Chapter 3: A Hope For the Future
"Fluttershy, darling," Rarity said slowly, "you are extremely loveable."
Fluttershy shook her head sadly. "You're being very nice to me. I'm grateful to you for it. But I know I'm not loveable. I wasn't loved the one time I ever tried to make love. I barely have any friends. I hide in my cottage. Most ponies look right through me. I'm not popular."
"Fluttershy," said Rarity, rolling upright to sit on her rump.
Fluttershy also sat up to join her.
"Let me tell you about yourself," Rarity continued.
"You are absolutely, utterly beautiful. You look like some princess from an old painting brought to life. Do you think I'm beautiful?"
Fluttershy was flushing a little at the earlier compliments, but she nodded in response to Rarity's question.
"I have to sit at my toilette for an hour every morning to look like this," said Rarity. "You look devastatingly beautiful when you wake up with your hair in a mess. You look beautiful sopping wet. You have a natural elegance about you that most professional models would kill to achieve, and I don't think you've ever been trained as a model. You move with a grace I've never seen in any other Pegasus, and that includes aloft, for all you think you're a terrible flier."
"I'm not really all that good a flier," Fluttershy pointed out, leaning forward. "Compared to Dashie I'm standing still."
"Well, you look good standing still," said Rarity. "And anyway, pretty much every other Pegasus is standing still compared to Rainbow Dash. She's an incredibly fast flier. And you are incredbily graceful. Do you understand me?"
"Well, maybe I'm not all that ugly," conceded Fluttershy. "But love is about more than looks."
"Indeed," said Rarity. "True love is about character. And you are also one of the nicest, kindest and sweetest Ponies I have ever known. You put yourself out tremendously to take care of your animals, you're good to anypony who isn't totally mean to you -- your worst fault socially is that you choose to hide yourself from others, so your friends often have to seek you out. Which we do, Fluttershy. Because we love your company."
"I'm not that nice," said Fluttershy, frowning as she considered her own recent actions. "I didn't want to let you into my house earlier. That wasn't very friendly of me."
"You were under a bit of strain," Rarity pointed out, unable to entirely keep the sarcasm out of your voice. "What kind of a friend would I be if I didn't take that into account? And normally, you are a very polite Pony. Your manners are at least as good as Twilight Sparkle's, and she was raised in the Royal Court. You exude class -- I noticed that about you the very first time I met you. You're like a diamond in the mud of this provincial little town."
Fluttershy outright blushed at this praise, but she also smiled. "You're just being nice to me," she said, "but thank you anyway."
"No, really," insisted Rarity. "I cannot emphasize how admirable and beautiful and loveable in every way you are in truth. Fluttershy --" she looked directly into her friend's eyes, "if I were not as straight as one of my rulers, I would probably be in love with you. And I could not love you more as a friend than I do. Anypony, of either sex, who gets to know you well and doesn't love you is an imbecile, with absolutely no taste in companions. Have I made myself clear?"
Fluttershy nodded, her face bright red, but notably not trying to hide behind her hair. She smiled warmly. Then she frowned.
"But there's one thing wrong with that," she pointed out. "The one time I actually did ... become intimate with somepony ... he didn't like me afterward. So there must be something wrong with me, something that becomes obvious when somepony gets that close to me."
"Oh, that no-account philliper?" Rarity asked angrily.
Fluttershy winced, and Rarity moderated her tone.
"Darling, I'm not mad at you," Rarity clarified. "I'm just upset that you put so much credence in the opinions of such an obviously false and unworthy individual as this 'Nosey,' who wasn't even honest enough to tell you his right name. I wouldn't trust him to sell me a properly-made ribbon, let alone to advise me in matters of the heart. And in any case, he was never interested in being your friend, or really your lover either. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything you said or did -- you couldn't win with him. Can't you see that?"
Fluttershy looked mystified. "Wait," she said. "I thought it was that I wasn't very good in ..."
"No!" Rarity shouted. "It had nothing to do with that!"
Fluttershy was sufficiently curious about Rarity's point that this time she did not flinch from the shouting. "What do you mean?" she asked.
Rarity sighed. She would have to spell it out, and she hated to be so direct on such an ugly topic. Sometimes, however, refinement had to yield to the demands of friendship.
"Nosey wasn't looking for a friend. He wasn't even looking for a lover, not in the sense that you or I would use the term. He was only looking to get laid." On those last three words, Rarity completely dropped her normal Stormy Elite pronounciation, and the dialect of the decent but unassuming lower middle-class home in which she had been born and raised showed through nakedly. Neither of them even noticed this, such was the emotional tension of the moment.
"Wait," asked Fluttershy, "wouldn't that make him care more about how good I ..."
"No." said Rarity flatly. "He went into that bar looking for a mare -- any mare, who was heterosexual and not entirely hideous, who would be willing for whatever reason to walk out of there with him. The fact that he found a goddess out slumming probably made him happier, but he would have settled for anypony. He didn't care about who you were at all."
Fluttershy looked hurt. "But he was so nice to me at first ..."
"Yes," said Rarity. "He was nice to you because he wanted something. Sex. And nothing more. And then when he'd gotten it, he had what he wanted so it was time to leave, before he risked engaging you in conversation and perhaps being tempted to come back. Because he wanted to avoid any complications."
"But you just said I was really nice and loveable -- wouldn't he want to come back to somepony nice and loveable?" Fluttershy was looking more and more confused.
"No," Rarity was being almost mercilessly direct now, a side of herself few Ponies saw outside of the hardest phase of business negotiations. She didn't like behaving like this to a dear friend, but she felt she had to make Fluttershy see what had actually happened that night four years ago, for her friend's own good. "As I said, he wanted to avoid any complications. Love is a complication. Even friendship is a complication."
"What?" asked Fluttershy. "But isn't that why one would want to be with somepony special? Love? Friendship?"
"Yes," said Rarity. "For you or I. And for quite a lot of other Ponies, both mares and stallions. Most of them, I should imagine. But not for Nosey." She marshaled her thoughts, trying to find a way to explain it so that her sweet and still evidently far too naive friend could really grasp it.
"Try to look at it from Nosey's perspective," Rarity continued, her tone softening a bit. "Not from Nosey if he were yourself as a stallion, but from Nosey the way he really was, the way he obviously was from every aspect of his behavior. He went into that bar looking for somepony to have sex with. He did not want a friend. He did not want a lover. That's plain from what he did the next morning.
"Why didn't he want a friend or lover? I don't know the answer. Maybe he was simply a cold and callous sort of stallion. Maybe he had a special somepony, or even a wife and foals, waiting back home for him. Maybe he just wanted to hurt you ---"
Fluttershy looked at her friend in shock. "Surely nopony would --"
"Yes," said Rarity flatly. "Someponies would." She briefly remembered a younger Rarity in Fillydelphia, and just how she had discovered this painful truth about equine nature. "It doesn't really matter why he was trying to avoid making any sort of emotional connection with you. The point is that this is what he was doing.
