Live Blogs Let's Read fallout Equestria: Project Horizons.

darkabomination2014-01-25 08:54:56

Okay gotta put this somewhere.. And right from the start, the fic shows why I loathe it so much. Retconning or ignoring things, of even just the ideals and feel, of the original just to make things as dark and depressing as possible.

Making a Stable like that!? No, just no. That is NOT what Stables are. Over a century of ponies just casually treating an entire gender like fuck toys, to be murdered as soon as a new toy came around, and nopony doing a damn thing about it? And the entire backstory for how it happened.

While I could see an experiment like the one Stable 99 was set up for being implemented. Not it devolving into that. Every experiment had an out built in. Had some way of stopping the experiment and returning to being a regular Stable should the experiment put the Stable at risk. And it was every Overmare's highest priority to ensure that the out was implemented if needed.

One of the things that I most loved in the story, that really highlighted that while there is darkness, this was still a world with hope, was Stable-Tec, and the simple fact, that a lot of FOE writers, not just here, seem to miss. Stables were not Vaults. While they had the same base concept. "The Vaults after all, were never meant to save anybody." Stables are the complete antithesis of that. So seeing one dragged down into... this...

The overdosing in gore and rape and other things just for the sake of being 'dark' is bad enough but, it's just something that makes me not want to read it. It's the retconning and twisting things from the original to make things more dark that gets me so upset at the thing.

That's your opinion, and your welcome to it.

Okay gotta put this somewhere.. And right from the start, the fic shows why I loathe it so much. Retconning or ignoring things, of even just the ideals and feel, of the original just to make things as dark and depressing as possible.

Making EQUESTRIA like that!? No, just no. That is NOT what EQUESTRIA IS. Over TWO centurIES of ponies just LIVING IN A POSTAPOCALYPTIC WASTELAND AFTER casually treating an entire SPECIES like ENEMIES, to be murdered OVER A REALLY STUPID CONFLICT, and BASICALLY nopony doing a damn thing about it? And the entire backstory for how it happened.

. . .

The overdosing in gore and rape and other things just for the sake of being 'dark' is bad enough but, it's just something that makes me not want to read it. It's the retconning and twisting things from the original to make things more dark that gets me so upset at the thing.

Sauce for the goose, man. And the gap between PH and vanilla Fo E is a lot smaller than that between Fo E and Fi M.

As for your substantive points, I'd object that the Stable wasn't "made" like that, as you yourself point out. Stable Tec did try to save the ponies of 99. That was the point. And there's every indication that in PH they tried, and hard, to save the ponies of all the others, too. So don't try to make an argument based on them not trying to save ponies, something flatly contradicted by the text.

Moving on to the issue of not believing that it would degrade to that state, well, if you can buy the descent into raiderism, banditry, and slavery for much of the Wasteland but not a coup instituting an apartheid autocracy, I don't know what to tell you. Doesn't seem like there's that big of a difference to me, but I guess that's just YMMV.

The issue is, one of those is The Wastes. The other is A Stable. The idea of that happening is counter to everything the Stables meant and stood for.

The Wastes suck, ponies do what they need to to survive. Some go mad from it. Lose hope. It's a reaction to environment.

A Stable is NOT that, there is no reason anypony, in a Stable, should be fine with mass murder, slavery, rape, making an entire gender nothing more then sex slaves, to be raped, beaten, degraded, and used, then murdered. For over a century, and everypony just goes along with it. And the reasons for it, are not reasons for it, it's excuses to simply HAVE an environment that fucked up, for the sake of having it.

And no the gap is way larger. Since in FOE, everything had a reason. It was reactions to the world, to how things had changed. The War, the Wastes, they came first, and the ponies adapted to them. It had a point. PH, shit is bad, just for the sake of having shit be bad, and brutal, and nasty, and dark.

I won't argue, simply because you refuse to see it any other way. And yes it's a terrible, terrible system they have going, but it's also 100 years of indoctrination and apathy put into the minds of it's populous so they won't rebel against the Overmare. Remember, everypony believes the Stable is all that's left, the outside is instant death, so to them even if they come to realize it's wrong, it's worth sacrifices to keep most of the population functional. I' not justifying it, but you act like the story never gives a reason for the way things are, which it does. You just happen to dislike it's explanations and brush them off as meaningless.

Because the 'reasons' completely and totally fly in the face of everything the Stables were. Everything they meant. It's treating them like Vaults, which they were not. Stables are the complete antithesis of Vaults. The simple fact that, even before the indoctrination, and entire Stable thought. "Hey let make sure that any son we have spends his entire life being a worthless, abused slave and gets constantly raped his entire life, until we get a new young colt to fuck instead so we murder the old one."

The third bit that I didn't bring up in the thread the other night, was this bit from Kkat

"And yeah, <name redacted>, one of the things that Project Horizons gets extremely /wrong/ is their use of Stable-Tec and the designs of those Stables."

