Isn't Lily herself supported dictatorships over democracy (comparing democracy and freedom to wasteland from Fallout games).

I thought you'd like that, being from Russia.

Post of the Day #2800

Posted by Ace Of Scarabs on Mon, 23rd Apr '12 7:37:18 PM - Post #170965 in the old thread

> I thought you'd like that, being from Russia

wow,that's just

R U D E

Sorry.

Yeah. That wasn't exactly nice.

So where are you getting that Lily supports dictatorships?

Mostly from her "morality is for losers and only those, who are the most amoral and kills civilians are most effective" rants:

There were also more videos, where she trowed her opinion about this and she writes fanfiction where main character is Lord Ryder (near omnipotent ruler of Val'Kyr), who rule with an iron fist and committed several genocides (against people Lily admitted "have no sympathy for") and he is constantly portrayed in the right. Here's the link if you interested - http://totv.wikia.com/wiki/Matthew_Ryder

I wrote a very long post, and then accidentally hit the back button... x.x

You have my sympathies.

I have a very more succinct response to all that.

Huh.

Yeah, that was the gist of my response as well. Lily is not really saying any of that. These statements are either pulled out of context or misinterpretations of her points. I also did not find anything about comparing democracy to Fallout.

I don't know about the fanfic, but this all just begs for more context.

If you quickly hit "forward" again, the browser will often still remember your post. At least it has when I've done stuff like that.

In fact I just tested it now, and my post was still here after pressing back and forward.

I don't know about the fanfic, but this all just begs for more context.

I don't know anything about the fanfic either, but I looked it up, and apparently it was a Troll Fic that was actually a fanfic about Family Guy, despite the fact that the story was some sort of epic fantasy Valkyrie war that has nothing to do with Family Guy. Apparently it was made to parody the concept of Mary Sues. Also, the author apparently deleted the fanfic due to stupid internet controversies.

Edited by storyyeller on Feb 25th 2020 at 8:22:47 AM

Thing about fallout was from one of her older videos and these videos just added that feeling to me with context to her fanfic, tumblr statements and that older video. The whole thing of "abandoning your morality to do the right thing" just seems contradictory to me.

Really? In her tumblr she discussed it as completely serious story.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Feb 25th 2020 at 6:47:58 PM

I'm just going by what I read after some cursory internet searching of the fanfic. I don't have any personal knowledge of the matter.

But where does she actually say that? I've watched all three videos, and while she does discuss these things, she discusses them in relation to these shows. Nowhere does she claim that these are her own views.

Post of the Day #2801

Posted by Red Savant on Mon, 19th Sep '11 2:38:13 PM - Post #20176 in the old thread

Found a video, where Lily uses Fallout screenshots, at the point when she talks about freedom (took a while to find):

I'm more partial to Spike and Sweetie Belle than I am to Spike Bloom, but I do understand how it developed. Back when Spike was considered a "seventh wheel" among the Elements.

Celestia needs to go? Looks like the show agreed, eventually. Though I think it would have been interesting to have Celestia step down at the beginning of season nine, so that we could see more of how Twilight would rule the kingdom.

Also, in retrospect, that whole coronation business when Twilight ascended was clearly meant to be her coronation as princess. And then the finale went "oh well, we've already done this, and turned her actual coronation into a disaster for the sake of comedy.

But yeah, Celestia is a terrible ruler in a crisis. She excels at peace time, but once shit starts going down on her, she tends to crumble real fast. This is not a particularly new or controversial opinion (the vid is 5 years old, by the way).

Nightmare Moon's future is actually peaceful, and she has a stable reign. It is a grim sort of peace, true, but man, compared to the other villain futures...

I tried to talk about this yesterday before my post was lost to the void (aaand switching to notepad now...). Nightmare Moon isn't just another villain ruling Equestria, she is explicitly set up as a dark mirror to Celestia, up to and including having her sister trapped in the moon. Which Celestia totally did as well for a thousand years. Also, as I've noted before, Celestia was a lot more... royal before the pilot, and even during the first seasons. She was a benevolent ruler, sure, but there certainly was a distance between her and her subjects. Celestia was a good ruler, but still flawed, content to let Luna rot on the moon until the thousand years were up and she was forced to deal with her. Which she didn't. Twilight dealt with Nightmare Moon for her, and was happy to just move on after that. And there was never any resolution to the actual, original conflict between them over Luna feeling unappreciated and feeling like the lesser ruler of the two. And this conflict clearly kept up simmering all the way up to season nine. Celestia not only used to be a flawed ruler, she still is during the show.

Contrast that with Nightmare Moon ruling Equestria. She is ruling over a peaceful kingdom, with no war or rebellion. The only obvious negative is that there is eternal night, and her subjects have a sort of grim acceptance about the whole thing... but they are not rebelling. What's more, they are working for Nightmare Moon now, and seem to be doing pretty well under the circumstances. Celestia is trapped in the moon now (why not the sun, by the way?), but you can hardly blame Nightmare Moon for returning the favour after a thousand years. Also, one scene shows her blowing up timber wolves left and right, showing that she is quite capable of dealing with threats, and confident in her rulership even in the face of danger. She is even ruling from the Everfree, which is a Badass Boast if there ever was one.

