I've been checking out the Legends of Magic comics. I've read Rockhoof's so far and will be reading Somnambula's soon.

I looked into the POTD issue, and it is really weird. The thread as it is now doesn't match the copy saved in my archives.

For reference, the post that was supposed to be linked in this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13791229970A85311100&page=4563#comment-114052

All the post numbers are 4 higher than they are in my saved copy. It's almost like they retroactively inserted posts into the thread's history some time after 2015. I'll have to investigate further to try to narrow down where the discrepancy first appeared.

Edit: I figured out where the issue comes from. There have been many forum bugs in the past, but there was one bug that caused posts to sometimes appear as a copy of the previous post, including having the same post number. It appears that at some point years later, the forum coding was changed so that the duplicate posts are now displayed with different post numbers, retroactively increasing the post number of every following post. (The actual content of the duplicate posts is presumably still lost forever).

In case you're curious, the discrepancy starts here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13791229970A85311100&page=3894#comment-97337

Anyway, I'm not sure what to do about this. It will be a huge pain to handle properly. Especially since this presumably means that there are at least 4 posts in the thread that never got archived, so I'll have to figure out which those were and a way to merge them into the archives.

Edited by storyyeller on Oct 9th 2018 at 12:33:53 PM

If you archived them in a database, it should be easy enough to locate the duplicate posts and insert them in the right location in the database, so the numbering comes out right.

So I notice that the YMMV page for the yakity-sax episode is HIGHLY negative. There's not a single positive trope on that page. I'm guessing that episode is controversial?

Edited by AfroProduction96 on Oct 10th 2018 at 2:49:34 AM

Well, it's more that it is disliked, I think.

Yakity-sax was pretty terrible. It came across like the ravings of a writer who saw "Horse Play" and thought its message was terrible, and was thus compelled to correct it. It's basically a twenty-minute essay about how everyone was being unjustly mean to Celestia by not letting her have the starring role in the play.

And it knows it, because it makes not one but two direct references to "Horse Play". The episode is very clear about its intentions of being a Fix Fic.

In addition to this, main character Pinkie Pie is stripped of agency halfway through the episode and turned into a passive recipient of her own plot. She ceases to be the protagonist around the midpoint and becomes the focus of a Hysterical Woman story. "Pinkie's EMOTIONS are destroying her! Quickly! We must save her from her TERRIBLE EMOTIONS!" No one should ever be a passive recipient in a story whose villain is the FEELINGS that said character is FEELING.

"We mighty heroes must save her from her UNCONTROLLABLE FEELINGS. We've made bad choices for her that made her FEEL FEELINGS. Now we must figure out the good choices we can make for her to save her from FEELINGS." That's pretty much exactly the kind of story that is written exclusively about women, exclusively by men who see women's emotional range as a strange and mysterious beast that cannot be tamed.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 10th 2018 at 7:04:49 AM

...

um, okay?

Sorry, I asked.

Edited by AfroProduction96 on Oct 10th 2018 at 6:05:11 AM

Don't be scared to ask, we just have strong... well, feelings, around here about certain topics.

Seriously, though, everyone is very nice in here.

Even me, oddly enough. TV Tropes is one of the few places I'm actually civil on the internet. Most everywhere else, I enjoy watching internet comment thread fights, and may or may not have intentionally started a few.

Post of the Day #2300

If you archived them in a database, it should be easy enough to locate the duplicate posts and insert them in the right location in the database, so the numbering comes out right.

The thing is that I don't have a database. I just store the raw downloaded html, one file per page. So in order to correct something like this, I have to do it manually in the code. My code is already full of hacks to account for all the various forum bugs and quirks and redesigns that have happened over the years.

Re Yakity Sax: I liked it. It's important not to mistake vocal opinions for a consensus.

Edited by storyyeller on Oct 10th 2018 at 10:23:35 AM

Happy 8th anniversary, by the way. Fun fact, the guy who made the MLPFIM thread over at 4chan had to bump his thread to get everyone's attention. Imagine if he hadn't bumped it...

About Yakity-Sax, I have mixed feelings about it. On the negative side, I don't like that the distinction between "Pinkie's playing is bad" and "Pinkie is practicing/playing in places/times that disturb others" was never really addressed. They really should have explained to her that she still was "allowed" to play the yovidaphone, but that she should play it in places where it won't disturb others. Or maybe suggest that she get lessons from someone who knows how to play it properly, which is what she should have done when she went to Yakyakistan.

On the good side, I was glad to see an aspect of Yak culture that was gentler and wasn't just about smashing things and yelling. I was also glad that the episode made sure to show that the yovidaphone isn't an inherently obnoxious instrument, especially when played well. That way it avoided the Unfortunate Implications of "yak instruments are inherently unpleasant to ponies".