No, that's not how it happened. Things were going well for more than a few generations before the Incident caused things to spiral out of control as bad as they did. It's treated as a tragedy and was not at all what stable-tech intended. When I get to the relevant chapter, it should clear things up for you.

No I know it's not what was intended, Somber's explained everything about what happened. I even said I COULD see the intended set up being possible. With a few tweaks, such as the 'out' every Stable experiment had but was missing here.

The issue is something THAT hideous, that sick and wrong happening in a Stable in the first place, entirely because the ponies decided to do it. The simple fact that ponies in a Stable made that choice, Completely ignored everything a Stable was. It turns them into Vaults. NO Stable we have heard of ever failed because of the ponies inside of it. But either through accident, exterior forces. Or in one case, a flaw with the stable itself.

I'm not too sure how blogs work but I think you should make the "Thoughts" section longer. This is a fine synopsis of the chapter, but it still could benefit from further elaboration on how you feel towards specific scene/events.

@Spirit. Will do. Though not entirely sure how to go about it. Saving the thoughts until the end save for the odd comment, or insert bullets in the middle of a synopsis?

@Spirit: Well, since this chapter's already done, I'll toss in my "thoughts" from my last reread. Hopefully this isn't distracting too much from the real thing.

Quite a start. I like the atmosphere, with the tension between the need to keep everything working and the need to keep living despite that. Setting up the Overmare as a petty tyrant, and Daisy as well, helped to show the rot even from the perspective of someone who didn't see the slave system as wrong from the beginning. And yet, there's no escaping that, at least in the end, the Overmare was right, and Rivets was planning a coup.

Plot-wise, just the basics show up, and that's probably for the best, as it lets one settle in to the world and the characters before things get complex. Right now, we didn't need much more than Monster invades stable, Monster's boss wants EC-1101.

The characters are great from the start. Deus is just a flat monster at this point, but the Overmare shows some underlying problems. There's implied history between Blackjack and Daisy, and Marmalade is there to remind you (not too subtly, true) that sometimes good people do bad things because they don't know better. I could go on with the bit characters, but suffice to say that they fill the roles they need to.

P-21 comes across as bitter and angry (we're told as much), and is built from there. The resourcefulness stands out the more for his assigned role, and it's hard to ignore that for all that his life was, he seems to have felt more than just hate for the mares of 99 (just not most of them), given his interaction with Duct Tape (though that could have been just to spite the Overmare), and to a lesser extent Blackjack, in particular copying over files and such.

But what really stood out to me was Gin Rummy. It's too bad she's almost entirely out of the story after this, because I very much enjoyed her interactions with Blackjack, and the sort of dances they performed around each other much of the time, and Gin Rummy's competence and professionalism make her something of a foil for her daughter (tempered, at times, with compassion, which is a trait they share), and possibly a point of reference for how she grows over time. It does seem like Gin Rummy greatly influenced Blackjack, and in many ways not for the better, but clearly there was love there, in both directions, even if it often had to be subsumed by their working relationship. But for all that her disapproval, disappointment, and resignation directed at Blackjack, and the internalized lack of self-confidence and desire not to be responsible for anything that those likely helped to build, when push came to shove, Gin Rummy trusted Blackjack even as she wanted to keep her little Fishy out of harm's way however much she could. And as both Blackjack's mother and the head of Stable 99 security, she feels like a source of both "Security Saves Ponies" and "I'm not an executioner" (however much the latter rang hollow in the inaugural chapter).

@dark

Just off of my amateur opinion bullets in the middle of the chapter would break the flow. Unless it's for something really important then such things should probably be kept to a minimum.

I think that in future chapters you should devote some more time towards an examination of the story and it's elements. Like looking for what the major theme of the chapter was, how characters did or did not grow, how the story progressed, etc. What icyShake did there is kinda what I'm talking about.

Were I a more learned person I would better express my point, but I hope you get the gist.

Thanks, I get it. Noted.

With mine, I generally bounce around a bit between summery and explanation. For quick thought on interesting lines or actions, then overall thoughts on a scene at the end before moving to the next. With the "Thoughts" section pretty much just that thoughts on the chapter as a whole, not just the individual scenes. And any other random things I didn't address already.

Always a pleasure to read thoughts. To be honest, yes. Initially, BJ was a slightly older scotch tape, teased for her inability to do magic. Fortunately, I realized how poor a retread that would be and so tried to make her the opposite of Little Pip, where she's social and in a position of semi-authority. The poor at magic thing stuck, with the plan that she would some day become uber powerful with her bullets. That evolved into her being good at many lower power spells. Strength wise, I envision her as strong as Rarity, though with a much wider range of magic. Hopefully a good counterpoint to pip.

Thanks for reading my post, I hope to make these better reading as I continue the Herculaniantask of blogging this beast. Speaking of, nearly done with chapter 2, apologies for the wait, real life struggles and blah blah. Expect it late today or early tomorrow.