"The things he said to you? The way he seemed interested in your life, your thoughts, your animals? It was just an act. He was simply saying whatever would work to get into your heart, because he had to assume that you might be somepony who was looking for a friend, a true lover, who would be driven off if you knew that he was just looking for a one-night stand. He was lying, Fluttershy, and he knew exactly what he was doing."
Fluttershy's expression was one of utter shock. She'd obviously never looked at it this way before.
"So it didn't matter how good or bad you were sexually," Rarity said. "If Ponies actually like one another, inexperience is rarely a real problem anyway -- they can always work such matters out over time. You could have been the most incredible lover in the history of love, and he still would have left that morning, and never come back. It had nothing to do with you. Can you see that?"
Fluttershy nodded dumbly.
"You came into that bar looking for a friend. He came in there looking for sex. You were playing two different games. There was no way for you to win as long as you played with him. In the future, just don't get into the game with a stallion like Nosey. And stay away from bars like that -- most of the stallions you'll meet in such places are more or less like Nosey. Do you see?"
A look of comprehension was dawning on Fluttershy's face.
"Yes ..." Fluttershy said slowly. "I think I do see. But you're wrong about one thing ... sorry ... but I think it's important to mention it."
"What's that, darling?" Rarity asked. She was glad to see that at least some of what she'd said had clearly penetrated, but still wasn't certain that Fluttershy had gotten her point.
"We were playing the same game," Fluttershy said. "We were just choosing different strategies ..."
"How so?"
"Birds."
"Eh?" Rarity was now thoroughly mystified.
"Most mammals just mate in season and don't stay together afterward," Fluttershy said. "Sometimes they just stay together long enough for the male to perform the act and then immediately separate. I used to think that Ponies were different because we're smarter and have civilization and morals, so that's why mating means more to us." Her gaze was direct, her ears up, her voice clear.
"Well, we do, darling," said Rarity. "At least most Ponies do."
"But I was wrong," said Fluttershy. "It's not about having better morals. It's about having a different strategy."
"You've lost me," Rarity admitted.
"Ponies are pregnant for ten months," Fluttershy said, "and we're increasingly helpless as the time approaches. We have difficult childbirths compared to most animals, because of our big heads, which we have to have in order to be smart. And then we have foals who take eight or more years to grow to the point that they can be trusted to spend much time on their own, and even longer to learn enough to be productive members of society."
"Yes, that's true," said Rarity. "But what does that have to do with morals?"
"There are two basic reproductive strategies for a species," Fluttershy explained. "High-r, or 'reproduction,' which means 'have a lot of babies and then abandon them to the chances of Nature.' That's what most insects and fish do. And high-k, or 'care," which means 'have one or a few babies but take very good care of them.' Ponies are at the extreme end of high-k -- we only have one foal at a time but we take very good care of our foals."
"I see ..." said Rarity. "But morals?"
"If you're a high-k mother," Fluttershy continued, "you need to put a lot of effort into your baby. You need to put so much effort that you endanger your own survival. It's a lot better if the father also takes care of the mother and foal, isn't it? And keeps on taking care of them as the foal grows to adulthood?"
"Well of course," said Rarity. "Everypony knows that being a single mother is a hard fate."
"Most mammals aren't that high-k," Fluttershy said. "Nothing like Ponies. But some birds are."
"Back to birds." Rarity wasn't sure where this was going.
"Yes. A bird lays an egg, and has to sit on it, and she can't go very far from her nest to get food. And then the egg hatches, and she has a hatchling, and she has to get food for the hatchling and protect it against predators. And it can take a while before the chick is old enough to fly, and even longer before it is developed enough to survive on its own. So birds are high-k animals.
"Well, some birds are," Fluttershy clarified her point. "The ones that are high-k are called 'altrucial,' because the parents have to behave altruistically to their chicks or they won't survive. But then there are other birds who have chicks which don't spend very much time in the nest, which can go off on their own in a matter of weeks. These birds are called 'precocial,' because the chicks are 'precocious.' And they tend to lay more eggs -- they are using a high-r reproductive strategy.
"Now, here's the interesting thing. High-k birds tend to mate for at least a season, and sometimes for life, like swans. But high-r birds mate just like most mammals -- the male will show off for the female, and mate her, and then fly away. The reason why, of course, is that the high-k mother needs the father to stick around; the high-r mother doesn't need the father for anything but his seed."
Rarity noticed that when Fluttershy was talking about biology from a scientific perspective, she displayed neither shame nor any particular shyness. This was her specialty, and within it she was very confident.
"I think I see what you're getting at," said Rarity. "The altrucial birds have -- well, better morals."
"Yes -- from a Pony point of view," replied Fluttershy. "But then of course we'd see things that way. We're very high-k creatures ourselves -- more like altrucial birds than precocial ones."
"You're right," agreed Rarity.
"And here's an even more interesting thing," said Fluttershy. "Dedicated birdwatchers have noticed that in some species -- especially ones that are around midway between the two reproductive strategies -- the birds in a mated pair can cheat on one another!"
"Who would have thought it?" murmured Rarity. "Should I be shocked at such scandals in the avian community?"
"Or," Fluttershy said a bit sadly, "sometimes the male will pretend to form a pair-bond -- that's what happens when altrucial birds mate -- but he doesn't really mean it. He'll get the female pregnant and just fly on. Sometimes he has a real mate and also tries to mate with many other females."
"Isn't it just like stallions?" commented Rarity.
"Yes," said Fluttershy. "It is. And here's why.
"The male bird -- the male of most animal species -- doesn't have to commit much when he mates. Just a little time and energy and seed. But the female gets pregnant, and grows a baby, which takes a lot of nutrition -- and in high-k species she has to care for her offspring. So what this means is that the female has to be more choosy about who she mates with than does the male. There's a basic asymmetry in the situation -- if he chooses a poor mate, he can just fly on to the next one, and if he impregnates a lot of females and helps none of them, he can just count on sheer numbers of offspring to make up for the poorer care given each one. But if she chooses unwisely, she has to take care of the chick on her own, and it's much less likely to survive."
"Now I see your point," Rarity said. "It's just like stallions and mares, then." She remembered her own unwise choice, long ago, and what had nearly happened to her in consequence. She looked away, not wanting to meet Fluttershy's gaze.
"I once didn't think so," Fluttershy said. "Because we are intelligent, and moral. But then perhaps I was wrong." She looked very sad at the shattering of her illusions.
"Well," Rarity said, "Some stallions." She looked back at Fluttershy. "My parents can be annoying," she confided. "But they love each other madly. They have my whole life. I've never seen my father look seriously at another mare. And the way he looks at my mother -- it can be very embarrassing, but it's also very beautiful."
"You're fortunate," said Fluttershy. "My ... my mother's husband abandoned her, soon after I was born." She looked down sadly. "I always hoped I could find somepony better than she did."
