets up her terminal, and makes plans to continue with her mission the following day. The mission appears to be an investigation of some sort.

The title of this chapter is "The Very Strange Tale of Midnight Shower," and skimming ahead it looks like these journal entries are dropped in after every other page break or so. This would unfortunately explain why this single chapter is almost 25,000 words long. Hopefully Midnight Shower's "very strange tale" will have at least some relevance to the present, and isn't just another silly anecdote from the past the author decided to dump in at random because for some reason he felt his book wasn't quite long enough.

Page break. Littlepoop asks SteelHooves what Zebratown is like, and he tells them that when the shield over Canterlot finally broke and the pink cloud came venting out, Zebratown was hit the worst by it. So, presumably, Zebratown is a lot like what Canterlot is probably going to be. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Another journal entry from Midnight Shower. This one begins on Day Two, and from skimming ahead I get the impression that this entire chapter is going to be a tedious day-by-day recounting of her very strange tale.

Anyway, Midnight observes that Zebratown is very similar to any other town in Equestria, except that there are zebras living there instead of ponies, Ministry propaganda is far less prevalent, and there a bunch of soldiers all over the place because the war and ehrmagurd raysism and so forth. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The group climbs higher into the mountains or whatever they are towards Canterlot and Zebratown, which I guess are fairly close to each other, and Littlepoop laments the groups still-baffling decision to not take their fucking airship. While crossing a river, the party is suddenly beset by intense pain, and LP starts bleeding from her eyes because this story clearly wasn't quite edgy enough. It turns out to be one of those haunted radio broadcasters that they were warned about earlier. However, they suffer no serious damage as usual and continue on.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310515
310523 310531
1623627647245.png
>>310476

When they arrive in Zebratown, they find the place to be a flooded ruin. Apparently the aqueduct leading from the Canterlot waterfall down to the city ruptured, and now the streets are basically canals. The rain, I guess, is keeping the taint or the pink cloud or whatever it is at bay, so the good news is they don't have to take their armor off or float their possessions, or accept any of the other limitations that were laid out earlier. However, they can't touch the water because bad stuff will happen, so LP has to be carried by Calamity, with Xenith and SteelHooves floating along on an entire goddamn bridge that Littlepoop is levitating. Not only would it have made more sense to have taken the Sky Wagon, it would have made the scene easier to write; but that's none of my business. *sips tea*

Page break. Midnight Shower's Very Strange Tale™, Day 3. Midnight Shower visits the local authorities and tells them that she is conducting research. They are immediately suspicious, and she does her best to assuage them, but to no avail. She assures us that, no matter how suspicious of her they are now, if they knew the real reason she is here, they would be even more so. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The party flies around the ruins of Zebratown, trying to figure out where the captive zebras are being held.

>“I don’t believe the alicorns would choose one of the smaller shops as a base,” SteelHooves noted. “It doesn’t fit their sense of ego.”
Do the alicorns have a sense of ego? For that matter, what exactly would having a sense of ego entail? Presumably, what he means is that the alicorns are egotistical and have a flair for the dramatic; trouble is, that isn't really apparent from what we've seen of them so far. The ones we've encountered are mostly just mindless drones that die almost as soon as they appear.

Then, suddenly, a wild alicorn appears.

>Fuck. It was one of the teleporting ones!
Are there non-teleporting ones? Again, it's kind of hard to gage what these things are like, because most of their appearances in the story have been brief and relatively uneventful. However, I'm fairly certain I remember most of the ones we've met doing teleportation and having giant impenetrable shields and all sorts of other ridiculous things that logically should make them a formidable enemy but for some reason don't.

Page break. The party decides they need to land, because they are too easy a target for the alicorns if they stay in the air. They land on a nearby roof, and it collapses. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop falls into a room that turns out to be one of the pink-cloud-pockets that she was warned about. She immediately gets all sorts of warnings about multiple organ failure from her PipBuck. For some reason, the concentrated pink cloud doesn't appear to be fusing her armor and PipBuck to her skin, like she was warned would happen.

She realizes she needs to get out of the cloud fast, so she runs to another room. However, that room is also full of cloud. So, she runs to a different one, and that one is clear. Phew! That was a scary ten seconds; all that multiple organ failure can't be healthy. She realizes she needs a health potion, because when all of your organs are simultaneously failing, nothing hits the spot quite like a health potion. But oh noes! Velvet has all of their health potions, and she's back at Glyphmark with the zebras! Wow, Littlepoop did not think this one through; seems like it would have made sense to at least bring a couple of those things along.

Then, suddenly, Xenith and SteelHooves come barreling into the room. Then, suddenly, it turns out that they are all standing on some kind of balcony above some water, and the author forgot to mention it. Oh noes! Water is dangerous or something here, because pink stuff that causes organ failure! Also, for some reason, there are a bunch of zebras down in the dangerous water. Are these the zebras they were looking for? Or are these some different zebras, maybe the bad kind? I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Then, suddenly, the balcony collapses and they fall again. Or rather, they would fall again, if Littlepoop's bullshit Mary Sue levitation power didn't save the day once more. Phew! That was a scary 2.3 seconds.

Littlepoop yells at the balcony. You go, girl! Show that inanimate structure who's boss! Then, for no apparent reason, SteelHooves starts shooting grenades at the zebras. Wait, it looks like he did have a reason; turns out they were actually zombies. It feels like that was something kkat ought to have mentioned, since, you know, they are down here looking for a bunch of zebras, and then they find a bunch of zebras; might be helpful to clarify what sort of zebras they are. Incidentally, minus all of the snark I'm employing, this is actually a 100% accurate synopsis of the way kkat is telling the story right now.

Most of the zebra-zombies zombras? zembies? get all blowed up, but one of them escapes, somehow loops back around the building, and jumps at them from the hallway they were just in a few seconds ago. It collides with SteelHooves, and they both fall into the pink dangerous water. Splish!

>“Well, he could use a bath,” Xenith commented as we floated above the pool, watching the dark figures of the two hoof-fight under the water, neither of them able to drown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyH6vOMYSnY

>“Y’all figure he needs any help?” Calamity asked. We both shook our heads.
Wow, SteelHooves really needs to find some new friends.

Anyway, for some reason the pool suddenly starts to drain, and for some reason there were a bunch of medical boxes under the water. Conveniently, all of the boxes contain health potions. So, Littlepoop and her friends, whose organs are still presumably failing, all kick back and enjoy a nice, refreshing round of health potion after a hard day's work. Aah!
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310523
310527 310532 310543 310557
1623638575960.png
>>310515

There was actually a bit more to the ending of that scene; I just ran out of space. Littlepoop gets a box open and secures some potions for her friends, but is attacked by another zombra before she can get another box open to get one for herself. She shoots the zombra with her fire bullets, and it explodes. Then, she gets the medical box open, and finds a "super restoration potion" inside. Yes, believe it or not, there is actually a potion in this story that takes the absurd restorative ability of the regular potions and carries several steps further.

However, it's not quite Miller time yet. As LP downs the potion, she suddenly sees that the zombra she just shot with exploding fire bullets is suddenly coming back to life, because Canterlot ghouls and pink clouds and something something blah blah magic. It punches her in the face, and she goes unconscious.

Page break. Midnight Shower's thus-far-completely-uneventful-adventure, Day 4. Midnight decides that Day 4 is the most auspicious of days for explaining the particulars of her mission.

Her explanation is circuitous, though I actually like the writing here. As I've said more than once, kkat does a far better job developing these side-stories than he does with the main story; probably because the format he chose basically forces discipline. It requires the mini-story to be told in scenes, so he has no choice except to build each memory fragment, journal entry, and what-have-you into a proper, self contained scene, and to tell the larger story across a finite number of these scenes. Conversely, with the main story he can just blather on endlessly and to no purpose. But, I digress.

The basic gist of Midnight Shower's mission is as follows:

Midnight was the court astronomer for Celestia and Luna. At one point, shortly after the attempted assassination of Celestia, Luna summons her to her chamber and tells her the story of the time she tried to rebel against Celestia. She confides that the special armor she wore as Nightmare Moon was fashioned from a metal she found in a meteor that had crashed to the ground. Apparently, every 100 years, a meteor shower occurs, and some of the meteors land in Equestria. The metal apparently has magical and/or physical properties that make it ideal for crafting weapons and armor. The zebras have apparently put a great deal of effort into studying these meteors, and apparently they are deeply ingrained in their religion and mythology.

After this lengthy preamble, Luna explains to Midnight Shower that she wants her to take a piece of her Nightmare Moon armor that she saved, travel to Zebratown, and learn all she can about whatever they believe regarding the meteors. It's not clear at this point why she wants this information, but presumably it has to do with either crafting better weapons to defeat the zebras, or to find out whether or not the zebras are using it to craft weapons against the ponies.

Page break.

>Reading that passage while I recovered may have been a mistake.
While she recovered? The last we saw of LP, she had just been kicked unconscious by a zombie. Does she mean to tell us that she woke up lying on the floor of a dungeon filled with pink cloud, logged into her PipBuck, and read a chapter of this fucking journal while she was lying there waiting for her headache to go away? Whatever happened to not nosing into dead ponies' memories during dangerous situations? Also, how much recovery did she really need? The couple of seconds she spent in the "pink cloud" was apparently bad enough to cause organ failure, and she healed from that pretty much instantly just by chugging a bottle of concentrated plot armor. I can't imagine a little crack on the jaw would be serious enough to require significant recovery time.

Anyway, she blathers on angstily for several paragraphs:

>I had never envisioned what Nightmare Moon had done before. Never ever tried. Now that I did, the vision shook my soul with horror.
>I was in a great rage, and I wanted to punish. I felt myself grow pale.
Imagine typing this bullshit with a straight face. Imagine reading it and not bursting out laughing.

Anyway, as with most of her angsty meditations, she manages to contort the situation and make it all about her. Instead of simply absorbing this interesting but hardly relevant information from 200 years ago and moving on to more pertinent matters, she manages to equate Luna's transformation into Nightmare Moon with her own descent into "corrupted kindness." Then, she manages to turn Luna's eventual repentance and reformation into a lesson designed personally for her: if Luna could overcome her Nightmare Mooniness and stop being all evil and stuff, then couldn't Littlepoop do the same?

>At the same time, they were a reminder that the stain of my fury-driven murders would never fade away. SteelHooves was right. Like Princess Luna, I would forever remember what I had done. And like the zebras remembered the actions of Nightmare Moon, there would be those to whom I could never be anything but that monster.
Jesus Christ, get over yourself. If this character's narcissism and self-absorption were crystalized into a physical object, not even her Mary Sue telekinesis would be able to lift it.

Anyway, Littlepoop chugs another healing potion, so she's fine now I guess, and also SteelHooves is okay, in case anyone was worried. Thanks to some bullshit plot armor it looks like wading through the pink-cloud-tainted water won't signficantly harm them, even though that runs completely contrary to everything the author has said up until now. Equally unsurprising is that the business about having to take off their armor and float their saddlebags seems to have been conveniently forgotten about as well. So, since earlier they surmised that the alicorns are probably hiding the captive zebras somewhere in the sewer system, they find an entrance into the tunnels via the basement and proceed to explore.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310527
>>310523
Is it smart writing and foreshadowing that the Zebra place they're in now has enemies and environmental hazards in common with Canterlot, a place that will presumably be tougher to survive in than this place?

also fuck Kkat for the Zombra death fakeout. Ghost People (and their ponified copy, the Canterlot Ghouls) don't stay dead unless you take their limbs off or burn them to death. You need to do more damage than their suits can heal or destroy the suits. Fire kills them so dead so hard they die to death permanently. Did he just go through the whole game without ever using fire damage on those things? Get that nigger a Superheated Saturnite Knife or PowerFist.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.310531
>>310515
>It collides with SteelHooves, and they both fall into the pink dangerous water.

Very odd how an emaciated, rotten zombie would be able to completely bowl over a hulking mass of plate armor and hydraulics. In Fallout 1, 2, and 4, power armor turns you into a walking tank that stands a good foot or two above the average person. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, it's basically just a suit of armor and less of a "vehicle", but even still, it's a good increase to your weight and stature.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310532
310533 310578
>>310523
>Anyway, Littlepoop chugs another healing potion, so she's fine now I guess, and also SteelHooves is okay, in case anyone was worried. Thanks to some bullshit plot armor it looks like wading through the pink-cloud-tainted water won't signficantly harm them, even though that runs completely contrary to everything the author has said up until now.
Presumably, and I admit that I'm reaching here, we're supposed to take as given that because Steelhooves is a canterlot ghoul he's immune to the effects of the pink cloud. Either his armor's hermeticaly sealed or the fact that he's undead means he doesn't need to breathe. Maybe? This is a good example of why you don't fill a story with pointless tangents and irrelevant details - you don't get time to set down solid ground rules about how the setting works, so when a situation like this comes along the audience aren't left wondering things like "why isn't this major character dead?"

...but who am I kidding. It's not like any of the danger in this story is anything but arbitrary.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310533
310541 310578
>>310532
Also Steelhooves is in a heavy-ass suit of Power Armour. Why would it be waterproof? It took a long time to get amphibious tanks IRL and numerous tank-making nations had longer to work on their tanks than ponies, the only smart ones, had to work on their power armour. They knew Zebras use guns and gas and didn't think to give their power armour suits magical ice enchantments to counteract enemy flaming-gun weaponry. Why bother making these obscenely heavy suits waterproof? Ain't like making them splashproof makes them immune to the bullshit effects of potions, consumed or thrown.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310541
310542 310578
>>310533
I have no idea whether the armour is waterproof or gas-proof or anything-proof, and that's the point. Besides the obvious "just shoot him a lot" it's never really been clarified what can and can't hinder Steelhooves. He's now been placed in what should logically be a life-threatening situation, but the characters react as if he's in no danger at all. Is he in danger or isn't he? How do the characters know but the reader doesn't? Kkat has failed to set ground rules for how his characters and setting work, so the result is a clumsy scenario where the reader's intended response could be any number of things.

Steelhooves fell in the acid water. Is this bad? It's probably bad, but the characters are cracking jokes about it. Is Steelhooves immune to drowning? Immune to acid? Immune to being beaten to death by ziggerzombies? Apparently the answer is yes to all the above, but none of this was ever established.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310542
310545 310578
>>310541
I kind of wish the story played Steelhoves's borderline invincibility for laughs instead of trying to sometimes pretend the heroes are in danger from shit like multiple organ failure, armies chasing them (and giving up after four baddies are killed), poisonous gas that sometimes does bad things, and so on.
Anonymous
991b32a
?
No.310543
310550 310578
>>310523
Been thinking with the whole pink cloud thing it could have been handy had Littlepip spent more time struggling to survive out in the Wasteland so could see her now without any armor, weapons, or her Pip-Buck and see how she has learned and adapted since the start of her journey. Before she would have lacked any of the wit and instincts to survive and was carried soely by her Pip-Buck but now she has a test to see if she truly learned to survive or if it had all been thanks soely to her Pip-Buck and OP items she had.

Of course none of that happened but with how video game-y the story is that's usually a neat trick some games pull with removing all your abilities you gained to solve problems and throw you into a situation without the comfort of the tutorial you had last time you were this powerless. Especially with this being a Fallout game (even if it's 3 so the rpg elements are near zilch) so could see her use utility stuff or improvised tools to make it through the city.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310545
310550 310578
>>310542
But that's the problem. It is being played for laughs when there's no good reason to find it funny.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310550
>>310543
Dude, YES. You're a fucking genius!

Come to think of it, the most OP thing about LP is probably her overwhelming telekinetic strength. Her ideas for solving problems "creatively" usually rely on her overwhelming (amd able to pull new powers out of nowhere like manipulating objects you cant see and the internals of safes) telekinesis to lift heavy things to squish foes, lift sharp rocks to behead them, lift grenades into dragon mouths and unpin them all without being able to see them, lift herself and radioactive bulletproof goo into a ceiling hatch while unlocking the door magically without needing to bother with a lockpick, and so on. The pink fart clouds won't take her telekinesis away.

For the Pink Farts Arc to really qualify as a "No Gear Level" and force Littlepip down into an intimate dangerous place where she has to scavenge supplies and fear traps, her OP telekinesis needs to go away. Them again LP needs psychic powers to use her guns. Guns designed for human hands by earth ponies for no reason. Robbing LP of her ability to self levitate over landmines is necessary to make landmines a threat but removing her ability to wield a weapon in anything but her whore mouth might be a bit much.

Could use some Old World Blues lobotomite bullshit for an excuse for the sudden depowering, blame a glitching Canterlot magic power plant that now absorbs magic from the air and living ponies, or say Pink Cloud was designed to fuck Unicorn horns up so lifting anything too heavy or exerting too much telekinetic force can fuck the horn up for good/attract enemy attention. Enemies that are hard and economically taxing and exhausting to kill. Ammo shortages should force LP out of murderhobo mode. Every melee kill should come with injuries LP has to deal with because health potions are precious and rare.

Oh, and some new monsters should force LP to enter this town without food because they smell food from miles away or something. Hmm, what if Pink Cloud also disabled health potions or turned them toxic? Pink Cloud could also magically make inhabitants see mirages and dead friends, for tragic edgy scenes where LP faces those she's killed and shooting any of them means wasting ammo on illusions and attracting monsters with the sound of gunfire.

>>310545
It makes people laugh when it isn't supposed to. If it was played for laughs the author would write it as the punchline for jokes and want people to laugh at it. Kkat wants everyone to weep for LP like the false-faced virtue-signallers in his comment section trying to look harmless and girly and overemotional.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310557
310569
1623655485363.png
>>310523

Page break. Another excerpt from the journal of Midnight Shower. We skip to Day 7:

In what I'm sure is only a strange coincidence, this entry happens to deal with the ruined bath house that LP & Co. just visited. In its heyday, the bath house was...well, a bath house; a public bathing area that doubled as a sort of zebra social hub. We also learn that wartime Equestria had its own version of SJW retards:

>I was astonished to discover there were ponies living in Zebratown. Only a hoof-full, I am told, but there are ponies who have chosen to live their lives in this place. On purpose. I had the opportunity to converse with one such pony at the bath house, a delightful peasant mare named Daisy. It is Daisy’s assertion that she chose to live here because the zebras need to be reminded that not all ponies are, in her words, “xenophobic bigots.”

This paragraph is also noteworthy:

>Upon leaving the bath house, I noticed several zebra colts quickly attempting to hide an inhaler, looking for all the land like they had been caught by their parents reading an issue of Wingboner Magazine. I am hardly a pony to know about such things, but I suspect they were using illegal zebra-imported pharmaceuticals. Perhaps the constables need to be keeping a better watch.

I'm not sure whether or not the satire was intentional based on prior experience I suspect not, but kkat actually does a pretty good mimic of progressive/SJW hypocrisy here. The cultured, progressive Canterlot ponies consider themselves above the bigoted commoners who are cautious of zebras just because their country is engaged in a bloody life and death struggle with them. So, the Canterlot ponies intentionally befriend zebras just to show how not-bigoted and not-common they are; however, they have a curious habit of treating their zebra "friends" like pets or research specimens. Here are the main bullet points of the situation:

>Equestria is at war with zebras, but has a zebra minority population
>the Equestrian zebras obviously need to be segregated for "their" safety
>it's not because the Canterlot ponies are afraid of them or anything, it's just because all the primitive bigoted redneck ponies might attack them
>well-educated, cultured ponies, obviously, are above such prejudices
>a number of them have even opted to live in Zebratown just to signal how progressive and open-minded they are
>surely the zebras would be grateful for such magnanimity; obviously these poor, oppressed, backwards creatures need to know that there are ponies looking out for them
>oh but look, some of them are doing drugs, the poor dears
>better get some more cops in here, for "their" safety

Again, I rather suspect that the satire here is unintentional, but it's some damn good satire nonetheless.

Anyway, the rest of this deals with the zebras' weird anti-space religion, the tenets of which still have not been properly explained. Midnight Shower finds that everywhere she goes, zebras freak out because of her cutie mark. I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not, but her cutie mark depicts a meteor shower; thus, it resembles stars and scares the zebras. Poor, silly, backwards creatures with their wacky superstitions; good thing they have magnanimous ponies like Midnight Shower to befriend them and look out for them.

Page break. Back to Littlepoop and her friends. We are once again unceremoniously dropped into the middle of a fight scene. They are still in the sewer tunnels, and for some reason there is also an alicorn. SteelHooves fires a bunch of missiles at the alicorn, which explode harmlessly against her impenetrable magic shield. One of these days someone is going to have to sit kkat down and explain to him why firing off high-powered explosives in an underground tunnel is a bad idea.

Meanwhile, Littlepoop hacks a terminal that's in the sewer for some reason, and opens a door to a research laboratory, which is also in the sewer for some reason. Inside, she finds three zombras which she proceeds to gun down without incident. SteelHooves, for some reason, starts firing off explosives all over the place. Even Calamity objects to this, and urges him to calm the fuck down and stop firing grenades. As usual, there is no structural damage to the surrounding architecture, none of these poorly-maintained 200 year old tunnels collapse on them, and nopony suffers any permanent hearing loss as a result of multiple grenades exploding simultaneously in an enclosed chamber with stone walls.

Incidentally, SteelHooves also set a proximity mine on the door-terminal before the party ran in here. They hear it explode from inside; presumably, the alicorn set it off and died. So, basically, here is the situation: the party runs inside this small, underground research lab surrounded by stone walls on all sides, fires off a fuckton of grenades to kill a couple of straggling zombies, and takes no damage as a result. Meanwhile, the alicorn in the hallway trips a proximity mine that SteelHooves placed on the door, even though she logically would have been able to see him set the mine. Despite the fact that this same alicorn just survived a barrage of missiles, this single small explosion manages to kill her. Naturally, the crumbling underground tunnel around them is still 100% intact.

Anyway, Littlepoop was bitten by one of the zebras and took some poison damage. Xenith tries to brew her an anti-zombie-poison potion, but is bitten by another zombie in the process. Apparently, one of the zombies somehow survived having 80 grenades flung at it. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Midnight Shower, Day 13.

Despite the zebras' intense fear of anything to do with stars, Midnight finds that most of them don't know anything about their own folklore and can't answer her questions. For some reason, the ponies in Zebratown are harassing the zebras and vandalizing their property, even though they are here ostensibly as a gesture of goodwill. Nothing else happens.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310569
310570 310622
1623730493039.png
>>310557

Page break. Littlepoop again. The gang finishes applying bandages and healing all of the minor damage they sustained during the fight. Littlepoop cracks open the wall safe in the laboratory because she's a klepto, and finds some more random junk she doesn't need, which she proceeds to take with her anyway. For some reason, Xenith wants to come back to this laboratory when they're done with whatever they're supposed to be doing here (I think they're still looking for kidnapped zebras, but who even knows anymore), so LP marks the location on her map.

LP and SteelHooves leave through a door on the opposite side, saying that they are going to scout ahead. They haven't gone very far when they spy two alicorns, who are holding back a metric fuckton of water using their shield. Suddenly, the alicorn they fought before, which I guess wasn't quite killed by the proximity mine, teleports in. It says "gotcha," and then all three of them teleport away. This causes the shield to disappear, releasing the water.

Page break. The alicorns' trick with the water was probably the first halfway-clever thing that kkat has had them do thus far, so I'm going to award him a couple of points here. Anyway, Littlepoop is now being washed down the sewer tunnels, fighting for air. She gets bounced around quite a bit, loses her sense of direction, nearly drowns, but then doesn't.

>I coughed up water, my head splitting in pain, my horn feeling like it was about to explode. My eyes were red with bloody tears.
Lol. Never change, kkat. Never change.

Anyway, another one of those haunted broadcaster thingies is nearby; it turns out that this is the reason her eyes are crying tears of blood and here I'd just assumed it was because she was goffik. Anyway, she dives down under the water, finds a skeleton with a PipBuck on its arm that contains the ghostly broadcaster, and throws it into the stream so it gets washed away. It turns out that she was washed up against some bars of a drainage tunnel that leads out into the open air. She holds herself against the bars treading water for awhile until eventually the stream dies down, and then finds SteelHooves, who also survived. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Midnight Shower, Day 23:

Midnight finds that she is getting settled into the town, and has found a contact who seems to know something about zebra folklore, a prisoner being held on an unknown charge. Meanwhile, it seems that all of the ziggers in town are getting hooked on a drug called Dash, which was probably introduced to them by the Equestrian CIA. The increased drug use is contributing to the rising incidents of petty crime in Zebratown. Midnight catches a couple of ponies who were trying to sneak liquor into the town for some reason. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Back to Littlepoop. She and SteelHooves emerge from the sewer. Even though Calamity and Xenith are still in the lab, they are hesitant to go back in there to fetch them, on account of how the alicorns might try to drown them again. LP decides it would be best to send SteelHooves back after them, since he apparently can't drown. As she turns to give him his marching orders, she sees that he has wandered off and is staring at a particular spot of ground.

>“I died here,” he said before falling into a long, strange silence.
Which time?

Page break. Midnight Shower, Day 24:

Midnight is on her way to meet with the local police when she is deterred by some wagons blocking the street. So, she decides to go talk to a guy who owns a store that sells zebra tribal masks, because he might know something about zebra folklore or something. However, she is subsequently deterred from this task as well; she chances upon a group of cops who are in the process of raping a zebra mare. Sacrebleu, le edge!

Before she can intervene, the rape is stopped by a police sergeant named Applesnack, which you may or may not remember was SteelHooves' pre-zombification name. Midnight decides it's about time to write a letter to Princess Celestia, who probably insisted that Midnight inform her, in lurid detail, of any incidents of >rape she might witness while in Zebratown.

Page break. Back to Littlepoop. SteelHooves observes a place in the street where a set of hoofprints have melted into the cobblestones. How exactly hoofprints could melt into cobblestones is a question I'm not even going to bother asking. He steps into them and they fit his hooves perfectly; he casts a mournful gaze up towards Canterlot and proclaims that this is where he stood on the day Equestria died. Cue Don McLean mournfully strumming "Equestrian Pie" in a minor key.

He proceeds to fill us in on a few details of a story we already know the gist of: he and Applejack were in Canterlot, trying to round up ponies and get them to safety, while the missiles pounded the shield over Canterlot. They received word that Cloudsdayle had been obliterated.

>"Applejack excused herself and raced to Ponyville. I…” He gave a shuddering sigh. “I never blamed her for leaving. Or for ordering me to stay. There was no pony to blame but myself.
Did she literally run all the way there? Seems like it would have been quicker to just take her flying chariot or whatever she had. Maybe she forgot to hire a new pilot after "Applesnack" kicked the old one off the roof.

>From the timber in the stoic ghoul’s voice, I could tell my friend was actually crying.
Unless this guy literally has trees in his mouth, I believe the word you're looking for here is "timbre."

>My heart went out to him, unable to bear hearing my stalwart Applejack’s Ranger finally unable to hide his hurt.
Fucking lol. Seriously, though, where was your heart when he got knocked off the fucking airship earlier? Remember, he went careening off the edge of the airship in the middle of a battle, plummeted into a rainy abyss, and was missing for the better part of a day? Ring any bells?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310570
310576 310601
Canterlot_outer_view_S2E9 (1).png
>>310569

He keeps going:

>We had been trying to repair our relationship ever since the night she had seen the darkness in me.
Which night was this? Was it the night you put on mascara and sang My Chemical Romance songs to her while your wrists cried tears of blood?

Anyway, the rest of SteelHooves' anecdote is, again, mostly just filling in the details of a story that we've already heard. However, one of those details elevates this already-hilarious scene to new levels of tragicomedy:

>“The Princesses’ shield was huge,” he reminded me. “Several hundred yards above the city, the shield bisected the waterfalls that pour down into Canterlot. All that water came down and had no place to go. It pooled in the bottom of the shield as the missiles began impacting from above.
>“Water absorbs the Pink Cloud all too readily. When the shield collapsed, that water fell down on Zebratown like a tidal wave from the sky. Except the water was saturated pink. That wave washed over the town and everypony… everyone left inside it.”
Seriously, think about this for a minute. You've got a city on a cliff, with a river running through it that cascades off the cliff into a waterfall. At some point, you need to shield the city from missiles, so you construct a magical shield that for all practical purposes functions as a physical barrier surrounding the city. Apparently, this barrier is not porous enough for water to flow through, so...what? You've effectively dammed the river, and Canterlot is now contained in a giant bubble that is slowly filling up with water? Did the Princesses really think this one through properly? Even if we forget about all the pink cloud stuff for the moment, what exactly was the plan here? Put up a shield to protect everypony from the barrage of missiles, only to have them all drown when the flood waters fill up the bubble?

There's another thing here too: if water can't get out of the shield, how exactly is it getting in? The ingress side of the bubble is water-porous but the egress side isn't? What kind of retarded spell design is that? If you have the capability to make parts of the shield porous, why not have it so the water flows out but not in? That way the water that's already in Canterlot would just drain out. And if you can't make it porous at all, then logically shouldn't the river just flow around the bubble instead of flooding it? There is so much concentrated autism here that I literally can't even process it. Of all the ludicrous instances of physics-rape kkat has flung at us, this is by far the silliest.

Anyway, to wrap the story up, Applesnack was standing in this very spot, looking up mournfully at Canterlot, probably humming a My Chemical Romance song while tears of blood caused his mascara to run, when suddenly the shield broke like an overfilled water balloon, and a tidal wave of pink water came crashing down upon him. And that's the story of how Zebratown became flooded with Pink Cloud and also how SteelHooves got his hoofprints melted into the cobblestones. I guess.

Page break. Midnight Shower's Purportedly Very Strange but So Far Very Uneventful Tale, Day 27:

Midnight has been sending letters to Princess Luna which continue to go unanswered. Meanwhile, she was kicked out of a jeweler's shop when she brought her "starmetal" fragment in to be appraised. Also, for some bizarre reason, the progressive, open-minded ponies who moved to zebratown in order to show how not-bigoted they are have suddenly turned into angry bigots, who drive around in chariots hurling epithets and molotov cocktails at random zebras. For some reason, they consider this to be a saner thing to do than simply finding somewhere else to live. This seems odd, seeing as how, unlike the zebras, they are not being held here against their will. If they have reevaluated their opinion of the zebras based on...wait, what exactly happened to cause this change of heart? None of this adds up, honestly.

>I was just leaving when a chariot raced by, drawn by a very familiar-looking pony as two others hurled burning bottles and shouted anti-zebra epitaphs too foul to sully myself repeating.
It's epithets, not epitaphs, by the way. An epithet describes a characteristic of a person or thing; an epitaph is...wait a minute.

It turns out that technically, an epitaph is a memorial phrase inscribed onto a tombstone. I was actually going to make a snarky joke here about how "epitaphs" are the chapter headers that kkat keeps fucking up, but it turns out I've been misusing this term for actual years. The chapter headers are technically called epigraphs.

It's an easy enough mistake to make, but still; I was technically incorrect, the worst kind of incorrect, and must now commit sudoku. Not really, but there is indeed an important lesson here: I don't know everything. I am as capable of error as anyone else, and you should feel free to call me out on any mistakes that I make. It turns out that today, kkat and I were both faggots.

So, to ensure that we're all on the same page going forward, here is the difference between epithet, epitaph, and epigraph:

Epithet:
"Filthy zigger!"

Epitaph:
"Here Lies kkat; we buried him ass-up so that he can keep on doing what he loves."

Epigraph:
"Alas, poor Yorick! What fools these mortals be!"
--Macbeth

Anyway, the business with the anti-zebra pones throwing the molotov turned into this whole big thing. A zebra filly got burned, and SteelHooves, who was a constable in Zebratown at the time, shot a bitch in the leg. The Dash problem seems to be connected with Angel Bunny's pharmaceutical lab. Also, it turns out the prisoner alluded to earlier, the one who knows about zebra lore, was arrested for smuggling contraband. The contraband turns out to be a book, which was then confiscated by the Ministry of Image. The implication seems to be that this is the zebra necronomicon that keeps popping up. Nothing else happens, really.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310576
310578 310916
>>310570
Ponies calling them "Molotovs" is dumber than a boomer mom calling her son's video games "Nintendos" because I'm pretty sure the soviet Molotov (origin of the name) never existed when Equestria was warring with Space-hating African Theocratic Zebras.
I've seen games call molotovs Petrol Bomb or Alcohol Bomb to avoid saying Molotov. Did Kkat think Molotov was some kind of foreign loan word or brand name? Does he think you can just drive up to a weapon store drive-thru and order an AK, 500 bullets, 3 frag grenades, and 3 Molotovs?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310578
>>310532
>>310533
>>310541
This is actually why I prefer to keep my settings relatively simple when I write. The more shit you think up, the more shit you have to keep track of. With this story, kkat introduces crazy ideas left and right and never fully explains or develops any of it. What are the protections and limitations of SteelHooves' armor? How far can alicorns teleport? Is there a weight limit on Littlepoop's bullshit telekinesis? What exactly is magic capable of in this world? The more of this ridiculousness you have, the more these little "what about this" scenarios pop up: SteelHooves' armor is impervious to physical attacks, but what about magic? Is it waterproof? If something could penetrate his armor, how immortal is his ghoul body exactly? What would it take to actually kill this guy? If he has the same weaknesses as the Canterlot ghouls the team is fighting, why didn't he die when the same things happened to him? Exactly how potent is this Pink Cloud stuff, and exactly how much of it does it take to be dangerous?And so forth.

Personally, when I write, I try to just keep my settings as simple as I can make them. Character A has a gun; when he pulls the trigger it goes bang. Maybe I'll clarify whether the gun is a handgun or a rifle, whether it's auto or semi auto or whatever, but beyond that I just keep it simple. I hate writing in excessively complicated sci-fi and fantasy type worlds where everyone has magic and psychic powers and all that sort of crap; it just creates all sorts of logical headaches. That's just me, however; some people are really good at designing imaginary weapons and bullshit powers and making them detailed enough to feel realistic. However, kkat has not proven himself to be one of those people so far.

One thing you can do if you want to write a story like FoE is to just lay out the rules RPG style before you even start writing, and adhere to them throughout. This is even easier when your setting is based on a game, because there are already rules you can use, or at least modify to suit your purposes.

The idea isn't to use dice and rulebooks to map out every fight and every storyline; I think I've already more or less gone over why that's a bad idea. However, if you have little character sheets for everyone in the story and a rulebook that defines how fighting works and how damage is calculated and so forth, you can run the numbers and see if your ideas are plausible. For instance, if kkat had run the numbers, he probably would have realized that having his level 3 PipBuck technician try to take on a level 55 alicorn was beyond fucking retarded, and he would have discarded the idea. Based on his personality and his love of games, I actually suspect he did create some kind of RPG-type system for this, and probably used it for a lot of his fights. However, if he did this, I suspect he was either cheating on his dice throws or just flat out making shit up whenever he wrote himself into a corner.

I've only mentioned it once or twice, but there's a footer at the end of each chapter that outlines all of the bonuses and level-ups that Littlepoop has "earned." As of Chapter 30, they've just said "Maximum Level," so presumably the idea is that LP is completely maxed out in everything. However, she's basically had the same vaguely-defined bullshit powers since the very beginning of the story; absolutely nothing has changed in how she approaches fights or how they turn out for her, so the "leveling" is pointless.

