Post of the Day #1665

Ah Sera, you are missed.

I swear I'll get to FOE one of these days... I've got so many other fics I want to get started on, but paradoxically they sound epic enough that I'm willing to savor them a chapter or two at a time, and squeeze in FOE the same way. The Flight of the Alicorn with its conspiracies, Sunset of Time and Long Road to Friendship which are both explicitly divided into acts (and which I like to think of as the Albinocorn Sunset duology), Eternal and Composure (Twilestia duology), Starlight Over Detrot with its everything... I'm planning to polish off Summer Days as an appetizer. I'm also looking forward to the Tangled Roots Trilogy possibly more than it deserves (though a one-shot I checked out by the same author was very well done).

It's not an MLP fanfic, but The Metropolitan Man is awesome and you should read it.

Why does Discord make the landscape look like a giant chessboard when he takes over a place?

Why not? It's what I would do. Symbolism and stuff.

It reveals his deep-seated issues with being a Chaos God by having him make the disorderly dirt and grass into a neat, orderly grid that spans on forever and ever.

Or it's an allusion to Nietszche and how "out of chaos comes order."

Prove me wrong, yo.

Discord has an obsession with games. He sets up his torments as challenges for his victims to beat. He will cheat, but never so much that the game becomes pointless. If his victim manages to cheat him, he will be impressed. If the victims beat the game-

-he will just stand there and let them hit him with the Elements Of Harmony, even though he damn well should know what they do this time around and can clearly see them charging up.

Easy there now; he's not that evil.

Chaos Spirit, at least I insist on calling him that.

What would the definition of a god even be in Equestria anyway? I mean they're already ruled by a veritable physical god and one third of the populace has access to magic.

edited 8th Dec '16 2:33:59 PM by LordVatek

Three thirds, I'm sure Earth Ponies and Pegasi are pretty explicitly magical too.

Now a god is a religion, is worshiped. Discord and Celestial Sisters might be gods to somepony or somebody, but that's a matter of perspective.

Objects of Worship in Equestria tend to come in duos, usually two complementary ideas. The Maker's Two Eyes, The Soil and the Seed, First Home and First Mother, The Eagle and the Lion, etc. This is because all magical creatures have an instinctive connection to The Flow, which permeates all things, and are therefore drawn to the notion of harmony. This is also what makes entities like discord so aberrant in their eyes: They embody Wrong Context Magic, and clash with the ponies' most base understanding of their world. This is why, in most cases, Luna and Celestia are not worshiped, because they're seen as inherently competitive elements, and therefore not divine. There are some faiths that recognize that Night and Day create a balance with one another, but even then Luna and Celestia, as individuals, are not seen as being worthy of worship, but merely embodying divine concepts. Prophets, in essence: Respectable, but not Gods.

I was thinking more about how the likes of Twilight and Cadence would be seen. In a theoretical universe where Celestia and Luna were worshiped, would they be seen as false gods?

I know that we can't really get an actual answer to that, but it's possible fanfic fuel (though I'm certain it's been done before).

edited 8th Dec '16 4:05:45 PM by LordVatek

Plenty of polytheistic religions have stories of mortals ascending to god/demigodhood through great deeds.

All available on your nearest fanfiction.

And failure to buy it will result in a $50 fine or three months in prison.

I got a Princess Luna plushie!

I got suspended from school today.

Those are two very different things.

Depends what he was doing with the plushie.

Had the for the original kings of the pony tribes being immortal uber ponies of their respective tribes. They had this to say about godhood:

"At first, they worshiped us as gods and, for a time, we believed them. For what was there that was as might as us? We knew of nothing beyond us and thought everything was in our grasp. It was only, after time, that we learned bit by bit of things we could not do. Our faith in ourselves was shaken.

"And then Discord happened."

I get the feeling that Celestia would probably be very uncomfortable with being worshiped. I mean, in canon, we know that she kinda wishes other ponies weren't so uptight around her. That and she doesn't seem fundamentally different from other ponies in general. More powerful, yes, but other than that at heart she's just a particularly experienced and powerful pony.

They found a switchblade in my locker.

edited 8th Dec '16 7:41:19 PM by marcen12

Triptych goes into the Unwanted False Faith for alicorns. Among other things, Twilight gets asked to bless foals when she happens to be present at their birth and is pretty uncomfortable with it since she knows she couldn't physically help them. Celestia and Luna feel much the same and apparently got thrust into the role similarly to Twilight, but I haven't really gotten to those stories yet. This is one of the less depressing parts of that story.

Stuff like that just seems weird to me, since none of the characters in the show have ever quite shown a religious degree of reverence toward Celestia. At least not in that fashion. It's an interesting idea to explore though.

EDIT: And now I'm going to bed.

edited 8th Dec '16 8:31:57 PM by JapaneseTeeth

By the way, how's the Round Robin doing?