"You shall," said Rarity, patting her friend's hoof. "You just need to understand that it may not be the first stallion you meet. And you need to learn how to reject the stallions who don't really care about you."
"Exactly!" said Fluttershy. "And that's where game theory comes in."
"I was thinking more in terms of discernment and restraint," said Rarity.
"Yes," said Fluttershy. "That's exactly the right strategy. In the game."
"Game?" Rarity tilted her head inquiringly.
"I ..." Fluttershy wilted briefly, then rephrased it. "A female would want a male who would stay with her after mating, which would mean a lot of commitment from a single mate. A male might want either to stay with his mate and take care of their offspring, which would be ideal for the female; or he might want to just spread his seed as widely as possible, and abandon each female in turn."
Rarity noticed that Fluttershy perked up again when she moved from the personal to the theoretical.
"In Pony terms," Fluttershy said,"that mare would be looking for a friend ... a lover ... a husband. But the stallion might be looking for the same thing, or he might just be looking to mate and fly on." She looked sad for a moment, then continued. "So how can the mare tell what the stallion really wants?"
"That," said Rarity, "is truly a conundrum."
"So what she does," said Fluttershy, "is see if the male is seriously willing to court her. In birds that would involve him doing a dance for her, or bringing her gifts of food. I suppose in Ponies it would be talking to her, taking her out to restaurants ... showing he cared about her. But he could be only pretending to be interested in her. And I guess she could only be pretending to be interested in him?"
Rarity nodded.
"So each of them has two possible strategies in the game," Fluttershy said. "From his perspective, she's 'cooperating' if she mates with him, 'betraying' if she takes his gifts and doesn't mate with him. And from her perspective, he's 'cooperating' if he stays with her, 'betraying' if she leaves right afterward. It's the Prisoner's Dilemma!
"But the problem," she continued, "is that if they do it that way, there's only one iteration to the game. And she can't let it work that way, because if she mates with him and he flies away, she'll be ..." Fluttershy swallowed, "very sad. And she might ..." Fluttershy's voice got very low, "... have a foal. I was afraid, right after that night ..." She started to cringe again, ears lowering, face going behind her hair.
"The game, darling," said Rarity. "Continue explaining the game."
"Oh, right," said Fluttershy, straightening her posture. "So the female makes it an indefinitely iterated game. She only allows certain intimacies in the early rounds, to give him reason to hope she's interested, while giving herself time to figure out if he's serious. And that way, if he is serious, he'll stick around long enough for her to mate with him, and if he's not serious, he'll fly away before she lets him mate her and then she won't have to worry about being a single mother while he spreads his seed to all the other females! She can do Nice Tit-For-Tat based on his behavior, and if he's Nice long enough she figures he's serious!" Fluttershy smiled triumphantly, clearly considering herself the discoverer of a new scientific principle.
It's actually a very old principle, thought Rarity, and it's one I think I was born knowing. But I think she's got it. This was, essentially, what I was trying to explain to her. It was, of course, more complex than that -- much more complex than that -- but Fluttershy had the main point down perfectly.
"Yes, darling," said Rarity. "You're correct." Even if there are two normal meanings of the term "nice" in this particular context, and one of them is almost the direct opposite of the other. But then, maybe Fluttershy's actually stating it more logically. Ponies aren't always very logical, in matters of the heart.
"I ... I had it completely wrong before, didn't I?" Fluttershy said. "I just wanted to be nice, and I assumed that he wanted to be nice too, so I thought that we'd both win. But we didn't. I picked Nice, and he picked Nasty, and he got all the payoff, and I got less than nothing." Her voice was soft, but she could say it now steadily, and without crying. "I couldn't have won, the way I was playing the game. My strategy wasn't a robust solution to the game."
"Yes," said Rarity. She felt sad saying this. It was an admission that sometimes nice Ponies finished last, that sometimes Love and Friendship could not conquer all, because one was dealing with those who did not respect Kindness. This was not the world in which she wanted to live, but it was Reality, and refusing to face Reality was what led to madness, what led to sitting alone at home staring at an ancient honor blade -- or a pair of not-so-ancient sharp fabric-cutting scissors -- and contemplating what seemed to be easy solutions to Life's problems. So it was better to acknowledge Reality than to avoid it.
"But, darling," Rarity said, "there's another, more fundamental way in which he didn't win."
"How is that?" asked Fluttershy, looking with surprise at her friend.
"He missed the chance to know a really wonderful Pony, a Pony who would have gladly been his friend and his lover and made him happier than a lout like that would ever have deserved," Rarity said, very seriously. "And I know this because your friendship makes me happier than anypony could possibly deserve."
Fluttershy smiled at her friend, a small smile that grew into a look of tremendous happiness that warmed Rarity's own heart.
"Now come on," said Rarity. "We're both messy from galloping and crying and rolling around on the floor and doing such other undignified things. We both need some good long relaxation.
"Let's go to the spa."
They both got to their hooves. As they turned toward the door, Fluttershy lowered her head, bumped, rubbed herself and leaned against Rarity's side, expressing wordlessly how much she loved her friend. Warmth spread from the point of contact.
Rarity looked at Fluttershy, and could almost feel the happiness streaming out from Fluttershy's soul. She knew that Fluttershy's future would not be perfect, because nopony's ever was perfect in an imperfect world, but Rarity also knew that she had helped her friend understand what had happened to her four years ago, and in understanding take the first step to conquer the demons of a terrible memory.
The two friends stepped out into the sunlight, together.
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*double comma
*space in the wrong place
*It seems like you would want this capitalized, as the start of new sentence, instead of a continuation from the speech.
That last part got me thinking about a quote I found online from Ernest Hemingway. I've read none of his books, and know very little about him, but I think the quote fits here.
For Fluttershy, the first half:
You can be a perfect saint, and people will still treat you badly sometimes. If you try your best and fail, that doesn't always mean you didn't try hard enough. A nice guy might finish last, but he's always in good company.
As for Nosey, the second half:
"Let me tell you about yourself," Rarity continued.
"You are absolutely, utterly beautiful. You look like some princess from an old painting brought to life. Do you think I'm beautiful?"
Fluttershy was flushing a little at the earlier compliments, but she nodded in response to Rarity's question.
"I have to sit at my toilette for an hour every morning to look like this," said Rarity. "You look devastatingly beautiful when you wake up with your hair in a mess. You look beautiful sopping wet. You have a natural elegance about you that most professional models would kill to achieve, and I don't think you've ever been trained as a model.
I so enjoyed reading this section, along with the affectionate nuzzling at the end. They're both so sweet. I also like the idea of Rarity being so attractive because she works at it, every day (though I feel she has more inherent beauty than she's willing to admit to). The usual idea I see in Ponyfics is that Rarity sees herself as 'third loveliest' after Fluttershy and Applejack.