>>310542
>>310545
Nigel II (548c81c) is correct here; I suspect kkat was trying to be funny. SteelHooves falls off the roof of the airship or gets kicked into a pool of radioactive water and the other characters are just like "whatever, he'll be fine." The joke is that he's such a big tough armored poner that they don't even need to worry about him. This gag would work if kkat had clearly established how much punishment this guy can actually take; as it stands we have no idea which dangers we should take seriously and which dangers we should laugh off. The fact that none of these characters ever seem to be hurt by anything just makes it even sillier.

>>310543
I would welcome something like that. The author keeps teasing it by putting LP into situations where she can't use her PipBuck for some reason, or she's too tired to use her telekinesis, or she has to take her armor off, or something; however, instead of having her actually rise to the challenge, he just cooks up some silly way to bypass his own restrictions and make it so she can use her PipBuck or her telekinesis or whatever.

>>310576
To be fair, the text doesn't actually use the word "molotov," that's just the term I used to summarize it. Here is what kkat actually wrote:

>I was just leaving when a chariot raced by, drawn by a very familiar-looking pony as two others hurled burning bottles and shouted anti-zebra epitaphs too foul to sully myself repeating. One of the bottles crashed through the window of the jewelry shop, setting it ablaze. Doing what any good pony would have done, I tried to gallop to the shopkeeper’s aid, but she fought me off, tossing a silver tea set at me before fleeing out a back entrance.
He calls them "burning bottles" here.

However, kkat has used a few similarly inappropriate terms that don't fit into the setting. I can't think of any examples right this second because I'm falling asleep, but I know I've pointed a few of them out.

Sometimes you'll casually use a term like this without even thinking about it. It's comparable to accidentally leaving a Starbucks cup or some other anachronism in a shot; you want to keep an eye out for it and be careful, but sometimes it just happens and you don't notice. Correct it during revision and move on.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310601
310602 310607
1e62d0a223c25197bf20007f41bde0c8.gif
>>310570

Page break. Back to Littlepoop.

>Heresy. I had a very dark suspicion of what that meant. And what book had been taken from the zebras’ contraband vault. We were headed into the Canterlot Ruins to get that Book, that very black Book, from Rarity’s secret safe at the behest of the Trixie-Goddess. I did not know what my plans were from that point, but I had made it very clear to myself that getting The Black Book to Maripony was crucial.
She's thinking about this now? The last time we were with LP she was tearing up because of what SteelHooves' told her about Canterlot's fall. She just suddenly shifts gears and starts thinking about the zebra necronomicon? Or is this another random time skip?

This whole chapter is actually a pretty good example of how deeply flawed kkat's entire storytelling method really is. He alternates back and forth between LP's exploration of the city and Midnight Shower's journal entries. The transitions are not smooth, even though kkat makes an admirable effort to connect events in Midnight's time to events in Littlepoop's time.

To his credit, I can actually see what kkat was trying to do here: LP is gradually exploring the ruins of Zebratown with SteelHooves, who used to live here 200 years ago (or was a cop here or something). The narration alternates back and forth between LP's perspective in the present and Midnight Shower's perspective in the past, and the locations in both narratives run more or less parallel to each other. LP explores the ruined bathhouse, and then we get a scene from Midnight in the same location 200 years in the past.

The problem, once again, stems from the author's decision to use first-person narration to tell the story. With a third-person omniscient perspective, he could use this type of structure and there would be no problem; the effect would be similar to switching cameras in a movie. The camera isn't really seen as a person in the story, it's just a portal through which the viewer is able to witness events. So, if a scene taking place in the present suddenly cuts to a scene in the past, or a scene in one location involving one group of characters suddenly cuts to a completely different location and focuses on another group, it's not automatically jarring. However, if the premise of the movie is that a character in the story is walking around with a camcorder, and the movie is just one long, unbroken shot, then it would be very strange to suddenly switch perspectives like this.

The difference between first and third person narration in a story is the same. If the author wants to alternate his scenes back and forth between the present and the past and change the viewpoint to different characters, in a third-person narration he is free to do so. However, in a first person narration, everything is seen through the eye of the narrator; thus, if you want to include scenes from the past like this, you have to frame it somehow. Kkat has chosen to use journals and memory orbs and so forth as his framing method; LP walks around, picks up journal fragments, and when she reads them we are allowed to "see" what happened in the past. However, it can be troublesome trying to work these fragments into the story's chronology. We've seen this problem many times before, and it's particularly apparent here.

When exactly is LP reading these journal fragments? What is going on here exactly? Are we supposed to believe that LP is reading entries of some dead pony's journal in between fights with zombies and narrow escapes from flooded sewer tunnels? Or is this similar to the radio broadcasts earlier, where she presumably heard them later on, but in her retelling places them at the time they would have actually occurred?

This story has a lot of problems, but I think the two most significant are the size and scope of the idea the author tries to execute, and his choice to use first-person perspective in order to do it.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic again. To answer my earlier rhetorical question, it turns out that this scene is indeed yet another random time skip. We rejoin LP and the gang at some undefined point in the future. They have (somehow) managed to get Calamity and Xenith out from the research laboratory without getting drowned again, and now they are all together in the ruins of some store.

>Thanks to the journal of Midnight Shower, I had gotten the idea that this was the best place to look for the alicorns and their prisoners.
This implies that she is, indeed, reading these journal entries in real time. So basically, to answer another of my rhetorical questions: yes, she actually is walking around reading this stupid journal in between zombie fights. This idea is beyond idiotic. Also, would you really need to read a journal from 200 years ago to figure out that a police station, which would logically contain a jail, might be a good place to look for prisoners?

Anyway, she scouts out the police station with her binoculars, and it looks like this is indeed the place where the zebra hostages are being held. So, let's just hurry up and get this bullshit over with.

Page break. Midnight Shower, Day 28:

It sounds like she's still trying to find some shop that sells ancient zebra masks, because she thinks the guy who runs it would know something about zebra folklore, but the location is elusive. It seems to be one of those black-market type shops. She chances upon a young zebra in the middle of a drug deal, and uses this as leverage to get the shop's location from him. He also tells her another snippet of information that we already know, but presumably she doesn't: the zebras believe that Princess Luna is evil and her actions are driven by "the stars."

Meanwhile, it turns out that the pony whom SteelHooves shot in the leg in the last chapter went into "dash withdrawal" and died, or something, and the tension between the zebras and ponies seems to be on the rise.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310602
310609
mememe_883e444ffbe2b908a244567a537e7339-1.jpg
>>310601

Honestly, this whole Midnight Shower story is starting to go off the rails.

As far as I can tell, the idea is that the zebras were all corralled into some kind of Warsaw-ghetto-style location, which makes sense enough. A group of slightly more open-minded ponies decided to move into the same ghetto alongside the zebras in order to show solidarity, or something. Makes slightly less sense, but okay. There is a great deal of black market trade going on in the ghetto, and drug use becomes rampant; social problems ensue. This causes friction between the pony police force and the zebra population. Again, still more or less making sense so far.

However, from here it begins to get strange. For some unknown reason, the ponies who chose to live in Zebratown explicitly to show how open-minded and not-bigoted they were are suddenly behaving like angry bigots. There is all sorts of vandalism and anti-zebra graffiti, and ponies attacking zebras and so forth. This doesn't really make sense; if the ponies suddenly got redpilled on the ZQ and decided that life in Zebratown was too real for them, it stands to reason they would just quietly leave. I haven't come across anything to indicate that the ponies are being compelled to stay here against their will; what do they stand to gain by picking fights with the zebras they came here to support? This is illogical behavior even by far-left standards.

Here's an example:

>And on that topic, I passed Sergeant SteelHooves on my way to the markets. The stallion was busily scrubbing down his combat armor. Some pony had vandalized it most egregiously by painting stripes on the protective plates and scrawling “Zebra Lover” on one of the boots.
Who would do something like this, and why? First of all, as I understand it, there is supposed to be tension between the police and the zebras, not between the police and the ponies. Second, for the reasons I've stated above, the tension between the zebras and ponies in this city don't make any sense to begin with. If they were forced into proximity with each other that would be one thing, but the ponies moved here voluntarily and can leave at any time. Also: when and how would someone be able to vandalize SteelHooves' armor, anyway? Did they just sneak up and spray-tag him when he wasn't looking, or...what?

Here's another thing that doesn't make a ton of sense. LP is conversing with a zebra foal:

>In an attempt to engender camaraderie, I suggested that if he really wished to rebel against the foolishness of his elders, he could always get a star-shaped tattoo. To my surprise, he grew upset. His words, minus the unnecessary and rather crude epitets, amounted to “I mock their old religion because I am smarter than they are, not because I am stupid.”
The implication seems to be that there is some kind of generation gap between the old zebras, who adhere to the old zebra traditions, and the foals, who are more...uh..."Equestrianized," I guess. There seems to be an implication that religion is one of the points of contention: the young don't believe in the zebra religion as strongly as the old do. However, at the same time, it seems that all the zebras, young and old, have the same weird paranoia about stars. The basis of this paranoia, and even the basic tenets of the zebra religion, still haven't really been explained, and it's not at all clear what aspects of it the zebra youth are supposed to be rebelling against.

As with the pony religion, and the Steel Rangers' ideology, and Red Eye's supposedly hearing the voice of the Goddess, this zebra-space-religion angle could have been quite interesting, if kkat had given us enough information about what the religion's actual beliefs are, and on which points the factions divide. As it stands, this is all just convoluted and confusing.

Anyway, the rest of this is just more half-baked rambling. Midnight and SteelHooves converse for awhile; Midnight proclaims that she is an open-minded and egalitarian pony, and she thinks the zebras deserve equal treatment. SteelHooves, who I guess is supposed to be among the few cops who are sympathetic to the zebras, or at least is willing to treat them fairly, tells her he's had enough and has requested a transfer. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop again.

>I stopped reading, my ears perking at the sound of exploding missiles at least two blocks away.
Yep. The little sperg is literally reading these goddamn journal entries as she's exploring a ruined city crawling with alicorns, and flooded with radioactive pink stuff.

>I whispered a quick prayer for SteelHooves. Surely, the Mighty Alicorn Hunter wouldn’t have difficulty taking down one alicorn… I hoped.
Seriously, where did all this "mighty alicorn hunter" stuff come from? I remember him fighting alicorns at several points in the story, but I don't get the impression he's any more talented at killing them then the rest of them are. Who gave him this nickname, and when?

>SteelHooves was the most resilient ghoul-pony-creature-thing in the entire damned Equestrian Wasteland. I should have more faith in my friends. But… still, I worried for their safety any time a plan called for anyone other than me to be the one taking risks alone.
This goes back to what we were discussing earlier. It's never clear which dangerous situations are actually dangerous and which ones can be laughed off. Moreover, LP's sentiment here does not seem genuine. Where was all this worry and compassion for SteelHooves when he fell off the airship during battle and was missing for the better part of a day?

Anyway, it's not quite clear what exactly the plan is, but I guess the basic idea is that SteelHooves is going to kill the alicorn guard while the rest of them sneak in one of the side entrances. Meanwhile, LP takes this completely inopportune moment to make some snarky assessments of Midnight Shower's character, again based on her own vaguely-defined moral calculus.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310607
>>310601
I bet the perspective switching would seem less asinine if LP was given a canonical reason to canonically listen to audio logs between each combat session. Like if she was told this audio log contained a password for something important. Or secrets vital to understanding how to solve this settlement's problems correctly. Or if Midnight Shower survived as a ghoul and she demanded LP read her life's story so LP won't judge the ghoul too harshly when LP finds out what the ghoul did. That would be a nice callback to chapter 1's "If I am going to tell you what I did you need to understand everything" bullshit. Or if Midnight Shadow died but was confirmed to be the last holder of the Ziggernomicon before the war and LP hoped to find some hints regarding where Midnight Manshowers hid the damn book. Hell, Kkat could take the absurdity of reading an audiobook in the middle of a warzone and admit it, making LP get ambushed during a chapter on Golden Shower's sex life or inconsequential ranting about her neighbours. Or as ponies would call them, neiiiiigh-bours.

Arbu would probably be less asinine if the author made it less edgy and more of a twist like the big twist in SpecOps. Littlepip goes in and sees a cannibal cult and a tied up gagged little boy colt. Why a boy? She already saved a little girl in this story. The tribe chants some foreignese nonsense and cuts the boy's wrist to weep tears of blood into a big burning bonfire and the crowd cheers louder as a corpse is brought closer to the fire. She runs in to save him, blasting enemies and taking the child. The high priest officiating this ceremony gets kicked into the big bonfire. They don't speak english, just tribal niggledegook, and they see a foreign (to them) mare trying to kidnap their son. She slaughters all the "baddies" and during the battle the entire town is set ablaze, burning ponies die in their homes or run out in the streets to collapse and scream and die or get mercy killed by LP. Finally LP "saves" the little boy and the boy is furious at her for slaughtering his friends and family and everyone who tried to save him from Littlepip. She burned his village down and he is furious. She completely misread the situation, he was bound and gagged because that was part of their tribe's traditional "take a bite of well-cooked human flesh and recite your tribal vows to become a man in the eyes of the tribe" chant. This kid is the only one who knows ponenglish because he once dated a travelling doctor's daughter before a terminal genetic illness took the daughter and the doctor moved on. But because of the miscommunication inherent in these idiot tribals not speaking properly, LP slaughtered them because she thought they were going to sacrifice this boy to the great god Mickey Mouse or something equally stupid and backwards post-apocalyptic tribals might do. Now instead of arbitrarily declaring everypony in Arbu a "bad" town and deciding she's a "bad pony" for helping it and trying to "balance things out" by SLAUGHTERING THEM LIKE ANIMALS, NOT JUST THE MEN BUT THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN TOO in cold cruel blood, now she can get a slightly less asinine and edgy moment of "oh... oh fuck. I wanted to play the hero just like in my Japanese Animes, but it seems I have ani-made a mistake".

Kkat is a faggot for not announcing time skips seamlessly with a few lines that explain what happened during the time skip. Tons of authors know to explain what happened offscreen whenever time is skipped. Insert King Crimson reference here.

>steelhooves did his job regarding a criminal that died from an overdose of an iegal drug he chose to take, harming race relations between civilized and uncivilized
Did Kkat predict Fentanyl Floyd the Banana Thief almost ten years ahead of schedule? This is weirder than seeing President Trump in decades-old Simpsons episodes and 9/11 references 20 years ahead of schedule in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310609
310612 310617 310622
1606375064548.jpg
>>310602

>There were faint hints of pink in the room beyond. The effects were minimal, making me feel vaguely sick rather than the swift and cloying death that the concentrated pink we had experienced in the bath house.
Seriously, is this pink shit supposed to be dangerous or not? They were splashing around in it earlier, and LP nearly drowned in it, yet she didn't seem to suffer from any of its effects. Before that, she walked into a cloud of it and her organs all supposedly started failing, for all the harm that actually did to her. Before that, we were told by SteelHooves that this stuff was in the very air here, and that they all needed to take their armor off and float it around if they didn't want it to fuse with their bodies. So far, those stupid magic radios that make your eyeballs bleed seem to be more dangerous than the "pink cloud" that destroyed Canterlot, and even the radios seem pretty easy to deal with. As usual, the "danger" in this story seems to fluctuate based on whatever kkat wants for a given scene.

As an aside, I used my old friend Ctrl-F to search for "alicorn hunter," and the phrase appears exactly seven times in the entire 620,295 words of the text. It shows up twice in Chapter 7, when SteelHooves was first introduced. One of the alicorns from the initial fight calls him "alicorn hunter," and the name is repeated by LP a short time later. It does not appear again until Chapter 20, where it is mentioned exactly once, in passing, in a conversation between LP and Homage. After that, it doesn't come up until the chapter we're currently reading, when Calamity comes out of the blue and says "So, are ya with us, Alicorn Hunter?" We've already encountered the two mentions of the phrase in this chapter; from here, it will appear once in Chapter 37 and once in Chapter 44.

So, though it appears that SteelHooves has been technically called by this name a couple of times, there's been little to no mention of him being known far and wide as an alicorn hunter; certainly it hasn't been brought up often enough to become an affectionate nickname for him.

Anyway, SteelHooves goes off to be the "mighty alicorn hunter," while the rest of the crew sneaks into the back of the police station. There's a bit more of the usual bullshit: LP uses her stupid, stupid telekinesis magic to levitate herself over some traps the alicorns set for them. It's curious they would even bother, since with their hivemind communication they should be perfectly aware of all the silly stunts LP is capable of by now.

LP overhears some alicorns talking in the next room, and sneaks up to eavesdrop on them. Something about their conversation strikes her as strange, but it's not clear what exactly:

>“We have enough striped ponies, right?” one of them said. “We have…” she beat her hoof on the floor eight times. “That many.”
>“No, we have this many,” another said, hoof-tapping seven times. “The scrawny one died when they went through the pink below, remember?”
The only thing strange about this is that for some reason alicorns don't seem to have a concept of numbers, yet are somehow able to count. Also strange is that kkat thought this was an important enough detail to bring to our attention. Anyway, I give this many fucks: *stamps hoof 0 times*. Moving on.

The alicorns chat back and forth with each other. It appears that they don't like being in Zebratown; they seem to be regaining fragments of their old memories, prior to joining the Unity or whatever it's called. From this, Littlepoop deduces that the pink cloud must be screwing with Trixie's mind control spell. So, not only have the negative effects of the pink cloud that we were warned about suddenly and mysteriously vanished, but it now is having a hitherto unforeseen effect on the alicorns that actually helps LP and her friends defeat them. For some reason, Trixie, who has about 200 some-odd years of experience on Littlepoop, was either unaware of this, or sent her alicorns to this specific location knowing full well that she would be at a strong disadvantage here, in order to guard a group of imprisoned zebras that she could have held literally anywhere. As the poet once said, "my brain is full of fuck."

Anyway, LP decides that this is probably the reason that Trixie wanted her to go into Canterlot to retrieve the zebra book instead of sending her own alicorn minions in there. However, a moment later, she drops this bomb on us:

>Then the other hoof fell. The Canterlot Ruins were supposed to be full of alicorns. And those alicorns didn’t know we were supposed to be friendlies. We were all sorts of fucked.
I have several questions here:

1. Why, exactly, are the Canterlot Ruins supposed to be full of alicorns? I mean, it stands to reason that they would be full of something nasty, but why alicorns specifically? There's no obvious reason and I don't recall it being mentioned.

2. If Trixie wants to avoid sending her alicorns to Canterlot specifically because they might break free of her mind control and turn against her (or at least I'm assuming that's what the implication is), then why would Canterlot be full of alicorns? Seems like Trixie would just have her alicorns steer clear of the place.

3. How does the pink cloud's effect on Trixie's mind control spell determine whether or not the alicorns would be friendly? They aren't going to see LP as friendly one way or the other, so how does this revelation change anything? I see absolutely no reason why this information should have any effect on what LP needs to do in Canterlot.

Anyway, LP decides not to fight the alicorns because there are too many of them or something, and she motions everyone back the way they came.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310612
310616
>>310609
I guess what's happening is that Trixie sent her alicorns to look for the book in the past, but the pink cloud cut them off from the hive mind and/or made them retarded, which is why she wants LP and co to get the book for her instead. The alicorns they're running into are essentially rogue.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310616
310618
>>310612
Actually, if I remember correctly the conversation that LP overhears is lifted almost verbatim from an incidental conversation you can hear between two super mutants in Fallout 3, where the muties are flanderized into essentially being dumb orange orcs. So yeah - the implication here is that the alicorns in Canterlot have been pretty much lobotomized by the cloud, which reduces them from "incompetent generic evil" to "stupid generic evil" even by the standards of this story,
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310617
310621 310905
1623721412128.gif
>>310609

Page break. Midnight Shower's Diary, Day 29:

Midnight finally locates the zebra mask store and speaks with the proprietor. She pretends to be interested in zebra legends on account of her cutie mark, which you may or may not remember depicts thousands upon thousands of zebra dicks ramming into kkat's gaping taint wound.

What she learns is disappointing: though Midnight assures us she heard some interesting tales, we don't get to hear any of them, and the author doesn't give us much more than what we already more or less know. The zebras believe that the stars are the visible avatars of creatures of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror and blah blah blah. We get no names of entities and no details.

We are given a vague story about how one of their major cities was destroyed by falling meteors roughly 1000 years ago. Presumably, this is the origin of their beliefs that the stars are evil, but as of yet it's unclear whether or not the idea of evil magic coming from space is something we're supposed to actually take seriously, or if it's just some bullshit the zebras dreamed up to explain a natural disaster.

Anyway, Midnight leaves the shop, and while she's out wandering around another of those goofy pedal-powered helicopter things lands, carrying Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy and a few servants. Fluttershy heads for the hospital, while Pinkie goes into a nearby house, followed by a bunch of servants carrying her suitcases. They are in there for awhile, then the servants leave and start knocking on the doors of other houses. Shortly afterward, Ms. Pinkamena herself emerges, buries something at the gate, disguises herself as a trash can (wearing a fake beard), and waits.

After a time, Flutters emerges from the hospital and goes up to the house that Ponk was just in. Behind her is a family of zebras; their daughter appears to be the girl who was burned in the molotov cocktail attack earlier. The zebra foal steps on the thing that Pinkie buried, and it turns out to be a mine, which explodes. However, it's not the bad kind of mine; it's the confetti kind of mine. It explodes and releases confetti everywhere. Turns out the whole thing was a surprise party and not murder after all. Then, a big party happens and all the zebras join in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI1cuht8jh0

This party was likely either a gesture of goodwill or a publicity stunt by the Ministry Mares meant to lighten the tensions between the zebras and ponies. I assume that word of the molotov attack reached them, and Flutters and Pinkie decided to team up and throw a party for the little burned-up zebra filly. The scene itself is actually rather cute, and it's mildly clever in that it sets you up to think that Pinkie is going to do something horrible, but instead we just see her behaving like the party-pony we all know and love. It's a wry jab at the story's premise: Pinkie's behavior here is out-of-character for this story, but ironically is in-character for the canon Pinkie. However, it does have the unfortunate side-effect of highlighting how bizarre this premise is to begin with.

All in all I don't entirely disapprove of this scene; kkat actually manages to poke fun at himself and make a subtle joke without being too much of a faggot about it. He only sucked about 1.5 dicks here. Not bad.

Page break. Any positive effect the previous scene might have had on my overall opinion of FoE, however, is immediately diminished when we are returned to Littlepoop's narration. She apparently read the previous journal entry sometime between sneaking past an entire herd of alicorns and cracking the Police Station's vault, which is what she is doing when the scene opens. As usual, she seems to have completely lost track of why the fuck she even came here in the first place; either that, or the matter of a bunch of imprisoned, emaciated and cloud-poisoned zebras is not so troubling that she can't be distracted by the prospect of whatever is in this dumb safe.

Showing just how much concern she has for the imprisoned zebras, the rescue of whom was ostensibly important enough to divert her from her main objective (whatever that is supposed to be at this point), she laser-focuses her thoughts on the most important and pressing problems at hand:

>I found myself thinking of the party trap on the roof of the G.R.H.A.S. building, wondering what sort of party she might have been setting up. A “welcome back, sorry the alligators bit your leg” party for one of the hatchery’s staff, perhaps? Or merely a birthday party for somepony working there? Or maybe just a birthday party for one of the alligators? I shook my head. No, I couldn’t imagine even Pinkie Pie throwing a party for an alligator. That would just be silly.
O captain, my captain! To the ends of Equestria I would follow this great leader!

Anyway, she gets the stupid safe open and finds a bunch of weapons inside. The conclusions the group draws from this are a little bizarre:

>“Whoa! Nelly!” Calamity whispered. I could only nod. I was pretty sure the zebras were never supposed to have this kind of armament. If the ponies of Canterlot had ever had any idea that the striped Equestrian citizens just beneath them were stockpiling something like this…
I thought this was the police station? Wouldn't the weapons therefore belong to the pony police ponice? and not the zebra detainees? Or did the zebras have their own police force? Literally everything about this story is hard to follow.

>“They was fixin’ t’ fend off an invasion,” Calamity said softly.
>Xenith nodded. “Most likely, they feared the ponies of Canterlot would eventually come for them.”
I...guess?

Anyway, LP also finds a goddamn balefire-egg-bazooka in here. She takes this, runs back to where the alicorns are, says "gotcha" durr hurr hurr just like the alicorn said to her earlier :DDDDD and blows them all up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyH6vOMYSnY
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
8a1d470
?
No.310618
>>310616
This actually creates a bit of a continuity error. Earlier, the alicorns rigged up a trap for LP by using their shields to hold back the sewer water, so they could release it and teleport away as soon as she turned the corner. This is probably the most clever thing I've ever seen them do; I even commented on it at the time. If the whole idea is that the cloud makes them stupid, should they have been able to think of this?
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310621
>>310617
If the Alicorns can teleport, shouldn't they teleport away from LP once they realize she's packing a ponified Fat Man(TM) Shoulder-Mounted Mini-Nuke Launcher?

also the author's a faggot for poorly explaining the police station having all those weapons but I think we're supposed to think "Wow, the cops took a lot of weapons away from the Zebras. I think they were stockpiling hidden black-market weapons and afraid Canterlot ponies might come for them!"

Which is retarded. The Zebras are in a concentration camp, mostly. Zebras shouldn't be able to have a black market for drugs and weapons! Unless we're supposed to assume Unicorns or magic Zebras with portal/teleportation magic are able to bypass any methods the Ponies use to keep contraband out of the area. Then again knowing Kkat the ponies probably forgot to actually do anything to keep contraband out of the area.

It's a fucking camp! Sure, ponies can choose to live there. But it's not like exposure to Ziggers inherently turns ponies so violent and mean that they wouldn't be welcome back in polite Equestrian society, right? It's not like the ponies who chose to live here ended up seeing something or learning something that made the Equestrian government want them here forever, right? It's not like Zebratown was once a pony town and the locals were never asked if they wanted to become multicultural and diverse yet still want their homes back, right? It's not like the ponies who chose to live here ended up permanently branded as race traitors or suspected Zebra collaborators, right? It makes no sense that ponies sick of Zebras wouldn't just move away and keep on moving away until there are no ziggerless places to flee to. Unless we're supposed to assume cops here allow attacks on zebras, which attracts racists who want to torment and kill them for fun/because they lost friends and family and job opportunities to ziggers. But something that shocking would stick out to Midnight Manshowers and she'd bitch about it in her journal. There are so many intriguing possibilities for stories and satire here but Kkat just uses this to try and make this boring little town seem more exciting and historically relevant than it is.
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.310622
310629 310630 310633 310647
>>310307
The problem is this: (You) never change. Go back to plebbit where you belong, but this time? Stay there.

>>310310
Pissing on Niggel's retarded pandering, obviously.

>>310514
>>310569
These two particular scenes show exactly how Littleshit is a legitimate sociopath Mare-y Snoot. She can make a thousand mistakes !!BuT hEr FrIeNdS aLwAyS sAvE tHe DaY!! at the most convenient point, thus keeping the entire story a stagnant mess of self-inserted rinse and repeat power fantasies. This ensures Littlecunt never has to 'grow' as a character. This already insane rambling self-insert slashfic has another detail that I've noticed: every single character is a 2D cutout whom do not matter to the story.

>>310609
>As usual, the "danger" in this story seems to fluctuate based on whatever kkat wants for a given scene.
Funny since there's an actual term for that problem, it's called: "The Enterprise Effect". During the original Star Trek, the Enterprise suffered from such varying damage throughout the series that one madlad meticulously compiled every single incident. If I remember right he also did the same for the movies as well. After the last Star Trek movie, he'd amassed a fuckload of Enterprise models, then began carefully replicating all the damage shown. What that ended up showing was this: the original Enterprise vessels had been fully rebuilt a minimum of 15 times each. It would've made more sense to simply construct a new one after every catastrophe, or to build extras JUST IN CASE!
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310629
310677
>>310622
You're saying some rather obvious things that have already been said when it comes to the story. And when it comes to me, you're misusing words again. "pissing on my retarded pandering"? What is that even supposed to mean? Who am I supposedly pandering to, and how does making an ass of yourself "piss on that" in particular?
Anonymous
8141f65
?
No.310630
310677
>>310622
I'm not sure you know what the word "pandering" means. There's plenty of words I'd use to describe Nigel's posts, but I don't think I've ever seen him pander.
Anonymous
7b6e8d7
?
No.310633
310647 310677
>>310622
Pandering to who?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310647
310677
>>310633
What you technically mean to say here is "pandering to whom?" :^)

>>310622
>This already insane rambling self-insert slashfic has another detail that I've noticed: every single character is a 2D cutout whom do not matter to the story.
However, in this case, "who" would be correct.
Anonymous
0681d3b
?
No.310677
310680 310681 310691
>>310629
Fuck off jewboomer.

>>310630
No? You haven't read enough of Niggel's dogshit. See his previous sperging out woe-is-me-I'm-always-the-victim-here posts in this thread and the previous 2.

>>310633
Niggel absolotely loves playing the victim card by asking "innocent" questions that are intended to invoke a sense of mass appeal of self-righteous umbrage that 'protect' against his 'enemies'. In short, he's calling on a defense from anonymity to anonymous posters against his NAMELESS SHADOWY DETRACTORS. It's a fucking skeleton of an abomination joke at this point.

>>310647
I stated 'whom' since these characters were written as if they were supposed to be individuals with their own goals suppsedly, agendas supposedly, motivations supposedly, emotions/moods suspiciously, and biases supposedly... even though they're nothing more than handwaved post-writes in the final draft.

Should ANYONE attempt to write these characters out as a human equivalent, they would be executed in the first week of their 'adventures'. This shit has gone from self-insert power fantasy to a "MY DONUT STEEL OC'S NEVER EVER GET HURT (UNLESS THE PLOT REALLY DEMANDS IT!!!)" level of nonsense.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310680
311229
>>310677
Dear faggot I suspect is hclegend (again)

Insisting something is the truth over and over doesn't make it the truth. I don't care what people think of me as a person even though you love personal attacks and calls to abandon discussions, and I see valid criticism of my writing as an opportunity to improve my skills as a writer. When people criticized my overly long posts and off-topic overexplaining habit did I call them whiny niggers or did I admit my faults and begin the slow process of working on that problem of mine?

Trusting your eyes and ears instead of this clown's mouth is enlightening.

Tiresome faggot, do you think that if you keep begging people to not talk to me people will start to see everything your way by default? I don't need to accuse you of being a shadowy legion of detractors, as you have the most recognizable posting style on this board no matter what flag you post with. You're that likely-underaged faggot who tries to sound mature on this site by "spicing up" his overly hostile speech with as many negative buzzwords and negative descriptors in general as possible. Christians aren't just Christians in your eyes, they're "cuckstains" and "jews" who """whoreship""" a "dead jew" or whatever you babbled out last time you sperged out in a religious discussion. When you convince people a conversation with you isn't worth the hassle, you feel like you win. But talking to you isn't really worth the hassle because you can't grow or change. You will always talk like this. You will never fuck off and take "your shadow of an abomination joke" with you unless you feel like you have to shut up for a while and find some other thread to pull this shit in.

Do you actually have tourettes? It's like you're on drugs or something. What do you think "even though they're nothing more than handwaved post-writes in the final draft" even means? Are you just saying writing-related words at random in the hopes that someone assumes you're a credible authority on writing? You're just repeating obvious shit others pointed out long ago. Did you just skim this thread for things to repeat after seeing my flag pissed you off?

Fallout Equestria likes to start its chapters with a random quote from MLP or a ponified version of a quote from a Fallout game without context or apparent relevance. Whether the quotes speak of drugs like Dash and Psycho or one unknown character's opinion of another unknown character, the quotes have no reason to feature in this story besides that they serve as a gimmicky bronybait/falloutfagbait reference. Here's a Fallout quote that seems fitting for the situation at hand.

[Medicine 45] Unwarranted hostility and general agitation. How long have you been a Psycho addict?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310681
310688 311229
>>310677
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/who-vs-whom-its-not-as-complicated-as-you-might-think/
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.310688
>>310681
It's a nice quick check resource there.
Ends in m stays that way.
He did what to him?
Who did what to whom?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/who-vs-whom-grammar-usage

https://www.writingforward.com/grammar/grammar-rules/who-vs-whom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPqMLKXoEac
Anonymous
86e921b
?
No.310691
310711 311229
>>310677
Why the fuck do you even care about "Nigel"? He barely posts anywhere but this thread, and the British flag posts outside here aren't that bad either? It's not like he's being disruptive.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310711
>>310691
I'm all he has. Aside from low quality Hyperdimension Neptunia fanfics I'm all he's got to hold on to. I don't like him and I wish he'd get a life, but he's decided he wants to be like one of those rival characters in shonens who never improves and is nothing outside of his one-sided rival relationship with his designated rival. If he didn't randomly pop out of nowhere now and then to REEEEEE at me and desperately hope other retards join in, then shut up and fuck off if nobody buys his bullshit, and then try again some time later, he wouldn't really be hclegend. This faggot desperately wants me to care about him and his opinion of me, even though his opinions are as worthless as he is. Intelligent people don't need to "spice up" their "prose" with pseudointellectual deep-sounding bullshit or an overreliance on negative descriptors. Intelligent people can make structurally sound and reasonable arguments for what they believe. Permanent redditors like hclegend can only repeat themselves while using underhanded lefty tactics and hoping for the best. Yes, I once used reddit to advertise my shit youtube channel years ago and my reddit account was banned for being "too right-wing" back during my trump-fanboy days. His reddit account was never banned from reddit because they can tell he belongs on reddit.

But at the same time, there is hope. For a while he'd interrupt intelligent political discussions and news cycles to blabber on about how "we are in the bad cycle" and "reality comes and goes in cycles" and "reality has good and bad cycles" and "if we know we are in a bad cycle we can guess when the next good cycle will be". When people asked what the fuck he was talking about and why he bothered posting unintelligent unhelpful bollocks about upward cycles in response to news about whites getting raped or random chimp events or wikileaks exposing DNC corruption, he tried very hard to sound smarter than he is. You know the deal, desperately trying to make himself sound deep and wise, some real Chuunibyou bullshit... only instead of coming from an actual underaged child whose perception of cool and mature was shaped by edgy animes it comes from one pathetic manchild who can't let go of personal grudges or contribute anything of value to a site he wants to dominate.

When enough people on this site called hclegend out on how annoying and pointless and worthless and disruptive his self-aggrandizing self-gratifying "cycleposting" was, he stopped doing it because he got the sense that if he kept doing it he'd lose credibility. And he cares deeply about his image and how he is perceived, he cares deeply about trying to give himself the illusion of maturity and credibility, even though his posts and "arguments" are not credible in the slightest, because who would ever take hclegend seriously if they realized what a faggot he is? How could hclegend have fun on this site disrupting discussions to make things all about himself if he pissed away all of his credibility? It would be great if he recognized how pointless and self-defeating his "reeee fuck nigel"posting really is. It's been multiple years since he started being mad and he's remained permanently butthurt since. He just can't handle the fact that I've grown since then and he hasn't. He is needlessly disruptive to every thread's topic when he tries to make threads all about himself, his views, and his precious little feelings.

