your authorial intent appeals to my audience sensibilities

any fanfiction should serve at least one transformative purpose, and intend to do what i did with caves of qud and make my fanfic a multi-layered critique of the setting and its implications, assumptions, consequences, and conclusions

but it's also going to a personal thing and if i'm getting this meta with it already then why shouldn't the change i make to the timeline be a character self inserting herself into the story feeling the same things i feel about it all

i am the space where metaphor fails and becomes the same as reality

i wish more people saw fanfiction this way, but then we wouldnt have to form meta-narrative realities to compensate would we?

from my experience most people write fanfiction to take canon characters and use them as masks to dress up their OCs so their story gets more views ngl

AGREED OH MY GOD
Its why I normally cant get into fanfic its just "I see your OC and youre too cowardly to love them if theyre lame"

here's my MLP fanfiction about what if twilight sparkle and her friends were living in pony-seattle and were a polycule dealing with learning bdsm together because they're all regulars at this local bdsm club

no see they're still the canon characters because uh twilight's kind of a nerd and fluttershy's shy, i totally didn't just turn my porn story into a fanfiction so more people would read it

not to be a Snob but if your fanfiction isn't commenting on the original fiction, isn't DOING something with it, isn't actually meaningfully making use of it?

if you aren't at least doing something with some academic worth? some justification for it being a fanfic?

just write your own original fiction. be brave about it.

I think this is a good conduit for your ennui towards the layers of reality... self-insert fic is a good way to deal with these feelings

Best way to process your feelings is to subdivide yourself into a new instance, personality and just kind of subject it to the horrors for you

It needs to be said otherwise people might not know to drop at her hooves or something

That's one of my favorite aspects of Equestria

it presents itself originally as a sort of pastoral peaceful vaguely utopian Romanticism kind of location

but as it goes on, you see how much of it is informed by capitalism colonialism and the exceptionalism of royalty

You're absolutely correct. It's not even subtle about it later on

everyone is unique and important but we do have an entire episode about how without Twilight the world would have ended SEVERAL times

so remember there ARE ponies more important than you in the world and you DO have to bow to them and worship them and Twilight sparkle has become one of those

she's the super extra mega chosen one

and I refuse to not examine the consequences of this

actually no i'm not done

so in steven universe we got an entire postscript season where we examine the severe and horrible consequences of steven being forced into being the chosen one and it ends with him, at least on good terms, bailing on EVERYONE and going to find his own life

what was done to twilight sparkle that she happily accepted all of this? all of this responsibility, these burdens, the expectations weighing on her withers since foalhood?

how different would things have been had she an, oh, i don't know,

fellow immortal alongside her, but an un-chosen one, someone who was forced into immortality by violence and whose inheritance is not the elements of magic and friendship and harmony but simply hunger? a pony who's known celestia as well but has known her from a more pragmatic and less motherly side?

what happens if there's a pony next to her who says "wait, she didn't even tell you that she was going to turn you into an immortal princess? like, she never even asked your permission before deciding for you that this was your destiny? you never got an opt-out? sort of like how i was murdered and turned into a vampire, too?"

i am making one change to the canon

here's an undead vampire who knows twilight and has no tolerance for more powerful things manipulating your life

how far can this cardhouse stand when there's somepony NOT willing to shove her face into the mud the second one of the Royal Chosen appears?

no im still not done becaues we all know those who walk from omelas and how it's a critique of how you won't believe in an utopia unless there's a suffering child fueling it

but it's also the metalayered fact of mlp presenting an ostensible utopia that remains heavily colored by american cultural assumptions and despite ALL of this, despite twilight being set up by celetsia to be her martyred monument to hold up equestria's happy endings with her blood FOREVER,

a world where good wins and kindness works ONLY if twilight sparkle continues to fight or else we get those bad ends we saw with nightmare moon or chrysalis or just the last one where the world was empty and dead,,,,

it has BUILT twilight as the omelas child, our sacrificial goddess, it has undone the assertion that utopia does not require a martyr to fuel itself

but with how america and much of the western world is descending back into fascism,

that in this our real world your 'destiny' is trampled by the profit-seeking of others who have analogues in equestria, which HAS real estate moguls, businessponies, exploitative hucksters,

some of it is also a metalayered narrative about the failure of the promise of utopia both in MLP and in the real world (connected and the same (i am the space where the metaphor and the reality become unified))

mlp diegetically within our reality promised us if we held true to ourselves and trusted in our friends we would be okay

but our world doesn't have a twilight to keep the monsters away, and the monsters are killing us and have been for a long time and show no signs of being stoppable

if mlp contains so many elements of our world within it--the colonialism, the capitalism, the racism, the assholes--if the entire world WOULD be a hellstate without Twilight,

and fuck it we see in g5 the moment twilight's gone a cosmopolitan society that united all creatures beneath her (colonialist pony culture (with a literal colonial school teaching other races how to be more like a pony)) the MOMENT twilight is gone it isn't that that just falls apart

even fucking earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasus ponies aren't friends anymore

she is the lynchpin of reality, the one single thing separating equestria's happy ending from the unending horrors of our world

how the FUCK do you carry that burden

and ultimately, how dare you promise us a happy ending that you knew would never reach us without the sacrifice of an all-powerful god-child?

Yeah you put it beautifully. Twilight is basically a god and there's no way they could function if she were to go away at this stage. Steven universe did attempt to show the other side but executed it a little poorly imo. Still it's interesting to think about how she feels being thrusted into this destiny she's forced to keep. I enjoyed reading all that! Thanks for sharing

and like she obviously DOES want it

she had a whole song about how she's eager to play her part

which is why a fanfic needs an external perspective to go like "hey uh you sure you ok with this"

and im not saying twilight ultimately wouldn't be okay with it

but there's a lot that happened here that NEVER GETS ADDRESSSED

I need to see twilight feel her membranous wings, i'm a little entranced by the translucence in them.

aren't bat derived wings just absolutely the most perfect archetype of wings that you can have

imagine the wing hugging potential

:2

:2

Just fell to my knees in the big tesco seeing you draw pony stuff in 2025, I'm hooting and hollering

autumn bramble is back baybey

Ohhhh good I missed your ponies

it's pone time :2

HA, a self-insert pony OC? CRINGE

what? no I don't have one, stheno is a draconequus that's totally different and doesn't count guise I swear 👀💦

yeah but you also have to understand the layers of metafiction i'm engaging with here

as a person i'm bothered by what happens to twilight sparkle and i want to do something about it (fanfiction)

so my self insert is bothered by what happens to twilight sparkle and is going to do something about it (the actions within the fanfiction)

what happens to her is her identity being consumed by a destiny which literally gets an external manifestation outside of her self (the castle) which compels her into action (the cutie map)

but what that destiny actually is on a metafictional layer is hasbro marketing team deciding that she should be a princess and have a castle to sell more toys

i'm not saying the fanfiction will end with twilight defying the egregore of hasbro, but i'm also not saying it won't

fair enough, that sounds kind of interesting! I don't really have the narrative chops to pull that kinda thing off, but it seems like tuesday for you lol. I do kind of like the idea of rebelling against the 4th wall so I will definitely find it entertaining if you go that direction 👍

I recall enjoying the S4 finale, though yeah hasbro went a bit too hard on the merchandising by adding "rainbow power" designs ONE TIME and never using it again, and quite conspicuously blowing up the tree-house library and pretty much nothing else (which was fixed by the end of the episode and conveniently enough, HEY new locale you can purchase for your pony toys to live in for the low price of 69.95$ 🤣 )