I just found this hilarious picture. XD

I didn't like just for sidekicks. Fun fact, it was my first episode.

Yeah, "Spike is incompetent" episodes are always "eh" for me.

Why is he incompetent when he's the main character of the episode but competent when he's a secondary/supporting one? :S

Oh you haven't even got to the worst (at least in my opinion) Spike episode.

As for why, I think it's because Spike was designed to fill a niche as Twilight's sidekick and aside from that and his crush, he didn't have a ton of material to work with.

It's hard to choose just one worst Spike episode.

The writers or at least MA Larson has admitted that they have trouble writing him. I can kind of see why he might be hard to write {Let's face it, compared to the mane 6 he's not a particularly interesting character}, but you'd think it wouldn't have taken them 5 seasons to figure out that going the "Spike is a moron" route never works.

I just sent my chapter of the RR back. We're going to have to work out how to upload to Fimfic, because fimfic's formatting isn't going to be able to handle this.We may have to do what that one fic about Santa Hooves did by uploading the letters as pictures or something.

What did you do? zalgo text or something?

Would your characters be latex compatible?

RE: D&D Imbalance: Xefas's Mythos System (( www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?335295-Mythos-Compendium )) is one homebrew that seems to address this issue by attempting to, so it claims, raise martial classes to the "Tier 2". It does so by taking the Exalted approach and saying, "Fuck it, you're actually magic."

edited 6th Dec '16 8:06:43 AM by God_of_Awesome

Oh, that might be my fault. I made a joke about a name being in a specific font as a matter of pronunciation. So a character's name is always in that specific font.

@War: Not Zalgo no (I actually don't usually like Zalgo. I find it inefficient.) But Fimfic's formatting sucks, so it may as well be for the loss of effect we're going to get if we don't do something to work around it.

@God of Awesome: I do something similar. Magic users may be reality warpers, but martial classes are superheroes. Yes, you can punch through a wall of force, cause an earthquake with a stomp, create winds by swinging your weapons, grab a wizard's teleportation out of the air, smash a skeleton so hard it kills the necromancer who created it, his astral projection, his clone and his contingent resurrection, jump to another continent in a single bound, kill someone through the volume of your battle cries, destroy a prison dimension with a single punch, rip into your enemy's time stop or celerity, cause their buffs to explode and dispell when you hit them with your weapon, etc.

In addition, I've tried to make magic slightly more costly and hp damage more debilitating while doing things like turning a full attack into a standard action, reducing BAB penalties for iterative attacks and stuff like that.

EDIT: Yeah, I more than ran with that. Maybe I should send you my chapter too so you can see what I did.

edited 6th Dec '16 1:49:08 AM by Sereg

Specific font? Like...

You would not believe how long it took me to track this down. The things I do for a joke.

Hah! That was a fantastic chapter.

But to be honest, the joke might honestly work just as well if there's no explanation for it whatsoever. Though a few things will definitely need to be brought over.

You know, I honestly feel like this is the first time I've written my chapter with absolutely no idea what's going on. I look forward to seeing how drastically things shifted along the way.

And after I tried so hard to rerail it with my chapter :p

The circlebird has no rails.

The very first story is called off the rails!

Thank you. But yes, I also have little idea about the basic structure we're going for this time.

Re: Font, we could reasonably approximate it via unicode, with mathematical double-struck letters. If, for example, you wanted to write "Steve": 𝕊𝕋𝔼𝕍𝔼

Season six wasn't great but they learned with the Spike episodes. When that dragon episode showed that he was competent, my reaction was so.

Post of the Day #1663

𝕰𝖘 𝖇𝖗𝖆𝖚𝖘𝖙 𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝕽𝖚𝖋 𝖜𝖎𝖊 𝕯𝖔𝖓𝖓𝖊𝖗𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑,
𝖂𝖎𝖊 𝕾𝖈𝖍𝖜𝖊𝖗𝖙𝖌𝖊𝖐𝖑𝖎𝖗𝖗 𝖚𝖓𝖉 𝖂𝖔𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖕𝖗𝖆𝖑𝖑:
𝖅𝖚𝖒 𝕽𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖓, 𝖟𝖚𝖒 𝕽𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖓, 𝖟𝖚𝖒 𝖉𝖊𝖚𝖙𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖓 𝕽𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖓,
𝖂𝖊𝖗 𝖜𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝖉𝖊𝖘 𝕾𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖒𝖊𝖘 𝕳𝖚𝖊𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖘𝖊𝖎𝖓?

𝕷𝖎𝖊𝖇 𝖁𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉, 𝖒𝖆𝖌𝖘𝖙 𝖗𝖚𝖍𝖎𝖌 𝖘𝖊𝖎𝖓,
𝖑𝖎𝖊𝖇 𝖁𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖆𝖓𝖉, 𝖒𝖆𝖌𝖘𝖙 𝖗𝖚𝖍𝖎𝖌 𝖘𝖊𝖎𝖓!

𝕱𝖊𝖘𝖙 𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖍𝖙 𝖚𝖓𝖉 𝖙𝖗𝖊𝖚 𝖉𝖎𝖊 𝖂𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖙,
𝕯𝖎𝖊 𝖂𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖙 𝖆𝖒 𝕽𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖓,
𝕱𝖊𝖘𝖙 𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖍𝖙 𝖚𝖓𝖉 𝖙𝖗𝖊𝖚 𝖉𝖎𝖊 𝖂𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖙,
𝕯𝖎𝖊 𝖂𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖙 𝖆𝖒 𝕽𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖓!

Unfortunately, it seems that Unicode fonts aren't supported on FIMFiction.

edited 6th Dec '16 8:22:22 AM by SantosLHalper

And it's not showing up on my smartphone, either.

I guess we'll just have to do pictures of that text after all.

Nice to hear it's going well. When I had it, it was relatively straightforward so I'm looking forward to seeing how it got so off the rails.

I've received the link to the next chapter, but whoever owns the document needs to give me permission to view it.

Also, as far as Spike goes, the main problem with most of his episodes is that they tend to deal on his relative immaturity and inexperience and focus on him screwing up whatever situation he's in. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad setup in and of itself, but it ultimately ended up being a issue for several reasons:

1. Spike plays the role of Only Sane Man or a Greek Chorus in most of the episodes where he isn't in focus, which means that there's a disconnect between his competence in most episodes as a side character versus his incompetence in the others.

2. Spike doesn't have a lot of one-on-one interactions with much of the cast outside of Twilight (and to a lesser extent, Rarity), which results in a lot of episodes where he's basically being a loner. Since character interaction is one of the show's strong points, it puts most of his episodes back a bit.

3. Because he's constantly identified as being a child, it kinda feels like low-hanging fruit to keep pointing out his flaws when he's supposedly young enough to the point where he shouldn't be expected to be as mature as the rest of the cast anyway.

4. Most annoyingly the writers keep going back to that same pattern over and over. I'm pretty sure that "Gauntlet of Fire" was the first Spike episode where he himself wasn't the cause of the conflict and contributed more to solving the problem than to causing it in the first place. (You could argue that that was the case in Power Ponies, but that was really more of an ensemble episode, and in any case Spike didn't save the day so much as enable the rest of the cast to do it).

None of those issues will necessarily make for a bad episode, but nearly every one of his early episodes fell victim to at least two or three of them.

What happened to Spike being flattered that Fluttershy thought he was cute?