Despite all his talk of cycles, he's been on a downward spiral mentally and now he's lost it completely.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310742
>>304714
I thought about how in The Matrix, the author likes to save the exposition and release it after the audience has spent some time wanting the answers.

There are scenes where Neo is confused, questions are raised in the audience's minds verbally or visually, and that's before questions like "What's with the head plug?" and "where is his head plug?" and "What's the crap they're eating?" and "What are those pills?" and "What is The Matrix?" get answered.

Neo doesn't start the film with "If I'm going to tell you who I am and why I flew off at the end of this movie, first I need to tell you a little bit about The Matrix and how I had kung fu downloaded into me".

This writing problem keeps popping up in Kkat's work. Memory orbs (or Lore Orbs, or Lorbs for short) and computer terminal diaries and audio logs and exposition dumps from designated "worldly" characters like Steelhooves/Calamity/Xenith aren't used to answer questions and fill gaps in holes the story smartly gives us at correct times. The story overexplains everything while dumping exposition on us at random. He wants you to know this shooty gallery environment used to be an office because it was that way in Fallout, this rock-breaking prison was managed by Diamond Tiara, and there are a lot of guns in this police safe because they were taken from criminals 200 years ago. But this kind of additional information is like a spice to spice up the relevant information in a story, make it feel fleshed-out and connected to cause and effect. And in this story's case, to the pre-war world. But the information we're given about the pre-war world isn't always relevant or necessary in a thematic way, and the overabundance of thematically and logically irrelevant crap exposition isn't part of some greater point a smarter author would make here about the futility of trying to piece together a moral lesson you can apply to the present day from the post-apocalyptic ruins of a civilization that died believing what you're trying to learn from it.
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.310745
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYtrV1lChsA

Writing has similarities to these motion of animation. I haven't quite nailed down the specifics. However large scale of multiple plot threads does has it. Even in calm times things are moving. that said there has to be a time for rest as well.
Even character beats.
Kkat most notably for me lacks follow through, a motion that follows the main motion. His story then lacks properly applied weight and inertia. Plot points drag the cuts move the plot faster and slower with no reguard for the previous dynamics. The points that would have tied the mini scenes together are missing.
What does have weight and inertia are seemingly nonsensical (virtue signaling), extreme pandering. Whiel pandering is fine so is trying to convey a message, a story must grow the meaning. Or else it is dust in the wind, an irritant to the eyes at the very least.

The reason why many like the work is that the story follows familiar story beats already experienced. Their mind fills in with what the audience has experienced. The suspension of disbelief is already far gone. They arn't being Littlepip, they usurp the position of the main character and Littlepip is just an unruly player character at times. Almost seemingly given agency againt the shackles of the feels and memories.
To have a character would get in the way of that, if any of them were more than stock stereotypes the memories and reexpressing old emotions and memories couldn't happen.
The other part is the band wagon effect, and then doubling down repeatedly.

Granted there are times when accidentally truth is set unknowingly by kkat on real issues and conflicts.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310758
310871
Isn't it funny that this story places such a high value on "finding your virtue", aka figuring out which of six nice-sounding words you can use to label your default behaviours and actions and reactions to the world without having to go out of your way to think too hard on what virtues are most important and which ones you should strive to emulate?

It's not that the ponies need to re-learn all the virtues. It's that LP needs to decide which one she inherently is.

She's killed so many ponies according to her own sense of morality, and the elements of harmony spit in her face by calling her unspecial. Imperfect. Not the embodiment of any one virtue or a champion of them all.

And yet she is certain that she needs one particular redeeming quality.

Does she seek to act more honest, loyal, and kind? No, she continues her murderhobo for hire adventures while occasionally paying lip service to these ideals and calling herself a little bitch full of corrupted kindness whenever she "slips up". As if we're supposed to judge her cruelty and boner for violence less because she believes she has good intentions.

This horse loves violence. Adores it. It is the first thing she thinks of, the great problem-solver. Talking things out? A fool's game. Speech is for avoiding those rare fights you can't win or talking others into taking action for you. Bartering skills? They aren't for life and death negotiations, they're for getting better prices when trading in the literal sense with travelling traders. This mare never hesitates to choose violence even when she should know she doesn't have all the answers. Even when the cost is lives.

Has LP once stopped to think which virtues this world needs more of? What good is loyalty when it's loyalty to an evil tribe, ideology, or faction? Is honesty a virtue when circumstances place you in a situation where to tell the truth would be needlessly cruel and a lie would solve more problems? Littlepip has proven herself to believe that showing any kindness to designated Bad Ponies like cannibals makes you a Bad Pony, but she seeks to redeem herself through her own personal element of disharmony: violence.

Violence is a fact of life for the ponies of the Edgequestrian Wasteland, just like gravity. Yet the Wasteland near-universally treats her as a paragon of virtue for becoming the best at it and killing "the right" kinds of people. Ponies. Whatever. The point is, she never questions her violence. She whines about the violence of this world as she gleefully partakes in it whenever she believes she can win. If she can kill, or choose stealth, she will kill. How easy would it have been to try getting water talismans from those Steel Toe RangerBrotherhood clowns she murdered by offering something they actually wanted or offering them safe passage to a town where they can take on new identities or even offer to complete some stupid sidequest for them? She could have tried anything besides insisting on a bad trade until they start shooting. Even if the author wanted this to happen this way, LP could have tried to be a good pony in that scenario. But she didn't, because she believed she was already the best thing anypony in the edgequestrian wasteland could possibly be: A (self) righteous murderer for hire.

LP learns no moral lessons from the mane six despite their frequent cameo appearances for the sole purposes of bronybait. The story would not be harmed if all pre-war moments were cut entirely. We don't need to know Rarity found the Zigger Negronomicon and was responsible for the creation of Fallout 3 Bobbleheads while Applejack had a boyfriend and was responsible for the creation of Fallout Power Armour. It's purely unnecessary information that bloats the story of Littlebitch's Murderhobo Quest. It's nothing but fanservice that reassures the target audience the OC bullshit they're wading through has some sort of relevance to the characters they are addicted to. A video game can scatter notes through a "prison full of enemies" level to tell people who put the prisoners here and how they escaped. But for a story, this shit isn't relevant to the protagonists and their journey unless this information has a relevant purpose in the story. If Sherlock Holmes and Watson enter a restaurant, we don't need to know the restaurant owner's checkered past and sex life unless they're relevant to the case at hand or intentional red herrings to throw people off. Kkat didn't write the backstories of the prison camp or New and Old Appleoosa or Fillydelphia with irony or thematic relevance/resonance in mind. That's why his sudden attempts at irony in this chapter stick out. LP's nigger moment in Arbu didn't change the character and make her reconsider violence as her first and last resort, it was just there for the sake of drama and angst. It was there for shock value, and to add more words to this steaming pile of diarrhea and infected nuvagina fluids straight from Kkat's retarded orfices.

It speaks to the dishonest moral particularism of the author that all six virtues of the mane six are held in equal regard yet are treated as equal in measure to LP's "virtuous" desire to purge the wasteland of the morally unclean through a neverending bloody path through a shooting gallery full of Mad Max themed cardboard cutouts, and the only time LP questions herself or her divine right to answer violence and moral questions with more violence is when she feels she has used violence incorrectly.

0/10 Not enough water - IGNigger.
Anonymous
548c81c
?
No.310871
>>310758
>>310758
>Isn't it funny that this story places such a high value on "finding your virtue", aka figuring out which of six nice-sounding words you can use to label your default behaviours and actions and reactions to the world without having to go out of your way to think too hard on what virtues are most important and which ones you should strive to emulate?
>
>It's not that the ponies need to re-learn all the virtues. It's that LP needs to decide which one she inherently is.

This is actually an excellent point. Much of the time in literature, virtue and heroism are aspirational - they're specific positive values that the characters and audience can aim for. A common and effective arc in literature is for a character to recognise the value of a specific kind of virtuous behavior and strive to emulate it (successfully or not).

FoE's characters don't have moral arcs as such because they never need - nor even want - to examine their behavior and how it could be improved. Rather, they continue to act as they always do while the author performs mental gymnastics to assign them inherent virtues. Littlepip's moral outlook at this late stage of the story isn't notably different from her outlook at the beginning - she kills the arbitrary bad guys the moment they step out of line, and responds with violent fury whenever anything she considers particularly heinous happens.

What has she learned about how to act virtuously? How has her conduct improved? Who are her moral role models? Rhetorical questions, obviously, but they highlight the conspicuous absense of any such thing. In fact, as we'll see when she finds the fucking book, the mirror scene back in Fillydelphia was actually secretly proof that she was always an inherently good person. For Littlepip, moral growth is explicitly and deliberately unnecessary from the very start.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310890
gaming is a waste of time unless it is skill based.jpg
meanwhile in a smarter story.png
but first we need to talk about parallel universes.png
ironic.jpg
b44.jpg
>>304714
What's the complete tally of unresolved plot points right now, again?

>There's a bomb in Tenpony Tower, she should deal with that at some point

>Red-Eye put it there and LP wants him dead
She almost had a clear shot at him after her asinine "walk into Red Eye's territory wearing nothing but rags and her "iconic" overpowered PipBuck and become his best servant and eventually talk to him and kill him" plan got further than it logically should have and only fell apart because she decided to free a nigger without consent
but to get his trust and get closer to him, first she decided to kill The Goddess (Trixie and her Alicunts) first because he said so
>We don't know if we can trust DJ Cuntmuncher as much as LP does
>The Pegasus Enclave exists and is probably evil since a "good" pony like Calamity doesn't want to be part of it. they were certainly considered "bad" enough for nopony to mind when Spike killed one of them on the spot.
>Littlepip wants to kill the Goddess but first LP's doing a sidequest for her: visit Canterlot and get the Big Black Book Of Overrated Importance

and then she'll probably get around to killing the goddess somehow, and then Red Eye even though his Sad Max: Slaver Road shit's less of a threat than a hive mind of regenerating overpowered mary sues out-sued only by LP, and then probably deal with the Enclave if they're a problem, and then... And then what?

We're OVER NINE THOUSAND words into this story and we still don't have a sense of what the long-term goal is for LP and pals. There are multiple "villainous" factions but they aren't really at each other's throats or part of a delicate balance of power, they're checklist boxes for LP to tick. Checklist boxes for the author to tick, so at the end of the story he can say "Wow, I referenced so many Fallout 1, 2, 3, and NV elements!".

We know what the stakes are if LP loses: Shit remains fucked. But what if LP wins? What is her plan for building a better world, or becoming a moral person? Not that she plans on doing either of those things herself. That all-seeing radio DJ LP serves, the one LP fucked, was getting fucked part of her master plan? Does she feel in control? If Littlepip won, would it be extremely painful (for the baddies)?

Name any movie mocked for having poor pacing. Assuming you read this story with an average rate of words per minute instead of using RapidReader(TM), this fanfic takes more hours to get to its point than that movie. Even "Empire" which is literally just a recording of some building has better pacing than this.

LP and pals should have killed Red-Eye by now, probably. But nope, they're taking on The Goddess and Alicorns first, even though a slave emperor and his slavers with shotguns and rusty 200 year old rifles should be easier to kill than gigantic fucking nuclear hive-minded alicorns and their overpowered magical and psychic boss. It's not like RE's helping the heroes much. And instead of taking on those Alicorns right now they're sidequesting for The Goddess to get a book that's supposedly important. But if it was really important, Kkat could have placed that book inside a safe in Twilight's bedroom in Ponyville to skip a lot of this shitty story without fucking up the balance by saying LP needs to find a zigger to read it, giving LP another reason to want to free a zebra slave. In the theoretical better version of this story where Velvet was captured by slavers and forced to sing for some of them before getting sent to Red Eye's lands, this gave LP a reason to walk into those lands alone and unarmed and hope for the best to free Velvet and any good zigger she meets along the way.

But we're not reading a theoretical better version of this story. We're watching LP waste time. On their road to getting to a hellish city to get the book for an evil boss they plan to kill to impress another weaker evil boss they plan to kill, all for the sake of rich radio DJ who lacks any viable long-term alternative to a world enslaved by a cyborg Earth Pony and his mortal slavers or cunty immortal retarded Alicorns...

What can she and her secret society offer the world? Old swing music? Tenpony Tower supposedly relies on trade yet it still hasn't cleared the surrounding area of Raiders and Bandits. It's basically under permanent siege from bandits with knives and clubs yet does nothing to free itself and secure trade routes with guards and fortifications.

They are currently on a detour from that detour. This story has been a long sequence of irrational arbitrary nonsensical detours and pointless EXP-grinding sidequesting with no end goal in mind. Smart authors relying on this story structure set the goal up early on (Find and kill Dhoulmagus, stop Darth Vader and The Empire, escape and beat Dreadzone) and then place reasonable obstacles in front of the hero to force them to sidequest OR let the hero's compassion and heroism force him to take detours like "help this town suffering from the Dark Lord we should be killing right now" that can pay off later on.

They are wasting time in some zigger town along the way that somehow still exists and hasn't been picked clean by scavengers or greatly transformed in the 200 years since the megaspells and pink cloud fucked shit up. We still basically know very little about the Enclave. We still don't know if we can trust DJ Cuntmuncher as much as LP.

Why is LP exposing herself to Pink Cloud in this town when it could fuck her up with cumulative organ damage, and would do so in a smart story where characters have reason to avoid hazardous and poisonous things?

The only valid reason for her to waste time in this town is that it prepares her for Canterlot by giving her "experience" dealing with similar problems...

LITTLEPIP IS LITERALLY EXP GRINDING RIGHT NOW.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310905
310916 311231
1623917115599.jpg
>>310617

Page break. Midnight "Golden" Shower's Diary, Day 32. This one is only two paragraphs long. Princess Luna has made a royal decree allowing Midnight to interview any prisoner. However, when she goes to interview the prisoner she wants to speak to, she finds the police station closed and locked. The rest of the town appears to have shut down as well, with no apparent explanation. Midnight speculates that it must be some kind of zebra holiday. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop has a dream where she is a zebra, living in the ancient zebra city mentioned in one of Midnight's diary entries. She witnesses the meteor shower from the perspective of a zebra, observing how from that perspective it would indeed appear as if the stars were attacking them. Presumably the purpose of this is to explain the zebras' religious beliefs from an anthropological standpoint. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop wakes up (with a gasp!).

>I looked around at the rubble. Blowing up the three alicorns with a balefire egg was delicious overkill. One of them had even been fast enough to get her damned shield up before I could fire. Didn’t help one damned bit.
So wait a minute; she broke into the police station, blew up a bunch of alicorns with a bazooka, and then took a nap? She's literally sleeping in a room filled with the blood and guts of a bunch of exploded alicorns? Did she do this before or after she sat down to read two paragraphs of Midnight Shower's diary?

>But I had been unprepared for how big the explosion would be. I’d been cautious, aiming for the wall behind the alicorns. That wall was no longer there. Nor was the floor or ceiling. The room that the alicorns had occupied, as well as the rooms to each side, had become a gaping maw open to the rain.
Holy shit. A building suffering actual structural damage as a result of a high-powered explosive being fired off inside of it? In my Fallout Equestria? It's less common then you'd think.

>I looked around. The B.E.L. lay crushed under a chunk of wall.
What the fuck is a B.E.L.? A Big Equestrian Lunch? A Black Ethiopian Lumberjack? A Boner-Enhancing Laser? Kkat and his damned acronyms; fuck.

I skimmed back a couple of subchapters and found that a B.E.L. is apparently a Balefire Egg Launcher, which is the bazooka-thing she used to blow up the alicorns. So, basically, all her comment here means is that the weapon she used to take out the alicorns is no longer serviceable. Damn; guess she'll just have to rely on the other 1,000 ridiculous weapons she has at her disposal.

Anyway, the author gives us no further information on how or why she fell asleep and had a dream about zebras after firing a bazooka at some alicorns. I think the implication is that she was knocked unconscious from the blast, though that still leaves the question of when she was able to read Day 32 of the journal. Calamity and Xenith wander in, each carrying a bag of weapons that they pilfered from somewhere, and the scene ends.

Page break. Goldie Shower again, Day 35. This one is three paragraphs long. Three days later and the town is still shut down. Midnight is beginning to get the distinct impression that the zebras are avoiding her. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Back to LP. It turns out that entering the police station was a waste of time; the prisoners are not inside. However, that does not stop the group from systematically looting everything of value from the vault. When they are finished with this, Littlepoop speculates that the prisoners must be in the other part of the police station, because apparently the building is divided into two sections, one of which can only be accessed through the basement (nice of the author to tell us this).

LP and Xenith have a conversation about their current objective. Turns out that Xenith has ambivalent feelings about rescuing her daughter; she worries that once she has rescued her, she will become "responsible" for her again. You may or may not remember that zebras have some kind of vaguely-defined belief about this: when one zebra rescues another, the rescuer becomes responsible for the rescued, and the rescued in turn becomes subordinate to the rescuer. If you don't remember any of this you couldn't be blamed; it's simply another wacky zebra belief that kkat dumped unceremoniously into the story several chapters ago and then never followed up on.

Anyway, they go down to the basement and find that it is full of Pink Cloud, which I guess is back to being dangerous again. Oh, darn.

Page break. Midnight Diarrhea's Journal, Day who-even-gives-a-fuck-anymore. Turns out Midnight's previous suspicions were correct: the zebras are avoiding her. It seems that word has gotten out that she is carrying a chunk of Nightmare Moon's armor around with her, and so the zebras are avoiding all contact with the "starmetal" and its owner.

She waylays a zebra constable and cajoles her into getting her inside the police station. There is a bit of back and forth with the commissioner (or whoever), but eventually he lets her in. However, it turns out that the prisoner she wanted to interrogate has killed himself in a fit of madness. She demands to see the body, and it turns out that yes, by all appearances, he did kill himself in a fit of madness.

Page break. The party runs through the pink cloud and breaks into some jail cell that I guess is cloud-free.

>The torture melted away, but my E.F.S. was flashing all the worst messages. Without healing potions, we couldn’t go back out. And we only had two left.
Oh darn; probably shouldn't have left all your potions with Velvet.

Two things stand out here. One is that even in a world where magic potions render death a mere inconvenience, LP still manages to fuck things up and place her friends in mortal danger due to poor planning. The other is that despite this, she always manages to evade death due to plot armor.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310916
310921 310922 310946 311231
1624200933328.jpg
>>310905

>Two of us would have to stay behind, trapped in this cell until the others could get back with healing supplies.
This is exactly what I was talking about. Seriously, consider the situation:

LP opens the door to this basement and sees that it is full of Pink Cloud. She has never been inside this basement before, does not know the layout, does not know how much of it is infested with the cloud, does not know if there are enemies or other hazards inside. She doesn't even know for a fact that the zebras she's trying to rescue are inside. So what should our fearless leader do in this situation? Does she:

A) Hold off on the basement for now, and try to locate a few more healing potions (which she should have brought along to begin with), or

B) Charge recklessly in through the cloud, make it to some kind of cloud-free safe point, and then send two of her friends back through the goddamn cloud they just went through to see if they can find a few more healing potions, and then run back through the goddamn cloud again in order to bring the potions to the rest of the group?

If anyone answered A, they clearly have not been paying attention to the story so far.

Anyway, there's a bit of bickering about who should go back for supplies. The consensus decision seems to be that LP and Xenith should go, with Calamity and SteelHooves remaining behind; however, the conversation is cut short when Xenith notices some writing on the wall of the jail cell. Oh yeah, that reminds me: I forgot to mention an important detail from Midnight's last journal entry. Here it is:

>I could see the prisoner. They zebras had not moved him. They had, I am inclined to assume, been unwilling to even open the door, much less share a space with the body of the striped inside. I could not make out the writing on the wall but I immediately knew he had painted the scrawling letters in his own blood. I recoiled as my gaze fell upon him, certain without doubt that the zebra had taking his own life in a fit of insanity.
You can probably guess where this is going. In what I'm sure is pure coincidence, the party just happened to seek shelter in the very same jail cell that was once occupied by the zebra whose suicide LP was just reading about.

Anyway, since it appears that in 200 years, nopony working at the police station ever bothered to scrub the blood off the walls would dried blood even survive that long?, we now get to read the dead zebra's suicide note. It basically reads like something a teenage goth kid would scribble into the margin of his 4th period history textbook, but since I'm sure it will be important later, here is the complete message:

>By the light of Our stars, We illuminate your end,
>And shine on the graves of all zebra kind.
>A hundred thousand Nightmares will descend upon you,
>The armies of Our Dark Child will fill the skies,
>And foes from impenetrable cities will fall upon all your lands,
>Shielded by armor crafted from their very souls.
>Rejoice with Us. For every single one of you shall die.
OooOooOOoOoOOOooOh, SPooOooOOoOoOky....

Here is Littlepoop's take:

>The prophecy was wrong. It was a lie.
>But surely, as much as the zebras loathed anything they associated with the stars, surely a prophecy like this would have gotten back to the zebras’ Caesar and the religious leaders of their land. I’d seen Four Stars. I knew there were zebras loyal to the homeland and ponies loyal to their cause. This would have gotten back…
I have no idea what she's on about here. This "prophecy" is vague, as prophecies usually are, and I'm not sure what her interpretation of it is. As to how any of this connects to the various loyalties of the ponies and zebras, I haven't the foggiest. If someone in the gallery wants to take a crack at this, feel free.

As a side note, I'd like to say that I think it was a regrettable choice to have the zebras address their leader as Caesar. This is another of those oddball words that shouldn't reasonably exist in this setting, sort of like what >>310576 was complaining about. "Caesar" was a Roman cognomen that eventually became a hereditary title associated with the Emperors; it doesn't mean anything on its own and I see absolutely no reason why zebras should address their leader by this title. Also, in keeping with the longstanding fantasy tradition of using mythical tribes as stand-ins for actual human tribes, the zebras in MLP are usually depicted as something like an African or Haitian culture; it makes no sense to give their leader a Roman title. Something generic like "Chief" or "King" or would have made far more sense.

I seem to remember someone mentioning at some point that there is a character named Caesar in one of the Fallout games; my best guess is that this is just another hamfisted reference kkat has wedged unceremoniously into the story.

Anyway, LP jaws on for a few more paragraphs, once again connecting dots that don't appear to connect, and once again does not bother to explain any of her reasoning. The long and short of it seems to be that Equestria was basically winning the war (I think), and to the zebras surrender was the same as death, because something something the stars Nightmare Moon. So, from their point of view, they had no option other than to launch the balefire nukes. Or at least I think that's what this is saying; once again, the last several paragraphs of this subchapter is a mess of convoluted autism and I can't make hide nor hair of any of it.

Page break. Midnight's journal, day whatever. Midnight appears to have given up on trying to get anything out of the zebras, and is leaving town. She is in the process of packing her bags. However, there is a persistent knocking at the door, which she assumes is her escort. The journal trails off mid-sentence, and there are no more entries. I'm sure she made it home just fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlIz0q8aWpA
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310921
310928 311231
1623886174156.png
>>310916

Page break.

>Xenith and I gazed upwards. The entire stairwell on this side of the building had collapsed, taking a fair bit of each floor with it.
As usual, the author has skipped a massive chunk of time without resolving the events of the previous scene, and it's not immediately clear where these characters are or what they are doing. When last we saw them, they were in a jail cell reading a 200 year old prophecy written in blood; now, LP and Xenith are in the collapsed stairwell of some building or other. Based on what was previously discussed, I'm assuming they went back through the cloud to find healing potions while SteelHooves and Calamity remain in the creepy jail cell.

>Three floors up, we could see a jail cell and the young adult zebras trapped inside... barely. The cell was behind a shield being generated by two familiar dark-green alicorns sitting in front of it like guards, unmoving, unblinking.
Oh cool; they found the zebras they were looking for. That was lucky.

Actually, I think I may have misinterpreted what was being discussed in the previous chapter. I think the idea was for LP and Xenith to keep going forward, not back. I guess they are going to rescue the zebras as planned, and will try to bring back healing potions in the event that they managed to find any. This still seems like a dumb plan, and I don't really see why it was necessary for SteelHooves and Calamity to stay behind, especially since the Pink Cloud shouldn't affect SteelHooves anyway. At least I don't think it affects him; it's getting pretty damned hard to keep track of details like that.

Anyway, blah blah blah, it's the usual shit: the zebras are locked up in jail cells, and there are alicorns everywhere guarding them, and blah blah danger blah blah blah. How will our intrepid heroes save the day this time? Does anyone still care enough to find out?

>Well, at least the Pink Cloud hadn’t seeped into this part of the building and become trapped here.
Pink Cloud appears and disappears based on whether or not the author needs to create a minor obstacle, eh? Mighty convenient, that.

>I was still getting nasty medical warnings on my E.F.S., despite having found a couple more healing potions in the constable’s locker room medical box and imbibed one.
The protagonist happens to find some healing potions just when she's in need of one, eh? Mighty convenient, that.

Also, what happened to bringing the healing potions back to SteelHooves and Calamity? Well, it turns out LP and Xenith only found two healing potions, and they each took one. They'll need to find a few more before they can go back.

>I felt slightly bad for not saving it, but by the time the two of us made it out of the basement, we couldn’t have rescued any zebras. If we hadn’t found those two potions, we would be needing rescue ourselves.
Mighty convenient, that.

>I really hated the Pink Cloud.
Why? So far it barely even qualifies as a minor inconvenience, one that could have been easily avoided by employing common sense. Something along the lines of: if you're going to go walking around in magical fog that will gradually deplete your hit points, maybe stock up on health potions beforehand.

>Five alicorns. Fuck.
So what? Since when are alicorns anything to worry about? You literally just blew a pack of them up with one shot a couple of scenes ago. Also: I thought the alicorns were all retards now, because the pink cloud messes with their telepathy? Or is that yet another phenomenon that comes and goes at the author's convenience?

>Alicorns normally work in groups of three. There were three in the other wing. One on the roof. That meant at least two more, and five made even more sense.
What the fuck kind of wacky alicorn math is this, anyway? There are five alicorns in the jail that you can see, one on the roof that we saw earlier, three that you killed with a grenade or an egg or something, so where are all the rest of these alicorns coming from? Are you saying that there are another seven alicorns in the building somewhere, and you know this because reasons? Is that what this is saying? What is the total number of alicorns you think you are going to have to fight, you sperg? Can you not even communicate this minor piece of simple information clearly? I swear to God, if I ever meet kkat in real life I am going to ram a balefire egg directly up his fake vagina and cunt-punt him to the moon.

Anyway, it turns out that none of this matters much. While LP is trying to think up a plan, Xenith suddenly sees her daughter, goes berserk, flings LP onto her back, and goes charging into battle with little regard for whatever number of alicorns are actually milling around. She uses her s1ck n1nj4 m00ves to vault over the alicorns, using them like stairs to jump up to the third floor where the cells are.

>Xenith reared and slashed her head to one side then the other, slicing her hellhound horn through the throats of the two alicorns in front of her. The shield dropped.
See what I mean? These things are easier to kill than raiders. Why does LP keep talking about them as if they're some kind of final-boss baddy? One crazy zebra just used three of them like stepping-stones and killed the other two with some dumb homemade horn-helmet she slapped together out of shit she had lying around.

Anyway, LP picks the lock on the cell door with her telepathy have I mentioned how much I hate LP's telepathy lately?, and then throws some memory orbs down at the remaining alicorns:

>“Yes, but they... won’t fall for the...” But these alicorns were cut off. They might just fall for the same trick! “Stand back,” I warned.
So it turns out the alicorns are just retarded enough to allow LP to pull some bullshit trick out of her ass and save the day yet again. Mighty convenient, that.

Also, it turns out that Xenith somehow created some kind of talisman that allows all the zebras to grow bat wings. Presumably that's how they intend to escape.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310922
310932
>>310916
>Caesar
Quick summary of one of Fallout's most important characters
*"but you didn't have to cut me off" intensifies*
200 years after the nukes fell, a charity doctor organization called Followers Of The Apocalypse sent Edward Sallow the romeaboo and Joshua Graham the mormon badass and some other third guy to help some local tribals but they were captured by a tribe that was "playing at war" with its enemies. Edward and the boys decided to teach these tribals Total War. How to conquer and absorb their enemies. Edward called himself Caesar because he's a weeaboo for rome and invented Caesar's Legion which conquered 86 tribes south of the colorado river. Edward "Caesar" Sallow wants hoover dam and vegas so it can become the capital city for his new rome, and he can start reforming his nation to have more of a long-term future. Legionaries (soldiers) use machetes or spears, the better gear is reserved for higher ranked men. His legion is brainwashed to forget their old tribes and die for him, crucifying many on telephone poles and being what the "mildly and subtly" liberal authors imagine fascism and on-again off-again hypocritical ludditery and Rome to be, even though Rome was at the forefront of weapon technology for its day. They ban recreational drugs like Jet so therefore they also ban medical drugs like health potion Stimpaks too, makes perfect sense. They love underhanded tactics like making kids use bombs and taking slaves and nuking towns. This post-war organization arose from the brutality of Wasteland life as an answer to it and the inefficiency of the New California Republic's bloated corrupt senate. It's a faction designed to be evil and love evil underhanded tactics yet raise good points and be a faction the player might reasonably join at the end.

All in all, it's absurd that Kkat would take "evil" groups like the post-war Caesar's Legion from FNV and the pre-war stealth-loving fire-rifle-using Communist China from FO3 and his own bullshit about stars/saving lives and construct Zigger identity from this confused mulatto mutt mix. Before the war they served a Caesar and threw spears and loved underhanded tactics. After the war they lacked a Caesar but were still cunts. These are the cunts that killed Equestria by forcing it to militarize poorly. In this story, Equestria died for this.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310928
310986 311231
1623967721032.gif
>>310921

Page break. For some reason, Xenith decides not to bother with killing the other three alicorns, and they all take off on their new wings, with LP still clinging to Xenith's back. Unsurprisingly, the seven malnourished juvenile zebras, none of whom have ever flown before, are ill-prepared to race a trio of alicorns. One of them is zapped by an alicorn's lightning spell and falls out of the sky. Naturally, Littlepoop is able to catch him with her Mary Sue telekinesis, but unfortunately the poor little scamp is already dead. Oh well, look on the bright side; now they only have six zebras to worry about.

>Twin missiles launched from somewhere in the Zebratown ruins below, striking against one of the alicorn shields. The monster turned her attention to SteelHooves.
It looks like SteelHooves somehow made it back through the Pink Cloud, even though my understanding of the plan was that he and Calamity were supposed to sit around waiting for LP and Xenith to come back with healing potions. Now he is apparently firing missiles at the alicorns from somewhere. Calamity's whereabouts are presently unknown.

Suddenly, and for no obvious reason, the police station explodes. The force of the blast knocks LP and Xenith and the six zebras out of the sky, and they land in the water-filled amphitheater. Sploosh!

Page break. We rejoin the party two days later. We are told that they arrived back at Glyphmark safe and sound, minus two of the zebras they were supposed to save (the first one was the one that was shot by the alicorns; I don't know what happened to the second one). The three alicorns, presumably, were conveniently killed in the mysterious explosion, the source of which is now explained by Calamity:

>Calamity looked up from the military robot he was repairing and tipped up his hat. “Ah blew up the big ol’ boiler they had in the basement.”
One of these days, someone is going to have to sit kkat down and explain to him what a boiler is. I'm not hugely well-versed on the subject myself, but I at least know the basics: a boiler is basically a large sealed container that heats water in order to generate pressurized steam, which is used either as a power source or to heat a building. If a boiler explodes, it's usually the result of the steam building up to an extremely high pressure level. Thus, for a boiler explosion to do any serious damage, it would need to be, well, boiling.

Seeing as how this building has been uninhabited for 200 years, I find it pretty unlikely that the boiler would have kept going for all this time. Since the alicorns were just using this place as a temporary holding cell for some zebras that they kidnapped for some unknown reason, it's pretty unlikely they would have bothered to start up the police station's boiler. And in any case, starting the boiler would be a cumbersome process: they would have needed to fill it with water (presumably whatever water was in the tank 200 years ago would have long since evaporated), build a fire (which would probably involve hauling in coal from somewhere), and wait for it to heat up to full pressure (which would realistically take several hours). This is also assuming that after 200 years the boiler is even still functional, which I find unlikely; odds are it would be rusted out and would leak all over the place.

So, in order to generate a boiler explosion of the magnitude described in the text, Calamity himself would have had to fill the boiler (somehow), source coal (from somewhere), ignite the coal (somehow), wait for the boiler to heat to full pressure (which would take hours), and then "blow it up" (somehow). Unless Calamity has some kind of superpower that enables him to manipulate time, it's virtually impossible that he would have been able to do all of this in the space of time it took LP and Xenith to rescue the zebras, particularly when you consider he had to navigate his way through the cloud-filled basement to find the boiler in the first place.

So, Calamity, you (once again) stand charged with blatant (and ridiculous) manipulation of the laws of physics. What do you have to say in your defense?

>“Hey, Ah knew Ah couldn’t make it t’ either o’ the exits, but Ah figured Ah could make it the three yards from the cell t’ the boiler, throw all the right switches and turn all the right knobs, and make it back t’ the cell before keelin’ over.” He grinned sheepishly, adding, “An’ y’know, open the furnace up so Pyrelight could fly inside.”
So...if I'm understanding this correctly...the boiler was already running when he found it, and also it was in the same room as the jail cell; kkat just didn't mention this before. Great; so we've explained how he found it and how he was able to detonate it. Now, the only question to answer is why. Not just the obvious question of why would a 200 year old boiler in an abandoned ruin still be functional, let alone running, but also why would you even want to blow the goddamn thing up in the first place?!? Well, Calamity? What do you have to say for yourself?

>“Well, Ah figured Li’lpip an’ Xenith had their saddles full as it was, an’ we didn’t want anypony gettin’ dead tryin’ t’ save us,” Calamity explained. “So Ah thought, hey, a boiler explosion is mostly steam, ain’t it? And we seen how the rain washes away the Pink Cloud, so Ah reckoned a steam explosion would clear the basement o’ Cloud right quick.”
So...basically...you decided that blowing the entire building up would be the quickest and most logical way to solve the problem of...having to walk through a little bit of pink cloud? This apparently made more sense to you than just doing what LP and Xenith did: holding your nose and running through it? Not to mention that you had absolutely no way of knowing whether or not Xenith, LP, and the zebras they were rescuing would still be in the building when it exploded?

Jesus H. Christ. The autism in this book may literally be the death of me.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.310932
310944 310947
>>310922
"Caesar" sounds closer to Red Eye in this story than any of the zebras we've seen. Based on the information you provide here I still don't see how kkat connected the Caesar character to the zebras.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310944
>>310932
You don't see the connection because there is none, Kkat just really really wanted to rip Caesar off because people liked him and he wasn't sure why,
Caesar is a post-war baddie created by the apocalypse's challenges, but he and his sports-gear-turned-romeaboo armour aesthetic is ripped off for the Zebras arbitrarily whenever he can't think of something vaguely african to use like silly talisman totem thingies.
He also awarded them Invisibility Cloaks and Fire Rifles because Communist China used Stealth Suits and flaming anti-power-armour rifle bullets during its war with Fallout's Shit 2069+ America.