I didn't know it was the anniversary until you pointed it out, and I looked it up, and yes, October 10, 2010 is the day the first episode aired, so happy 8th birthday, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic!

Edited by Rainbow on Oct 10th 2018 at 10:23:39 AM

I sure wish they kept Somnambula's Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies in the show.

I'm still salty AF about that. I've complained several times about it. Problem is, her introductory episode wasn't much better, and then she was shoved into the same episode as four other ponies who were only there to go "Look, it's the Elements precursors!" with no limelight. I hope she gets an episode focusing on her, like Rockhoof did, next season. It's the only season left, after all.

I'm not mainly because I don't want the Pillars to be JUST like the mane 6. Starswirl isn't really like Twilight. Rockhoof isn't like AJ. Flash isn't like RD. Meadowbrook is kiiinda like Fluttershy but nowhere near as timid. Mistmane isn't like Rarity.

I just appreciated the idea that the core of the elements can be represented by different types of people, and that's most demonstrated by Pink and Somnambula, with Som being VERY calming and hopeful as opposed to Pinkie's exuberance.

She is. I just wish she wasn't a generic, Rosie the Riveter "We can do it!" color-horse, and had some personality to her. One can be goofy but not be Pinkie Pie. It's possible, believe it or not.

Random opinion/hypothesis: There's actually no such thing as a "Nirik", it's just a term the Kirin invented for themselves to rationalize not feeling like themselves when they're the particularly fiery sort of mad and/or to distance themselves from that aspect of being a Kirin because of the destructive potential inherent in the form.

(And I say this partly because there is no such thing as a Nirik in real-world mythology that I could find, unlike the Kirin.)

Did you miss that Kirin and Nirik are two sides of the same species? There are no Nirik in the sense that they ARE the Kirin in a bad mood.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the hypothesis seems to be about the term Nirik being invented internally to be used as an active denial-of-self sort of thing.

Given how the Kirin behaved in the episode and their issues with anger repression, I could see it being a thing. The way I see it, the legends about Nirik found in the books had to have come from somewhere and there's two obvious possibilities: someone exploring there saw one and gave a panicked, biased account for the history books, or the Kirin wanted that distinction to be public knowledge to expand their internal denial.

That is the idea I had in mind, yes. The Kirin were afraid to face this aspect of who they are, so they pretended it was something other, something separate. And then through magically enforced means, they made sure this aspect could never surface so they would never have to worry about confronting it.

I don't think they mean for it to be an intentional lie they tell the outside world, but more a lie they tell themselves that later leaked out into the wider world. They may not have even invented the term "Nirik" themselves. After all, they stopped talking completely, and only communicate in yes, no, and confused head-tilt. It could be that they simply emphasize the otherness of their fiery forms in their own history records, and it was outsiders who coined the term after learning bits and pieces of these stories, thinking the Nirik to be a separate race of creatures. (This is all speculative, of course, so I could be wrong about any or all of this.)

That's a nice theory, but I don't think it really works. The Kirin seem to be perfectly aware of who the Nirik are, and don't seem to have issues with that side of them beyond "they could burn the place down".

Nirik appears to be the official name for that form of the Kirin. We never heard a Kirin mention it, but Fluttershy relates it to AJ as though that's how it was explained to her. Later, the characters say things to the Kirin like

Fluttershy: And if you're really angry, then take some time away to be a Nirik where it won't hurt anypony.

And none of the Kirin are all, "The f*ck's a Nirik?" So. Like. It's pretty clearly their official term for the form.

As for why nobody knew they were the same creatures going in, keep in mind that literally the only intel the ponies had on these creatures was a thousand-year-old legend interpreted from a decorative shield. It's the equivalent of trying to understand ancient grecian culture based solely on a single urn depicting Heracles slaying the Nemean Lion. Some assumptions might be made that prove not wholly accurate.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 10th 2018 at 7:55:54 AM

Post of the Day #2301

Hm. Do we have any information about the timeframe of Autumn Blaze's story? Based on the lyrics of the song, there was a span of years (maybe) between the Kirin taking the vow of silence and Autumn Blaze discovering the cure. But exactly how long ago was this argument that ended up burning the village? How long after that did they decide to give up their voices? How much time has Autumn Blaze spent in exile before AJ showed up?

Twilight mentions the legend that Kirin used to live up in the Peaks of Peril during Rockhoof's time, which would have been thousands of years ago. But the only thing we get from that is that Kirin and Nirik have been around for a while, but no idea whether this legend is at all connected to the events of the episode. Normally I would assume not, but when creatures based on mythology are involved, it's not so easy to dismiss the possibility that they just live that long.