4186894
The reason I called the story A Robust Solution is that it's about Fluttershy learning how her original approach of trusting anypony who seemed nice to her was fatally-flawed. I got the idea from responses Bad Horse made to the original story, Fluttershy's Night Out, which Fluttershy basically summarizes in the last half of the second chapter. Bad Horse made the point to me that Nosey wasn't particularly evil -- just not very nice -- and that given Fluttershy's extreme naivete in the story (which obviously took place before she knew most of her friends, hence when she was in her mid to late teens), something like that was bound to happen to her. Nosey was like a reef onto which she crashed.
I thought about that and realized that the essence of the situation was that Fluttershy was pursuing a bad strategy for dealing with other ponies when she chose to deal with them. Trust-everyone -- the "Always Nice" strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma -- is a workable strategy only when dealing with other "nice" strategies -- it fails to be "robust" in iterated plays against mixes of strategies including non-nice ones. (I maybe didn't explain the concept of "robustness" enough in-story, but I didn't want the whole fic to be Fluttershy lecturing Rarity on game theory -- I hope it's comprehensible as written).
Now, in the original Bad Horse story, Fluttershy signally does not understand what happened to her. She concludes that she was somehow lacking in her sexual response (she was very obviously not only virginal but also utterly unaware of male sexual ploys) and that this is why Nosey didn't want to have anything more to do with her. In reaction to this situation, she hides in her house and -- by implication -- has pretty much remained hiding in that house (in spirit) until the series begins.
This makes horribly-good sense ("horribly" because it involves Fluttershy suffering and I like the character) if one considers just how afraid of other Ponies Fluttershy was in the first episode of the series (and really, during most of the first half of Season 1). It's obvious that Fluttershy was at some point emotionally-damaged, and Bad Horse's scenario seems plausible. After all, we know from canon that Fluttershy is not just attractive but extremely beautiful, to the point that -- without any formal training -- she can work as a high-fashion model. It's quite likely that a young mare like that, if she tried to go out by herself and meet other Ponies -- might fall afoul of an unscrupulous seducer like Nosey.
What Fluttershy learns from the events of Fluttershy's Night Out is that she should have nothing to do with other Ponies, especially strange stallions, and that she instead must hide from the world lest it hurt her. This works from the point of view of keeping her safe from sexual exploitation, but it's not all that good a strategy either -- it's like responding to The Prisoner's Dilemma by refusing to play the game at all. But the "game" here is life, and Fluttershy is choosing to be a hermit.
Fluttershy obviously has no idea how to deal with the reality that males have less reason to avoid sex than do females, and that consequently the eternal problem for any female is making sure that she only mates with males who actually care for her. (This can be worded different ways, more or less prudishly, but it amounts to the same thing however one words it). Fluttershy isn't actually a prude, especially by her culture's standards; however the thought of sexual intimacy without love or even friendship, repulses her -- in the terms I'm using here, she hasn't quite gone Lone-Mad enough to take companionship on any terms. (The reason she's contemplated suicide is because she's lonely, not because she's sexually frustrated).
So I wondered: how does Fluttershy get over this? She obviously does, because through the series we see her becoming progressively more confident and comfortable with dealing with other Ponies. At the start of the series she's only really able to express herself to Rainbow Dash and Rarity, her two best friends. Eventually she opens up to Twilight, Applejack and Pinkie Pie. By Season Four she can talk to other Ponies provided they display some acceptance of her, and she even seems to be making friends with Bulk Biceps, who as a big stallion should be truly scary to her (the key is that Bulk is actually a fairly nice guy).
Obviously, she's had a talk with somepony who understands how to deal with other ponies -- especially stallions -- a bit better than does Fluttershy herself. But who? Well, I started with the short list of her two best friends, and it became obvious. Fluttershy trusts Rainbow Dash most of all, however Rainbow Dash could not coherently explain how to deal with stallions -- her own technique is to be friendly and a bit flirty, but to aggressively defend her own body against intrusion.
Rainbow is terrible at actual romance -- in my fanon she's still a virgin at this point -- all she'd tell Fluttershy is "don't let them get fresh," which is good as far as it goes but doesn't really address Fluttershy's key point of ignorance, which is "how can you tell the difference between somepony who really likes you and somepony who just wants to have sex with you?" Rainbow actually can't very well -- but she can better than Fluttershy, because she's picked up (from her cultural surroundings) the basic point that it's wise to be coy.
That leaves Rarity, and rather obviously Rarity knows how to deal with stallions. She can twist them around her hoof. And she -- unlike Rainbow Dash -- actually understands what she does, and why. So I figured that Rarity would be the one to have this talk with her. Rarity is also pretty damn generous with her time when it comes to her friends, and Fluttershy at this point in the story is absolutely her best friend, hooves down. So it's perfectly in character for Rarity to go far out of her way to try to help Fluttershy.
4186945
Indeed. What surprised me, writing this story, is how little having already read Fluttershy's Night Out immunized me against the emotions I felt when I wrote Fluttershy's retelling of the very same incident recounted in the earlier tale. I was actually close to crying at points. What made it worse was that, to write it properly, I basically had to first get inside Fluttershy's head, consider how she'd express what she was thinking, and then how it would look to Rarity and what it would make Rarity think in response. That was painful.
Yes, well, I have similar sentiments. I just realize that it would make a fairly pointless and implausible story to write a hate fic in which Nosey suffers a Humiliation Conga. And of course in-universe, it wouldn't actually help Fluttershy -- worse, it might make her feel sorry for Nosey, who doesn't deserve it.
Rarity recognized this too, but she loves Fluttershy, so she can't help but feel like hurting him. And she's not at all afraid of any normal stallion, not even physically, given her spirit and her skills. Realistically, only a trained combatant, or a very large stallion, would stand much chance against a Rarity willing to hurt him, based on what I've seen Rarity do in-show.
Rainbow Dash would also, unsurprisngly, want to hurt him. Rarity is quite correct in assuming that Dashie wouldn't despise Fluttershy if she knew about this, RD would just be furious with Nosey for hurting Rainbow. The more so because Rainbow has what amounts to a huge unacknowledged (even by herself) crush on Fluttershy, in addition to seeing her as her best friend.
Good -- I'm glad that I conveyed that correctly. It's a difficult balance here -- too little emotional affect and it comes across as implausibly flat, too much and it's Narmtastic (overdone).
This is basically how it worked in the original story. Fluttershy was so happy that somepony was being nice to her that she totally ignored the question of his motives. Fluttershy is herself too decent to pretend to like somepony just to get something out of him, so it didn't occur to her that somepony else would pretend to like her just to get something out of her. She's also rather straightforward when she gets up the courage to approach anypony in the first place, so she assumed that if he liked the sex, he would want to come back: the possibilities of adultery or (worse) social sadism making him want to make sure not to make a connection with her didn't even occur to her either.
She did understand that he wanted sex. At least she understood this when he actually made a pass at her. Fluttershy sees nothing wrong with this -- it wasn't the sex that bothered her, it was the sequel of complete emotional abandonment. Fluttershy's emotionally very direct, and good sex would make her like somepony more, not less. So she assumed that she just hadn't been very good at it -- which I took from the original story, and made perfect sense.