If you look shallowly at the villains of Fallout:
>F1 - The Master, a psychic mutant in charge of strong mutants

>F2 - The Enclave, mean racist cartoon-fascists that want to exterminate the unclean and purge america for the wealthy elite

>F3 - The Enclave again only retarded, not that kkat noticed. (they are ruled by one gary stu forced to be your "rival" and a retarded supercomputer, they fight a war with the Power Rangers-ified Brotherhood Of Steel over who gets to turn on a water purifier just because the supercomputer wants to put a virus in the water that instakills anyone irradiated, purging america)
Oh and nuclear war happened because of a "morally grey" conflict between two shit nations full of assholes: Commie China and Evil America.

>In a DLC for Fallout 3 you fight Ashur the Slave Emperor Leader Guy after getting to him by serving him as a slave. In this DLC you have a choice that Kkat disliked so he cut it from this story, killing Ashur aka Red Eye is LP's goal here and there is no special rad-immune McGuffin child to give the hero a moral dilemma.

>FNV: Caesar's Legion

>FNV's DLC Dead Money is a location that is hard to get through. That's the shallow reading of it. In reality, it technically lacks a villain if Elijah the final boss and prick who brought you there and Dean who's 90% of the reason everything went wrong 200 years ago don't count. But every hazard and foe in the Dead Money level is the result of the casino owner's defenses fucking up ironically or experimental shit from the Think Tank accepted by the casino owner for funding.

and unrelated to villains
>Fallout 3 had a pointless nonsensically omniscient radio DJ and everyone hated it
>Fallout NV had a smartly-written omniscient radio DJ implied to be an AI working for Mr House, New Vegas's boss, and everyone loves him. The radio host, not House.

Therefore, what does Kkat take from Fallout, a franchise built from the ground up to be both a fun RetroFuturist roleplaying world and a semi-subtle liberal critique of America and America's fetishization of "the good days" before multikulti accelerationism? (ok fallout 3's retarded because Bethesda made it, so it's a quirky shooting gallery that wishes it was borderlands)
He takes imitations of the baddies and cranks up their physical threat level, only changing them fundamentally at random if they can't fit into pony land even if it makes them something entirely different.

>The Master is now The Goddess, a bigger stronger mean egotistical Alicorn in charge of Alicorns instead of a psychic mass of flesh and decidedly leftist critique of fascism
(The Master was trying to make a Master Race to survive the apocalypse, unaware that he was producing sterile things and all mutants made after the first wave are retards, he commits die after you prove his dream is impossible thanks to birth rates)

>The Enclave exists and is mean and all Pegasi even though it makes no sense. Fallout's Enclave was a bunch of politicians+top generals+their soldiers on oil rigs, and a competent Fallout+Pony crossover writer would probably make the Enclave a bunch of rich evil deep-state Canterlot pony and their soldiers while making them responsible for the war on zebras in the first place, but Kkat thought making literally all Pegasi join the Enclave and then making a few quit to be branded "Dashites" later would be clever.

>Communist China and Caesar's Legion and assorted african bullshit along with arbitrary cosmophobia/astrophobia/meteorphobia is mashed together to make up the stupid evil backwards spear-chucking bomb-loving inherently-evil drug-loving Zigger race that ruined Equestria in this story.

>Ashur is there and he's named Red Eye. The rad-immune child is gone which means the moral dilemma is gone, LP gets to have "Kill Red Eye" as her goal without feeling even remotely conflicted over this.

>3-Dog the annoying omniscient radio DJ is there but now he's a lesbian horse who broadcasts from the silly rich people tower and is helped by a secret society and pre-war 1984x9001 surveillance tech and has a reason to suck the protagonist's cock live on air: she's lesbian co-cooch-cohabitators with Littlepip.

>Dead Money just sort of happened to Canterlot thanks to ponies doing their best to handle a zigger bomb. No ironic love story gone awry, no ironic message about the best laid plans and the importance of letting go

This fanfiction got so absurdly popular, Fallout 4 by Bethesda referenced it by naming a character in the DLC "Nuka-World" Red Eye.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.310946
>>310916
Kkat took the pre-war "antagonists" of America in Fallout (the Chinese) and merged them with the antagonists of Fallout: New Vegas (Caesar's Legion) to create the Zebras for this story as a big Fallout reference. Zebras have stealth op units, government infiltrators, and are the subject of this nation's propaganda like in pre-war fallout, and have red romanesque gear/ ceremonial outfits, hail to a Caesar, etc like Caesar's Legion. That's the extent of the reason for why this stuff exists.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.310947
>>310932
I think I explained this before, but Red Eye is nothing like Caesar. He is actually based on two primary antagonists/ notable figures from Fallout 3: President John Henry Eden (Base game) and Ashur (The Pitt DLC) and combines the two directly.

He broadcasts about old Americana(tm) and a better future from spritebots, which is something John Henry Eden does. He has a home operating base in Pittsburgh which is identical to Fillydelphia here, uses slaves for the greater good, and the entire sequence with infiltrating, fighting in the arena, etc are all lifted from that DLC
Anonymous
4e25c7a
?
No.310985
_.jpg
For... multi work references in other works based on Littlepoop's Fallout Equestria.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/455151/fallout-equestria-redemption-is-magic
A unification of various fictions in the same origin (Fallout Equestria original characters) setting including the actual friendship poners.

So stumbling across this the comments provide a... nostalgic point of reference for kkat's stuff.
Kkat's crap was is in the second season, and the slew of words because 'big word, big important'. This is also back in the harry potter craze, because tv people were publicizing being wowed that reading was a thing.
With Fallout being relevant at the time.
Littlepip is practically never described, a point for being a player character insert. Yet also mimics the adventures of Harry Potter, but totally edgy.
Meaning that if Harry Potter was replaced with a potted plant very little actually changes. This also applies to Littlepip.
Always the under dog as everyone else for whatever reason filp flops between loving and hating the main character. The reasoning provided is vapid and nonsubstantial or even a flat out lie. The suicidal tendencies of both are there without consequence. The logic is all over the place.
What is most remembered is that a thing happened, scenes and points of reference exist, but not a story. Sure Littlepip goes on adventure and defeats murderizes bad guys.
The trio of characters meet in the same order, the relationship is delt with roughly the same, the starting point is the same, the character 'arc' follows the same steps. Also various tasks that don't actually directly impact the mainstory just sort of happening too.
The items, guns and spells follow the same usage. The call to action was a letter (one a pipboy buck audio recording but whatever).
As mentioned the whole writing is stilted and jumpy.

More amusing however is the possible arc names.
Littlepip and the itchy vagine.
Lil'pip and the various assholes.
Latterpop and the self-interested rescue.
Litterpewp and the ass vagu.
Letterpoop and the birb hole.
Ladlespew and the whatever intermission.
Ect.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310986
310994 310999 311231
download (13).jpeg
download (14).jpeg
fuck u physics.png
>>310928

I ran out of space, but I'm not quite finished with this boiler business.

>“Well, the cell looked real sturdy. Ah figured it would hold.” Calamity grinned, blushing. “Course, we got a helluva bigger bang than Ah was expectin’. Good thing the blast mostly went straight up.”
Seriously, what the hell was going through kkat's mind when he dreamed up this idiotic plot twist?

If I'm understanding the situation correctly, the jail cell that Calamity and SteelHooves were hiding in was directly across from this mysteriously-still-running 200 year old boiler. Calamity sees this thing and thinks "gee whiz, I should blow this thing up," because...the basement is full of cloud, and he figures that a massive explosion will...clear it out of the basement. I guess. Now, it seems to me that the first problem that would occur to anyone contemplating something like this would be how to survive the fucking explosion.

Maybe kkat had something different in mind as ever, it would be extremely helpful if he would provide some decent physical descriptions of these locations, but when someone says "jail cell" to me, I think of something like pics related; basically a small room surrounded by stone or concrete walls on three sides, with bars making up the fourth. The way I'm imagining this setup and again, there is very little actual description in the text to go on, the boiler would be directly opposite the barred wall, thus placing anyone inside the cell within the immediate blast radius of a boiler explosion. Kkat's grasp of basic physics seems to be rather tenuous, so maybe he didn't know this, but as far as I'm aware steam can quite easily travel through the spaces between jail cell bars. Not just steam, but presumably boiling water, bits of shrapnel and debris, and whatever the fuck else would be unleashed during a boiler explosion.

So basically, Calamity's plan to push the boiler pressure up to 11 and then hide behind some bars a few feet away does not strike me as a particularly good idea. However, it seems that in FoE, complete idiocy is frequently rewarded with ridiculous dumb luck. In Calamity's case, this seems to also involve the laws of physics suddenly and inexplicably altering themselves in his favor. Let's take a closer look at the quoted passage:

>“Course, we got a helluva bigger bang than Ah was expectin’. Good thing the blast mostly went straight up.”
Yes, in most cases, hiding behind a single row of evenly-spaced metal bars would probably not do much to ward off an explosion. However, what if the explosion was inexplicably vertical? Well, that would just change the whole equation then, wouldn't it? Yes, I imagine that if a boiler exploded, but instead of exploding outward in the usual fashion, it simply blasted upward like old faithful, then you could stand just about anywhere besides directly above the exploding boiler and everything would turn out just fine.

Anyway, Velvet is angry with Calamity for taking such a stupid risk; clearly she doesn't understand the physics behind vertical explosions. Meanwhile, Xenith's daughter approaches and introduces herself.

>Xenith was leading the group of zebras down into the labs beneath Angel Bunny Pharmaceuticals. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Xenith teaching the town of Glyphmark how to manufacture Dash, but I had given in to her argument that the town needed something they could sell to merchants in exchange for food and supplies. This was her way of trying to be responsible for them.
Yep, you read that correctly. For reasons that would only make sense in kkat's demented brain, Xenith has taken it upon herself to take the zebras she just rescued down into the abandoned laboratory in Glyphmark, and train them to be professional meth cooks for...some reason or other. Incidentally, the author still hasn't provided much clarification on what "Dash" is exactly, or why Xenith would be expected to know the recipe.

Kkat now displays one of his trademark glimmers of almost-but-not-quite-awareness:

>The Canterlot Ghoul paused in his work, looking up at Calamity. “How did you know the boiler would still work?”
This is an excellent question, seeing as how the boiler was 200 years old and there was absolutely no reason for it to still be functional, let alone boiling. Surely the author has a plausible explanation ready for us?

>“Kinda countin’ on it not workin’ right, actually. That’s kinda how ya get ‘em t’ explode.”
Swing and a miss.

Anyway, fuck it; I could probably go on for another five or six posts about the utterly preposterous nonsense contained just in the last few scenes of this chapter, but it hardly seems like a productive use of time at this point. Here is how the arc wraps up:

>I listened to them, a smile on my face. Then turned back to the zebras standing in a line next to me. Each was wielding one of the firearms Calamity had rebuilt from the mess of weapons we had scavenged from the police station’s contraband vault. “Now watch closely,” I instructed, beginning their first lesson on marksmanship and firearm safety.

>They looked at me intently, eager to learn how to defend themselves and their town. For the first time in the Goddesses knew how long, there was a sense of hope in Glyphmark.

And that's the story of how Littlepoop and her wacky pals infiltrated an abandoned prison with an inexplicably-still-functioning 200 year old boiler, initiated some kind of mysterious vertical explosion, saved a bunch of zebras who were kidnapped by alicorns for some unknown reason, and taught them how to be gun-toting drug peddlers.

End of chapter.

As a bonus, here's a gem I found in the comments section for this chapter:

From user Alchemystudent (whose avatar is Edward Elric drawn as a pony):
>Noiw, did you always plan on Calamity being a crowning moment of awesome on wheels?

This is roughly the level of intelligence I would expect from kkat's fanbase at this point.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310994
310995 311231
1624199691772.jpg
>>310986

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Shadow of the Ministries

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Shadow of the Ministries
>“Come here, Stable Dweller. There are things you should know.”
As usual there is nothing to indicate who is speaking this line or in what context, but the author helpfully includes the chapter title as part of the quote for some reason.

Welp, here we go. This chapter is a beast within a beast, clocking in at over 50,000 words in length; easily long enough to be considered a separate novel in its own right. As usual, the chapter begins with an opening monologue from Littlepoop, which is...even more special than usual.

>Finally!
>At long last, I have reached this point in the story. And, at this point, I beg your permission to take a little liberty with the telling of it.
Who are you talking to? Also, I would say you've taken nothing but liberties with the telling of the story so far, but whatever. Let's just get this over with.

>That it took so long is probably exasperating, and you might wonder why I didn’t skip to this part sooner.
Yes, come to think of it, that thought had indeed crossed my mind once or twice.

>(In truth, I have skipped over a fair bit, trying to tell you only the parts of my adventures that were important or exciting enough to keep you reading.)
This is literally the most terrifying thing I've read in this entire text.

>I have told you these things, I suppose, for the same reason that Princess Luna told Her story to Midnight Shower: context.
>Only with the proper context can you see how meaningful those memories were, and how they set my hooves on the path that ended with me coming here and doing what I am about to do.
Irony levels critical.

Anyway, this preamble sets up what promises to be a long, long, long and possibly-even-less-coherent-than-usual chapter. Yipee. Apparently, by the end of this voyage through the heart of darkness, Littlepoop will have discovered six Dragonballs memory orbs that will help her to finally realize what her destiny or virtue or whatever the fuck is supposed to be. So, without further ado, let us sally forth.

Page break. As usual, the author skips over a large chunk of time and dumps us into the middle of a new adventure with little preparation. On the plus side, we seem to (finally) be done with all of the stupid diversions and side quests; the gang has just arrived in Canterlot. Here is how the author describes it:

>Most of the city was built from stone carved from the very mountain Canterlot embraced. Cobblestone streets had been lined with elegant structures formed from stone and mortar or magically molded rock. Most buildings of stone still stood, although cracked and crumbling from the weight of unnatural ages. As we flew by, a three-story tower, once an upscale inn, collapsed with a deep-throated rumble, sending up curling swirls of pink-tinted stone dust. Everything more susceptible to the entropy of the Cloud had been reduced to rust and rubble, smears and stains that once signified objects, and decrepit structures stained pink and falling apart at the seams.
From what we've been told, the Pink Cloud is supposedly much more potent here. You will note that, according to SteelHooves, they are supposed to strip off their armor and clothing here, and have LP levitate their gear. This rule was blatantly ignored during the previous episode and they don't seem any the worse for wear, so we'll see how the author handles it this time around. In general, I've been pretty underwhelmed by the Pink Cloud so far.

For whatever it's worth, I'll actually give kkat a couple of points here: he does a reasonably good job of establishing ruined-Canterlot as a forlorn and very creepy setting.

>One of the things our experiences in Zebratown had made very clear was that the threat posed by the Pink Cloud was directly proportional to its concentration. We had spent hours in the light haze of Cloud that persisted in the Zebratown Police Station with only minor health problems. Nothing that couldn’t be remedied by a health potion and some time in fresh air.
One thing I've observed about kkat is that whenever he comes up with a rule that puts his characters at a strong disadvantage, he usually gives himself a subtle workaround. The workaround is usually exploited to the point that the "hazards" in this story barely qualify as inconveniences. Got your leg blown off? Some potions and a couple of spells will heal you right up. Facing an entire platoon of all-powerful something-or-others? Don't worry; they're complete retards who will fall for the dumbest tricks you can think up. Pink Cloud? Yeah, don't even worry about that stuff; it's basically harmless except in high concentrations, and with the kind of blind luck this party usually has, their chances of ever catching a serious blast of it are virtually zero.

>The places where the Pink Cloud pooled thickly, however, were lethal beyond even SteelHooves’ descriptions of it.
We have yet to see any direct evidence of this. To my recollection they have experienced high concentrations of Pink Cloud exactly twice: once in the bathhouse, and once in the basement of the police station. Both times they were basically fine afterward. In each instance LP was able to fix her various organ failures with a couple of healing potions, and in the second instance Calamity suffered no observable damage at all, despite not only walking through the same cloud that LP did, but also standing right next to an exploding boiler, which conveniently also somehow dispelled the cloud. Again; so far, I am completely underwhelmed by the supposedly "deadly" Pink Cloud.

>“We’re going to land right in front of the Ministry of Image, dash in and grab what we came for,” I told my companions. “Then we gallop to the Ministry of Awesome, get what we need from it and go. With any luck, we’ll be in and out in under an hour.”
I have completely forgotten why they are even here.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.310995
311000 311231
1623911800881.jpg
>>310994

It appears that Xenith is not joining them on this particular outing; she has elected to stay behind in Glyphmark and teach the rescued zebras how to cook meth. As far as I can tell, everyone else is present. Incidentally, was it ever even established why the zebras were abducted in the first place? My first assumption was that Trixie had taken Xenith's daughter as a hostage to ensure LP's cooperation with whatever she wanted her to do, but that seemed to make less and less sense the more the adventure progressed. Really, nothing about that last adventure made sense; I don't understand why Trixie wanted the zebras taken hostage, and I don't understand why she would deliberately keep them hostage in a place where her telepathic control over the alicorns would be disrupted. Honestly, it feels like the author just wanted to send the party to Zebratown in order to have LP find that Midnight Sparkle journal, and a story about kidnapped zebras was the best excuse he could think up. In any event, the whole chapter was a complete waste of 20,000 words.

Anyway, they bullshit about Pink Cloud and how it destroys buildings and whatever for a few paragraphs; apparently, kkat wants to explain why some buildings are destroyed and others aren't. It's not really worth summarizing. On the other hand, there's this bullshit:

>The greatest danger we expected to face in Canterlot was the Pink Cloud itself, but the interior of the Zebratown Police Station wasn’t much different than Canterlot right now, and so I was highly confident that we would be fine so long as we minimized our exposure. Likewise, while we knew that the Pink Cloud had the potential to fuse objects to flesh (or each other), that only seemed to be a concern while within the highest concentrations, at which point such fusions were the very least of our health concerns.
>As such, I announced that I was going in wearing my armor and PipBuck.
>“Ah’m gonna put on muh battle saddle the moment we touch down,” Calamity responded.
See what I mean? Kkat thinks up a rule that would inconvenience the party and potentially make the story more interesting, but then deliberately throws in a complicated workaround so the rule he created doesn't have to be followed. Why even bother?

For that matter, why even bother writing the story out at all? If the protagonist isn't going to face any serious challenges and the whole thing is just watching her come up with stupid hacks to get around whatever the game throws at her, why keep dragging this out? You could pretty much tell the entire story in a few sentences:

>Once upon a time, there was an annoying little sanctimonious klepto who was also a lesbian and a deranged psycho-killer. She left her house one day for no reason, fought a bunch of enemies that massively outclassed her, but was somehow able to defeat them all with virtually no effort. Also, she could lift several thousand times her own weight for some reason. After wandering around aimlessly for several weeks, she eventually found a pack of background ponies who wanted to hang around with her for some reason, and also she got to chow down on the box of some equally-annoying little pint-size Vinyl Scratch knockoff. Then, she probably saved Equestria somehow. The End.
There; I just saved you 620,295 words of sheer torture.

Anyway, moving on. SteelHooves advises Calamity to use his Enclave armor instead of his battle saddle. I don't entirely understand why; I guess it has anti-pink-cloud protection or some shit, because why the hell wouldn't it?

>Our Canterlot Ghoul’s words reminded me of one of the more painful lessons from Zebratown: my combat skills were almost worthless here.
I agree that if the author had any intention of following his own rules, her combat "skills" ought to be worthless here. Since she relies entirely on her PipBuck, and she ought not to be able to wear her PipBuck here, it stands to reason that she ought to be helpless, just as she ought to have been helpless in Zebratown. However, that was not the case; she never took off her dumb PipBuck even once during the entire Zebratown episode that I'm aware of, and as usual she made it out of there using the same bullshit tactics she usually relies on. What was even the point?

>The two enemies we were most likely to face were Canterlot “zombies” and alicorns.
I still don't understand why she would assume there would be alicorns here. It makes absolutely no sense for alicorns to come here.

>None of my weapons were worth a damn against the latter once they got up their shields, or against the former at all.
Again: Littlepoop keeps trying to act like the alicorns are some kind of formidable enemy, but nearly every alicorn they've encountered in this story, including the seven or eight of them they fought in the last chapter when LP's skills were "almost worthless," have been taken down almost effortlessly using childishly simple tactics.

>“Yeah, Ah know that,” Calamity responded stubbornly, “But while Ah know the chances are mighty slim, Ah still ain’t takin’ the risk that Ah might be fused inta that damned thing.” He spat for emphasis.
For the last fucking time, kkat, is having your armor fused to your body by Pink Cloud a legitimate concern in this story or isn't it?!?

Anyway, yap yap yap. LP keeps droning on in her endless meandering way, mostly detailing the kinds of enemies she thinks she is going to have to fight. She brings up the haunted radios again, even though she only bumped into a couple of those in the last chapter and they didn't seem to do her much actual harm either. The suggestion is made that the megaspell never stopped megaspelling, or something like that I guess. I'm not really sure what is being implied there. Then, eventually, they all stop talking and the scene comes to an uneventful stop.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.310999
>>310986
The ideological content of this chapter is particularly galling.

This is a zebra camp. Zebras are here for their own good. Snooty race traitors desperate to appear above the common folk move here thinking they'll never be racist. Exposure to normalized zigger criminality and irrationality turns them racist. The zebras can't even have a concentration camp to themselves. Even the main heroine Sharting Showers is here for an ulterior motive, she wants to study bullshit zebra mythos when it would be so much easier to magically open the mind of any zebra Prisoner Of War and extract this information magically. Maybe with a "Fantastic Voyage" style episode but mentally so more like Persona 5 or Inception or that dream-hopping episode of Spongebob.

Anyway, according to kkat's writing this zebra village is terrible specifically because there are ponies here who don't like this drug-loving space-fearing culture. Zebra kids do drugs in public but the presence of ponies forces them to hide it. Hide what they are on the inside and what they want to do with their lives. A pony sees a zebra child do drugs and wishes there were more cops here to enforce pony law for the "protection" of ziggers that live for drugs. But after Equestria dies, this settlement thrives despite zebra idiocy kicking out everyone more experienced and knowledgeable than the kids or whatever. And yet the settlement thrives despite the pink cloud and alicorns and other threats. Nobody fucks off and moves away. Littlepip's Littleshits love this settlement so much, they do their first act of "future-proofing" in this story over 300k words in by teaching the local settlers how to shoot guns they already had hidden in safws and make drugs using equipment and supplies they already had in the pharmaceutical building. LP doesn't seem to care she is effectively creating a gang of drug runners here that cannot grow food or purify water or do anything to survive besides sell drugs made from supplies that come from fuck knows where, meaning if this gang of a town wants to eat they need to find territory to sell drugs and get ponies addicted.

This Zebra settlement on pony land didn't have hope until it was allowed to be Zebraish and cook drugs and sell them openly while defending itself with stolen black market weapons. Equestria's attempts at helping and protecting these Zebras were at best born of suicidal kindness and at worst something the ponies "had an ulterior motive for uwu" even though trying to understand someone better in a setting that repeatedly says "misunderstandings cause disasters" is hardly a bad thing.

In a parallel universe Kkat had the balls to make LP say "fuck drugs, make healing potions here instead if you want to feel like a zebra and brew something".

But hey, it's not like LP went through a character arc involving drugs that should change her mind on drugs and drug pushers after all. LP is always Kkat's idea of an optimal murderhobo, and that means knowing when to tell others to make addictive combat enhancing drugs even if there's a chance they will be used against you.

Kkat's answer for racial problems is more redpilled than he realizes, he believes Zebras need to fuck off to Zebra lands without Ponies where they can act like Zebras in peace without any pony "kindness" worsening things for Zebras and Ponies alike. If ziggers slaughter each other en masse when ponies aren't looking, that's just fine because it won't happen anywhere near civilizarion. It's a shame Equestria had to die in this setting before the Zebra settlement Equestria built for them on pony land could thrive despite the steps Ponies took to protect it. And protect Canterlot (pink cloud shield) and Equestria (twilight invented alicorns hoping to win the war) from Zebras who nuked equestria with the ultimate dirty bombs.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.311000
311002 311059 311233
download (18).jpeg
>>310995

Page break.

>“No!” I said, telekinetically snatching the Fluttershy Orb away from Velvet Remedy as she brought it out of one of her medical boxes. She gasped as the orb floated away from her.
>“Littlepip! Give that back,” she demanded, her voice lowering.
>I frowned but shook my head. “You’ve been losing yourself in this too much, Velvet. It’s really beginning to worry me.”
Out of absolutely nowhere, this thing with Velvet and the Fluttershy orb, which at various random points throughout the text has been kinda-sorta hinted at as being an "addiction" for Velvet, is now suddenly a major problem that Littlepoop decides to confront.

>“Excuse me?” Velvet huffed, telekinetically snatching it back. “I’m pretty sure I’ve spent nowhere near the amount of time lost in memory orbs that you have,” she pointed out. “And I’ve been a lot smarter about when and where to do so.”
Lol this is actually a pretty good point. Most of the time I want to hit Velvet upside the head with a two-by-four every time she opens her mouth, but I'd probably high-five her for this. Or high-hoof her, or however it works with a horse.

>Velvet frowned. “Because I like this one. No matter how bad it is out here, I can always find solace in Fluttershy.” I cringed inside.
I, too, am cringing inside, but I suspect that LP and I have radically different reasons for doing so.

Like most of the ideas in this story, the Velvet/Fluttershy connection is half-formed. Some of kkat's ideas are good and others not so good, but his consistent problem overall is that he never fully develops any idea he comes up with. By this point in the story, there should be no ambiguity about who Velvet idolizes and why, or about why LP thinks that hero-worship is misplaced. This entire story is just a mishmash of half-formed ideas that never end up going anywhere.

The whole connection between Velvet and Fluttershy was never clearly established. She obviously idolizes her for whatever reason, but much like LP's crack-mint problem, it never seems to factor into the story unless the author is specifically thinking and writing about it. Most of the time we'll go chapters upon chapters without hearing a single word about Velvet being obsessed with Fluttershy. Also unclear is why LP objects so strongly to Velvet's Flutterworship in the first place. From what we've been told, I think it has something to do with whatever Flutters did during the war; LP is concerned that learning the "truth" about her idol would be somehow damaging to Velvet.

The story is so convoluted that it's difficult to keep track of exactly who did what during the war; if I remember correctly Flutters was responsible for inventing the technology that made balefire bombs so catastrophically deadly, or something to that effect. Also, I guess her pet rabbit went on to become some kind of giant mutated meth kingpin feared by the entire zebra kingdom, so I guess you could accuse her of being an irresponsible pet owner. Beyond that, though, I don't really understand what the big deal about Flutters is; odds are whatever she did 200 years ago isn't anywhere near as gruesome or reprehensible as the shit that LP herself has done in the present, and Velvet still sticks by her for whatever reason. Whatever LP's gripe is, it's hard to sympathize with her.

Anyway, they argue about it for awhile, and then after awhile they don't anymore. Eventually they arrive at Ministry Walk, and see that for some reason or another, a buttload of alicorns are congregated outside.

>So much for setting down in Ministry Walk. They would be all over us before the Sky Bandit touched ground, and alicorns were yet another enemy that my skill with firearms was pretty much useless against… at least as soon as they got their damn shields up.
So...you can't shoot them, but for some reason Xenith can cut their throats at close range with her silly hellhound-tooth-helmet, or whatever she has? Also, you can fire a bazooka and kill three of them at once? Or just throw a memory orb at them and have them kill themselves somehow? Or have SteelHooves fire an endless chain of grenades at them until eventually they die? Or just stab them with anything sharp you have lying around? Alicorns are pretty much invincible, except for when they're not, which is most of the time as it turns out? Is that basically the gist of what you're trying to tell us, Littlepoop?

Anyway, they decide to land somewhere nearby and sneak through the buildings instead of landing outside the Ministry directly.

Page break. They fly around looking for a place to park. On the way, they fly past Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. Littlepoop observes that for some wacky reason or another, it is filled with zombie dragons. Several of the dragons fly out to attack them. SteelHooves is about to kill them, when LP summons Velvet instead. Apparently she can now order the various members of her party about like soldiers under her command.

For some idiotic reason that I'm not even going to waste time speculating about, Velvet throws a dress at the dragons, which she probably picked up somewhere at some point for some long-forgotten reason. The dress is studded with sapphires, and the dragons go chasing after it, because they eat gems as well as ponies. I guess.

Page break. They land the ship and disembark, and notice a store that sold clipboards. For some idiotic reason or other, Calamity wants to use the clipboards as plate armor on the bus. There's a long, silly conversation about the clipboards being made out of either Obstinatanium or Stubbornite; it's impossible to tell whether these are meant to be real substances in this world or if the characters are just horsing around hurr durr puns. Then, they go inside Celestia's school where they find and destroy a couple of haunted radios. Shooting up the school apparently triggers some kind of security shield, and now they are trapped inside the building.
Anonymous
3bdb375
?
No.311002
311008
>>311000
>Shooting up the school apparently triggers some kind of security shield, and now they are trapped inside the building.
Sounds like 10/10 design to me. Someone shooting up a school? Better lock the students inside!
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311008
>>311002
Reminds me of when that gay club "Pulse" got Mudslimed. If I recall correctly a liberal reporter conveniently already near the scene said "I don't want the shooter to get out, that's dangerous!" and barred an emergency exit despite all the people banging on the door from the inside hoping to get out. In situations like that you want people away from the shooter, and you want someone good with a gun close enough to the shooter with a clear line of sight. Princess Luna's schools had automatic gun turrets outside the school that shot some ziggers for invading, how come this school doesn't have similar turrets? Those turrets could have thinned the monster population here over 200 years. Or broken down and turned into sources of useful scrap nopony would have touched in centuries thanks to the poison and hazards scaring away all sane scavengers.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.311059
311078 311079 311104 311231
1589397330669.jpg
>>311000

Page break. The current plan seems to be to make their way to the administrator's office on the top floor of the building, because presumably it will have some kind of terminal that can switch of the shield that is locking them in. They are currently exploring a classroom on the second floor.

>I paused, staring at the globe tucked in the corner, the continents beginning to peel off its surface. Strangely, I had always considered Equestria to be flat.
>This was not something the science classes in Stable Two had covered. We had learned instead about mechanics and robotics, arcane science and spellcraft.
This is one of those areas where it would have helped if kkat had fleshed out the world a little better. We still have no clear picture of what exactly LP was taught during her upbringing in Stable 2, nor do we know how to contrast her upbringing against that of, say, Calamity, who (I guess) grew up in the Enclave. We've been given a rather blurry picture of the Stables as some last bastion of pre-war civilization, with schools and hospitals and so forth, but at the same time they're presented as being completely cut off from the world.

How much knowledge of the world and its history would a Stable pony have versus an Enclave pony, or a wastelander, or a zebra slave? How much of that knowledge would be incomplete or erroneous? Here, the text appears to be saying that subjects like robotics and magic-computers were somehow understood, but LP grew up believing the world is flat. For that matter, is the world flat? The presence of a globe in this classroom seems to suggest that it isn't, but is that view accurate? How much of the old-world knowledge carried over into the present? How much of it was retained by the Stables? How much does the Enclave know? The Steel Rangers? These are all questions the author should have thought about before he even started writing.

Anyway, Velvet sees a poster instructing children to hide behind their shield spells in the event of a megaspell attack. The author draws a parallel between this and the 1950s-era "duck and cover" campaign instructing children to hide under desks in the event of a nuclear explosion.

>“Maybe Celestia just didn’t want them to be scared?” I offered. I had to imagine that telling the children a lie that allowed them to believe there was something they could do was kinder than leaving them feeling helpless.
>Or was my belief just born of corrupted kindness?
Again with the corrupted kindness.

Anyway, suddenly, LP's radar starts flashing red, and a bunch of enemies appear. It is once again time to shift into unintentional comedy mode battle mode.

>It was a small, Canterlot Ghoul-ized unicorn child, her schoolfilly uniform melted into her flesh. There were several more behind her, all colts and fillies, locked in the endless routine of going to and from their exams… until they spotted us and the air filled with a sound more horrifying than any I could imagine -- a wordless sound of unadulterated and monstrous aggression from a chorus of achingly childlike voices.
>No. Celestia have mercy.
Much like the bloody cutecenara party we saw earlier in the Stable, this shock content is only shocking until you think about it for two seconds and realize how preposterous it is.

At the time the Pink Cloud went off, Canterlot was under a shield, being shellacked by nuclear missiles. My understanding is that it withstood the barrage for several hours. So...school was still in session while this was going on? Celestia throws up a magic shield to block an incoming megaspell attack, and her school for gifted unicorns just keeps its classes going? No attempts to evacuate or move ponies into shelters? Then, suddenly, poison gas seeps in and turns everypony into zombies?

Even if the megaspell attack was unexpected and came while school was still in session, it would stand to reason that a major city like Canterlot would have protocols in place for attacks like this. Most likely these children would have been whisked down to a shelter or, if the government assumed that the shield would be enough to protect the city, they would at least have been sent home, seeing as how you couldn't really expect children to continue studying normally in the middle of a goddamned missile attack. Seriously; the amount of simple problems in this story that could have been resolved if kkat had just spent a fraction of a second thinking about them is just staggering.

Anyway, the usual bullshit ensues. Littlepoop stands there in horror, having her umpteenth "moral" crisis about whether she can bring herself to turn her guns on a bunch of little-kid zombies, Velvet tries to use her anesthetic spell and is horrified to find that it doesn't work on zombies, and meanwhile Calamity and SteelHooves just start capping the little bastards. Then, SteelHooves blows a hole in the ceiling, and LP levitates them all into the next room.

Page break. Since this chapter is like 50,000 words long, and so far it's looking like it's mostly just more of the same, I'm going to try to zip through the dungeon crawl as quickly as I can. I'll try to breeze through these microscenes in relatively short order, and will only stop to examine things that appear important or merit closer scrutiny.

The new classroom the group finds itself in has Pink Cloud seeping in through the ventilation system. It's not thick enough to be dangerous (surprise surprise) but appears to be getting gradually thicker, so they reason they can't stay here. LP orders SteelHooves to scout ahead. Meanwhile, the party bickers about whether or not it's worth their time to go poking around the other Ministry buildings for weapons and supplies while they're here. They ultimately decide to check out the Ministries of Peace and Magic, but also to be quick about it. Also, they are worried that SteelHooves might be wounded under his armor. Nothing else happens.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311078
>>311059
Zebras didn't have ICBMs, they were only able to nuke Equestria because they filled some Megaspell bombs with radioactive necromantic balefire and smuggled them into the country with the help of that Team Four Star company (or whatever it was called) to be detonated.
Celestia magiced up a shield to keep the cloud contained in Canterlot and keep it from spreading across Equestria, hoping ponies could get to a bunker in the time she bought them. Or was it Luna who did that heroic sacrifice? I forget. There are so many pointless needless details in this story that contrast with important questions that never get real answers.
This means the bomb went off without prior warning (damn, guess whoever was in charge of using that omniscient radio tower was looking at the wrong thing that day) and yet when the alarm went off to tell everypony to head to a bunker, the schoolponers remained here.
I guess they had a typical female teacher who said "The bomb siren doesn't dismiss you, I dismiss you!".
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
5441c9e
?
No.311079
311080 311088 311233
1622932928775.png
>>311059

Page break. The party is now in some kind of storage room. They appear to have run through some more of the Pink Cloud, and I guess the stuff is once again back to being kinda-sorta dangerous, because they are all making a huge deal about how much pain they're supposedly in. They pass healing potions around, and LP plugs her PipBuck into SteelHooves' armor and runs a diagnostic on him. She learns that his armor is apparently out of healing potions or something, and he's got a broken leg and some other shit wrong with him. Since it's never been clearly established which injuries are actually something a ghoul should worry about, it's impossible to gage what any of this signifies.

