So I've been thinking, if your nature is to constantly change, can you change your nature?
There's a poem I picked up somewhere, I forget where, that goes:
"You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
That's part of nature too"
So I'm up against a contradiction, which are normally enormous fun, but... not today. The question is, if what you are is the engine of change, can you turn that on yourself to cease to be the engine of change, and if you do, does that create a paradox? Also, realistically speaking, what are the consequences?
I can't believe I care about consequences. Maybe I have changed.
I don't want to do it anymore. I want to give it up. I want to have what "normal" creatures have in their lives, at least to the extent of the basic consistency of their own selves so they know that barring magical interference they aren't going to sell out their friends. But I hate myself for wanting this because I promised myself millennia ago I would never be ashamed of who I am and I would never let anything make me want to be "normal", because normal is boring and boring is the worst possible thing in the universe. Except that I've just found out there are worse fates. It's not exactly boring to be a traitor who nearly gets your closest friends killed (and who, let's not forget, stands around and does nothing while the first being you ever loved and a being who helped take care of you when you were sick and never did you any harm and a being who hates you now but used to look up to you as a big brother... all get thrown into Tartarus. Why, that's not boring at all. It's just completely reprehensible.)
Am I allowed to get tired of it? Why do I have no sacred principles except the principle of "never give up chaos"? I mean, if I really had no sacred principles, then giving up chaos would be an option, wouldn't it? And if I'm going to have one sacred principle, then why not two, or several? And if I hate myself for betraying my one sacred principle, but I hate myself for who I am if I don't, well...
Now I really regret blowing up my thinking tree.
I wonder sometimes if this is the end. Chaos avatars are immortal and yet every past one of them died or had something happen to them, because otherwise I wouldn't be here. I never put a lot of thought before into the contradiction of being the heir to a position that makes you immortal. If chaos avatars don't die of old age and are incredibly hard to kill, what happened to the ones before me?
Well, I actually know what happened to most of them. Mayhem: Luna's mom killed him (technically Celestia's mom too but I always think of her as Luna's mom for some reason.) Which I strongly suspect was suicide-by-pony, given what I know about his last few years and what he did. Ar: may actually still be alive, for moderate values of "life". Dragons don't commit suicide, they just go to sleep. Forever, maybe. Pan: went worldwalking, never came back. Set: got possessed by Apep, killed the lover he'd spent centuries protecting, and... no idea what happened to him after that but given that he's not still around I suspect someone killed him. And he probably let it happen, if he managed to wrestle any control back from Apep (who I strongly suspect is responsible for Nightmare Moon as well, though to be fair, pretty sure neither I nor Sombra helped matters.) Completely unaware of what happened to Eris or Loki, mostly because up until now I didn't really care. If there were any before that, I'm not sure.
None of them lasted over two millennia. Congratulations, Discord, you're the first Chaos avatar to make it this far! Yay! I should tell Pinkie, have a party. Is there a prize? What do I win?
I am starting to think I've lasted this long only because of the millennium-plus as a garden gnome.
If the essence of chaos is change, then chaos must change, but if you change who you are so you're not chaos, then you can't really represent chaos anymore. So you do something stupid, and you die. Or you more or less kill yourself, even if you use proxies to do it. And then some other poor schmuck gets the job.
But I don't want someone else to get the job because quite frankly Chaos avatars are little shits and we could end up with another Mayhem. Or Ar. I'm the only one I trust with this, but since I don't trust myself anymore...
...this is wrong, this is all wrong, I'm not supposed to be like this. I'm not supposed to be thinking this way. Doing something chaotic and stupid is what I do, I shouldn't want to give up my powers or my life because I betrayed someone. Chaos has no loyalty. I used to want to be loyal but I gave it up for Chaos because Chaos is where my first loyalty has always been, but then logically speaking because Chaos has no loyalty that should mean I can betray it if I feel like it, right? But I'm not supposed to want to. But when have I ever cared what I'm supposed to do?
Ar wanted to save the world from what she thought was the worst thing ever, and instead she set it on fire and made matters infinitely worse for a lot of the ones she wanted to protect.
Set tried for centuries to protect Ra from Apep and ended up being the one that killed him.