Fluttershy's also not particularly promiscuous by nature, so if she decided she wanted to have sex with somepony, it would go hoof-in-hoof with her having decided she really liked him. The concept of avoiding emotional engagement in such a situation is pretty alien to the way she thinks.
Which is ironic, considering the identity of her true father and the circumstances of her conception (in my fanon). But then, genetics is an influence on, rather than a complete determinant -- of character.
That was actually Bad Horse's idea. And it's not, of course, as seedy a place as Rarity thinks. Rarity's simply a snob.
But a really nice snob.
Incidentally, the two teamsters were completely harmless, just a bit rude. They totally did not expect Fluttershy's extreme reaction (which in truth had little to do with them) and were kind of ashamed of themselves when Fluttershy ran off and Rarity glared at them.
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Rarity is very pretty, even beautiful. She's just not spectacularly beautiful like Fluttershy and Applejack. Without her careful preparations, Rarity would look a lot like an adult version of Sweetie Belle with different colored hair. Which is an interesting comparison, because in my continuity, Sweetie Belle herself is considered a notable beauty as an adult, and for the same reasons as Rarity.
Rarity is a bit envious of Fluttershy's beauty, but not enough to seriously mar their friendship. Certainly not enough to avoid helping her out in time of need. This story, as you may have noticed, takes place before "Green Isn't Your Color" -- and Rarity's already well aware that Fluttershy could be a high-fashion model.
Fluttershy is almost totally unaware of, or actively disbelieves in, the existence of her own beauty. When she becomes aware of it, she finds it mostly a curse, as it attracts the attention of other Ponies, and that's what she wants to avoid. Her shyness is, in part, her paternal heritage. It actually was a curse to her in her backstory, though if she weren't actually hideous she would have faced this sort of problem eventually in any case.
Rarity's beauty is part natural, part preparation, and part a matter of how she behaves. Rarity is energetic, friendly, spirited and sympathetic. She's very good at making other ponies -- or even non-Pony sapients -- decide that they like her It just occurred to me that Rarity and Fluttershy, together, would make an awesome diplomatic team -- Rarity could deal with anything that understood Equestrian, and Fluttershy with anything that didn't.
Rarity was designed by Lauren Faust as a deliberate subversion of the fashion-obsessed shallow bitch stereotype. Rarity is most certainly obsessed with fashion, but she's not at all shallow -- she has extensive depth of personality -- and she is only bitchy to those who go out of her way to offend her. She's a genuinely nice Pony, which is why many who are first attracted by her beautiful facade come to like her even more on closer acquaintance. She goes much farther out of her way to help Fluttershy, because Fluttershy is her best friend, but she would actually go at least a bit out of her way to help anypony in need who was not her outright enemy -- and even with an enemy, she might decide to help in the hopes of ending the hostility.
I'm glad you feel I portrayed the friendship between Fluttershy and Rarity well. I had done something similar with Rainbow Dash in Fluttershy Is Free, and I wanted to show how Rarity's feelings for Fluttershy are strong -- but also different in tone, because Rarity and Rainbow Dash have very different characters. (For one thing, Rarity is very aware of her own emotions, and for another thing she's not at all bisexual, so her appreciation of Fluttershy's beauty is more purely aesthetic in character).
I'm also glad you liked the way I described the affection at the end. That was most definitely gratitude on Fluttershy's part, and love for Rarity, and it was wordless because Fluttershy couldn't find the words for what she was feeling. at that moment. Also, Fluttershy unconsciously did something that comes from her paternal heritage, but which true Changelings can't actually do. She gave back some of the energy. That's part of her being not merely an empath, but a telempath. It becomes important in later stories.
Gah! I missed a typo!
*him.
That's kind of a big deal, too. Changes the whole mental image right there.
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Trusting anyone who seems nice to you is still making a judgement call; it means not particularly trusting the ones who don't seem nice to you. That method would work perfectly in any situation, so long as your personal evaluation of someone's niceness is an accurate appraisal of their trustworthiness. Which I guess is Fluttershy's big problem.
What happened between Fluttershy and Nosey wasn't a prisoner's dilemma. The game they played is something else.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma in many ways. The game is played in iterations/encounters. In each iteration, both players make one of two choices. As a direct result of these choices, players either win or lose, with the four possibilities being C/C = W/W, C/B = L/W, B/C = W/L, and B/B = L/L.
However, there is a very important distinction.
In the prisoner's dilemma, winning and losing is determined iteratively. This is true for Nosey. He wins when he gets sex, and he loses when he doesn't.
It's not true for Fluttershy. She didn't lose because Nosey was unfaithful (had sex with another mare/betrayed her), she lost because Nosey was unfaithful (left her/ended the game). Fluttershy doesn't play the game iteratively.
After that first night, Nosey could afford to quit. Having already gotten everything he wanted from their relationship, he could leave the game a winner. Fluttershy, on the other hand, could only win if she built a stable emotional relationship. Therefore, she could never have afforded to quit playing. Playing the game is a risk - she might win, or she might not - but quitting would always result in a loss, no matter what stage she quit at. Even if she had already found a friend in Nosey, ending the game (a.k.a. the relationship) would, by necessity, mean she no longer had that friend, and she would be left a "loser."
Of course, what happens in the iterations is important for Fluttershy too. She wants a healthy relationship, not just a long one. That gives her another lose condition. Both meanings of unfaithful mean a loss for her.
To Fluttershy, the game is her life. Or more accurately, her Life is the game she plays.
If Fluttershy wants to win, she needs to play her game with someone who has the same goals she does, or at least similar ones. I suppose the best advice I could give to her would be this: next time, take a wingmare who is a good judge of character.
Or Rainbow Dash, I guess, but only if you keep her with you the whole time.
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First off, thanks for pointing out the typo -- that was a critical one which could have messed up the whole point of that paragraph.
Secondly, you're right -- the game purely between Fluttershy and Nosey isn't an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and I knew it when I wrote it. It's a single round of the larger game Fluttershy was playing by going out to seek other Ponies.
Labeling the two axes "dad/cad" and "eager/coy," (as Dawkins actually does in his writing on sexual selection) Nosey played "cad" and Fluttershy "eager," which led to Nosey betraying Fluttershy and getting the maximum payoff (from the viewpoint of this round -- from the viewpoint of the larger iterated social game of which this encounter in this setting was part, he -- as Rarity correctly pointed out -- lost the much bigger payoff of Fluttershy's long-term friendship).
Fluttershy could have won by playing "coy," and seeing what Nosey did next. In reality, Nosey would have backed off and refused to play further rounds, which was given Nosey's character the best which Fluttershy could expect. In the song "Janie's Crying," Janie can only win by saying "no," and all she wins is not having to play that particular game any more with that particular player. If she says "yes," she loses. Which is why she's crying.