Anyway, LP spends several paragraphs pretending that she actually cares about any of these ponies she travels with, and then the scene ends.

Page break. Now they're in a hallway somewhere, being attacked by some more dragons and zombie kids. One of them can apparently conjure up Pink Cloud somehow. LP and Velvet are still freaking out because "oh no, zombie children, how horrible."

>Velvet Remedy was curled into a ball, crying. The two other baby monsters were trying to eat her. Her body was a tapestry of shallow, bleeding scratches.
The visual here made me kek. Other than this, nothing happens. They fight the zombies, and move on.

Page break. Now they're in some other room. They are all wounded from all the undead children they've been battling, and they're almost out of healing potions. Again.

>The large, circular room had no windows, but both the fireplace and the chute provided means for the Pink Cloud to enter the room. Fortunately, a magical ventilation spell had prevented the Cloud from pooling here, leaving the air only the lightest shade of pink. Survivable levels of pink, so long as none of us fell asleep in here.
Mighty convenient, that.

Anyway, it appears that the dungeon crawl through the school went quicker than expected; this room is apparently the administrator's room they were trying to reach. Velvet lies on the ground, moaning about how awful it is that a bunch of little kids were turned into zombies; meanwhile, LP hacks the terminal.

Page break. We are suddenly dropped into another memory orb. Normally I'd comment on the randomness of the transition, but LP actually explained in the prologue to this chapter that she would be taking some dramatic license with the presentation of these scenes. Apparently, she finds and watches these orbs at some later date, but in her retelling of events she's decided to use them as interludes between scenes. Had she done something similar with Homage's radio broadcasts and Midnight Shower's journal, it would have saved the author quite a bit of headache, but I digress.

The memory belongs to an unidentified male pony who appears to be some kind of security guard. Zecora arrives, and a conversation between them makes it clear that Zecora is here to steal something. The guard is a plant or a rogue agent or something; he has agreed to let down the shield so that Zecora can go in and get what she needs. However, it seems the other half of the story is that Zecora is some kind of double-agent as well. She is stealing something from the pony side to give to the Zebra Caesar I still think calling him "Caesar" is a retarded idea in order to gain his trust and get close to him. The objective of both Zecora and the guard appears to be ending the war.

Anyway, the guard asks Zecora to kick him so he can say that he put up a fight, but she kicks him too hard and seems to fatally injure him. Then, SteelHooves (née Applesnack) appears from somewhere and misinterprets the situation. He believes that Zecora is betraying the ponies, when in reality she is only pretending to betray the ponies in order to actually betray the zebras. Oh le irony. He becomes incensed and starts shouting. The guard tries to explain the situation, but oh no; Zecora kicked him too hard and he can't speak. Oh, le irony.

So, SteelHooves kills Zecora, and then at that precise moment, Applejack enters the room. She is wearing a fancy black dress because apparently SteelHooves was planning to propose to her that night. Then, she sees Zecora's corpse. And it turns out that this is why they broke up. Oh God, so much le irony. It's like le irony is cum and the situation is kkat's face; it's just le irony everywhere.

This scene reminds me of that R. Kelly "Trapped in the Closet" video. It's the same kind of hammed up, unintentionally-comedic tragedy, and the story is about as coherent.

Page break. Now they're outside I guess, going to the Celestia Monument for some reason. They make it there, and are attacked by a sprite bot, because I guess the sprite bots are enemies now. LP kills it. They see a bunch of skeletons, and then they arrive at the Ministry of Peace.

Page break. Turns out the Ministry of Peace headquarters is mostly offices, so they don't find much in the way of medical supplies. They do find an auditorium, which turns out to be the same auditorium in which Fluttershy gave the speech in Velvet's memory orb. Unfortunately it is now full of Pink Cloud. However, Velvet, who you may or may not recall is supposed to be obsessed with Fluttershy, is so overcome with emotion that she rushes into the room, ascends the podium, and begins to recite Fluttershy's speech from memory. To make the already ridiculous scene even more ridiculous, she recites it exactly as Flutters recites it in the orb, complete with all of the pauses and "ums" and "ahs." Then, her bird flies in and starts also dying from gas. Eventually, LP floats them both out of there.

>I nodded, blinking back tears of my own. “From your lips to Celestia’s ears,” I whimpered as I levitated Velvet Remedy and pulled my friend from that gas chamber.
This whole story is just so off-the-rails ridiculous at this point that I don't even know what to say here.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311080
311180
>>311079
It's pretty ridiculous that LP lifted boxcars yet isn't just telekinetically dismantling buildings and swinging a giant fan really hard to blow the pink fart cloud away, right?

also is it a missed opportunity that only one pony can view a memory orb at once? If all the ponies in Team LP could react to those memories together whenever it was important, everyone learning Steelhooves killed Zecora could be a big dramatic moment that makes everyone question their faith in him while we enjoy watching Steelhooves cringe himself into a pekora singularity.

Also this "steelhooves killed a spy but didn't know" moment is retarded because AJ knows Zecora is a spy but didn't tell Steelhooves, her excessively violent boyfriend. Keeping a secret like that from someone that could fuck her plan up easily seems out of character. AJ isn't stupid. Outside of the "racist fruit-hating hick" episodes in later seasons that flanderized and derailed her into a bigger meme than Pinkie Pie.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311088
311091 311105 311233
Reflecting_pool.jpg
>>311079

Page break. Since Velvet thought it would be a good idea to expose herself to (I guess) near-fatal levels of toxic gas just to do a shitty Fluttershy impression for an audience of basically no one, she is now lying comatose under the care of SteelHooves and her stupid bird. On top of that, she consumed their last healing potion. This is actually something of a milestone: to my recollection, this is the first time we've seen this supposedly lethal pink crap actually deal serious damage to anyone. Meanwhile, Calamity and Littlepoop go exploring, because why not?

They wander around through some of the offices, and naturally decide it would be sensible to split up even further. LP goes off by herself and wanders into an office containing yet another skeleton. At first she is sad because she thinks the skeleton is Fluttershy, but then she realizes it's not Fluttershy, it's just some random NPC who doesn't matter, so then she isn't sad anymore. Then, she finds the Fluttershy statue lying on the floor. If anyone gives a damn, the inscription on this one is "Be Pleasant."

Oh, this is rich:

>The final of the Ministry Mare statuettes. I now had a full set. Only I wasn’t going to keep this one. I knew a unicorn who needed her more than I did. Besides, wouldn’t it be wrong for corrupted kindness to be carrying around the statuette of the Bearer of the Element of Kindness? Wouldn’t I be… dishonoring her somehow?
Yes, you read that correctly. Littlepoop, who didn't see anything wrong with literally prying Pinkie Pie's much-loved statue of her also-dead friend Twilight Sparkle from her cold dead hands hooves, whatever just so she could have a dumb collectible to carry around, is now suddenly worried about "dishonoring" Fluttershy.

Believe it or not, it gets better:

>I felt a surge of magic, much like with the others, but this time it was accompanied by something more. Something greater.
>As I lifted the Fluttershy statuette before me, I knew that I was going to keep her. Not out of selfishness. Not because it was something I wanted or felt I deserved.
>The statuettes wanted to be together. The Ministry Mares needed to be together. They were meant to be. Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Applejack. They were stronger when they were together, better. Separating them had been the worst thing anypony could have done to them. I knew that; and now that I had brought them together, I knew I couldn’t separate them again.
Yes, you read that part correctly too. LP wants to give the Fluttershy statue to Velvet, but then she realizes it would be wrong to separate these inanimate objects from each other, because something something Friendship is Magic™. So, she decides she's actually going to just keep them all.

Page break. The gang is back together again. Calamity managed to find Fluttershy's office. The place was filled with medical supplies; however, it seems that Flutters' skeleton is still at large. Anyway, they have enough panacea potions to last them the rest of the adventure now, so we know we won't have to slog through anything tedious, like the party having to face an actual challenge or something like that. They have a long and pointless argument about eating meat, which once again touches upon our favorite subject of cannibalism. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They are done screwing around inside the Ministry of Peace; now it's time to go screw around inside the Ministry of Magic. However, they are suddenly attacked by an alicorn as they are crossing the street.

>I collapsed, clutching my ringing ears, as the shot from Spitfire’s Thunder pierced the alicorn’s shield and tore through her neck, splattering her blood against the inside of her shield behind her. The shield flickered out as the alicorn plowed into the ground at our hooves.
Yep. Apparently, Calamity's gun can shoot through alicorn shields for some reason. You may or may not remember that the alicorns' shield-generation ability is one of the things that supposedly makes them invincible. Now, they don't even have that anymore.

Anyway, the shot attracts the attention of the 500 other alicorns that are all gathered on this one street for some reason, and they all attack at once. Calamity and SteelHooves, who both seem to be able to kill these supposedly invincible creatures quite easily, begin simply picking them off one at a time.

>SteelHooves seemed to have forgotten the rest of us completely. He was just being the Mighty Alicorn Hunter, steel-armored scourge of monsters in the Equestrian Wasteland.
If anyone is interested, this marks the sixth time in the entire 620,295 words of the text that SteelHooves' nickname "mighty alicorn hunter" is used, and is the second-to-last time it is mentioned at all.

Anyway, they keep on fighting the alicorns for awhile, and eventually SteelHooves gets knocked into a nearby reflecting pool. Kkat doesn't specify depth, but from the way he describes the scene I'm envisioning something comparable to pic related. If so, this pool should only be about a foot deep, because it makes very little sense to make a purely decorative pool any deeper than that. It also doesn't make much sense for it to still be full of water after 200 years of neglect, but at this point I don't even bother questioning stuff like that.

In any event it's deep enough, because SteelHooves disappears under the surface, and LP dives in after him. Unfortunately, there is a haunted radio down there, and it also seems that the pink stuff in the water is suddenly dangerous again. At this point, LP levitates all of the water out of the pool, takes SteelHooves out of the water, and then floats them both to safety. Then, she loses consciousness.

>I felt myself starting to pass out. The effort of self-levitation was too taxing, and my body was screaming from abuse.
That's not your body screaming, it's the laws of physics. Even in a magic world this is bullshit.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311091
311094 311100 311146 311206 311233
57e.png
>>311088

Page break. Another orb; this one relates to Fluttershy. There is apparently going to be an orb for each of the M6, and they apparently have something to do with Littlepoop figuring out what her virtue is.

The memory belongs to Angel Bunny. Angel goes into the office where LP just found the statuette and observes Flutters throwing an out-of-character tantrum; she must be extremely peeved. Apparently the source of this...peevement?...empeevening?...is that the zebras she used her healing-megaspell to save came back to life and attacked everyone. I guess. Also, they're dropping magic nukes or whatever the fuck on Canterlot, so everypony is going to die now. I guess that would have nearly anyone in a state of extreme peevulation.

Then, Rarity comes in and tells Fluttershy that it's time to go to the glue factory Stables. But Fluttershy doesn't want to go to the Stables; she thinks her soul is full of icky doo-doo because she helped cause this destruction, so she deserves to stay here and die. But Rarity insists. However, before they can reach an agreement about which one of them deserves to die more, they see a giant pink fart cloud drifting their way. Rarity sees that there is a hole in the window because Fluttershy threw something through it in her empeevened state, so she runs up and plugs the hole with her hoof. She then uses a teleport spell on Fluttershy, because I guess she can do that now. Flutters disappears.

Now it's Angel's turn to be empeevened. Where did Fluttershy go, he wonders in pantomime? Or maybe he's mad because it's time for his five o'clock tail fluff or because he wants that bitch Fluttershy to toss him up a salad or something; who knows? He's a fucking rabbit and he doesn't talk. Meanwhile Rarity uses her last bit of strength to...somehow magically encode a message into Angel I guess...that is addressed to Twilight. It basically tells her that she can find the Zebra necronomicon in her desk. Then, the scene cuts off abruptly.

From this, we can infer that the skeleton in Fluttershy's office was actually Rarity. Boy, won't Littlepoop's face be red when she figures this out? Here she thought it was just some NPC Background Skeleton that doesn't matter, but it turns out to have actually been a Main Character Skeleton that does matter. Oh, dear.

Page break. LP wakes up, and spends the next several paragraphs whining about how much pain she's in. The pink shit, which she has now spent the better part of two chapters walking around in while suffering few if any negative effects, is suddenly doing horrible things to her organs (all of them!), and oh holy jeez she just can't go on any more. But by gum, that plucky little so-and-so is just too darned tenacious to quit. She isn't going to just lie still and let the wasteland have its way with her now apparently half-melted body; not while there are heroic deeds of heroism to be done! Nope; she's just going to pick herself up, dust herself off, down a few thousand more magical all-purpose elixirs that will literally fix everything wrong with her in two seconds flat, and go right on back to mindlessly killing anything that wanders into her line of sight, and stealing any bright and shiny object that isn't nailed down or wedged into somepony's ribcage too deeply to pry out. What a brave little soldier she is!

Anywho, she eventually gets tired of moping heroically, and notices that while she was unconscious, somepony stripped her naked and took away all of her weapons. Also, she's in a strange room. Also, her friends are nowhere to be found. Also, there is a robotic owl named Wordsworth who talks like a butler.

The mystery is cleared up in relatively short order. The owl is part of some kind of security system in the Ministry of Magic, or "Arcane Sciences," or whatever it's called. The system is designed to automatically teleport anyone inside the Ministry to whatever location it deems proper. As the author's all-important Mary Sue, it appears that Littlepoop was sent directly to Twilight Sparkle's Athenaeum. Not the Twilight's Sparkle's Athenaeum that Homage lives in; this is a different Twilight Sparkle's Athenaeum entirely.

>My mind conjured the alarming image of Velvet running into the Ministry, levitating SteelHooves behind her, only to be teleported away, leaving SteelHooves helpless outside on the doorstep.
Incidentally, whatever happened to Velvet being so full of cloud that she couldn't move, because she wanted to stand in the cloud-filled auditorium pretending to be Fluttershy like an absolute retard? I thought she was supposed to be completely paralyzed and at death's door? Is this just another one of those "she drank a potion and it literally fixed everything wrong with her in two seconds flat" moments?

Oh, also, it seems that the pink cloud caused LP's PipBuck to fuse with her body. Now she can never take it off. Mighty convenient, that.

>“Wordsworth,” I whimpered several minutes later as I tried to fight back the hollow feeling in my heart. “I need medical supplies. Any painkiller, healing and restoration potions you can give me.”
>“You would not prefer to use the autonomous healing booth, ma’am?”
Yes, you read that correctly. There is actually a bullshit magical-cure-all in this story that is even more bullshit and magical than the magical potions that magically cure every injury with magic. Also, there's healing magic.

Seriously; why did these ponies even bother fighting a war with each other? Anyone who gets killed can just be resurrected with magic spells, healed with magic potions, or absolute worst-case scenario scraped off the pavement and flung into the "autonomous healing booth." Literally any injury, no matter how serious, can pretty much be shrugged off in this story. Why are there so many skeletons? Did the stores that sell super-duper restorative elixir suddenly run out on the day the megaspells fell? Is that the big tragedy here?
Anonymous
f2cc57b
?
No.311094
>>311091
You're Doing God's Work Glim. Keep it up Bro
Anonymous
1e51a9f
?
No.311100
>>311091
There's a missed opportunity here. What if LP's pipbuck could detect the names of corpses and body parts for added horror and tragedy whenever she sees one? Also what if the PipBuck locked up and needed to undergo a lengthy rebooting process, during which it was entirely useless, whenever it detected too many ponies (including dead ones) in an area? Suddenly while the raiders are still a starting enemy they have something going for them: their corpse gore interior and exterior decorating tastes plus any worn bones fuck with LP's autoaim minimap wallhack hammerspace-inventory Action Replay/GameShark of a bullshit cheat device. When she left her Stable at the story's start and entered Shattered Hoof Edgefest it could foreshadow this and create some irony that the pipbuck technician is relying on a faulty piece of hardware not designed for the challenges of the edgequestrian wasteland. And if it ever got some upgrade that removed this, perhaps an OS Update from a Ministry Of Magic computer, it would feel like a major meaningful victory. Right now, how can LP's absurd mary sue lethality grow any further in a reasonable manner? Literally meeting the ghost of Twilight Sparkle and getting telekinetic training from her in the afterlife after blacking out for a while and being dead for a minute or two wouldn't significantly enhance her telekinesis beyond this do-anything OP cheat ability.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311104
311180
>>311059
Yo that's actually a good thing to bring up. But also consider, Glim, that this is the school for gifted unicorns. For all purposes of prioritized individuals, this place would probably have reservations in some kind of nearby stable for the unicorns within. They're basically the toppest tier unicorns with the most potential, chosen by Celestia herself. There should be great lengths to get these ponies into a stable as quickly and easily as possible the moment shit goes south, as they would be considered ponies of interest.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311105
311106 311180 311233
Dw3clLGUYAE1qgh.jpg
1559560.png
>>311088
>Yep. Apparently, Calamity's gun can shoot through alicorn shields for some reason.

To be fair, we don't know the strength of these shields (kkat's fault as an author), but we could assume they have some kind of limit. I posted prior about the gun Calamity found: It's a .50 BMG anti-materiel rifle, and based on the strongest rifle in the fallout series. Not only that, it's a "unique" variant, which, in the games, is basically a statistically-superior, """enchanted""" version. In regular gameplay these guns pierce through power armor with ease and can kill great beasts in one or two shots.

I guess Kkat meant by alicorns being "invincible" is that their shields make them turbofuck generic raiders/ wastelanders due to shrugging off common, small-mid arms fire.
Anonymous
f2cc57b
?
No.311106
>>311105
Based Anti-Tank Rifle
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311146
>>311091
Isn't it ironic that Kkat made the Alicorns so overwhelmingly powerful, they can only be defeated if their overwhelming advantages go away?
>they are big and strong and tough but they never meaningfully physically overpower foes and they aren't that much tougher than the average pony
>they regenerate in radiation but killing them hard enough or beheading them overcomes regeneration. Their regeneration is nothing compared to Steelhooves's ability to be a Canterlot Ghoul in self-healing self-repairing OP power armour.
>they have a hive mind that lets them learn from each other's mistakes and communicate flawlessly around the country but many just hang around in random spots to be killed by The Alicorn Hunter plus the ones in Canterlot are cut off from the hive mind rendering them extra femininely retarded
>their hive mind is managed by a big retarded cunt and it only gives them great teamwork sometimes
>they have an entire alicorn faction and are "friends" with Red Eye and his slaves yet they have no hyper-dense magically-crafted armoured faction uniform or weapon production capacity
>in 200 years they have no food. No infrastructure. No farms. No mines. Slaves exist but what the fuck do they do when not fighting in the Thunderdome or shooting bugs in an office? WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY EAT, GAYKAT?
>they have op telekinesis but you'll rarely see them use any truly threatening giant weapons or out-telekinesis littlepip. No meaningfully dangerous miniguns and no psychically swinging pneumatic super-sledgehammers around miles from their heads.
>they have a magic shield that makes them invincible but they can be killed before they get it up plus 50BigMotherfuckingGun rounds can pierce the shield and grenades can probably destroy it too
>some can turn invisible and are blue but this never matters as smart blue ones never gather intel for the non-invisibles, plus LP's PipBuck radar spots invisible targets anyway
>even though they presumably fought countless ponies and saw countless things over 200 years, and even though Trixie is a pre war pony who should know what memory orbs are at the very least, they don't have more experience surviving in the wasteland than LP and can be tricked with the most obvious tricks ever.

Every time the Alicorns make retarded errors and go down like little bitches despite being the most OP mary sue race Kkat could imagine, it makes the Alicorns seem like a non-threat. But that doesn't make the heroes look impressive. LP was almost backed into a safe and murdered by a "really scawwy" small child once during Silver Bell's "arc". That small child literally came closer to killing LP than any Alicorn or Alicorn group so far. Consistent challenging settings would shred them for trying Troll Physics moments like vertical explosions and hiding under cumstained bedsheets.

Meanwhile competent stories are able to make less OP enemies more threatening.

Once I read a novel where the villains were barbarians who lived in the wilds. They were nothing to strong heroes but there were a lot of them and they were unifying under one really evil boss. And they had Breeding Pits, where captured slaves and women born into the slave tribes are stuck for life and raped for pleasure and childbirth until death. When the heroes go to kill the barbarian boss of bootleg Mount Doom, many barbarians ran into the breeding pits to fuck bitches while the lines were shorter than usual. The barbarians were shockingly desensitized to sex and the lives of their fellow barbarians and that stood out since the author tried so hard to make "civilization is good because it makes people stronger, helps the disabled contribute instead of killing them, and encourages teamwork and goodness which is good" a theme for that story arc. Sure the story got so carried away with edge I could never recommend it in good conscience or call it good, but that part was alright. A bit dumb that the barbarian problem ever got that bad to begin with but fuck it.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311180
311191
>>311080
>also is it a missed opportunity that only one pony can view a memory orb at once?
I don't really see how group orb-viewing sessions would add anything to the story. Each orb corresponds to one individual's memories, so all it would be is different instances of the same memory being viewed simultaneously by different individuals. The effect would ultimately be the same as if LP viewed the orb, and then passed it to Velvet or Calamity or whoever so they could also see it.

>>311104
That's a good observation. You'll also remember that in SteelHooves' recollection of the megaspell event, he and Applejack were running around trying to round up all of Zebratown to get them into the Stables, even as the Pink Cloud was beginning to seep up out of...wherever it seeped up out of. It stands to reason that the unicorn school would have been even more prepared for this sort of thing and would have had all of their students underground and secure well before this; honestly, if I were in charge, I would have turned the school into something like a stable in its own right, so it would have just been a matter of flipping a switch or something and activating the lockdown. One would expect the Ministries and the other important buildings to have had similar protections.

>>311105
I actually don't have a specific problem with Calamity's gun being able to blast through the shields; if anything I think it's a good idea to give the alicorns some kind of vulnerability. The problem is cumulative: the alicorns are vulnerable to just about every stupid trick Littlepoop has tried, plus Calamity has a gun that can blast through their shields. I actually agree with some other people in this thread that the alicorn hivemind was one of kkat's better ideas; the problem is that he makes such poor use of them. These alicorns have proven themselves vulnerable to everything from magical exploding anti-tank bullets to a simple "throw the stick and make the enemy chase it" routine, yet at the same time LP keeps talking these things up like they're some kind of formidable enemy.

If the fighting in this story were more balanced I'd frankly be willing to look the other way on how preposterous a lot of it is. For example, if Calamity or SteelHooves had some specific battle tactic that worked particularly well against alicorns, but nopony else had that ability and it wasn't really useful against anything but an alicorn. Most RPGs are fairly balanced in this way: some enemies are immune to fire but susceptible to water, but others are susceptible to earth but not wind. Some enemies can shrug off magical attacks entirely and you need to hack at them with swords, while others can only be beaten with magic. It basically requires you to have a well-balanced party and to not rely too heavily on any one character or type of character.

Translating this same principle into fiction requires giving your supplemental characters their own unique talents and having them work together to solve problems, something which kkat has proven himself to be almost criminally inept at. He wants the entire story to revolve around his stupid Mary Sue OC and how cool she is, so he solves every problem by either having her pull some idiotic trick out of her ass, or by having the enemy do something unbelievably stupid. Usually it's some combination of both. We've seen alicorns get taken down effortlessly by LP in so many silly ways at this point in the story that they are almost comic relief; giving Calamity's gun the ability to blow their shields apart on top of everything else just feels superfluous.

The biggest problem with the fighting in this story is that it doesn't signify anything at all or contribute to the growth of any of the characters, not even the overpowered Mary Sue that the entire story revolves around. For instance, if Calamity were the only one who could take down an alicorn, and LP suddenly found herself trying to fight one alone, she would be facing an enemy that her friend could take down almost effortlessly, but presents a major challenge for her. This would be a legitimate, meaningful challenge that would require her to face her own limitations. If she were then able to succeed by using some clever strategy, she would have overcome that limitation and by "clever" I mean actually clever, not just tossing a memory orb and saying "here, hold this memory orb; haha you are now stuck in a memory orb and I can shoot you". This is called growth, and it occurs when a character is able to overcome a difficult challenge and learn something as a result. In this particular example, there would actually be two lessons for LP to learn: a personal lesson about recognizing her own limitations, and a friendship lesson about respecting and valuing the talents of others.

In the entirety of this story, LP has not experienced a single moment of genuine growth. She's been goofing off in the wasteland for about a month or so now, and all she's really learned is that, despite having no innate talents worth speaking of and no formal training in any discipline except PipBuck repair, for some reason she is really, really good at just about everything she attempts. What the hell kind of lesson is that?

Moreover, the fights don't even present a challenge. Sure, she gets injured every now and then, but as I've complained again and again, medicine in this world is such complete bullshit that any injury she sustains is just a minor inconvenience. There's nothing really at stake in any of these fights, and she doesn't learn anything from any of them, so what's the point? There is none; it's just level-grinding. In fact, according to the footnotes of the last several chapters, LP is actually at maximum level now, so at this point the fights serve literally no purpose at all. They just drag out the length of a story that is already far longer than it has any right to be.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311191
311197
>>311180
If LP exploited the hive mind of Alicorns by shooting one's horn off and shooting its wings up outside the Pink Cloud so it's connected to the Trixie and Alicorn network, and then injected the alicorn with addictive combat drugs until it died or she ran out of drugs and shot it, in an attempt to fuck with every alicorn on the network and get all of them addicted to drugs at least psychologically if not physically, would that be fucked up or what?
Anonymous
ee964d4
?
No.311197
>>311191
I feel like a missed opportunity is not having more at play with the Goddess being a fusing of Twilight and Trixie. With how neurotic Twilight is and how much of a braggart Trixie is kkat could have made the alicorns much more entertaining if he wasn't going to make them dangerous.

Maybe have Littlepoop and an alicorn fighting over some loot like a memory orb or audio log since the Twilight part wants to gather any knowledge she can and LP wants to just get the platinum trophy achievement. Can have the gang run into an alicorn while Trixie has more of the hivemind under her influence so can make the alicorn vulnerable by forcing it to try and show up the party and since Trixie isn't a skilled mage the alicorn's magic will be weaker and perhaps open itself up for attack attempting a big spell or tries to show how tough it is and challenge a big monster infront of the gang to show how great and powerful it is before getting ripped apart.

Sure kind of ruins the whole intimidation factor they have but Twilight's influence could have them be dangerious at times and they aren't dangerous now so are just boring anyways. The Master was unsettling in Fallout 1 since even without his horrific visage it was still scary hearing him speak with all the different voices and the occasions where an individual voice would interject and try to speak out. Could use it as a method to add more character as well with LP being able to hear the Goddess sometimes when near her. Maybe have it so LP can hear the hivemind occasionally and listen to Twilight and Trixie fighting to maintain their sanity and regrets about what's happened while other aspects of their personality are embolden by the hivemind with having a captive audience and ponies to add their knowledge to the collective.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311206
311221 311225 311233
1624525069064.png
>>311091

Page break. After spending most of the last subchapter complaining about how much pain she was in, she now proceeds to complain about how scary it was to go into the magical healing booth that magically healed her and magically removed the very pain she was complaining about.

>The air had been stifling even before the door slid closed behind me, plunging me into darkness. I had never felt claustrophobic before (if anything, I was prone to sudden onsets of agoraphobia). But in that metal casket, in the absolute darkness, with the sounds that horrible thing made…
Ah yes, who could forget Littlepoop's sudden onsets of agoraphobia? It's almost as significant a plot point as her on-again, off-again crack mint addiction or her alcoholic mother.

>And then I had started to feel the magical energies probing me, washing over me like some sort of slimy, alien massage from an invisible and horrible creature!
Mechanical Butler Owl: "Oh sorry, Littlepoop, I put you into the tentacle rape machine by mistake. I don't know why Twilight insisted on keeping those two machines right next to each other, but I always get them mixed up."

>Never, ever again. Even though my body felt better, I knew I would have nightmares for weeks. I could already anticipate waking in cold sweat, feeling the dream terror of being trapped endlessly in that “autonomous healing station”.
Aw, poor you. Sounds almost as bad as that time you went insane and slaughtered an entire village because they convinced you to slaughter another village and steal a water talisman for them but then it turned out they were cannibals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtvmTu4zAMg
Sorry, I just like this song.

Anyway, as soon as she's done blathering for literally five paragraphs about how scary the magical healing box was, she goes down a hallway and notices that there is a door at the end with an ominous message written on it in blood. The message reads "be sure to drink your Ovaltine." actually, it says "spell in a box," which is written in blood underneath the door's actual placard, which reads "Spell Testing." But honestly who even cares at this point?

>“Not a good sign,” I muttered to myself. I was appropriately creeped out.
Good. The sign really was not written that well at all, and I always like to be creeped out at the appropriate level myself.

She hears some static hissing from under the door, and correctly deduces that this must mean there is a haunted radio inside. For some reason, she decides to open the door anyway. Inside there is some kind of laboratory with, you guessed it, a haunted radio. She runs through the lab to the door at the other end. But oh noes! The door is locked! She tries to pick the lock, but oh noes she can't! Then, she does pick the lock, and goes into the next room.

Anyway, at this point I have no idea what this character is doing or why, but that's hardly anything new. She runs through several rooms and it's mostly just more of the same bullshit: there's a hazard of some kind in each room, and usually a lock that she has to pick. She bypasses the hazards and picks the locks. At one point she levitates some water out of a fountain and uses it as a shield against a magical energy turret that is firing at her, because that's not a completely retarded idea.

>I supposed I should consider myself lucky that my barding hadn’t been submerged in the pink pool long enough to fuse to my body. And that my hacking and repair tools had likewise not been fused together or otherwise warped into uselessness.
Reminder that we are currently on Chapter 37 of this 46-chapter work and the author has still not given us even the most cursory explanation of how she "hacks" terminals or what kinds of tools are involved.

Anyway, eventually she winds up in an office belonging to some long-dead ponies named Gestalt and Mosaic. These names may or may not be important later. She finds some weapons inside and takes them, because for some reason the mechanical butler owl returned her barding but not her weapons. Either that or she dropped her weapons while she was running away from the alicorn barrage and the butler doesn't have them; I forget which. There is also a terminal on the desk, and of course she decides to hack it and read whatever's inside.

>Mercifully, the pink-saturated water that bound my PipBuck to me did not seem to impair its functioning. Stable-Tec didn’t fool around when they made PipBucks; the devices had a durability somewhere between SteelHooves and a soul jar.
Wow, that's pretty durable. Or, not that durable at all. Actually, what level of durability are we talking here? This comparison is useless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UFIYGkROII
I don't even like Soul Jar Boy that much, but I can't even pretend to take this critique seriously anymore

Page break. This time we don't even get to find out what was on the terminal. We rejoin LP at some mysterious point in the far flung future; she has just opened some mysterious door that may or may not even be in the same building, and miraculously finds Velvet Remedy inside. Since Velvet is nowhere near as important a character as Littlepoop, the magical transporter system seems to have just thrown her into some kind of broom closet or something. Velvet is naturally happy that Mary Sue came to rescue her, because Lord knows she couldn't have found her way out of that closet all by her lonesome.

>“Thank the Goddesses,” she whispered as she reached me, nuzzling my face. “I… I was trapped in here for so long. Alone. Trapped.” She’d said that twice. I didn’t need explanation. My lovely songbird friend had once again found herself caged and alone. She was trembling.
Imagine typing any portion of this novel with a straight face.

>“Thank you, Littlepip, but the others are who are important now.”
This is an incredibly awkward sentence. Try "thank you Littlepoop, but we need to worry about the others now."
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311221
311224
s-l1600 (1).jpg
>>311206

Anyway, we get a brief recap of what happened between the end of the last subchapter and the beginning of this one. The terminal LP hacked in Mosaic and Gestalt's office helpfully contained the locations of all of her friends, so now it's just a matter of rounding them all up. The only issue appears to be Calamity, who I guess is somewhere in the prison block in the basement. There was some kind of security issue down there that isn't very clearly explained, but it sounds like the focus of their next adventure will be rescuing Calamity. Also, it turns out that the robotic owl butler actually does have all of their weapons and equipment, but fearless leader LP forgot to ask for it back. Nothing else happens.

Page break. We are mysteriously teleported into yet another new location, where LP is once again shooting at haunted radios in some kind of laboratory. She has a magical shotgun now, which I think she found in Wingus and Dingus' office, and as the scene opens she is blasting merrily away at the radios.

>In a panic, I fled to the far side of the lab. I pressed myself into the corner, breathing a sigh of relief as the vices crushing my horn and skull vanished. That last yard of space was outside the danger zone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siwpn14IE7E
Sorry, I had to do it.

Anyway, LP kills all the ugly radios and then Velvet comes in and starts looting medical supplies from the lab. LP grills her about why she pulled that stunt in the auditorium earlier, and Velvet replies that it was because Fluttershy. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They are now in a different room. SteelHooves is in this one.

>Velvet Remedy and I dashed inside. Our friend was laying on a circular platform, surrounded by a magical shield. At our entrance, he stood up. I think I even detected a whinny of relief.
Our friend was lying on a circular platform.

>Velvet stopped just outside the shield, looking it over before asking him if he was okay. Clearly, the alicorns’ attack had knocked him unconscious after all, but he had regained it hours ago. Five-point-three hours ago, according to SteelHooves who had nothing better to do than watch the timekeeper on his visor’s E.F.S. count away. Even if his weapons could disable the shields, the explosions would have torn him apart in that confined space. Not even SteelHooves could survive dismemberment.
I'm not really sure what's going on here. I guess the security system put him inside this shield for some reason, and if he goes outside the shield...he will...explode? I guess?

At any rate, it appears that the "mighty alicorn hunter" has spent the last 5.3 hours sitting on his ass waiting for Fearless Leader Mary Sue to come rescue him. Par for the course in this story. Anyway, Littlepoop cracks another terminal that takes down the explody-shield and also contains seven lab reports, which kkat proceeds to unceremoniously dump into the text as usual. Meanwhile, Velvet uses the healing supplies she just commandeered to replenish the auto-healing system in SteelHooves' armor. You may or may not remember that all of his supplies had run out, and he's apparently spent the last several chapters getting by on grit and moxie alone, the poor dear.