On the other hand Mayhem had no loyalty to anyone or anything until he got us all killed, when all of a sudden he remembered he was a draconequus and wow, did that stunt ever backfire or what? At which point he killed himself. Well, came up with an enormously stupid plan to destroy all the ponies in Equestria with a volcanic eruption combined with an inland hurricane, which led to him getting killed, but I'm pretty sure it's the same thing.
So I guess the moral of the story is, don't be loyal to anything if you're a Chaos avatar, and if there's something you're actually loyal to that you don't recognize, you'll end up destroying it and wanting to die, but hey, the same thing will happen to you if you do recognize your loyalties, so the point is, don't be loyal to anything. Or viewed from another perspective, Fluttershy's killed me by making me want to have friends. Except I can't even hate her for that, because I actually do want friends. Maybe I was better off not knowing what it felt like, because I didn't know what I was missing, but now that I do know...
I don't want to live if I have to be alone and loyal to no one and care about no one and have no one care about me, for the rest of my life, ever again. I don't want to live that way. Chaos isn't worth it. Nothing's worth it.
But because of what I am, I'm going to destroy anything I care about sooner or later. As demonstrated by the fact that I just almost did.
...I need them to stop me. I need them to make it so I can't hurt them, without passing on the mantle of Chaos to someone else. Can't keep living like this, it'll break me and I'll change and I'll do something awful because I can't stand being like this anymore and maybe I won't even care by then. Can't lose my powers, they'll go to someone else. Can't die, they'll go to someone else. Can't become something else... that's the same thing as giving it up, they'll go to someone else. Can't get the Tree to turn me to stone.
I need to make my friends do it instead.
Oh no... I really hope the mane six find Discord's book before he dose something dumb.
Well...fuck. On the one hand I can understand Discord's issue(s), but on the other? I think the ponies are going to have a hard time locking their 'Friend' back up in a living nightmare for the rest of eternity. And hell, Discord also knows this wont work! Glory said it herself, that eventually he would no longer give a shit and break free by destroying the MLP solar system.
So..isn't the only choice to have the rest of the Q take him out?
5270537
Wrong universe. This is based on "Last Draconequus" continuity where Discord is not Q, not "Next of Kin to Chaos" where he is.
In this universe, no, Discord can't break loose if he goes insane enough.
Woah...
s2.quickmeme.com/img/b7/b7d8883a3850c9897f16fa3a78b73cdf5a9105761b50cb3f4c192ad9b8440ff4.jpg
Love your world-building with the Avatars of Chaos of past. Apep, Set, Pan, Eris, Loki, your references to mythology are WONDERFUL!
Oh boy, Discord's thinking suicidal thoughts...
Discord, no. Don't make them do that. Talk it out with them at least! Ooooh...
5270765
Watching Discord's decision making is often like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Someday maybe I have to do a story called "The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Discord, Lord of Chaos". :-)
NOOOOO! Pinkie you better find that letter before Discord decides to do something. Also that is a horrible plan. If they trap him in stone, he'll forget how wonderful friendship feels as he succumbs to the pain and loneliness of conscious dis-animation . If he ever gets free, he'll go back to being evil and feel his past self was an idiot for letting friendship in.
5270540
Ah! My bad.
Nooo, Discord, what are you doing? Stooop. Someone stop him and his horrible idea.
Seriously, though, reading Discord go through his inner turmoil is like watching a bomb tick. You don't know when it'll set off, but just watching it tick is worrying as hell.
Um, Set was the go of evil not chaos, he was defender of Ra so he was part of Ma'at too! ( Ma'at is order) Pan is the god of wild things . And Eris ... okay Eris is a god of discord, but whether Loki was the god of chaos is still debated by scholars.
Ohhhhhhh dear. It makes a lot of sense that Discord might think this way, but there are just so many ways that this will go wrong...
5272530
Firstly, this is MLP, not Mythology 101. Pegasus is a proper name and referred to one singular horse, Tartarus was a specific area of Hades, and unicorns are malevolent monsters who can only be tamed by the pure heart of a virgin. Except that this is MLP so no.