In the larger game in which Fluttershy would have met many players, she would have eventually met somepony she liked who would have responded to the first (partial) rebuttal by continuing a protracted courtship, in the course of which they could have come to trust each other enough to give freely to each other and engage in long-term sexual cooperation. That would have constituted a "win" for both of them.
But then my example (and Fluttershy's) is much-simplified, because in real life the choices are only at some points binary -- there is a whole spectrum of intermediate behaviors between "have sex immediately" and "reject completely," and between "utter devotion" and "total lack of caring." Also, a real-life "round" isn't defined with the mathematical purity of the game -- looked at on a smaller time scale, Nosey actually did do a lot of "courtship" behavior before actually mating her.
Exactly. Which Rarity normally is -- she's only really fooled when she's in the grip of one of her extreme crushes, and even then will only let the crush-object be obnoxious up to a point (note how she turned on Prince Blueblood in the end).
Fluttershy herself is not a bad judge of character, either. It's just that she didn't even know any of the rules of the game, save for a general sentiment that love and sex should ideally have something to do with each other. Fluttershy was almost a complete innocent, which is what Rarity means when she thinks to herself that it is not sex that ends innocence, but rather betrayal. And she was not only thinking about Fluttershy at that point, either.
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Oh, Rainbow Dash's friendship with Fluttershy is definitely romantic. It is, however, not all that sexual, because Rainbow Dash doesn't handle the mushy stuff well and hence doesn't totally admit her desires even to herself, and Fluttershy is ... well ... shy.
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I go into a room automatically assuming people don't care about me, and I make attempts to make sure I don't intrude on their world. Its a really bad habit that's ingrained in my subconscious, and difficult to shake off.
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Yeah, that's pretty much what Fluttershy does, too. Her fear of other Ponies, combined with her mind control powers, also tends to cause her to emit a "don't notice me" area command -- it's weak, so her friends usually notice her, but at this point in her life she isn't aware that she's doing this, and thus she can't turn it off. Tends to be strongest when she's emotionally-stressed.
This is a power most Changelings only wish they possessed.
Here via Fluttershy's Night Out, now that the last chapter's out.
This story gets pretty lecturey on game theory, perhaps to the detriment of it as a story, but it's rare for a fanfic to teach me something so effectively. That's worth a favorite and an upvote. Thank you.
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I'm glad you liked the story even though it delved into game theory.
The reason I had it delve into game theory is that I was continuing the theme regarding Fluttershy acknowledging her animal side, and that to Fluttershy this has even more significance than it does with most characters (Humans or Ponies) ... because she's a naturalist.
Rarity isn't into conscious game-theoretical analysis for the same reason that most pitchers don't devote themselves to the mathematical study of ballistics. To her, social game-playing is an intuitive skill, which she has taken far beyond even a modern Western (let alone Equestrian) grasp of mathematical game theory.
To Fluttershy -- who demonstrably doesn't comprehend the social games Ponies play -- these are new ideas, and the closest analogous ideas she has are animal mating strategies, which often must be approached in game-theoretical terms because, depending on their reproductive biology, lifespan, position in the food chain etc., the set of winning strategies may be very different than it is for sapient, dominant, large, slow-breeding, high-k creatures such as Humans or Ponies. The version Fluttershy is learning is actually more important for her future role as Gaia, as having the powers of the Concept of Ecosystems without the understanding of them would be a quick ticket to Nightmare (this isn't covered in the story, but it's part of my concept of Fluttershy, derived from Warlorn's).
It's personally important to her too, because Fluttershy would like to learn how to love without being hurt as she was again (note that I wrote this before Bad Horse did his Epilogue, so it's in detail inconsistent with hie Epilogue, but in spirit I notice our concepts are very consistent -- in both stories Fluttershy learns that she needs to choose somepony trustworthy to trust with her heart, instead of just assuming that any Pony who acts nice is necessarily trustworthy).
Game theory is very important to my larger story arcs, because the sorts of interactions modeled well by game theory are very important to life itself, ranging from the level of biochemistry all the way up to international diplomacy. For instance, game theory is at the core of why the Changelings can in the long run come out of the cold -- living as symbiotes with the Ponies is much more beneficial to both Changelings and Ponies than trying to live as parasites (the traditional approach) or predators (Queen Chrysalis' strategy) upon them. It's not so much the sweet mathematical loveliness of the matrices (I'm bad at matrix algebra anyway) as it is the real truths being modeled, of course.
So I brought it up in this story, but it's not the last time it will be seen in my work in general.
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Why, thank you.
It's right up Fluttershy's alley because one of the applications of game theory is to evolutionary biology.
4548823 As an evolutionary biologist myself, I rather liked the explanations in this fic. It absolutely makes sense that Fluttershy would understand Nosey's actions only by analogy with the reproductive strategies of birds. These ideas mesh nicely with the lines from "Fluttershy's Night Out" regarding whether ponies are animals. Overall, a well written and very intelligent piece. It somewhat reminds me of the book Jane Austen, Game Theorist, which describes how Austen's prescriptions for women's behavior in Victorian society follow game theoretic strategies.
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I was of course inspired by Fluttershy's Night Out (to which this is a direct sequel of the original, three-chapter version) and specifically by the "Ponies vs. animals" concept in there -- of course Ponies are animals (just like Humans) -- but then, Fluttershy understands animals. What she didn't understand were Pony mating strategies -- however, such are comprehensible by analogy with animal mating strategies (especially birds, as birds are often monogamous or serially-monogamous, like Ponies).
So I then thought: "Who would explain this to Fluttershy?" And the obvious candidate was Pony social manipulator extraordinaire, Rarity -- who is one of Fluttershy's two best friends in canon.
From that point the story almost wrote itself.
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Oh, and I find evolutionary biology fascinating. Both the theory, and its practice in the form of the Earth's natural history.
Fantastic story. Two things:
First, there are two cross-sections of "popular author" on this site. Those that continuously produce words at a very high rate, and those that produce words that are consistently insightful and entertaining. You are one of the few authors who does both, and I love you for that
Second, I added this story to the LessWrong group. You cover a topic that is very much in their domain, and it is very integral to the story. It is well-explained, and doesn't intrude on the story too much
I hopei t gets moved to the Approved side, as this is one of your better works(which is really saying something for you!).
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Thank you for your kind words.
I was endeavoring to write a sequel worthy of Bad Horse's Fluttershy's Night Out (whose last chapter was written later and thus with which my story isn't entirely consistent), and maintain the emotional intensity of that earlier tale while letting Fluttershy understand the reason why she was hurt (and hence be able to open up to others again emotionally while avoiding having the same thing happen in the future).
You're basically telling me that I succeeded, which makes me very happy.
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One of my favorite articles on LessWrong is about the perceived gap between Logic/Rationality and Emotion. It pretty much states that, "No, you don't have to be Spock to be rational and logical about things."