Anyway, the reports that LP reads are just the usual fare: the Ministry of Something or Other is conducting research into zebra invisibility cloaks and whatnot, and there's a lot of inter-Ministry intrigue over the project. The eventual result was something called the Ghostmare Suit, which appears to have been an invisibility suit powered by multiple StealthBucks. The project appears to have had mixed results.

>Twinkle and Daybreak have been particularly snippy with each other again today for no apparent reason. I suspect those two bucks are having an affair. If so, I hope they keep it quiet. Personally, I think they would make a cute couple. But we have fraternization rules for a reason, and the last thing I want is to lose one of them because the magic twins decide to put them on separate floors.
Obligatory superfluous gay relationship between two throwaway characters who will never be mentioned again, tossed into the story for absolutely no reason.

Anyway, when she's done reading the reports, LP goes looting and discovers some kind of enhanced StealthBuck that was part of the Ghost project.

Page break. They are now going to the basement to get Calamity I guess. The stairs were blocked, so they try an elevator shaft. However, this is also blocked. There is some kind of shield spell in place that has something to do with the security system. LP cooks up a ridiculous plan that involves levitating the elevator and using bypass spells or some shit; it probably wouldn't be worth going over even I could understand what the hell she's talking about. She attempts to explain the plan to her friends, and is exasperated to learn that they are nowhere near as smart as she is.

>I looked at them. Of course they didn’t understand. SteelHooves had no clue about magic at all, and Velvet Remedy’s levitation magic was comparatively foalish.
Gah, morons! Why can't LP's friends be a super-genius like she is? Oh wait; it's because if they were, then solving every single problem the group encounters would no longer be the exclusive domain of the author's beloved Mary Sue. We certainly couldn't allow something like that.

Anyway, it looks like she needs the elevator schematics to do whatever kind of bullshit she's planning, so I guess their next task will be to track them down.

Page break. Scratch that; turns out LP had the elevator schematics on her PipBuck already for some reason. Makes perfect sense; why would her personal PipBuck not have the schematics to a specific mechanism in a building she's never been to pre-installed? My phone came with the design spec for the large hadron collider, though I deleted it to install Candy Crush Saga.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311224
311226 311227 311394
1624210526798.jpg
>>311221

LP goes over the elevator schematics which for some reason are installed on her PipBuck, and which for some reason SteelHooves had to find on there for her. As he is messing with her PipBuck, SteelHooves notices that it is now fused to her foreleg, and there is a lot of appropriate respect paid to Littlepoop over how far she is willing to go to save her friends. Such a hero!

Anyway, she uses the schematics to get whatever information she needs, and uses her goddamn ridiculous stupid bullshit levitation powers to do her stupid magic trick. She levitates the elevator through the shield somehow and the party gets in. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Velvet and LP ride down in the elevator together. SteelHooves had to wait in the hall because the elevator is too small to hold the three of them plus Calamity. LP asks Velvet if she knows what happened to her most favorite gun, Little Macintosh. Velvet gets mad because LP is worried about her gun instead of their pet firebirb, who is still lost outside. LP apologizes, but the damage is done.

>Oh. I felt a twinge of guilt. “Pyrelight’s not in the building according to the security system. She never got trapped in…” I stopped, feeling a sinking sensation that chilled my heart and stole my breath. The elevator car stopped moving with a jolt as my eyes widened. If Pyrelight never made it inside, that meant she was still out in the pink. A whole night in the Cloud meant death.
I thought Pyrelight was made out of balefire, and couldn't be affected by radiation or whatever? Wouldn't bathing in the Pink Cloud make her stronger, or at least not hurt her since her body composition is different? Or is the Pink Cloud not made out of radiation? It's almost impossible to keep track of how all the autistic made-up bullshit in this story is supposed to work.

Anyway, there is now some tension between Velvet and LP I guess. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The two of them are down in the basement now. There is some kind of gas down there making it hard to breathe. There is an alicorn chained up in a nearby room for some reason, and it appears to be talking to itself. Upon closer inspection, the conversation is likely between the alicorn and Trixie, who I guess can kinda-sorta break through the telepathy block caused by the Pink Cloud and kinda-sorta try to convince it to return to the herd. At least I think that's what's going on.

>Or not. Purple alicorns teleport. Blue ones turn invisible. The green ones do that weird statue thing. But what if that was part of a broader gift? The green alicorns were the telepaths! Even cut off from the Goddess, they still had their gift. If anything, the Goddess probably borrowed that magical talent from them.
Has any of this been previously established? I don't remember. I don't even remember the alicorns being different colors or having different powers; I thought the whole point of the alicorns is that they're a hivemind, and are all basically identical? The probable explanation is that I didn't notice certain minor details of the fight sequences, which as it turns out were plot-critical.

Probably, kkat has been describing this alicorn as green and that alicorn as blue, and having them do different things, and assuming that everyone would follow along, because because obviously we are all as autistic as he is and will automatically connect different powers to different subtle varieties of alicorn. It's honestly pretty hard to give a shit at this point. The blue alicorns can teleport, and the green ones have shields, and the purple ones can fire acid-rainbows out of their buttholes, and the burgundy ones have balefire eggs as crotchtits...sure; why the hell not? It's not like dumping additional layers of ridiculousness onto this already-beyond-convoluted story is going to add or subtract anything. Go nuts, kkat.

Anyway, as the alicorn argues with itself, or with Trixie, or the hivemind, or whatever, a cutie mark keeps appearing and disappearing on its flank. The symbolism here is about as subtle as being whanged upside the head with a two-by-four; however, what's strange is that it's a different cutie mark each time. Maybe the idea is that the alicorn lost its identity when it was absorbed, and is now trying to find it again? It needs to rediscover its special talent in order to gain autonomy from Trixie and reclaim its individuality? Not sure what the author is going for here exactly, but I assume it's something along these lines.

Page break. They find Calamity, but it turns out there is a problem. The gas the basement is filled with turns out to be hydrogen, because I guess the Ministry of Whichever Ministry Building They are In Right Now was building Pinkie's hydrogen balloons, and a hydrogen crystal went off down here, and blah blah blah there's hydrogen everywhere. So, it turns out they can't blast the lock off of the door because the room would explode. LP is going to need to find the key.

Page break. LP apparently found the key sometime in the ether-space between the last microscene and this one. Phew! That was a scary 0.3 seconds. Calamity is out of the cell, so now they can turn their attention to more interesting things, like walking back to the elevator. On the way, they briefly discuss the situation with the alicorns, and how the Pink Cloud is cutting off their telepathy. It seems the disconnect between the hivemind and their former identities as ponies is causing the alicorns to literally go mad. Calamity seems to know something about it, and has a plan. He wants to go to the castle now. Sure; why not add another side trip to their itinerary? It's not like they have anything more important to do, like tracking down...what was it again? A book? I think they also had to go to the Ministry of Image to get...what was the other thing again? I forget which of the story's many MacGuffins they are currently supposed to be searching for.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.311225
>>311206
>I could already anticipate waking in cold sweat, feeling the dream terror of being trapped endlessly in that “autonomous healing station”.
Wow, Littlepoop is a little bitch. Christine from Fallout NV was actually trapped in one of those things as it constantly did assorted surgeries upon her, fucking her mind up and giving her the voice of Vera so she can open something in the casino. She wasn't a bitch about it, unless her claustrophobia "please don't make me go in the elevator shaft" moment counts.

>LP and pals are put in their appropriate locations
This is fucking stupid because it misses the symbolism inherent in the moment this happens to the player in FNV: Dead Money!

The Player is left in the middle of the casino, it assumes you're a guest. You're here to plunder the Casino or escape it so putting you here like a pre-war civilian either fits perfectly or it un-fits in the most perfectly ironic way possible.

And when you go to your three friends who have REASONS for not being able to leave their assigned location, you either talk them down like a nice guy or kill them like a cunt since your lives are no longer linked to theirs. And if you were a cunt when working with them they'll attack you.

Dean Domino goes to the theatre because he's a Lounge Singer surrounded by danger and only singing can get him out.

God/Dog is trapped in the kitchen, because the Casino views him as a servant. He throws on the gas and prepares to kill himself via firebombing. Player must talk one personality into overcoming the other or both into fusing and forgetting everything. If one personality hates you things get harder.

Christine, hot chick with the voice of Vera, is put in Sinclair's bedroom next to Vera's corpse and the door her voice is needed to open. Must talk her into giving up revenge and letting you kill Elijah (or you can also stylishly trap him in the casino or join him).

There's a reason why this mission takes away your usual friends like Boone and forces you to work with pricks that can be far more difficult. These characters were built for this DLC. They were made to tie into its themes.

NONE of this GENIUS DEPTH is carried over to this shallow imitation of Fallout NV's greatest DLC. WE ALREADY KNOW WHO LP'S FRIENDS ARE. Well, not as people. They're too shallow to have any depths, hidden or otherwise. But we know all there is to know about them. And we know they aren't going to turn on LP just for showing up and getting them in this mess.

Where's the irony in the locations chosen for LP's friends? How can she and the friend she's currently saving work together to get out of the situation they're both stuck in until it's resolved? Theoretically if she pissed her friends off before this happened, how could they make getting through each friend's situation before killing them and running harder?

>Even if his weapons could disable the shields
He could fill his shield-prison with grenades to blow it apart but that explosion would also make him run out of HP and get dismembered to death. Kkat sucks at explaining that part but I know what it's referencing. Bet he wishes that power armour had some strength-enhancing properties that would let him punch his way out. In the actual Fallout games Power Armour boosts your strength. Guess Kkat forgot strength can do more than carry infinite-ammo grenade guns. Bet Steelhooves wishes he brought a melee weapon like a crowbar or Pneumatic PowerFist(TM).

Hang on, how are Kkat's locations for LP's friends ironic or fitting or ironically unfitting?

Steelhooves gets trapped in a magic shield for no reason and his only means of escape, le big booms, would kill him. Who trapped him there? Alicorns, I guess. The Legendary Alicorn Hunter, everyone.
Velvet is trapped somewhere with a lot of lethal radios around because she's a singer.
Calamity is in a prison because he's a killer I guess? Or because when you first met God/Dog, God had locked himself in a cage and hidden the key hoping to keep his split personality Dog safe from the villainous Elijah's commands and schemes.

Is this really the best Kkat could do? What a shitload of fuck. He apes moments from Fallout without understanding the writing behind the visuals, because he isn't a writer, he's a motherfucking consumer whose fanservice-laden dreck killed any chance any good Fallout and FIM crossover had of ever getting popular enough to rival FE.

>alicorn arguing
it's been years since I read this but is this Kkat's God/Dog knockoff? LP's friends are already stealing the roles of God/Dog and the rest so why bother including them? I remember hating this knockoff. In FNV Dog was a loyal servant so desperate for a master he constructed a tulpa named God to call him a faggot 24/7 and tell him not to eat random bullshit. Or maybe God's the original and Dog's the split personality, who knows. Anyway he was lost specifically because he needed a new master, his old one The Master (Trixie's inspiration) was dead for years, and he was here because the villain Elijah was using him.
Anonymous
49e2179
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No.311226
>>311224
>Or is the Pink Cloud not made out of radiation?
The Red Cloud(Pink Cloud) in the games is a wholly separate entity from radiation. Iirc it's airborne corrosive/ heavy metals condensed into a toxic, mustard gas-type cloud.

In the fic, it's the product of multiple megaspells detonating and then being sealed/ condensed within the shield the sisters erected over their city. The wiki just simply states that it was a "pink cloud megaspell", but the fic seems to imply some necromantic energies in the nukes? Are the nukes elsewhere different, or did being condensed under the shield make it worse here? Were separate nukes used for Canterlot compared to the rest of the world? I don't know, man.
Anonymous
49e2179
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No.311227
>>311224
Oh shit sorry for the multiple messages. Reading Nigel's posts reminded me that there are some things I missed

I find it very curious that Steelhooves needs to have his armor's life support refueled with healing potions, when he is a pink cloud ghoul, thus functionally immortal. Perforations or great wounds literally do not matter. He has fallen a mile, and technically died multiple times. Why even bother? The ones they have fought came back from death, and they don't even have armor that keeps their vital parts like their heads from being detached. It makes little sense and seems like a waste. Also, would health potions even work on a necro gas magic zombie? That seems like prime territory for magical interference/ fucking your body up.

Nigel brings up another point. Littlepip being separated from her friends is another reference to the DLC this location is based off of. During the midpoint of the DLC, you enter a significant pre-war building and are separated from your friends due to a security thing at the entryway. The facility's automated systems put your companions in different locations according to what it detects. The pre-war lounge singer is put into the stage he used to perform at, the female with the voice of the facility leader's crush is put into her personal room, and the big dumb brute is put into the kitchen because he's thought of as a typical laborer. You, the blank slate protagonist, are put into the entry hall because, well, you're a generic "guest". Kkat took this and referenced for seemingly no reason, in a location that is not plot critical or significant, and didn't even follow the tenents of the idea proposed in the original content.

I THINK the alicorn arguing with herself is another reference to the same DLC. There is a Super Mutant (Alicorns are this setting's Super Mutants) companion who is struggling with multiple personality disorder who constantly fights with himself internally and talks to himself. This might be a really bizarre reference as well, knowing Kkat.
Anonymous
0681d3b
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No.311229
1479962860680.png
>>310680
Always with those power fantasies and delusions of granduer, hmm? Never change, Niggel.. especially since you will never change. To answer all of your questions, I have this simple response:

kill yourself.

That will be the most historical/i] and hysterical act you could ever perform. Not only will I forever live rent free in your brain as the invisible, untouchable, impossible-to-stop boogey man that will never go away, you will likewise never cease to be a lime-burning britcuck for what little short life you have left. For all the rest? [i]Your suffering amuses me. No one cares about your oh-so-important-suffering against so-called "reddit loving shills", since after all: YOU CAME FROM FUCKING REDDIT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Your but-I'm-the-good-goy-here platitudes always end up with: "B-B-B-BUT I'M THE GOOD GOY!" Your unhinged, UNRELATED, CONSISTENTLY retarded animu rants that never cease to piss people off is not solely my fault. I don't KNOW how many anons have chimed in to tell you to STOP FUCKING TYPING, yet there have been enough complaints that said rants have been directly addressed by mods. INCLUDING one that you fucking claimed was gangstalking your pathetic jew-loving ass.

What I wrote are my PERSONAL opinions on how absolutely horrible kkuck's interpolations and inDERPretations of his own characters are. No, I don't BOTHER to read anyone's opinions on how shitty this self-insert slashfic is. I typed what I typed without interference. How come you are utterly oblivious to recognize that fact? There is no building off someone's opinion in order to chime in my own, which is YET ANOTHER gaslight attempt from you! How funny is that, you fucking up by projecting your own pathetic weakness! My thoughts and knowledge express what I have expressed! Whatever I have stated, being my OWN statements, what does that matter if it ends up being similar to what others have stated before? This can only mean the following: kkuck is an even bigger faggot than ever considered.. except for (((You))).

Why? You. keep. failing. You never win. You take every single fucking bait and detraction, screaming that, like a common Karen SJW, (((You))) are "always right". You will never STOP failing in that redress against your mysterious detractors. For all the shitslinging and mudraking you have done in trying to figure out who, exactly, is pissing on your never-ending jewsade to make yourself out to be inviolable, gets this reaction: every single gaslight you do to every single detractor in the vain hope that (((You))) will, somehow, magically, ULTIMATELY, come up as "right" for once, is the end point. After that, SHOULD you somehow, magically, ULTIMATELY, become consciously aware of what a fucking inbred niggerstain you are.. then good job, goy. You keep playing yourself.

And that amuses me.

>>310681
Yes, yes, yes, semantics matter. I've had the same discussion with a certain mare's ass of a 'friend' several times, when he bothers me enough to force a discussion. That specific point was brought up in this thread as a matter of hypocrisy.

>>310691
Why? Forcing Niggel's online """personal"""" life to be as miserable possible while he desperately searches for his !!NAMELESS EVIL RIVAL!! that only wants to seeks him due to !!PURE EVIL!! is my new hobby. I declared that some time back. Has been said hobby since that dipshit kike-loving mutt started posting on this site, more so due to the fact that one of the mods I trusted was removed from his position when Niggel whined, cried, begged, and whimpered that he was being (((gangstalked)))) by "a certain hateful person". Ninja isn't here now as a mod, and that alone pisses me off. Do I need any other reason? Should I explain why the other britposter ISN'T a britmutt or a cucked piece of kike and mudslime loving shit? No. Niggel has ALWAYS been a disruptive cunt, and he continues to be, especially when he panders to ((((his audience))) that he believes exists to protect him from "the bad goys". Check back into the first two fucking threads of this admittedly hilarious and equally sobering shitshow. Niggel has done EVERYTHING to disrupt those threads, and this one, that he could possibly do. What specifically annoys me is his constant gaslighting. Don't give Niggel any screentime, end of fucking story.
Anonymous
0681d3b
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No.311231
311261
>>310905
>So wait a minute; she broke into the police station, blew up a bunch of alicorns with a bazooka, and then took a nap? She's literally sleeping in a room filled with the blood and guts of a bunch of exploded alicorns? Did she do this before or after she sat down to read two paragraphs of Midnight Shower's diary?
This line is a painful tribute to the way that raiders supposedly slept in their bunkers or shelters in FAILout 3: covered in the blood, flesh, guts, and bones of their 'victims'. Which doesn't make a single bit of sense since doing exactly that shit would attract the thousands of horrific mutant wildlife strains into destroying them. kkuck is still a retard.

>wacky zebra beliefs
Since kkunt can't be bothered to state anything less than !!SuPeR aMbIvAlEnT dIaTriBe ReLiGiOuS vOodOo NoNsEnSe!!, here's a wild guess; none of the zebra religion means shit. It's simply a "bad enemy faction" to "utterly dispose of in the end game because they're !!!bad!!!".

>>310916
How convenient it must be to find yourself in the same cell that a crazy-but-totally-sane-prisoner was in! More dogshit "Enterprise Effect" style plot armor, except now at the peak of Star Trek: Voyager stupidity.

No, dried blood on a wall, floor, or ceiling MIGHT survive 3-8 years depending on ultra-specific conditions. After that time, said blood flakes off the material it was 'painted on', falling apart completely. Unless the material is somehow magical.

>>310921
These timeskips are even worse than those in the fucking MechWarrior novels. At least the MW series authors have the decency to write a basic synopsis of what happened between the 5-20 years of 'shit happened and our technology degraded further'.

The correct word for manipulating objects due to the power of one's mind is 'psychokinesis', which itself is a rather bizarre subsect of sentient/sapient controlled electromagnetics that the Greek City-States toyed with. Again, the author is a literal retard.

>>310928
At this point kkuck is simply using all of his power fantasies to make sure his """big heroes""" survive. Nothing more needs be stated there.

>>310986
A boiler is, for the extremely short version: "a self-contained water evaporation and recollection system based on generating power system when fuel (gas/solid/liquid/liquidus) is burned to produce a spinning rotation of self-contained internal blades which produces electrical/gaseous/hydraulic power into a specific function".

Taken literally: boilers (except for the earliest ones) DO NOT simply "explode". There is almost ALWAYS a pressure release valved system that, if said pressure rises above a certain threshold, automatically automagically? releases said pressure externally in a non-harmful manner. Overriding a boiler system so that it COULD explode is a quite literal engineer's hornet nest of multiple safety systems that require explicit knowledge of how to defeat them all. In other words, not happening. That is unless the retarded EcuckstryhardLOL universe is simply that stupid. And no, one does not "throw all the right switches and turn the right knobs" to cause a pressure-based boiler system to 'explode'.

Bear in mind that the few RECORDED instances of a boiler exploding was between 0.5 to 3 city blocks of ultra-heated steam which was enough to fry off the skin layers of every living being in the cloud of vapor. There is LITTLE chance of survival when that shit happens, which is exactly why boilers are, for the most part, no longer used! Major miss there.

As for how long even the best stainless steel boilers can last without constant maintenance? Roughly 10 years. After that requires a full maintenance and replacement cycle.

>>310994
That first line is a reference to Fallout 2's 'Vault Dweller' references.. from Fallout 1. In Fallout 2, it was the Village Elder telling the Player/Player Character how the Vault Dweller was fucking awesome. What really gets shit on here is that the Village Elder DOES try to share why the Vault Dweller was not a hero. Instead, kkuck runs this generational story-telling through with a typical "b-b-but muh FAILout Tree wuz ahwsum!" sword-to-the-dick garbage.

Another severe issue (that I think was already stated?) The Cloud in F:NV Dead Money DLC was LETHAL. You could only spend a few seconds in it before you. fucking. DIE. There is no protection against it. There is no warding it off. There is only The Cloud which MUST be avoided, and the places that are (somewhat) safe. As you've stated, kkuck basically makes the Pink Cloud out to be nothing more than a MacGuffin to be used in 'times of !!REAL!! distress'.

>>310995
Adorable image.

This... first paragraph of yours is a shitshow, though not by your own accord. In F:NV (depending on your stats and learned recipes), there are several points that you can teach the two drug dealers of the Great Khans (IF you saved them) how to make certain drugs. Three of them are HIGHLY helpful, but a couple of them are miserably addictive and don't contribute jack shit. By helping them with the OBJECTIVELY good three drugs, that makes the Great Khans stronger (and you'll find most Great Khans using them throughout the rest of the game IF you did so). As for the other two? There's a chance that, whenever you encounter a Great Khan squad, they'll be fucked up on the negative drugs. Thus, they'll usually get some damage in, then die easily. I'm completely unsure if there's anything related in FAILout Tree since I quit playing that after half an hour.

>>311059
This here is the second biggest deal-breaker. Where the fuck is this Lovecraft-wannabe shit even coming from? Fallout 1/2/NV did play with the 'elder gods from above' schpiel, yet there were ALWAYS clues that none of it was real. In Fallout 2, the Wanamingo was, before the Player FOUND one, an 'Alien'. BUT! Turns out they were xenomorph-like military weapons developed by the same rock-paper-scissors morons that created the 100% artificial FEV virus. Oh gee, plot hole!
Anonymous
0681d3b
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No.311233
>>311000
This entire exchange of NOU! and NOU!! is blatant fan-service shilling over 'who is MORE LIKE X canon character'. Disgustingly retarded.

Here's a serious question that most non-military persons will find fascinating: what does the average grenade weigh? Well, in most parts of the world, a throwing grenade weighs from 8-20 ounces. A cased-grenade that is to be launched from a grenade launcher weighs from 14-36 ounces. How many, exactly, is the average person supposed to carry of each? The average soldier (expendable) carries 4 hand-thrown grenades along with their combat rifle, often 3 fragmentation and either 1 smoke grenade or a special purpose design. The average grenadier does NOT carry a combat rifle nor 8-15 magazines, allowing them to carry from 20-30 launched grenades. But guess what? If said grenadier takes a few shots, most of those grenades go kaboom in a chain reaction. How does that fare for rocket or missile carrying troops? Even worse since they have larger munitions that are intended to destroy hardened obstacles and tanks. Thus, ShitHorse being the 'grenadier' of the group makes absolutely zero sense as none of his munitions are protected. Unless they're somehow MAGICALLY PROTECTED against being destroyed, in which case there is negative sense being made.

>>311079
Ah yes, zombie young. Hasn't the party dealt with them enough to realize that they cannot be recovered from their initial state? Utterly fucking brainless. No, the author, not the """zombies""".

Yes, MORE plot armor, that's exactly what the nonsensical author needed to introduce.

No Caesar ever ruled in Afrika. The Persians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians, and Egyptians did, leaving a rather lasting succession of kings/queens and other royalty. The closest would have been Alexander, whom found that the intense heat and painful conditions made ruling Afrika a useless prospect. He swiftly abandoned the idea of 'ruling the deserts' after the second expedition.

Unfunny irony is the worst form of "humor".

Another pointless, completely unoriginal power fantasy. According to Chris Avellone, he intended a cutscene in F:NV where, after completing Dead Money, the player character steals the gold and locks in (Father Elijah) forever while the narrator proclaims that the 'Dead Money' would be used to enlighten the Wasteland through either commerce or acceptance. That was supposed to tie into either a Brotherhood of Steel or a Followers of the Apocalypse (the Player Character would lose all the gold bars they took) quest line. Said quest line never made the cut due to time constraints.

>>311088
Ahhhh yes, the Scooby Doo approach: ALWAYS SPLIT UP! Fucking inane.

The necrophiliac hoarder actually has a change of heart?! Oh no, that's such a surprise after all of the CORPSE ROBBING she's done throughout this entire fucking power fantasy. Dogshit.

BUT WAIT! She gets a perfect exemplar of why she should be a corpse robbing hoarder through some convenient plot magic! What a WONDROUS turn of events! How absolutely MAGICAL is their FRIENDSHIP to last 200 years, DESPITE all of the bad shit that they caused to each other! It's completely great! No troubles at all! Just a perfectly normal power fantasy that somehow keeps getting worse!

Adding to your last line, there's a specific book series, the Elric of Melnibone trilogy, that the main character (Elric, of course) is 'shown' to be the GREATEST magic user in universe. For those that have not read it, there's a series of nasty twists which I will not spoil. However, Elric is not the greatest magic user ever. In fact, all of his actions fuck him over, from start to finish. He only gets to play villain, or hero, when he isn't consistently being used.

>>311091
I honestly like the idea of every single "Stable" being a glue factory, mostly since all of the characters are such retarded, weakling simps that that is the only possible positive outcome they could deserve.

Yet another problem with The Cloud: it doesn't simply "do horrible shit" to your organs in an instant. It is an entire collective of nanites that tear apart organic and inorganic matter, break said matter down, then repurpose the matter into what look like poker chips. No, that is not a joke. As stated before, it is COMPLETELY lethal, though solely due to one problem: said nanite swarm rips apart the unlucky host's tissues and bones in the course of 2-5 minutes. Once enough physical mass has been lost due to that there is no returning from the damage. After X% of bodily loss, there's no chance of recovery.

More fucking power fantasy. The """character""" doesn't die, never learns a lesson, and is always protected by the most imperious Mare-y Snoot plot armor to ever exist: a piece of shit writer's headcanon.

>>311105
There are considerably stronger weapons, including the Gauss Pistol and Gauss Rifle (which I explained about much earlier), and several energy weapons. It's virtually impossible for those to have any real weaknesses given how insanely costly they were to develop and deploy. Another problem here is that the .50 BMG is one of the WORST anti-tank rifles in current military standards. It isn't even considered an anti-tank weapon anymore, it is an "anti-vehicle weapon". Which essentially means: 'take out that unarmored vehicle's engine' instead of 'take out that tank'. There are now >40 cartridges that are suited to anti-tank roles, all of which greatly surpass the .50 BMG. (For reference, 12.7MM = 0.50" caliber). There's everything from man-portable 13.5MM to 17.5MM anti-tank rifles, some of which are BULLPUP designs. Most of which are, fortunately, combat proven, unlike the piece of niggershit Barrett series.

>>311206
Yes, more inane plot armor, which is ABSOLUTELY what kkuck needed to keep his power fantasy flowing.

Nope, can't even imagine a time where I would ever require using those words. Not even for comic relief, funnily enough.
Anonymous
3ec6f7a
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No.311260
I'll just drop this here
https://youtu.be/DfUJb1IAwBI
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.311261
311803
>>311231
Thank you for doing your best to focus on the fanfic (the thread's topic) after getting another cycle of "fuck you nigel everyone stop listening to nigel and trust me instead" out of your system, hclegend from reddit.

How do you think Kkat's choices of location for LP's friends are supposed to relate to them? He knew they had to go SOMEWHERE that seemed relevant to them, since he didn't copypaste the casino locations used in Fallout. But at the same time, he has no idea what to do with the concept of reusing Dead Money and converting it into Canterlot before converting the Casino interior into the Ministry Of Magic building.

Come on, if ANYONE would make a museum section of their ministry open to the public, it would be Twilight. Maybe Rarity and RD too.

Perhaps if Steelhooves was placed in a museum wing with the other relics besides other exhibits on Power Armour, surrounded by laser tripwires and security miniguns enhanced by the cloud to deal extra magical poison bullet damage to anyone who trips those wires, LP would be forced to come in and hack the security system off while dealing with autonomous prototype power armour suits out for her blood.

Perhaps if Velvet was trapped in a museum exhibit on the history of radios, unable to move without getting killed by the cursed radios. So LP would be forced to hack the PA broadcast system to play whatever song Velvet sings, making the radios harmless while she's still singing, giving LP a chance to telekinetically lift all the radios into the air like clay pigeons before firing at them. Then a shitton of enemies pour in, attracted by the PA system fuckery, and LP and Velvet are forced to slaughter them all even though Velvet hates getting her hooves dirty when the author remembers she's supposed to.

Perhaps if Calamity was trapped in a set of exhibits on the Enclave and its sins and its formation, this would be a seamless way for LP to learn horrific things about the Enclave Calamity "overlooked" when telling his friends about them. There could be a Prototype Memory Orb system designed to let guests view war, only corrupted to have its safeguards removed, and Calamity could be stuck in it until LP saves her.

Not all three of my suggestions give LP's friends a chance to help her deal with the problems trapping her, but I reckon it's a start. Besides, these characters don't have enough character depth for truly ironic imprisonments.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.311375
In Fallout 1/2/NV by Black Isle Studios/Obsidian, human error and human flaws result in war. Things never change until people grow from the past and deal with the fallout of problems. Humanity doomed itself long before "resource shortages" from 1960s Peak Americana Boomerism never going out of style started an era of resource wars that ended when ShitMerica and ComChina nuked each other.* It is in humanity's nature to destroy itself and rebuild, but to sacrifice one's humanity to infertile mutant supremacy would be a tragedy at best.

*Yeah, the liberal authors thought boomers were right wing and resource consumption is a right wing thing that doomed the planet. Their first game has you stop "The Master" and "The Master's Race" while the second game has you stop remnants of fantasy-hitlerian america. They wanted their Fallout 3 codenamed Van Buren to focus on Caesar's Legion, which paints romeaboo cartoon-fascist imperialism as a bad thing. I won't make excuses for that cuckish writing.

In Fallout 3 by Bethesda, pee pee poo poo beep bop skebop. Deep themes would get in the way of a highly marketable shoot gallery wearing Fallout assets and iconography like skinned corpse suits, so the game frequently implies Vault-Tec did everything wrong. Then there's the Mothership Zeta DLC which canonically states aliens caused the war and has fucked with humanity for a long time, even abducting and freezing random people from random points in the timeline for silly random wacky reasons.

Fallout 3 goes out of its way to challenge the idea that people are at all responsible for their problems or solutions or destinies. Most people you meet are dense lazy retarded faggots who do dumb shit for no reason. Only important people can get shit done and you can't mock characters for failing to have excuses for not solving their own damn sidequests before you got there. You canonically die sacrificing yourself in the end to radiation from a fucked-with giant water purifier and if you ask your giant overpowered radiation-immune friend to handle this for you he says "no, this is your destiny" even though he never seemed to believe in until now. Fan outrage got a DLC patch for the game made that lets you play after the main story is over, called Broken Steel.

Don't get me started on how Fallout 4 would later canonically state PAM the robot working for the Railroad caused nuclear war because she thought it was inevitable. But F4 wasn't out when FE was written.

With all of this in mind, what do all of you think of Kkat's attempts to strike a compromise between these two wildly different design philosophies and takes on human nature by ripping shit off from games made by different companies with different writers and directors?

Does Fallout Equestria say anything deep about the human condition, or in this case, Equestria and the equine condition?

Aside from the author's unintentional moments that lay the falsehoods of self-serving pseudo-moral liberalism and liberal "heroes" bare, Kkat has no thematic consistency. Equestria in FE isn't the Equestria from the show, except when it is. Sometimes it suffers for being too soft and sometimes it suffers for being too mean. It's not like pre-bombing Equestria was consistently too innocent and pure to know anything about PTSD or Total War or Rape until the Zebras taught them these things the hard way. Ponies were taking in zebra refugees while warring with zebras and conquering Diamond Dog land for resources at the same time. Kkat's Equestria was industrializing, learning the joys of fossil fuels like coal for the first time while learning to enchant items, not running out of fossil fuels and faced with a choice between starvation and conquest. Ponies are given societal flaws they never had and these cause them to make choices they would never make while Zebras gain absurd beliefs out of nowhere to make them inherently opposed to the continued life of ponies.

Despite all the jokes about crackhead Pinkie Pie snorting a gallon of cocaine, would she really create a Ministry Of Unpersoning and spiral into meth addiction when her best friends needed her the most? Would Rarity really choose censoring all novels that have anything nice to say about Zebras over attempting diplomacy or trade agreements or sending enchanted animated living clothes dummies to fight on the front lines? Would AJ really sell her farm to run a gun company and invent power armour with Twilight's help? Would Twilight invent alicorns and energy weapons instead of trying to find some magical deus ex bullshit way to save everyone like magicking away the Zebra desire to do harm, using time travel to disprove the anti-stars zebra religion, or magicking a way for everyone to understand each other into everyone? What we truly call the cause of the pony-zebra conflict besides Zebras? Sometimes the inherent differences between others is blamed for conflict and sometimes an unwillingness to understand is blamed. And when LP is involved murder and force is always the best solution. But if LP existed before the war could she have changed anything about the war with her usual violent tactics? Plot armour makes a "Wasteland Savior" of LP and spite makes Wasteland-Creators out of the mane six. Kkat understands how differences between races can cause conflict but can he understand why? Can he understand any solutions? After all he wrote about LP murderhoboing pony raiders and pony slavers and pony Brotherhood Ranger Of Steel retards and pony cannibals and wildlife and mutated ponies, what solution do you think LP will think up for the Zebra Question?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
41249d5
?
No.311394
311403 311406
1624557136472.png
>>311224

They make it to the lobby of the building without incident, and proceed back outside. It seems that being outside is dangerous again, so they want to minimize it as much as possible. They all hold their breath and run for the next building, which is the Ministry of Technology. Along the way, they see that Velvet's bird has helpfully gathered up all of the equipment they dropped earlier, thrown it into the trash, and pooped on it to mark it. Not making this up, this is what actually happens.

Anyway, LP scoops up their junk and they make a run for the Technology building. Some alicorns are naturally there and naturally confront them, but this time they can't just easily vanquish them all because blah blah blah reasons reasons reasons, the alicorns are dangerous again. So, they jump over a giant pile of skeletons in front of the entrance and dart into the Ministry of Technology, hoping that the alicorns won't be able to break through glass, which incidentally is what the entire front portion of the building appears to be made of.

LP realizes just an instant too late that the lobby is filled with multiple haunted radios, and sees that the alicorns are now blocking their exit from the building but are not advancing on them.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA

She tries to dismantle the radios, but there are too many of them, and she loses consciousness.

Page break. We now find ourselves in the Twilight orb.

The memory belongs to Trixie. When the scene opens, she is at Tenpony Tower, filling out some forms. Twilight then appears, and calls her into an office.

They bullshit for awhile. Twilight asks Trixie if she has come up with any new tricks recently, and Trixie boasts that she has created an invisibility spell. She demonstrates it, and Twilight is visibly impressed; however, she later confesses that she learned the magic by imitating the magic of a StealthBuck. Twilight is still impressed that Trixie could figure out the magic behind something her ministry developed.