Secondly, you're actually wrong about Set. Set was a lot of different things. He was actually the primary god of desert nomads, which resulted in him being kind of demonized by the city people who formed most of Egypt's recorded culture. He was, at one point, a god of evil, but so was Apep. He was also a god of chaos, but so was Apep. And he had the job of protecting Ra from Apep which is a significantly weird job to give a god of evil, but a god of wildness and deserts, it might make sense. (Which, viewed by the average Egyptian citizen, is equivalent to chaos.)
So when I read that a god who is associated with chaos used to protect a sun god from another god associated with darkness, evil and chaos, and then later on the first god got merged with the concepts the god of darkness he used to fight represented... my mind went to Nightmare Moon and Discord and Celestia, so I MLP-ized the story. In my version, Set was one of the chaos avatars, who are not inherently evil but are inherently jerkasses. He did in fact split his brother into multiple pieces, but this didn't kill him because chaos avatars can pull that kind of crap and this is MLP, not Mythological Evil Creatures. And it was his job to protect Ra, the sun-raiser, from Apep, the darkness from beyond the world. But eventually he lost the fight and got taken over by Apep (who also has a lot to do with the Nightmare creatures responsible for Luna's fall), and while possessed, he was an avatar of darkness, evil and chaos... and he killed Ra. Which resulted in the world going dark for a while until someone else took over the sun.
As for the others, yes, Eris was the goddess of discord. So is Discord. (well not the goddess part.) He was identified in Return of Harmony as the "mischievous spirit of disharmony." Not chaos. Then they promptly associated him with chaos. So in MLP, chaos and disharmony are linked (in reality they are separate concepts and in my fiction I do draw a distinction; the chaos avatar usually chooses to represent disharmony as well, but does not have to.) Pan was the god of the wild, and if Loki was a god of anything he was a god of mischief, but these things are as closely associated with chaos as disharmony is. So in my MLP universe, which draws from mythology but isn't tied to it, the same way that the show itself does, they were also chaos avatars.
wooooah *.* sooo nice ^^
gooosh xD now its waiting time again xD
5271462 I agree with this. Put that together with your amazing writing and you've got not just a draconequus with a heck of a lot of inner turmoil, but a lot of readers too. I want to wish for a happy ending, but it seems so futile by the way it reads. Discord, Discord...
5273901 A lot of the stuff you're saying about Apep and old Egyption Deities and Nightmare Moon actually sounds similar to the most recent comic with Discord in it, did you draw on that for inspiration.
Here's a puzzler: One other option is for Celestia to use the Ultimate Reform spell on Discord, although I don't remember if it would actually work on him. I guess the question is, which is worse, being Reformed, or being Stoned.
One less-"AND I MUST SCREAM" possibility is for Discord to simply speed up relative time for himself, so for every second he experiences, a year goes by for the rest of the universe. By the time he's gotten over feeling guilty and wants to cause Chaos again, there would be no one around, except for maybe an old Celestia and a red sun.
4727560
What story would this be? You've made me kind of morbidly curious.
5405272 Judgement Day: The Partisan. It was an AU where Q's side lost the civil war in the Continuum.
5407110
Just read it. Christ, that was depressing. I can see why that might've made you crash for a while.
Though, I did also find the time to read some of your other fics, and the fact that you never finished the Do It Again series is possibly even more tragic.
5523250
Well, of course. Tirek's evil, but not chaotic. (I'm not sure whether D&D would call him Lawful or Neutral; stealing magic isn't very lawful, but plenty of Lawful Evil overlords conquer and kill to obtain power.) Honor is a concept of Order, and Discord, being Chaos, has none. (Well, very little. He mostly sticks to the rules of the games he plays, although he creates the rules in the first place to favor himself, he'll probably do what he promised to do at least some of the time, and he has lines he won't cross. But in comparison to a traditional sense of Honor, where you keep your sworn word and remain faithful to those who have put faith in you no matter what, Discord is entirely too much Trickster to have those traits.)
I do like DannyJ's headcanon for Tirek and have mostly adopted it. I've never had a chance to get into what my version of Tirek thinks or feels because Traitor is entirely written from Discord's POV, so that's a thing I'll have to do one of these days.