I do think you succeeded in making an unofficial sequel to that story, and even though the shipping doesn't match up, the themes do.
The thing is, both of your Fluttershy's(Night Out ch4 and ARS ch3) are taking simultaneously emotional and ration viewpoints to "solve" their issues. Yours is a little more overt. She's using game theory as a direct parallel to her situation, and channeling her emotion into that. FNO ch4 'Shy realized the spiral that Nosey was running down using her own life as a model, and tries to help him by dissecting just how sad and lonely his life really is. The conclusion if FNO 'Shy and ARS Rarity are exactly the same. Nosey missed on on one hell of a catch.
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I agree with Ayn Rand's point that emotions serve as "registers" for the intellect; they allow one to respond more quickly with a functionally-rational decision than one would be able to if one had to think through every time issues such as "Is it rational for me to act in my wife's interests, given that she reliably acts in my interests?" as opposed to simply feeling "I love my wife!" Ayn Rand got the precise sequence of causation wrong, because she thought in more Classcial-to-Scholastic logical terms and hence did not handle emergent causation very well, and in fact logic evolutionarily emerged from emotion which acted as a register of the appropriateness of various instinctive behavior in primitive chordates, but the logic still applies since it's a virtuous (or, if it malfunctions, vicious) circle.
Fluttershy emotionally feels bad if she is romantically-rejected or taken advantage of, and this is also rational on her part. Because of her social isolation growing up, she was never provided with the conceptual tools necessary to avoid such negative consequences, save by avoiding interaction with all save her most trusted friends (such as Rainbow Dash and Rarity) who would never take advantage of her.
Rarity, growing up, has learned the rules of behavior needed to avoid such abuse. (In one case, she learned it in one of the most painful personal manners). Because she was not socially-isolated growing up, she knew from an early age how to avoid being abused in the most obvious fashions. Rarity had never thought through the evolutionary causation of these rules, though she's aware in general of the concept of evolution -- it's just not her field of expertise.
Having received a basic explanation of the social rules from Rarity, Fluttershy is able to connect them with what she knows of animal courtship behavior and see how this applies even to sapient animals such as herself and other Ponies. Rarity, in turn, understands Fluttershy's games-theory-based explanation, though it's not the way Rarity herself would have put it.
Presumably Fluttershy and Rarity have future conversations about social rules of courtship, as applied to events they witness in their own lives. But I'm not really interested in writing a long and convoluted series about the details of Rarity's romantic advice to Fluttershy, so it probably will only come up in passing. Still, I'm aware it's going on in the background, and consider it one reason why Fluttershy starts to emotionally-open-up to Ponies outside the Mane Six, as the series progresses.
Emotional indices can be useful as a monitor on logical conclusions. If one's logical conclusion doesn't feel right, one should seriously consider checking one's work. The subconscious is actually much bigger and hence able to process information than the conscious -- it's just less easy to apply properly to specific problems.
Indeed. Literally, by the standards of their world, a goddess. And more prosaically, a really kind and loving mare, who also happens to be breathtakingly beautiful.
Interestingly, Bulk (in Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason has no problem understanding this. He even senses that she's more than just a normal Pegasus, even though he can't explain what it is that he's sensing about her. This despite the fact that, superficially, Nosey is smarter than Bulk.
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Another thing that I love about you as an author is your...I guess I'll call them "commentaries" in the comments. Every single story has an extra few pages worth of material pertinent to the story down here. And the best part is that it's not necassary, just a cool bonus to read
This is a fantastic piece. I came here from Bad Horse's fic, and I believe this story compliments the other.
Rarity is so spot on, so perfectly characterized, I literally cannot offer a single critique of how she could be written better.
It took me a bit to warm up to Fluttershy espousing game theory, but the naturalist approach explains where she would start the analysis from, and the examples she uses fit her character to a t.
Truly one of the gems of pony fiction.
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I'm really glad you liked my characterization of Rarity.
I had originally meant this to be just a story about Fluttershy, but as I wrote it I realized it was also as much a story about Rarity, given that a lot hinged on her reactions to what she was being told.
I'd already decided that Rarity had a fairly dark secret in her past -- not so much that Rarity had done something terribly evil, as that a younger and more naive Rarity had been taken advantage of by a smooth-talking stallion, in a manner analogous to what happened to Fluttershy but actually more serious in terms of both the emotional involvement and the consequences. One reason I'd decided this is that in canon Rarity is by far both the most cynical and emotionally-brittle of the Mane Six: she's the one who I would most, based on these tendencies alone, point to in the early series as being sexually experienced, and with at least one of those experiences being highly-unpleasant.
And as I wrote A Robust Solution, I realized that the fact that Rarity was totally willing to draw upon her own experience to help Fluttershy, without trying to turn this into a conversation about what happened to herself, implied really awesome things about how nice and caring a Pony Rarity really is. Which dovetailed well with her canon portrayal, most of the time (and she's been getting nicer as the series has progressed).
Rarity rocks.
That was sad at first but really really heart warming at the end
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Then you understood what I was trying to convey -- the story is both about how deeply she was hurt, and about how Rarity helped her understand what happened so that Fluttershy could open herself romantically again while avoiding being hurt again in the same way. It's about healing and getting past an injury, as much as it's an indictment of those who behave as cruelly as did "Nosey."
Ahh. This game. I knew it had more tie-ins in life than just business. Every relationship we have is all based on trust. No trust, no friendship or whatever relationship. We always pay nice then we see the outcome. This story made me realise this. Good job! Also, I loved the characterisation of the characters were believeable. Made me feel sorry for Fluttershy, choosing 'Nice" then getting betrayed.... Though I would choose betray from past experiences dealing with trust.
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The original (by Bad Horse) of which this was a sequel, Fluttershy's Night Out, was a cautionary tale about the dangers both of denying one's own animal impulses (and by denying them being more vulnerable to them) and of recklessly assuming that others are as well-intentioned as oneself (and thus being blindsided by them when they turn out to be not as nice as one hoped). The original version of Bad Horse's story ends at the end of Chapter 3 and is hence a very dark story, because it ends with Fluttershy heartbroken and assuming that it was her own lack of loveability that led "Nosey" to want to never see her again. It is obviously meant to serve as a partial explanation of why Fluttershy is so terrified of other Ponies when we meet her at the start of Season 1 of the series.
My concept in writing A Robust Solution was to show a part of the process of healing which leads Fluttershy to become braver in social situations by the later seasons. To heal in such a way that she doesn't smply repeat her previous mistake, Fluttershy has to understand what happened to her; that it was not that she was unloveable, but that she let herself be seduced by somepony who had absolutely no interest in loving anypony. That she was, in short, playing a social game and that she simply made a bad play.
The idea occurred to me that animals play exactly the same social game Fluttershy was playing, and that hence I could tie Fluttershy's epiphany in to her deep and abiding interest in animal behavior; this would run with Bad Horse's theme of the importance of paying attention to one's "animal instincts." What's more, there is actually an extremely logical way of examining such social games -- Game Theory.