After this, the reason for the meeting becomes apparent: Trixie is applying for a job at the Ministry of Arcane Sciences. We get a little bit of Trixie's backstory from here. An incident involving an Ursa Minor this refers, of course, to the S1 episode in which Trixie first appeared; however, the details of this incident have not been given in this story destroyed her reputation and effectively ended her career as a performer. It seems to have picked up again after the war started, as enough time had passed for ponies to forget, and in any case there were more important things for them to worry about than whatever Trixie had done in the past.

Twilight tells her the job is hers if she wants it, but the condition is that she wants to "record one of her memories" and use her as a test subject for a program her Ministry is developing that changes ordinary ponies into alicorns. What could possibly go wrong? Trixie appears hard up for cash, so she accepts. Twilight now invites Trixie to spend some time with her at Maripony, where her underlings Gestalt and Mosaic have some kind of experiment going on. Through some incidental side-banter we learn that these two are twins, and that they are apparently capable of a mild form of telepathy.

>I suddenly understood why there were three breeds of alicorn, why they had the abilities they did… even why all the alicorns were female!
You may understand, LP, but we don't. As usual, LP is autistically connecting dots without explaining how she reached the conclusions she did.

She goes on, though:

>But, it wasn’t just Trixie who held power. There were four ponies within the amalgam that formed the Goddess who were powerful enough to exert influence over the alicorn creation process.
This seems to expand upon the idea a bit. Again, LP doesn't really give us much insight into her thought process, but I think what's going on here is that the Goddess is not just Trixie, she's also Twilight and the two twins. I think the implication is that each of the three alicorn varieties represents the personality of one of them, with the twins together constituting a single personality. Not a bad idea necessarily, but as ever, it's only half-formed and isn't fleshed out very well.

>Blue is invisibility. Purple can teleport. The greens are telepathic and can work together to create greater effects with their shields.
This is a fine example of what I'm talking about. Until it was pointed out a few scenes ago, I didn't even realize that there were different types of alicorns, let alone that they had different abilities. Again, I've been imagining a herd of identical creatures, all of whom can go invisible and teleport and communicate with telepathy and whatever else they can do. I can see now what kkat was going for, but he did a piss-poor job of setting it up and explaining it.

Anyway, to summarize: the blue alicorns can use invisibility spells, and this comes from Trixie. The purple ones can teleport, and this comes from Twilight. Incidentally, I'm not sure if the text has even mentioned that Twilight had a teleportation ability; kkat seems to be relying on the reader's familiarity with the show here. Finally, the green alicorns can use telepathy, and they get this power from Wingus and Dingus. I will try to keep all of this in mind going forward.

>Four ponies, all mares.
This clarifies the last point of confusion in LP's earlier statement; presumably the significance of this is that since the four original alicorns were all female, that is why all the alicorns we've encountered have been female.

>I wondered, if the Goddess consumed me, would a new breed of alicorns begin with extra-powerful telekinetics?
Yeah, that's just what the world needs; an even more ridiculously-overpowered Littlepoop.

Anyway, that's the end of the orb.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
41249d5
?
No.311403
311405 311407 311408
1624581342218.png
>>311394

Page break. Once again, after a cliffhanger in which she passes out from Cloud exposure, LP awakens in an unfamiliar location, and once again she is being attended to by a stranger. Two near-identical situations spaced only a few scenes apart is honestly a bit much.

Anyway, it seems she is now in a place called Stable City. Her surroundings resemble the Stable architecture she's used to, but the ponies around her are all Canterlot ghouls. They tell her that they rescued her because she fought alicorns, and apparently they don't like alicorns. They put the haunted radios in the lobby explicitly to keep the alicorns away. Apparently, haunted radios have no effect on ghouls; not sure if this was established earlier or not, but I'll try to keep it in mind moving forward. Also, it appears they rescued Velvet's bird at some point, or the bird flew down here, or something. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The gang has since reunited. LP and Calamity are walking down a hallway. It's clear enough that "Stable City" is just another Stable, though it isn't clear where exactly it's located. I'm assuming underneath the Ministry of Arcane Sciences building, since that was the last place we saw the party in, but I'm not 100% on that. Calamity chides LP about being reckless and getting her PipBuck fused to her arm:

>“Don’t go using specific details to muddy the issue,” Calamity warned. “The truth is, a loss like that pains a pony, an’ Ah’m not talkin’ just physically. An’ it ain’t brave t’ pretend ya ain’t hurtin’. It ain’t smart neither.”
>I stayed silent.
>“When Velvet Remedy lost her leg,” Calamity recalled, “She was a right mess, even after she got it back.”
One of these days, someone is going to need to sit kkat down and explain to him what losing a leg usually entails. Namely, that it involves actually losing a leg. When any injury can be healed with magic, injuries become meaningless; trying to use meaningless injuries as character-development episodes will always fail. I'm honestly surprised LP hasn't been able to fix her fused PipBuck by just downing a couple of magic elixirs or having Velvet cast a spell or something.

>“We’ve become experts at not getting what we need to do done. After Canterlot, we go right to Splendid Valley. No more delays, no more side quests, no more distractions. We get the damn job done.”
This is from Littlepoop. This is pretty much a 180 degree reversal of her attitude thus far; wonder what brought on the change of heart?

Meanwhile, Calamity keeps prodding her to get her to talk about her feelings.

>“I’m weary, Calamity. I’m getting worn out,” I admitted dourly. “I need this job to be over. To get out from under this threat, this mission.”
What exactly is the mission again? Though I basically agree with her here; this story could easily have been over and done with at least 300,000 words ago.

Anyway, they yammer back and forth some more, mostly about how depressed they both are because something something blah blah the wasteland and its many horrors. The issue of the Arbu cannibals and Bucklyn Cross, at this point a dead horse that has been whipped into an unrecognizable pulp, once more resurfaces. There is some more arbitrary discussion about different gradations of badness: the conclusion seems to be that cannibals are worse than bandits, but that bandits are pretty bad too.

Interestingly, Calamity attacks Littlepoop over her decision to attack Bucklyn Cross. He basically points out what I pointed out at the time: that the party simply marched in, demanded something they had no right to demand, and slaughtered everyone when their demand was refused.

>Still unconvinced, Calamity stepped up to the door of the weapons shop. “If ya take from the rich an’ give t’ the poor, yer still just a raider,” he said as the door slid up.
>“No!” I said firmly. “You’re not. A bandit maybe, at best. But not a raider. And you know better.” I couldn’t believe my kleptomaniac pegasus was arguing this. “Some would call you a hero.”
As ever, the distinction between different types of baddies in this story is rather poorly defined. What exactly is the difference between a bandit and a raider, anyway?

>Bucklyn Cross had to be disturbing Calamity deeply for his thoughts to have plunged into such uncharacteristic and messy logic.
I'm not sure if the irony here is intentional or not; with kkat it's often hard to tell. Either he is foreshadowing LP's eventually having to reckon with her actions at Bucklyn Cross and acknowledge the wrong she did, or else he's attempting to argue that LP actually was in the right at Bucklyn Cross and he's having Calamity play devil's advocate. Based on kkat's usual attitude when it comes to having his precious Mary Sue acknowledge her own moral failings, I'm assuming it's probably the latter, but I suppose we'll see.

In any case, the conversation ends without resolving the debate and that's the end of the scene.

Page break. Calamity buys some missiles from a shopkeeper and haggles over the price. Apart from a mild bronybait reference, literally nothing else happens.

Page break. This microscene is basically just an infodump on Stable City. Here is the basic gist of it:

Stable One was originally built into the Ministry of Arcane Sciences building as a place of protection for Equestria's elite. When the megaspells went off and the city was filling up with Pink Cloud, the elites all went inside. Meanwhile, a bunch of regular ponies tried to get in, but the doors had already been sealed. However, we are told that Stable Tec "pretty much killed all the ponies in Stable One." The details here are not given. Then, somehow and for some reason, the stable was opened. The ponies who had tried to get in originally had since been turned into ghouls by the Pink Cloud, and were living in the MAS building. However, once the stable opened, they all moved in and changed the name of the place to Stable City.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311405
>>311403
Isn't it silly how often losing a life or death fight is actually good for LP, since it tends to get her ass saved at the last second and dragged offscreen to where the plot needs her to be if it doesn't get a new companion to join her?

Also Kkat is a faggot for making LP the graverobber call Calamity a kleptomaniac pegasus. Did Kkat ever iron out exactly what he wanted this character to be in terms of personality, backstory, themes, and how he contrasts with the other characters? It's not like she secretly judges him for being even more "Optimal murderhobo wastelander, no matter the cost" than her. Kkat needs to make her the ultimate being at all times which is cringe and a sign of insecurity. If you want your character to be an overpowered god you should find a better and simpler excuse for it that makes things seem less retarded, right?

While LP genuinely didn't know she was killing and robbing to benefit "bad" ponies at the time, she wouldn't have been in that situation if she hadn't appointed herself judge, jury, executioner, and commissar wealth-redistributor supreme over this burned land.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311406
311415
>>311394
Something I thought about during an earlier scene: If I remember correctly, Twilight was dragged into the Goddess' vat of magic goo. I understand she was starved, dehydrated, and tired at this point, but she knew how to teleport. The bombs were falling and she probably had nowhere to go outside of the facility, but it stands to reason she would have done so to at the very least get out of harm's way. She could very easily teleport in the show, so it wasn't a very strenuous activity for her magically.

Not only that, but holy shit teleportation alone is such an insanely broken ability and the purple alicorns would be absolute avatars of death. Putting aside the pure strength of disorientation and danger-avoidance, ponies have a very awkward setup for guns. I get it doesn't matter if you handwave it and move on with the story, but the guns in FO:E are functionally extremely retarded. One of the big problems even with battle saddles (which are considered to be "sensible" as a solution according to some people), is that you need to turn your entire body to aim at things slightly off to the side, whereas humans can simply rotate their hips and arms to much more comparatively swiftly and efficiently take sight at targets. Purple alicorns could teleport directly behind anyone with a gun and be entirely out of the way of danger, as ponies would need to rotate their entire body 180 degrees to target them, at which point they could teleport again. Even unicorns can't see or target things directly behind them (the bullshit auto-targeting Littlepip has can't target things behind you, at least in the video games).
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311407
311415
The_Mall.jpg
Underworld_interior.jpg
maxresdefault (1).jpg
>>311403
Oh by the way, this settlement is a very thin reference to a location in Fallout 3.

There is a city called Underworld and it is a sanctuary for ghouls. Outside is central DC, with a lot of important, core American buildings like the capitol and Washington monument, a museum, etc. It is an area utterly swamped with Super Mutants, as well.

Canterlot itself takes heavy inspiration from the Dead Money DLC of New Vegas, with the cloud, radios, and undying magic ghouls. However, it doubles as a reference to underworld and the surrounding DC area: It is a collection of highly-important, pre-war establishments (Ministry walk), it is full of super mutants (alicorns), and there is a ghoul-centric city inside.

Just more game trivia for you.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
41249d5
?
No.311408
311413 311424
derpy_mail_pony_by_masemj_d61kz3f-fullview.png
>>311403

Page break. Things have taken a turn for the bizarre.

Littlepoop and Calamity are walking through Stable City, while Calamity explains to Littlepoop that the Pink Cloud is actually a dragon. Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, the spell worked similarly to the balefire bombs: a relatively simple spell was used as a base, and amplified into a weapon of mass destruction. This one was created from gemstones or something, and then a dragon ate the gemstones, and then...started exhaling Pink Cloud for some reason...and then...that's where the Pink Cloud came from? I think?

This part is extremely confusing; I have no idea which orifice kkat pulled it from or why. Not only does this development make no sense, it seems to blatantly contradict what the story has told us so far about the origins of the Pink Cloud. My understanding is that this stuff was deployed by zebras who somehow snuck it into Canterlot while they had the shields up, or something like that. I could be getting the details wrong; it's nearly impossible to keep track of everything we've been told about the war era, but I'm pretty sure I don't remember anything about the Pink Cloud being released by a dragon. I'm almost positive the text said earlier that this stuff was released intentionally by zebras in order to kill Celestia and Luna. This latest twist seems bizarre even for kkat.

Believe it or not, it gets even more incoherent from here:

>Turning back to Calamity, I commented, “Okay, now the secret passage makes sense.”
What secret passage? I don't remember the gang exploring any secret passages recently.

>“How ya figure?”
>“Well, Princess Celestia’s school was obviously using baby dragons for something.
I don't remember if I mentioned it or not, but there were baby dragons among the child zombies the team fought earlier; this is probably what LP is referring to here.

>They had to come from somewhere,” I reasoned. “I think the Princess had some sort of arrangement with the dragon. She got the biggest horde in Equestria and the Princess got… well, her children.” The royal treasury dragon was mommy.
How exactly does one thing follow another here? I get tired of saying this all of the time, but once again, LP is connecting dots that don't necessarily connect.

I'll grant that if there are baby dragons present in Canterlot when there ought not to be, and if there is a big dragon in Canterlot somewhere, then it would stand to reason that there's a connection. However, what in the world could this arrangement between Celestia and the dragon possibly have been?

Celestia brought a big-ass dragon into Canterlot, gave it all of her treasure, and in exchange it pumped out baby dragons so she could...do what with them exactly? Send them to her school to educate them? Also, the big-ass dragon not only gets all of the treasure in Canterlot, it gets to expel Pink Cloud and kill everyone? Seems like Celestia is getting the short end of that stick no matter how you look at it; in fact, I don't see how she's getting anything out of the arrangement at all. Either there is something I am massively misunderstanding here, or kkat is even further off the deep end than usual. Also, what the fuck does any of this have to do with a secret passage?

Anyway, yeah; it appears that there is a dragon down in the royal treasury, and it's snoring out Pink Cloud for some reason. Whatever, let's just roll with it. Also, in case anyone was wondering why Calamity would even know any of this, it seems he gleaned it from the ravings of the alicorn that was arguing with itself down in the bowels of the Ministry of Wherever They Just Were. The place with all the hydrogen in the basement.

Page break. Calamity and Littlepoop are hanging out in some kind of music room that Stable City has, when SteelHooves suddenly shows up and tells them to come along with him. Instead of asking where they are going or why, Littlepoop decides to listen to a recording that she just randomly downloaded from some terminal that was on the wall a couple of scenes ago.

The message is from Scootaloo, and it explains what happened to the Stable One ponies...kind of. Apparently, Scoots was so severely assblasted at the elites about all the death and destruction this war had caused that she decided to program the door of Stable One not to open until all of the ponies inside were dead. That's it. No nasty surprises, no poison gas, no gun turrets going berserk and turning on the ponies they were supposed to guard. The elites just have to stay inside the stable for the rest of their natural lives; kind of like sending a child to their room for misbehaving, but making it a life sentence.

It's better if you read it in her own words:

>I have seen to it that Stable One will not open so long as even one of you is still alive. (Which, if the Princesses are in there, might be a very long time.) No matter how fast Equestria heals, not a single damn one of you is going to get to profit from what you have done. Equestria is something you ponies don’t deserve.
I'm not really sure what this was intended to accomplish. The elites whose managerial ineptitude destroyed Equestria remain inside the stables for the rest of their lives? They are denied the privilege of leaving their well-provisioned bunker and venturing forth into the ruined hellscape their ineptitude created? That's Scootaloo's big revenge play? Alrighty then. Moving on.

Page break. SteelHooves takes Littlepoop out of Stable City to a space under a stairwell that has been converted into a residence. He announces himself to someone named Star, saying that he brought his friends along.

>Although I had counted SteelHooves amongst my friends for weeks, to hear him refer to us this way was surprising, strange and poignant.
Reminder that LP watched her "friend" go plummeting off the edge of an airship and showed no apparent concern, not even bothering to ask what had happened to him when she bumped into him later.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311413
311426 311465
1624803885142.jpg
>>311408

Anyway, "Star" turns out to be some elderly unicorn ghoul, whose body is fused with her wheelchair. SteelHooves has brought her some recordings and books and a few other things. From his demeanor and the fact that Star calls him "Applesnack" instead of "SteelHooves," it appears that this is someone he knew from his pre-ghoul days. After the provisions are unloaded, proper introductions are made. Star is introduced as Star Sparkle, and is apparently Twilight's mother. We learn that she is being "shunned" by the other ghouls, because they believe that her daughter created the alicorns.

Page break. Star Sparkle shows off her bedroom, which is decorated with Twilight Sparkle memorabilia: posters, news articles, family photographs, you name it.

>And in the center was a precious Twilight Sparkle statuette, her base reading a familiar “Be Smart.”
Careful, Star; your acquaintance's "friend" has a bad habit of yanking those things out of your ribcage when you're not looking.

Anyway, the rest of this scene is fairly pointless. We learn that Twilight ensured that her mother was given a place in Stable One, but unfortunately she and her husband (unnamed) didn't get inside, because the doors closed early.

>I found myself looking at her wheelchair and thinking of the stallion’s skeleton outside with his hooves sunk into the concrete. I was suddenly very angry with the ponies of the Ministry of Wartime Technology. How dare they seal up the Stable, trapping good ponies outside, family and loved ones who the Stable was supposed to save! They deserved… Well, what they got.
What exactly did they get? I'm still a little confused there. It's clear enough that Scoot intended for them to be stuck inside the stable for their entire lives, but from what I understand, the only way the door could open is if everyone on the inside had died. Stable Two, where Littlepoop was born, was also sealed up from the time of the balefire bombs until the present, and that place managed to house multiple generations of ponies who lived out their entire lives there. Scoot's "punishment" of the Canterlot elites was imprisonment, not a death sentence. Something must have happened to them for the doors to have opened as early as they did.

Anyway, it seems that Star Sparkle was somewhat afraid of her daughter and hadn't really kept in contact with her over the years, and it seems that the shrine she built after becoming a ghoul is some sort of overcompensation for that. This scene is touching in a bizarre, autismo sort of way, but it doesn't have any obvious story significance that I can see. I'm not really clear on how SteelHooves knows this pony, how he knew to look for her in this out of the way location, and why he went to all the trouble of introducing her to LP and Calamity.

Page break. Well, we at least find out why SteelHooves wanted LP and Calamity to meet Star: it seems that he feels sorry for her, and wants to bring her along with them. He and LP argue briefly about it; LP is opposed to bringing her along on their mission for rather obvious reasons, and SteelHooves insists that they take her along anyway.

Velvet suddenly shows up and gives LP a present she picked out for her. I'm not even going to bother asking how Velvet knew to look for her friends in this out of the way location. Anyway, the gift turns out to be police barding, which I guess is an upgrade from LP's current Stable barding. She puts it on, and then the conversation about Twilight's mother resumes. After some fairly pointless bickering, they decide to leave her here for now, and to pick her up when their mission is done.

Once all of this is settled, SteelHooves flags down a nearby guard and has him shut off the haunted radio array that keeps the alicorns out of the Ministry building. It appears that it is now time to once again venture forth into the wild pink yonder.

Page break. Ponk's orb.

Unlike any of the previous M6 orbs, this one is actually viewed through the eyes of its subject. The scene opens with Pinkie in her office at the Ministry of Morale building in Manehattan. She is high on crack mints, and everything is all distorted and weird. I didn't know that hallucination was an effect of the crack mints, but then again there's quite a bit about these things that kkat hasn't bothered to tell us.

Pinkie appears to be in denial about her drug problem. She hallucinates various objects around her office telling her that her friends are just being buzzkills and that she doesn't need them. She finds a mirror that Rarity has apparently sent her as a gift, along with a note explaining that this mirror might help her to "find her way." As she looks into the mirror, her reflection changes from drugged-out flat-haired Pinkie into poofy-haired exuberant Pinkie, and they proceed to have a surreal conversation. It's not clear if this conversation is magic or the result of a hallucination, but there is a subtle implication that this is the same mirror that LP encountered in the funhouse earlier, the one that shows you your "true self" or whatever.

More significantly, the mirror-Pinkie addresses Littlepoop by name, and responds to the thoughts in her head as if she were speaking them out loud. Real-Pinkie occasionally notices and seems confused that her reflection is addressing an unseen third party. I feel like something similar happened in another memory orb from a long time ago; Pinkie appears to have some kind of precognition ability or something.

Pinkie assures LP that the future will be "sunshine and rainbows," then orders herself to get off drugs and to shut down her Ministry. Then, she tells herself to record a memory orb for Littlepoop, which is presumably the one we're watching. I really hope the author is planning on going somewhere with all of this; if it serves no purpose other than to make an elaborate bronybait joke about Pinkie Pie having superpowers I'm going to be a very sad and angry panda.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
750f328
?
No.311415
311420
>>311406
If I remember correctly the text said that Twilight couldn't teleport out of there for some reason, something to do with the magic security shields she placed around the building. It seems rather illogical that she couldn't override her own magic, but I'm fairly certain that was the explanation kkat gave.

I agree completely about the guns. It makes very little sense for ponies to have even engineered a weapon like this in the first place.

>>311407
That actually answers a question I had earlier. A few scenes ago LP wound up underwater in a reflecting pool near the Celestia monument, and my first thought was that it sounded similar to the Washington Monument and its corresponding pool. Kkat likely took his inspiration for the scene from Fallout's version of DC. If so, I restate my earlier position that the scene was illogical: there's no way that pool was more than a foot or so deep, and it shouldn't even still have water in it to begin with.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311420
>>311415
>It seems rather illogical that she couldn't override her own magic,

Wait, how does that make sense? Wasn't it some kind of research facility? Why force the brightest unicorns to rely on their clumsy hooves and mouths, something they'd be incredibly out of practice on, to write notes and stuff? How could they use their magic for research projects or experiments? How would this impact the magical energies of whatever is being researched within? So many questions.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311424
>>311408
I think the idea here is
>Kkat wanted to add some headcanon on where Spike came from
>Decided to implement the idea that Celly has a personal dragon under Canterlot who she made some kind of deal with to give her children as assistants to her gifted unicorns
>Bombs fall, pink cloud fills city
>Dragon gets ghoulified with pink cloud and snores it out periodically, possibly as an explanation for how it lingers around the city for 200 years?
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311426
311442
Sierra_Madre_armor_reinforced.png
>>311413
Littlepip being gifted her new suit of armor here is actually intended to be another reference. Yes, this small event is indeed another opportunity for a Fallout reference. As i've said, Canterlot is a reference to the Dead Money DLC. In that DLC you get the strongest light armor in the game, a security officer's armor from the Villa police department/ Casino. Littlepip's "final" armor upgrade is intended to be this, and I find it a bit funny in how her top tier armor is kinda dumped on her passively by a companion who just decided to give it to her. In adventure stories you usually have a bit more of a moment when a character gets their godslayer iconic weapon or dragonheart armor or whateverthefuck.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311442
311452
>>311426
How do you think Kkat could have turned "LP gets the best light armour" into a more significant, emotional, memorable, and earned moment?

Personally I reckon it would be cool if she was hunted down by a Bounty Hunter that started tracking down wannabe-heroes when they start doing serious damage and leaping into "judge jury executioner" mode without having all the facts and ruining or taking innocent lives. The bounty hunter uses smart tactics to fuck over the whole party, and then LP says something smart to make him retire and give her his sick armour. Or she defeats the baddie after the hardest fight of her life and claims his armour as a reward. He should run around in the shadows during their Canterlot adventures making things harder for her intentionally, that would be a clever way to try and make Team LP use their healing items and ammo up. Sure they all have infinite ammo but it's still smart. It should be a real challenge of her moral fiber and intelligence. Ideally LP would get opportunities to screw her friends over while making things easier for herself and reject these, proving her moral worth to the bounty hunter who decided instead of hunting slavers or alicorns he should hunt the 75% good and below.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311452
311457
>>311442
It doesn't really NEED to be that much of a significant moment, really. To be fair, I don't think Littlepip expressed a desire for earning a badass knight suit of armor, and the setting has more of a focus on power armor as the cool badass endgame thing, not security armor. It's just kind of funny to me how she gets her "final" suit of armor here and it's nothing more than a vague footnote in what is supposed to be an RPG translated into fic format. You'd think Kkat would be more autistic about this.

If you wanted to have some kind of meaningful connection, you would need to do a lot of prior character work in the fic. Maybe Littlepip was a goody two-shoes back in the vault, and viewed the security detail as noble heroes and since she was a shut-in neet she tied that belief to the knights of yore in her fantasy books. So when she finally gets a suit of "fallen" security armor in the heart of her race's dead capitol, there would be a bit of a somber focus on the idea to draw out some concepts of the setting and perhaps her character. But it's not really necessary, as i've said, and I guess I erroneously asserted this idea as if it was SUPPOSED to have some kind of significance.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311457
311460
>>311452
My bounty hunter idea is a bit overcomplicated for what's essentially a random encounter with one enemy NPC. A competent writer could turn the character into a memorable character like Skullker or the Skullker knockoff Khyber but Kkat is not a competent writer.
For a simpler way to make LP fight for the suit and earn it that way she could get attacked by a rival scavenger who wears that. Maybe a canterlot ghoul.
Or it could be awarded to her by the populace here. Because if anyone would have scavenged and maintained that suit for 200 years shouldn't it be these ghouls?

I love the idea of making the security outfit symbolically mean something to her! That sounds like an excellent way to make the security outfit significant on that level.

Isn't it weird how Calamity spontaneously started knowing so much FE lore from hearing an Alicorn mutter? I'd make that into a "he knows all about Canterlot because he is ex-Enclave and all Pegasus kids are taught about the fall of Canterlot its current state and told this is what happens when non-pegasi get to make decisions" moment, it saves words and characterizes the Enclave. And characterizes him for leaving the Enclave too. Then again did he actually leave or was he just kicked out for punishing his subordinates when they refused to help some ground poners?
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311460
>>311457
>I love the idea of making the security outfit symbolically mean something to her! That sounds like an excellent way to make the security outfit significant on that level.

Yeah, if Kkat absolutey had to make it symbolic, then i'd suggest something along that sort of line. Identifying the symbol of peacekeeping of a law enforcer with saving the world or bringing hope/ killing baddies, in a sense, since that's pip's thing.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
41249d5
?
No.311465
311467 311471 311479
1624847994272.png
>>311413

Page break. Apparently the alicorns amassed outside don't bother them and the pink cloud which has thickened to the point of being deadly again doesn't harm them, because we rejoin the group outside the Ministry of Image building. Apart from some mild lung-burning and organ failure, everyone seems relatively intact.

Whoops, I spoke too soon. As soon as they round a statue of Rarity outside the building, they see that a bunch of proximity mines have been set up. Then, a pair of alicorns appear and erect a shield around them, trapping them in with the mines. Oh noes! What will they do?

Littlepoop uses her telekinesis to push all of the mines to one side of the barrier, and then Velvet Remedy erects a shield around the party. Littlepoop then switches on the radio broadcaster on her PipBuck. Apparently, since they are in the Pink Cloud now, her radio is now haunted and has the same kind of eyeball bleeding effect that all the other haunted radios do. Though the party takes damage from this, the effect causes pain to the alicorns as well, and they drop their shield. Then, the mines explode, presumably killing the alicorns and not harming the party. Wow, that was a scary 2.3 seconds.

Page break. We rejoin the party at an indeterminate point in the future, presumably somewhere inside the Ministry of Image building. Calamity has just blown up a security turret that was attacking them. They are still suffering from a nasty bout of organ failure from all the time they spent in the deadly Pink Cloud, and I'm assuming their eyeballs are still probably bleeding a bit from having the radio on, so they all pause and have a nice, refreshing swallow of magical healing elixir. Ahhh! Good as new!

With the pesky business of death averted for the 3,789th time that day, the party can now turn its attention to more important matters, like figuring out why there are a bunch of dead Steel Rangers behind the reception desk. After some brief and pointless speculation on the subject, they decide to take the elevator up to the whatever floor to the executive whatever offices, which I guess is where the zebra necronomicon is supposed to be, because as valuable as this book is supposed to be, it seems that Rarity just kept it in one of her fucking desk drawers. However, they ultimately decide not to take the elevator, because it is full of dead bodies.

Page break. We rejoin the party at an indeterminate point in the future, in an entirely different part of the building, with no explanation given as to where they are or how they got there. LP seems to find it passing strange that they have not seen any dead bodies in here apart from Steel Rangers, but she decides to back burner that for the moment, because suddenly she notices a woefully unhacked terminal.

She hacks the terminal, and finds a bunch of interoffice memos about design aesthetics for propaganda posters, and something about an employee meeting on some kind of radio broadcast system being implemented. Then, Calamity sees a spoopy message that someone wrote on a terminal screen, probably in blood. The message says "be sure to drink your Ovaltine" "They eat your soul!" Nothing else happens.

Page break. The party is now in a different room, and once again there is no explanation given as to where they are, how they got there, or how much time has passed since the previous scene. They are now combing through a bunch of restricted publications, most of which I assume are porn. For no apparent reason beyond striking up casual conversation, Calamity brings up the business about the dragon that he told LP earlier.

Despite it having nothing obvious to do with them or their mission, they decide the dragon needs to be dealt with. SteelHooves is concerned that they may not have the firepower to kill a dragon, but Calamity says that they don't need to kill it; apparently, the crazy alicorn has a spell that can turn it into a field mouse, so they just need to get hold of the spell and deploy it. Mighty convenient, that.

Anyway, I don't entirely understand the details, but it seems the spell has been attached to some kind of a box and they just need to get the dragon to open it. Whoopee, another pointless side mission begins. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The party is now one floor above where they were in the previous scene, and they are still talking about the dragon. Calamity explains the particulars of what they have to do. It's probably better if I just quote it directly:

>I groaned, pressing a hoof to my face. “Okay, okay… let me see if I’ve got this. In order to stop the continuous replenishment of the Pink Cloud, we have to trigger a Spell in the Box that will turn the treasury dragon into a field mouse. The trigger for the Spell in the Box has been rigged into the fireworks display for the Grand Galloping Gala…”
At this point I'm not even going to bother analyzing this. They need to find a box of fireworks and set it off so that they can turn a dragon into a field mouse, because reasons. Got it. Moving on.

The catch here is that apparently the trigger for the fireworks spell is in Luna's personal quarters, also because reasons. So now, they have to make an additional detour into the castle. A reasonable person might wonder: "why even bother with any of this?" However, a reasonable person would have either stopped reading this story or blown their brains out ages ago, so we have little choice but to follow along and see what happens. Conveniently enough, Calamity has some kind of remote device that will light up as soon as the dragon is dead. How it works, where he got it, or why someone would even bother to design and build such a device is...you guessed it...not explained.

Then, suddenly, some kind of shadow monster comes through a blackboard on the wall. Cue dramatic fight music.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311467
maxresdefault (2).jpg
>>311465
>The trigger for the Spell in the Box has been rigged into the fireworks display for the Grand Galloping Gala…”

Hey GLIM! Wanna wonder why this bizarre and sudden detour exists? Because Kkat wanted to shove in another reference to the games, and forced it into this sequence for no reason other than to reference Dead Money's Gala event. In the DLC, you have to set off the Gala event because it's tied to opening the casino, which is the core plot goal. Here it's just done for a reference.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c68b1c
?
No.311471
311476
keyboard.jpg
>>311465

The shadow monster turns out to be a swarm of terrifying something-or-others that function as a hivemind entity. Apparently this is what killed all of the Steel Rangers. Their weapons are useless against it, but it turns out that magic shields can hold it off, so Velvet throws up a shield and tells the rest of them to go on without her.

Page break. Littlepoop is now in Rarity's personal office, and as you probably suspected, the text gives us no clue as to how she got there, how much of an interval has passed, or what happened to Velvet. Presumably, she is still holding off the Lovecraftian horror from beyond the stars, but if this bothers Littlepoop in any way, she doesn't show it; she's far too busy reading a note that Rarity left on a locked chest about some kind of dress she was working on.

Never one to be thwarted by locks or matters of privacy or petty questions about whether her friends are alive or dead, LP breaks the lock on the chest and steals the dress. Apparently it's armored or something and blah blah blah. She gives it to Calamity, who vows to give it to his lady love Velvet in the event that she did, in fact, survive.

Then, Littlepoop breaks open Rarity's desk and finds the zebra necronomicon.

Page break. If anyone cares, Velvet Remedy is still alive; however, she seems to be under considerable stress trying to maintain her shield until they can exit the building.

Littlepoop, meanwhile, explains her latest autistic plan: she wants everyone else to go to the Ministry of Awesome I have completely forgotten why they even need to go there, while she goes into the castle by herself to set off the fireworks so the dragon can turn into a mouse. There is some perfunctory bickering over whether or not fearless Mary Sue should be allowed to selflessly risk herself yet again, and then the matter is settled. Velvet's only request is that if she finds the bodies of the Princesses, she is to share the juicy details with her.

Calamity now hands over the magic gem that tells you when the dragon is dead turns out I got that detail slightly wrong; it's a gem and not a device and gives her a generic parting "go get 'em" speech in his insufferable pseudo-hillbilly patois, and then they head out of the building. Littlepoop mumbles autistically to herself about whether or not her insane plan which she herself does not even know the details of will actually work, and wonders aloud if she can rescue Twilight Sparkle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2YqGciFOmM

Page break. Littlepoop is now in the throne room of the castle. Wow, that was a quick trip. She is using a Stealth Buck to sneak around undetected, and the Pink Cloud is slowly killing her, and blah blah blah all of the usual stuff. She counts herself lucky that she hasn't found the skeletons of Celestia and Luna yet, which is a big deal because finding skeletons of important ponies is much sadder than just finding ordinary NPC skeletons.

Despite all of the alleged danger she is supposedly in right now, her autism compels her to stop what she's doing and read a little of the zebra necronomicon. Turns out it's written in zebra glyphs that she can't understand! In frustration, she throws it across the room, and then picks it up again.

Suddenly, a wild alicorn appears. Two of them, actually. One of the alicorns thinks it senses something, but the other alicorn doesn't, and they decide to keep moving. Typical inept guard behavior. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The door to Luna's bedroom is locked with a complicated lock, but Littlepoop picks it easily. The pink cloud in here is so thick it might as well be cotton candy. Uh oh! That stuff is extra lethal; better down a couple extra magical cure-all elixirs just to be on the safe side.

With almost certain organ failure just barely averted, LP can now run into the room. But oh noes! She can't find the fireworks switch. She runs out again. She downs another healing potion. But oh noes! She's only got a couple of them left. Better be quick about this. But oh noes! A wild alicorn appears.

This one is super-edgy, wearing armor made out of pony bones and carrying a knife. She uses the knife to cut her own shoulders, which then cry tears of blood get it? she's goffick! that turn into blood-swords. Sacrebleu!

Littlepoop's attention, however, is focused on the unicorn skull around the alicorn's neck. The implication seems to be that it's Luna's skull; this alicorn edgelord went and fashioned Luna's skeleton into a suit of armor, the goof! Wow, what a bad little pony; that's almost as naughty a thing to do as stealing somepony's precious statue of their best friend from their ribcage because you want a collectible to put on your shelf. Ahem.