That one scene with the Nightmare Moon future is such an interesting moment, and it is over so quickly, but you kind of wish you could see more of it.

Yeah, sending Discord to look for Tirek wasn't the brightest idea ever. Discord is an ally at that point, sure, but not a particularly reliable one, especially in the face of temptation. Discord could have come in at some point, but maybe not as a first choice.

Nightmare Moon is also willing to kill fuckers when they are a threat. That seems pretty evil, but considering who those threats are, it can seem justified as well. This is a big real life issue as well: when is it justified to kill someone? When is a threat so great that it justifies the means to ending it, even if that means killing it? And it's not like good rulers don't kill threats to their country or rule. And democracies are hardly above this as well. See the whole War on Terror: everyone who is labeled a terrorist is basically fair game for assassination as far as certain war hawks are concerned. Which is of course problematic when those same war hawks are the ones who get to place that label on people, but let's not go into that for now.

Ah, the Fallout image. Let's quote the context: "If I were forced between the two, I would rather live in a tyrannical dictatorship that was stable and secure [pictured is a bunch of (I assume) Siths and Empire folk from Star Wars], than have all the freedom in the world and get besieged by eldritch horrors every few months [picturing the DC Wasteland from Fallout]."

Here, Lily is postulating two extremes to clarify her point about Nightmare Moon's rule as compared to Celestia's. The first is the situation where a dictatorship provides stability and security for their subjects. And this is a major reason why a lot of dictatorships can endure for so long: as long as they don't turn too tyrannical and can actually provide that peace and stability, people will be content to let the situation continue, rather than rise up in rebellion. This is because rebellions and civil war generally lead to a lot of misery and danger, and it is hard to stabilize a country again once the dictatorship is overthrown. For an example, well, see Iraq (and again, let's leave it at that for now). And yes, people generally prefer freedom over oppression, but not at any cost. If the road to more freedom is too fraught, they will often choose the safety of the status quo.

Now to the other example: freedom, but with constant existential threats by eldritch abominations. As noted before, this refers to Celestia's rule specifically (NOT democracy in general), and... she's right about that. Under Celestia's rule, there have been many, many threats to Equestria, often of the end-of-the-world variety. And it does raise the question: would YOU want to live in Equestria, knowing that sooner or later some eldritch horror or warlord or what have you will come and burn your house down, enslave you, or just up and murder you outright? And knowing that your ruler is terrible at actually defending you from such huge threats, and generally goes down in the first round of attack? I imagine it would be a very stressful life. Under Celestia, you are basically always under threat from a Sugar Apocalypse.

And yes, a comparison is made to Fallout, which is apt in this case, because in Fallout, you have pretty much complete freedom (though, again, this is hardly a democracy, because there is no government to speak of here), but you are constantly under threat from super mutants, ghouls, and other mutated wildlife, to say nothing of the psychopathic raiders roaming the land.

So no, Lily is not comparing democracy and freedom to the Fallout wasteland. She is comparing a Sugar Apocalypse to Fallout.

Also, Lily makes it clear that these are not the only two options, and that this choice would only be made when pressed and having no other option.

Lily's point on morality, meanwhile, is basically this: that having the moral high ground is not neccesarily the best way to deal with a threat, especially existential ones, and sometimes the need for decisive action must overrule morality. This philosophy exists in the real world, and is usually known as realpolitik. It is the idea that circumstances and practical reality must always trump ideology, morality, or ethics, and that sometimes these higher philosophies must be broken in order to gain a desirable result, or ignored to prevent a situation from getting worse. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. The Middle East is a prime example of how messy realpolitik can get, and how quickly good intentions can get subsumed by the needs and reality of the moment (but again, let's not go into that now). But on the other hand... I wouldn't know how you could do it differently, at least not in all situations. North Korea is a prime example of a situation in which we definitely want things to change for the better there, but we can't really do it because doing so is guaranteed to lead to a nuclear exchange and millions of deaths, which is too high a price to pay for the goal of turning North Korea into a democracy (or anything better than what it is right now, for that matter). In such a situation, what else can you do but realpolitik around it?

So, again, it is a bit more complicated than what you say, and Lily's opinion is not all that unheard of. Arguably, it is the basis of modern Western politics.

Really, you're going to ship children just after we had a whole discussion about how problematic that sort of ship is?

I said partial, not full supporter. And when I involve Spike in ships, it's when he's older. Same goes for any of the kiddos.

The worst thing is, you can't really blame people for shipping minors on this show when the show itself encourages it through Sparity, and is not really willing to back away from that even after devoting an episode to showing just how creepy that dynamic gets.

For what it's worth, Celestia's rule had a thousand years with no threats of note. It's only when the TV cameras started rolling that everything started going to shit every 22 minutes.

The Elements seem to have an arbitrary 1000 years time limit whenever they're used, and the cameras started rolling 1000 years after Nightmare Moon.