Some fans see Fluttershy as just being a cute little fluffball, or at most a Tsundere with a far stronger sweet side than most of the breed. But she is in point of fact a natural scientist, and one of considerable ability. This is obvious from both the show and the comic book series. She doesn't just cuddle animals, she runs an animal sanctuary, which means that she studies both ethology and veterinary medicine. Fluttershy is a highly-intelligent mare, even though she is one who doesn't understand other Ponies very well, and so Game Theory is the obvious approach for her understanding.
I pick Rarity as the one who has the conversation with her that Fluttershy's mother really should have had with her when she was entering adolesence, because (1) Fluttershy would only ever reveal such a painful and shameful episode in her life to somepony she truly trusted; (2) that means Rainbow Dash or Rarity; and (3) since Rainbow Dash's concept of how to deal with stallions boils down to "hit them if you aren't really in love with them and they try to get too fresh" (which, since she hasn't really been in love with any stallions at the point of this story, means that she is an extremely inexperienced virgin) leaves Rarity by default. And Rarity is not a bad choice for this -- though on the surface she's a bit bubbly, she is actually a brilliant businessmare with a keen intellect, quite capable of understanding Game Theory, especially as it might apply to her own real-life situations.
Rarity explains how Ponies think about love and sex to Fluttershy. And Fluttershy puts it into Game Theory concepts. Rarity then finds Fluttershy's analysis of it interesting. Both remain in character.
I hoped it would have that effect on readers. Rarity then saw the extended implication -- that in a fundamental sense, Nosey had been even more foolish. Had Nosey behaved differently, he could have had Fluttershy's undying (*) love or at least friendship; instead, all he had was a one-night stand.
===
(*) Literally, but neither Fluttershy nor Rarity know it at the time.
I generally avoid stories involving Fluttershy as a victim of abuse (the sheer number of such fics which come out is rather off putting). But I'm glad I read this as it was fascinating. All the game theory at the start seems just a little out of place, which works well to get the reader curious, and it's very satisfying how you come back to explain it all at the end.
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Well ... I wrote this as a sequel to (the original three-chapter version of Bad Horse's Fluttershy's Night Out) and I liked and was horrified by that story because the victimization of Fluttershy was so totally consistent with both the good and the bad aspects of her canon character that it seemed almost necessary that something of this sort happened to her a few years before Luna's Return. Equestria is a kind and loving society, but not a perfect one, and sexual predation (even in the mild and legal form in which Nosey accomplished it) is a viable reproductive strategy, and one to which a younger, lonelier and more innocent Fluttershy would have been vulnerable.
In other words, it was something which not only could but likely would have happened to her, if she didn't have her friends.
I wrote this story in part to exorcise the bad taste Fluttershy's Night Out left but also because I saw in canon that Fluttershy healed over time from what had happened to her before the Return of Luna, and I wondered how Fluttershy came to finally understand what happened to her (since she signally doesn't by the end of the third chapter of the original story).
Aside from the way it ties in to Fluttershy's method of understanding the logic underlying coyness in courtship (something she desperately needs to learn), I wanted to emphasize that Fluttershy and Rarity aren't just silly fluffballs. They are highly intelligent mares and they do have intellectual conversations. Their intelligence is strongly implied by what's shown of them in canon: Fluttershy has a vast understanding of natural sciences (my wife's own specialty!) and Rarity is a brilliant artist and successful businessmare.
Rarity's talent is also linked with the successful playing of positive-sum games, so the conversation has important consequences for Rarity's deeper understanding of her own social skills and how they operate at the deep theoretical level.
Okay, this story made me tear up because I've felt like the Fluttershy in it, and I've read Fluttershy's Night Out and it didn't have the same effect on me. It was still a good story, and I felt sad and horrified for Fluttershy, but this one really hit home.
Because I've been that person who thought she was getting love and was just being used, but it wasn't a one night stand- it was a relationship that was years long and I thought (or wanted to hope) that the person I was with loved me for who I was, but they didn't. They didn't see the real me, and they mostly just wanted sex from me, whether I was in the mood or not. And they were subtly trying to change me and control me for their own ends.
And to this day, even though I think that guy is scum and I want nothing to do with him, the whole situation sometimes still makes me think I am unloveable.
Whoa...TMI there, but yeah, I just wanted to let you know that's good writing, and this is going in my favourites.
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I'm glad it touched you -- it means I communicated it effectively. Would you be surprised to know that I was literally crying when I wrote parts of it? I didn't think I would, because the parts which made me cry were mostly restatements of the original chapters of Fluttershy's Night Out -- but I had to put myself in Fluttershy's place in order to make her reactions believable, and I tend to "method-write" -- I feel what my characters are feeling.
The parts where Fluttershy describes her seduction, and then when she describes her belief that she must have done something wrong to cause him to not want to see him again, particularly made me cry when I wrote them. That and I still get a frightened thrill when I read about Fluttershy contemplating killing herself with the ancestral Honor Blade. And it wasn't because she felt dishonored by losing her virginity (though that didn't help). It was because she felt that she must be eternally unlovable.
She's far from the first first-born Wind mare of the Mandatial matrilineage to do something seriously stupid because of a stallion. She may well be the first Wind mare of the Mandatial matrilineage to do this and be that naive and socially isolated. This is because her mother Sweetwing was, in her own way, crazier than Fluttershy ever got, and Sweetwing brought her up.
That's actually closer to Rarity's untold story, but then Rarity's is analogous to Fluttershy's. Here's part of an unpublished story about Rarity:
I think that this is the situation for which the phrase "in trouble" to refer to pregnancy was created.
The story it's from is an AU where the foal lives, instead of being lost to miscarriage. But this part of it is true in the main line Shadow Wars Storyverse as well.
the word appears to be altricial, "requiring nourishment"—but it could be Fluttershy getting it wrong. This breaks the line about it being from altruism.
Well-done.
Goodness, this story sure is nerdy.
And sad. And hopeful.
I kind of feel like there's a bigger story going on in the background here, but it isn't clear to me the totld roadmap of fics. Do you have such a guide?
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This is part of the Shadow Wars Story Verse. Specifically, it's part of the Kindness Is Magic series, of which I've written three episodes -- S1E08 Dragonshyness, S1E12 A Robust Solution and S1E13 Fluttershy Is Free. Fluttershy's main story arc in Season One is recovering from her abusive and damaging upbringing, and learning how to open herself back up to the rest of the world -- without letting it hurt her.
Game Theory -- and learning how to play bigger and bigger positive-sum games -- is at the core of the power of the Elements of Generosity and Kindness.
6866431
Definitely both sad and hopeful. What happened to Fluttershy in the past was sad, but since she can now understand equine behavior better, she may have a happier future.
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On the subject of KiM, you have hinted a lot about changes in the S2 ending two parter. Any chance of seeing them play out some day?