The third chapter simply illustrates why beings entirely consisting of just one aspect are really silly.
That's why God is awesome! He's EVERYTHING!!! And EVERYWHERE!! And has all the powers of ever! (My God's bigger than yooooooour's iiiiiiiis!)
5407110 You have dared to bring up that awful "Star Trek: Voyager" episode which completely bastardized the Q, ruining it forever.
By bringing down such beings to feeling MORTAL angst over immortality, it rendered itself oxymoronic!
The Q were made too human. They were no longer Q.
And then P showed up and PWND them hard.
5642287
That's why God is totally uninteresting to write about. Characters who personify only one aspect can have conflicts with other characters who personify others, they can have issues with how to personify their aspect, they can have conflicts between their aspect and something else that they want. (Such as Hades, who represents Death, wanting a wife.) Also, my chaos avatars aren't actually gods, though they are sometimes worshiped as such and Discord will refer to himself as the God of Chaos when he's feeling pompous.
5642336 If they're only one aspect, they can't think because they can basically only exist in a single mode.
They work best in ancient tales, since no one back then bothered to think how limited a being that personified, say, teen angst would be.
If you are the personification of love only, you CANNOT ever be angry, because you are ONLY love. You cannot be sad, because you are ONLY love. You cannot even feel hunger, because ONLY LOVE!!
That's the truth of a being that is TRULY as aspect, which means no character ever stated to be an aspect has ever been truly an aspect throughout the entire history of writing. Such characters can't exist, because they can't really do anything.
Discord, for instance, were he to be pure chaos, could never think because... now, muse on this a bit... thought requires order. A mentally ill man ranting into the wind on a street corner to things only he can see is far closer to chaos than anything capable of making plans.
5642394
Yes. That's why Discord isn't actually a god, why Q doesn't want to be worshipped as a god, and why the Greek gods weren't, in fact, literal personifications of their element. (Also, most of them had more than one.) Being the God of Blah means your life revolves around Blah but it doesn't mean there is literally nothing in your personality or existence but Blah. Apollo controlled the Sun, but he wasn't the Sun.
Being a literal personification would suck. Being a literal personification of true Chaos is impossible. (Or true Order.) Discord's very, very chaotic for a living being with a mind, but not to the point where he has no personality and cannot think and doesn't have a working body. :-)
5642486 The Q from Star Trek: TNG didn't want to be worshipped as a god because mortals didn't really have any idea what being one actually meant. It was a mortal attempt to put into a nice little bottle everything that a Q was, and failing miserably at that.
Gods also tended to be authority figures, and be bound to ruling and morals and so forth, while Q were rather beyond those things altogether.
They did, however, act far more like gods than the characters of many legends, going so far as to test the human race to see if it could prevent itself from destroying itself in the process of discovery, as Q said, "The test is never over." And while human-conceived gods were content to mainly keep mortals in their place, Q seemed to have a bit more to their motivations, with the conditions of the test also allowing Picard to expand his consciousness beyond the boundary of their neat little plane of existence and glimpse just the tip of what lay beyond.
THAT was Q. Not the simpering, shallow creatures of "Voyager", limply existing with boundless power, space, and time at their disposal and no idea what to do with it.
Okay, so I was going back to reread some of your stories and saw the title and thought "oh shit" then clicked it and saw the Love and Rockets quote and thought "oh shitter!"
I've just now published a chapter that uses the same quote and now I'm very worried that may have seeped into my subconcious somehow while reading your work.
tl;dr- I did not mean to plagiarize you! Perhaps my subconcious did, and it needs a good ass-whipping. D:
5733038
I do not own the copyright to anything by Love and Rockets. :-) It's all good. You can't plagiarize off me by choosing a quote I also chose when we're both taking it from the same place that isn't us.
5733108
Whew! Just thought I should tell you in case it seemed that way!
5733111
I still have plans eventually to write a Q story around the NIN quote "I just made you up to hurt myself"...
Some things are just plain obvious when you're working with the same characters. :-) Your take on Discord has a very different backstory than mine but a very similar personality, so obviously some of the same ideas will come up.
5733157
I would totally read the hell out of that Q story.
I adore your Discord and your Q. You write the trickster so well.