Anyway, the alicorn swings its bloodsword and cuts Littlepoop, which means that now she can be seen even though she's invisible. LP fends it off by using the necronomicon as a shield, and they trade barbs back and forth, and Littlepoop is slowly bleeding out and blah blah blah. Meanwhile, the alicorn attempts to take the book away from her, but it turns out she underestimated how selectively pissed off LP gets about certain injustices.

In a supreme moment of unintentional irony, the alicorn's desecration of Luna's grave sends LP into an incredible-hulk-style frenzy, which allows her to completely ignore how weak and blood-deprived she is and summon a spell she's never in her life cast before. She summons magical knives out of nowhere, throws them at the alicorn, and then, for good measure, uses telekinesis to take Luna's skull and impale her brain using the horn.

Page break. Since she apparently has nothing better to do, LP gathers Luna's stylishly-repurposed bones off of the alicorn and sets them on fire. But oh noes! She is now out of healing potions. Oh noes, what will she do?
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c68b1c
?
No.311476
311478
d03.jpg
>>311471

In probably the dumbest plot twist yet, the fire from Luna's burning skeleton sets off the sprinkler system in her room, which nixes the Pink Cloud, rendering this deadly obstacle harmless yet again technically, the "sprinkler system" in Luna's room is a spell that creates clouds on the ceiling and causes it to rain, but this is splitting hairs. LP easily finds the switch to set off the fireworks, presses it, and watches the gem change colors to indicate that the dragon is dead now, or a mouse, or whatever the fuck ridiculous thing was supposed to happen to it. Yippee. Meanwhile, LP jumps up and down on Luna's bed and watches the fireworks while giggling like a retard.

But wait, there's more:

>On the opposite wall I saw them. A collection of Ministry Mare statuettes. All six, gathered together, just like they should be. Lined up in a crystal display case. I realized that only Luna and Spike had kept intact collections. Even Rarity had separated the ponies in her set, giving herself to her sister Sweetie Belle, keeping Fluttershy with her wherever she went.
>I wrapped my magic around the case, taking it with me.
Jesus H. Christ. I am seriously about to reach through my screen and strangle this autismo. She already has a complete set of these silly things, which she has mostly acquired by plundering them from the graves of ponies who cared about them far more than she does. You're telling me that on top of that, she now has to take Luna's personal set as well?

Seriously, not half a page ago she was livid with rage at the alicorn defiling Luna's memory by wearing her skull as a necklace. This reaction would logically be in line with LP's supposed religious reverence of Luna. However, here she is, jumping up and down on her bed like a little filly, and helping herself to the Princess' treasured personal belongings, never once even questioning her right to do any of this. Does this character have any legitimate respect for anything?!?

Page break. Once again, we are magically transported into an entirely new location at some undefined point in the future. Presumably, despite setting off a massive fireworks blast that would have logically attracted the attention of every alicorn in a 20 mile radius, LP somehow manages to sneak back out of the castle without incident. We rejoin her at the Ministry of Awesome with her friends.

>Watcher had told us that the Ministry of Awesome had been repurposed as a warehouse. But I had never pictured this.
>The interior walls had been knocked out. The entire building was a gigantic black void filled with seemingly endless rows of crates, filing cabinets and metal boxes. The rows were divided into clear sections that stretched the length of the building, each section filling with containers painted a single color. Small, diamond-shaped lights hung from the ceiling at intervals, many of which had burnt out. The effect was like staring down the length of a rainbow under a black sky sprinkled with stars.
Wow, so this place is pretty much a klepto's paradise. LP probably feels the way kkat would feel if he stumbled across a grain silo filled to the roof with cum.

Anyway, unlike kkat in the cum silo, LP is able to restrain herself and focuses on the task at hand. I have long since forgotten what that task is, but I suppose we shall find that out momentarily. However, first she pulls Velvet aside. Velvet is wearing the dress that LP stole from Rarity, and there is, naturally, a lot of cringey sex banter over how hot she looks in it.

Thankfully, this is soon over. LP then gives Velvet the collection of statues that she just stole from Luna's room. I suppose that in her twisted, self-absorbed autistic brain, she probably thinks this is some kind of beautiful gesture of friendship. Velvet, for her part, seems to have no moral qualms about accepting such a gift, even though LP is upfront about where she obtained it.

Page break. Once again, we are dropped into the middle of a battle taking place in an unknown location at an unknown time. They're fighting some kind of robot swarm this time.

Anyway, they fight these things for awhile. There's a bunch of them I guess, and refreshingly enough the party seems to be getting their asses handed to them for once. SteelHooves is in pretty bad shape, and LP at one point catches a blast of magical energy that apparently dissolves one of her ribs. Don't get too excited, I'm sure she'll be fine in a couple of scenes.

At one point, the robots fire off some kind of disruption-thingie that shuts down LP's PipBuck and SteelHooves' armor. For just a tenth of a second it looks like LP might have to face an actual challenge without her stupid gizmo doing all of the fighting for her, but then Calamity manages to shut down the security system somehow and all the robots power down. Wow, that was a scary 5.1 seconds.

Page break. They make it to the magical shield that is apparently guarding the portion of the warehouse they need to get into. Velvet is able to pass through it because she is a descendent of Sweetie Belle. I seem to remember something about this being discussed way back when the Goddess first sent them on this silly quest, though I still don't remember what they are supposed to be looking for.

Apparently, the next step is more difficult: Velvet is going to have to disable the shield generator, which I'm sure is a complicated process that is going to take a great deal of skill and cunning--

Oh wait, looks like she shut it down without incident. The shield disappears. Wow, that was an exciting 2.4 seconds.

Watching the shield protecting all that unstolen loot disappear has Calamity prancing giddily about like kkat on the day he discovered "Mandingo Mondays" at Club Manhole; however, LP tells him he needs to fly back and get the Sky Bandit. He is as disappointed as kkat was when he realized it was Tuesday, but nevertheless he acquiesces and flies off in a huff.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c68b1c
?
No.311478
311481
1624887327190.jpg
>>311476

The rest of them go inside the formerly-protected area and examine what they apparently came in here to find: a big box full of memory orbs. That actually rings a bell; I think I remember the Goddess telling them to find memory orbs for some reason. Or maybe it was Red Eye. Or maybe LP just wants these because she's autistic; who the fuck even knows? I'm just happy we're almost done with this long-ass chapter.

>I gasped as I saw the symbol emblazoned on the lockbox:
>A burning hoof.
The significance of this emblem is what exactly?

>Six memory orbs. Each sat in a plush velvet indentation with a symbol pinned underneath: an apple, a butterfly, a star, a balloon, a cloud with a bolt of lightning and finally a diamond.
Ah. I'm beginning to see how all of this is put together. This is apparently the moment where she finds the M6 orbs that she's been using as interludes between scenes.

Page break. Speaking of the M6 orbs, it's time for Rainbow Dash's.

LP's host this time appears to be Apple Bloom. She finds herself standing in some kind of fancy meeting hall for the heads of the ministries, complete with a big fancy table that has all of their emblems on it. There is also a map of Equestria that shows the placement of troops and strategic military installations and whatnot, including those wacky radio tower things that seem to be important, yet their purpose has never been clearly explained.

Anyway, Rainbow Dash is there, and she suggests that Apple Bloom use AJ's chair. Then, Luna enters:

>A door opened, and Princess Luna strode into the room. I felt a javelin skewer my heart.
Ouch. Literal or metaphorical? Seriously though; is this reaction because you just saw an alicorn wearing her skeleton as a fresh summer look, or because on some subconscious level realize that jumping on Luna's bed and stealing her collection of pony figurines was kind of a shitty thing to do?

Anyway, after some mild formalities, they get down to business. Rainbow Dash explains that she wants to use her ministry to create something called the Single Pegasus Project. I think we've heard something about this before, and as I recall it involved those goofy radio towers somehow.

RD explains that the purpose of the project is to control the weather with automation, to free up more pegasi to use as combat pilots. Apparently the network of towers would allow the entire weather system to be controlled by a single pegasus, who would be placed in a coma in some kind of life-support pod in a central location.

When all of this is explained, Luna says that she will need to think about how best to integrate this with some other shit the other Ministries have going on, and the scene concludes.

Page break. With both of their objectives in Canterlot apparently complete, LP is now focused on levitating all of their new junk out of the warehouse. Velvet has healed her dissolved rib, but it seems that until she can get some potions in her, she's going to be experiencing some mild discomfort, the poor dear.

>I plan to ascend, Red Eye had told me. Somepony will have to take up the tasks that the Princesses and pegasi left to run wild, after all. Somepony will have to regulate the weather, to raise the sun and the moon.
>Weather control. Now I knew how he intended to pull that off, just as I knew how he was going to become a God capable of doing Celestia’s and Luna’s tasks. (And I realized he would be able to move the sun and moon too, since neither of Them stood in the way to, as Princess Luna had told Midnight Shower, “trump” his efforts.) I wasn’t sure on the details, but by now I had learned enough to know that Red Eye had a plan, even if I couldn’t see it. That cyberpony knew exactly what he was doing.
Author's italics preserved. There is actually a minor continuity issue here. In the prologue at the beginning of the chapter, LP said that she didn't actually view these orbs until after they had already left Canterlot. However, here, she is obviously using the information from this orb to connect dots about what Red Eye is apparently planning, which would suggest she has already viewed the orb.

In the next paragraph, she gives us this:

>After hacking the Ministry of Awesome’s terminal, I had been able to review the specifics of the Single Pegasus Project.
She could plausibly have gotten the info she needed from this terminal before viewing the orb I suppose, but without the orb she would really have no reason to be looking up schematics on the Single Pegasus Project in the first place.

The entire chronology business with the orbs in this chapter has been pretty messy, honestly. The prologue feels almost unnecessary, since the author really didn't deviate much from his usual structure in this chapter: LP just dumped the orb segments into the middle of her narrative the way she usually does. The only reason chronology mattered this time around is because she was giving us the details of orbs that she technically hadn't found yet, and thus couldn't have viewed.

Anyway, my usual gripes also apply: it's not even remotely clear how LP manages to connect the dots she connects here, and she doesn't bother to explain any of her reasoning to us. However, at this point that probably doesn't matter much. The big takeaway is that Red Eye plans on doing something with raising the sun and the moon, and it somehow involves the Single Pegasus Project that the Ministry of Awesome was working on during the war.

Oh, also, the text mentions that LP triggered some kind of alarm when she accessed the Ministry's terminal. That may or may not have anything to do with what happens next.

Anyway, the gang exits the warehouse, and this happens:

>My lungs collapsed, and I fell to the ground, my magic imploding, dropping SteelHooves. I felt myself dying, the Pink Cloud tearing me apart like I was filled with Fillydelphia parasprites.
Oh dear, collapsed lungs you say? That's going to be a two-potion job at least.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311479
>>311465
Missed opportunity: if Rarity hid this special book inside Canterlot and the world's most secure bank of all time, filled with all sorts of magical defense systems, the story could do a fun thrilling bank heist where everyone's skills are useful and the answer to all of life's questions are not the usual "explore and murderhobo" shit.

Right now the heroes are mostly just exploring and murderhoboing in an area while occasionally sipping health potion to undo the Damage Over Time effect of the fart cloud. If kkat bothered to specify exactly how many healing items the party has and didn't make finding new healing items effortless this could be a tense slow drain on resources full of mounting horror as the heroes have to balance dealing with body horror effects from magic cloud poison and preserving their limited supply of anti-poison items for as long as possible.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
6c68b1c
?
No.311481
311495 311497 311551 311555
1624843130980.gif
>>311478

Apparently what happened is that the basement of the Ministry of Arcane Sciences, which you may or may not remember was filled with hydrogen gas, finally exploded, and this set off a chain reaction that destroyed most of Ministry Walk and released a fuckton of Pink Cloud into the air. Apparently, turning the dragon into a mouse did not have any effect on the amount of Pink Cloud that was already released, thus rendering that already pointless side-quest even more pointless.

Anyway, there's a bunch of concentrated cloud in the air and they've got seconds to live and blah blah blah. "Oh noes, how will our intrepid heroes get out of this one?" asks Glim Glam, in his best approximation of Maud Pie's voice.

Well, fortunately, it seems that Calamity made it back with the Sky Bandit just in time. Even more fortunately, he seems to have dodged the explosion and most of the cloud. More fortunately still, Velvet Remedy shoved like three healing potions down LP's gullet at once just seconds before losing consciousness, so now LP has the strength she needs to levitate them all onto the airship. "Hooray. I was so worried there. That was the scariest 1.3 seconds of my life," says Glim Glam, once again channeling Maud Pie.

Anyway, there is some more minor excitement as they leave. Calamity is kinda-sorta affected by the cloud, and eventually he loses consciousness and falls. LP searches for super-duper-restorative-potions, but it turns out they don't have any more. Oh noes. Will Littlepoop, who is apparently now suffering from some kind of mass organ failure or lung collapse or whatever is supposed to be wrong with her, be able to once again levitate the entire airship with all of them and all of their stuff on it to safety?

Spoiler alert: she can. She levitates the bus far enough for it to get to the river that flows out of Canterlot, and drops it in. The bus, which as I recall is 200 years old, mostly rusted-out, windowless, and heavily weighted down with all of the crap they stole, is somehow buoyant and floating. LP can relax now. Or at least, she can relax until they go sailing over the edge of a waterfall.

>I pressed a hoof against Velvet Remedy’s neck and checked Pyrelight’s breathing. They were both unconscious but alive. I prayed neither of them were in a coma.
Yeah, comas are a bitch. You have to take like three, four, maybe even five super-duper-bullshit-elixirs to get over one of those.

Anyway, they go careening off the edge of the waterfall, and LP kinda-sorta levitates them enough so they don't completely plummet.

Page break. They hit the aqueduct that leads to Zebratown, and Velvet falls out the window, but the jolt wakes Calamity up and he starts flying again. Meanwhile, LP jumps out the window after Velvet.

Velvet is unconscious in the aqueduct, being carried by the stream. LP dives in and levitates the two of them while also swimming I guess. She can't really concentrate on the spell, and also her on-again-off-again magic fatigue conveniently sets in, and now she can't use her stupid ridiculous bullshit telekinesis. Oh noes. They go sailing off the edge of the aqueduct. Will Calamity, who is still flying the airbus, be able to save them in time?

Spoiler alert: he can. Somehow, he manages to get ahead of them and underneath the aqueduct just in time to catch the unconscious Velvet and the nearly-unconscious Littlepoop before they go plummeting to a watery grave. Hooray. The day is saved. Kind of; Calamity drops them or something, but they're relatively close to the ground I think, because the last we see of Littlepoop she is lying in mud, and I think she passes out or something.

Page break. Rarity's orb. I think this is the last one of these.

LP's host is a unicorn named Snips. This character should be familiar to fans of the show, but to my knowledge has not appeared in this story yet. Apparently he is a high-ranking magician. He greets Rarity, who lands one of those bicycle-copter thingies, and they head off to conduct some kind of magic experiment. She tells the stallion that she wants him to cut her soul into 43 pieces. Apparently, the plan is to put all of the pieces into soul jars for some unknown reason.

They go down into some kind of ritual chamber. A second unicorn named Snails is down there. Rarity appears, now clad in some kind of ceremonial black robe. They conduct some kind of dark ritual, Rarity's soul kerplodes into a bunch of soul jars, and the scene is over.

>I already knew what they were.
Care to enlighten us? Because I don't have the slightest idea what the significance of any of this shit is.

Page break. There is a short monologue from Littlepoop that attempts to connect the details of several of the memory orbs. It is mostly incoherent, but it seems to more or less explain the significance of the last orb.

>Only forty-two were ever made, Watcher… Spike had told me. Seven sets of six. One for each of the Ministry Mares, and one for Princess Luna.
Apparently, Rarity split her soul into 42 fragments, put them in soul jars, and these jars were turned into the action figures that LP has been collecting.

This makes very little sense, honestly. If the statuettes were made out of Rarity's soul, then shouldn't they all be statues of Rarity? Also, why did she even do this? I really don't understand what is supposed to be happening here.

Anyway, we have finally come to the end of this 50,000 word behemoth chapter. Thank God. I feel like I just took a watermelon-sized shit. I need to go lie down.
Anonymous
49e2179
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No.311495
311496 311551
>>311481
The concept of "soul jars" in this story is an ill-defined and incredibly ridiculous concept.

As I recall, creating a "soul jar" is done through "enchanting" any item with a fragment of your soul, making it indestructible. The process of how this "sacrifice" is carried out isn't explained, nor is the consequences (going to hell????). I'm not sure if it gains any other kind of effect, because the statuettes give you stat bonuses. Perhaps they were enchanted beforehand. Anyways, the text NEVER clarifies what it means to lend a piece of your soul, if it changes your personality, leaves a "hole" that hurts you spiritually, etc. Rarity has done it FOURTY-TWO TIMES and seems no less worse for wear. It stands to reason that this sort of thing might be looked into more, because you could create literally indestructible suits of armor with it that cannot be penetrated by or damaged by spells and projectiles.

Then again, this is some kind of secret, evil book but you'd think a kingdom so desparate to win a war might take advantage of this, even if it has to be subtle and under Rarity's discretion.
Anonymous
d77fe6d
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No.311496
311498
>>311495
>making it indestructible
Why make it entirely indestructible? That diminishes the opportunity for a "destroy the phylactery" type arc. It should at least have conditions in which it can be destroyed.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311497
311551
>>311481
Now that we finally know everything about the Statuettes, what do you think?
It probably took Kkat months, maybe even years to write this...
But we finally learned:
>Rarity made statuettes of herself and her friends
>she knows how to do the following thanks to the Zebra Necronomicon
>she filled them with bite sized chunks of Rarity's soul
>snips and snails helped, not that they mattered
>the statuettes not of Rarity had their soul data overwritten with a copypaste of soul info discreetly copied from Rarity's friends
>collecting one statuette boosts the stat Kkat deemed most relevant to that pony
>collecting them all also boosts your luck because there are only 6 mane six members and Kkat couldn't decide who Luck should be
>she gave sets to her friends and Luna and many ended up scattered
>having their stats boosted did not help them
>fucking Twilight of all ponies failed to notice these statuettes are magic
>only Luna kept a complete set for some reason. And spike I think. Everyone else gave the gifts away without knowing what they really were
>Velvet really should start showing symptoms of having all her Fallout SPECIAL stats like Strength and Endurance boosted by 1. Like how after LP picked up the awareness statuette she started saying "It was under E" a lot

>Kkat: And that's how Equestria was made! I mean, Equestria's statuettes.
>Reader: wait, how is all this statuette lore relevant to the story or its themes?
>Kkat: It's not, I just wanted to show off my autistic headcanon for how Fallout 3's magical retarded plastic statuettes would function and how they would have been made if they were in MLP, a setting with magic.
>Reader: Kkat, you really are a colossal faggot. You wasted all this time trying to make a stat-boosting videogame collectable make sense in your own shitty lore? And yet you still ended up with a completely retarded explanation full of plot holes and story-breaking questions? Why didn't Rarity split up someone else's soul if soul data can be copypasted onto soul fragments like a goddamn computer program? Perhaps a captive zigger could be consumed to produce stronger enchanted armour. I'm sure Celestia soul data over a split zigger soul would make a gun or statuette or helmet magically superior to normal ones. The story would remain the same if the explanation was cut because it never truly matters to the characters or plot. You'd think gathering these Statuettes so the soul fragments can be fused together into something important like a pony robot or a ZAX Crusader ManeFrame or the weather control towers or the Gardens Of Equestria world-healer would be an important part of the plot, since so many words were wasted on pretending these statuettes would matter. But no, it was all just filler. Littleshit graverobbed Twilight's corpse for this. A set of collectables, even though Spike and Luna already had their own sets! Why did this story prioritize a fucking collectable set for gamer achievements over giving people a completed timeline of pre-war and mid-war events as quickly as possible? Because Kkat's a faggoted goomer who loved Fallout 3 and its retarded focus on collectables and paeudorandom encounters and Skyrim dungeons and "unique" overpowered weapons over anything that makes Fallout Fallout like writing or character or story. Fuck you, Kkat. I'd tell you to go gargle rat cum but you'd probably enjoy that.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
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No.311498
>>311496
Yeah like tossing it into Mount Doom after an epic journey. Or stabbing it with whatever they used to destroy the Horcruxes in Harry Plopper.
Hell if Rarity can really make anything indestructible, where is the indestructible Power Armour? Where are the indestructible riot shields? Where is the indestructible tarp for covering up the moon? What happens when you make a liquid or gas or plasma indestructble? Can Pegasi in space-proof power armour drop indestructible rods on Zebra land harder than the Rods From God bullshit could ever dream of? What happens when you try shoving a soul fragment into a robot, or a corpse, or a living pony? Can clone ponies have soul fragments shoved into them? What happens if Twilight wears diamond earrings containing soul copies of herself? What happens if a clone of Twilight Sparkle starts wearing diamond earrings containing copies of the souls of the entire mane six? Why is copypasting soul data from one being to another so effortless and unintrusive that all of Rarity's friends could have their own gamer powerup yum-yum-mushroom that looks like them? Why is the black book, the number one most important thing possible in this setting right now, a limitless source of blood magic and soul magic knowledge, still right where Rarity left it after 200 years of retardity if it can let literally anyone make anything invincible, even buildings? Putting it in a hyper-secure bank vault made deadlier over the years would at least make its location less convenient. And it would let Kkat rip off more Dead Money shit instead of trying to shoehorn the fireworks into a Dragon-To-Mouse-inator.

Kkat's retarded answer for a question no Fallout 3 fan thought to ask ("Where did the magical stat boosting achievement granting videogame collectable statues come from?") only raises more questions than Kkat could ever answer. I know I stopped writing my shit Fallout Equestria fic to focus on the main FIM fic but this shit makes me want to go back to it just so I can show what a competent practical genius unicorn could do with the black book, prep time, and the will to get shit done.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311516
Wait a fucking second

Littlepip can't read Zigger

How did that cursed book teach her the Blood Edge spell?

haha I made a blazblue reference
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
b512cc2
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No.311551
311559
>>311497
>Now that we finally know everything about the Statuettes, what do you think?
I think basically the same thing that I thought before I knew everything: it's a completely silly element that adds nothing of significant value to the story. There's no obvious reason for LP to collect these things, and they don't seem to do anything other than provide a minor stat boost that doesn't seem to have any practical effect on anything she does.

>only Luna kept a complete set for some reason. And spike I think. Everyone else gave the gifts away without knowing what they really were
>fucking Twilight of all ponies failed to notice these statuettes are magic
kek, these are actually pretty good observations.

>the statuettes not of Rarity had their soul data overwritten with a copypaste of soul info discreetly copied from Rarity's friends
Is this in the text somewhere? I don't remember it explicitly stating that, and if it was implied somehow it was completely lost on me. In fact, I actually commented on this here:
>>311481
>If the statuettes were made out of Rarity's soul, then shouldn't they all be statues of Rarity?

>>311495
>The process of how this "sacrifice" is carried out isn't explained, nor is the consequences (going to hell????).
> the text NEVER clarifies what it means to lend a piece of your soul, if it changes your personality, leaves a "hole" that hurts you spiritually, etc. Rarity has done it FOURTY-TWO TIMES and seems no less worse for wear.
This is exactly my gripe with all of this. I was actually wondering if this was another continuity issue, since a reasonable person could assume that having your soul cut into 43 pieces would be fatal, yet we witnessed Rarity's actual death scene at a later date. Then, I realized that this was probably something similar to the issue with AJ falling down an elevator: something happened to a character that logically should have killed her, but it didn't kill her because reasons, and kkat just assumes that we would understand that without it being explained.

There's no accurate way to gage how Rarity was affected by the loss of 43 distinct pieces of her soul; it didn't seem to have any serious effect on her from what I've seen. The "sacrifice" here is pretty much meaningless. The statues have a little more value as symbols of Rarity's affection for her friends, which is what I assume the author meant these statues to signify overall. This is why LP wants to keep the entire set together, because the ponies had drifted apart by the end of the war, and Rarity wanted to make statues of the six of them together to symbolize the friendship they once had. I'm perfectly fine with this as imagery, but I really don't see why all this extra gibberish about soul jars and black magic was necessary.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
b512cc2
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No.311555
1368680 - Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Princess_Cadence.jpg
>>311481

Chapter Thirty Eight: Peace in Our Time

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Be good... or I’ll shoot you dead.”
I'm assuming this is what the guy in the van told kkat once it became apparent that he did not actually have a puppy to show him.

Anyway, on with the story.

>Enough.
>My abused body was through. My nerves didn’t even have the will to scream at me anymore. My muscles arched dully, my insides hurt, my PipLeg itched. I could feel the mud slowly squishing in between my armor and coat, seeping through the hole the Ultra-Sentinel had burned in my chest.
"Enough" is right. Enough of this crap. It's just the same shit over and over and over. Littlepoop goes charging into some ridiculously dangerous situation guns-a'blazing, sustains some horrible batch of injuries that in any other universe would be fatal, spends multiple paragraphs whining about how much pain she's in and how she can't go on and blah blah blah, and then a scene or two later she downs a couple of potions or has Velvet cast a spell on her or some other kind of bullshit and she's fine again. First I thought it was stupid, then I thought it was funny, now I just find it tiresome.

Protip for writers: sending your protagonist through hell for no reason other than to do it is a waste of both your time and the reader's. There are no stakes to any of these fights anyway, so the outcome doesn't even matter; it's like playing poker for buttons. No matter how banged up LP or any of these other retards get, we all know perfectly well they're just going to drink some healing potions and be fine again, so what is even the point of this? Kkat is basically just torturing his characters for no reason here.

I've said this a million times before, and I'll say it again for emphasis: if a character gets her leg blown off, then she shouldn't have a leg for the rest of the story. If she needs to have a leg for the story to work, then don't have her get her leg blown off; it's as simple as that.

Constantly injuring your characters in horrible ways, patching them up with magic and having them whine about how much pain they're in during the interval between doesn't make them sympathetic and it certainly doesn't make them heroic. For anyone who wants to write this kind of action-adventure story, there is a single basic concept that you need to internalize:
IF THERE ARE NO ACTUAL STAKES, THE FIGHT DOESN'T MATTER.
Memorize this. Repeat it to yourself over and over like a mantra. Set it to music and hum it in the shower. Kkat obviously didn't, and look how his shitfest of a story turned out. Don't be like kkat.

Anyway, for once, the chapter actually begins where the previous chapter left off. The gang is right where we saw them last time: LP is lying face down in the mud, Velvet is unconscious, the Butt Wagon is topped over and half sunk in the lake; everyone's got the blues. Hilariously enough, Calamity is trapped upside down in his flight harness.

>Behind him, a groan rose up as the Sky Bandit slipped further into the lake. With a start, I realized SteelHooves was still in the back of the passenger wagon, paralyzed in his dead armor, unable to move as he sunk into the water. I knew he couldn’t drown, but the thought of being trapped in a watery grave had to be horrifying. My mind immediately conjured memories of my nightmarish imprisonment in the healing booth.
As usual, LP is outwardly concerned about her friends, but inwardly is only thinking about herself. SteelHooves is currently in real danger of sinking to the bottom of a lake and being trapped in a state of perpetual living death like Jason Voorhees or something, and all LP can think about is how similar his situation is to that one time she had to go into a confined space for like five minutes and it scared her. It's also worth mentioning that the confined space she's thinking of was yet another preposterous healing contraption that magically cured every single thing that was wrong with her. This character has never faced a legitimate challenge at any point in her life, yet all she does is whine about how much suffering she's endured. She's basically Tumblr the pony.

Anyway, whatever. Velvet isn't breathing I guess, and LP can't get to her because her legs are broken or something. Her magic fatigue still seems to be in effect, so she can't use her bullshit levitation powers to save the day like she usually does. However, she is able to summon enough magic to undo Calamity's harness, so he drops down and starts giving Velvet some kind of pony CPR.

>Tones of grey bled into my vision. My whole self cried out for rest, begging me to just let go, just go to sleep. But I fought the cool embrace of darkness, the little pony in my head kicking and screaming, telling me that if I let it overtake me, I would never wake up again. If I lost consciousness now, I could slip into a coma. And somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be a peaceful sleep. All the nightmares of the healing booth awaited for me down there.
This is what kkat's hero is actually thinking about while one of her closest friends is desperately trying to save the life of one of her other closest friends.

"Waaaah, I don't want to go into the magical heawing boof, it's sow scawwy in dere!! Waaaah, Mummeh was an alcohowic and she wasn't nice to me! Waaah, I didn't want to spend my life wepaiwing PipBucks because it was boring so I left the stable but it was scawwy out dere! Waaah, I've been shot and stabbed and had my wibs bwoken multiple times and even though that's basically the equivalent of a skinned knee in this ridiculous world it was scawwy!! Pwease don't make me go into the scawwy dawk heawing boof daddeh! And use Wittlepoop's pwownouns shitwowd!!" and yes, I'm having her talk like a fluffy on purpose here. If only its allegories were intentional, FoE could be one of the most brilliant works of satire ever penned.

Anyway, blah blah blah Velvet is fine. End of scene.
Anonymous
49e2179
?
No.311559
All_bobbleheads.jpg
Fallout_equestria_statuettes_by_thorwaldsen92-d6pf4f0.png
>>311551
The logic most likely went like this:
>"Hmm, what "iconic" things from Fallout(tm) can I reference in this fic?
>"Oh I know! The Bobbleheads(tm) are pretty iconic as items, even though they were invented by Bethesda(tm) and not part of the games which established the series!"
>"Now how do I approach this? Perhaps i'll weave some weird magic artifact ideas into the statues to explain their boosting properties, or how they're these unusual relics in the setting"
>Cue the weird lore for these items that are basically designed as a reference and nothing else

I could appreciate the more unique approach instead of 1:1 copying, but these items have little bearing on the plot and setting and in fact raise a ton of terrible questions like the aforementioned rules as well as why wasn't Rarity making this more widespread and having LITERALLY INVULNERABLE suits of armor made. On top of this, it is indeed very odd that each of the Mane Six(tm) only has one of these items apiece despite being intended to receive entire sets. I guess if you want to spread them apart for the sake of a reference you have to go against this logic as well.

Not only did Littlepip graverob these statues, they were intended as gifts to bring Rarity's friends back together. Littlepip stole each and every one of these from their final resting places/ areas of safekeeping, and took them with her. This random pony who has no direct relation to any of these six mares took their relics from them because she wanted to. She's a random wastelander, who will probably die in the muck somewhere and lose these things forever (if she weren't the mary sue protagonist). Sure, all the statues are "together". Together with her. Taken from their INTENDED place in the world.
Glim
!Glam8.itxo
b512cc2
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No.311565
New thread:
>>311564 →
sage
sage
0681d3b
?
No.311803
>>311261
Poor series of gaslights again, mutt. Now shut the fuck up and go back to plebbit where you belong. Stop denying it. We ALL fucking know that is precisely where you came from after your screaming fits. Do the world a favor: kill yourself. Also who the fuck is "hclegend"? Sounds like another britcuck you happen to be a faggot for.
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.311824
Is it bad writing that Littlepip killed The Goddess before killing other baddies that should logically have a lower level and take less effort to kill? LP outwitted a retarded giant faggotess with the help of a zebra who basically did everything LP didn't do on crack mints. Where can she go from here after this? Will she find a bigger, gayer Goddess to kill? Will she find an even richer slave master with TWO nukes he's willing to give away? Or return to kill that slave master, plunging that region into chaos until enough Thunderdome veterans become the new raiders of that region? What is left for LP? Kkat clearly wants to reference as much Fallout iconography as possible but he was a fool to put The Master first, when he was such a big deal for the franchise's past and present and presumably future.

By the way, didn't LP find an unexploded nuclear bomb in Silver Bell's barn and then give it away earlier in this story? If Kkat wanted LP to have a nuke he could have just used that and called it a "certified chekovs gun moment".
Anonymous
f3d56e1
?
No.316591
At the start of this tale, LP's motivation was getting Velvet back to the stable.

The Velvet motivation was forgotten almost immediately due to bad writing. It doesn't factor into who LP or Velvet is or how they adventure.

Normally characters with "I must retrieve someone who doesn't want to be retrieved" as a goal get to a point where they grow morally and decide they want to respect their target's freedom and protect it, quitting their job. LP didn't go through that character arc. She just became peak murderhobo instantly after leaving the Stable and never looked back.

Perhaps it would improve the story if Littlepoop's father was some kind of idealistic dreamer who left her Stable one day to venture out into the world, never returning home.
LP could be bullied as a child because "Haha her father's fucking dead! Everypony knows there's no such thing as an outside world! My uncle got so sick of his plumber job he deepthroated a shotgun and he's still less of a bitch than your dad, LP! Run away and paaay! Run away and paaaaaay!"

This motivates LP to try and learn all sorts of skills it would be abnormal for a comfortable civilian girl to learn(combat, stealth, shooting guns, melee weapon usage, telekinesis training, etc) because one day she wants to follow in her father's footsteps and leave this stable once she's an adult.
At the same time her focus on combat skills means she is severely lacking in the friendship and social manipulation department. Therefore she will need friends to handle this for her but she never makes friends while in her stable.

Also despite being a crack shot when calm it takes months of real wasteland exposure before she can remain calm in a real-ass firefight. Fuck VATS/SATS AutoAim, all my homies hate AutoAim.
But when she's in her late teens (so it's sadder and more traumatic when bad stuff happens to her) something happens that forces her out of the Stable. Or gives her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leave it for real.

Anyway she leaves her stable and almost immediately encounters her dad as a pony skeleton with sunglasses and a gun. Little Macintosh is the gun. And evidence here suggests The Enclave killed him and a Dashite that was travelling with him. It's out of the way, that's why it hasn't been looted yet. LP cries and gets the sunglasses and sick gun, skipping that robot factory bullshit, and she also finds her father's diary hidden under a rock.
Now the diary can give her a coherent plot to follow with an initial goal(find Calamity) and end goal(kill the Enclave for killing her dad).
Oh and to make things more realistic and make the Enclave extra evil, the Wasteland should have made attempts of its own to unify and unfuck things over 200 years only for the Enclave to sabotage everything because an eternally warring surface world gives the Cloudian Archipegago (that's a cooler name for the pegasus enclave) more time to prepare their army.

LP's new diary can also infodump all about the past of this world and the mane six without LP having to zigzag all over the wasteland like a drunken tourist cunt visiting places usually slightly related to the apocalypse somehow before she can get at the info involving those places.
Kkat loves telling people he's thought of this silly thing and that silly thing with his fanfic even though he can't fit them into the story neatly. But this one giant random document and/or audio log is the perfect way to foreshadow places LP will visit and sum up dear old dad's completed adventures in places LP has no reason to visit and waste time in now that the sidequests at those locations have been finished for her.
And if the diary's written in a dead language only LP and her dad still know (or a made-up language like klingon or elvish) even better. Because that means the diary can be a McGuffin the Enclave wants and they have a reason to spare and try to capture LP alive: only she can read it.
The diary should have something like a nuclear launch codes-style password for the Single Pegasus Project or the location of a prewar military supply depot LP can use in the end to get her team overpowered loot so it's more believable that 4ish friends could take on two warring armies at the same time and win.
;