TThe Minoan Crisis
MLP: FiM
Adventure
Drama
Mystery
Thriller
Someday the Princess of Friendship will be able to handle all of Equestria's foreign relations, but until then, we will rely on our proud corps of trained diplomats, and of course their able guards, ready for anything. Lightning Dust is not ready.
OC
Other
Lightning Dust
Cosmic Cowboy · 52k words · 54 1 · 1.3k views

I'm still alive! · 9:41pm Jan 11th, 2015

If any of you actually pay attention to stuff I do (probably not), you might remember little mentions (like this and this) of a bigger story involving minotaurs that I was really excited to get started on. I'm still really excited for it, and it keeps looking better and better. Lily and Binary were both done really, really fast, so it's kind of weird for me to take so freaking long to even publish a first chapter. The reason for the slowness is that I'm trying to learn from my mistakes and plan ahead for an actually good plotline. Basically, I made up the other two as I went along, with just some idea of what I wanted to happen (discovery writing), which led to weirdly-structured plots and things I really wished I could go back and change after I wrote the next chapter. For this next story (which is currently working under the title of "The Minoan Crisis" and will probably be about 100,000 words), I'm planning EVERYTHING out from the get-go (outlining). I can already tell that I've saved myself a bunch of headaches come writing time. I got myself an outlining program called Scrivener (check it out, it's great) to help. I've got the major events and characters planned out up until the beginning of Part 2 (probably only 2 parts. We'll see if there'll be a Part 3), and details planned almost to the end of Part 1 (thirteen chapters planned out right now, and a couple ideas for a prologue). Still a long way to go, I just thought an update was needed.

I've also been slow because I've taken on a bit more work than I'm normally happy with. Besides the three fics I'm in the middle of reading, I'm finishing work on this project, which means I can get back to this project, then I can get back to editing this and this and another unpublished one I haven't even started working on (sorry, Kharn!). And then, of course, there's school. Right now all my work on Crisis happens when I'm lying awake and an idea comes to me, so I sit down for a couple hours in the middle of the night and flesh out a few more chapters of the outline. Expect this to be published sometime in the summer at this rate. Sorry, guys!

Just to keep you interested, here's a snippet I did to flesh out the main villain and his motivations and philosophy. This may or may not end up as-is in the final draft, but either way, I imagine this lecture actually happened at some point. Here you go, your first peek at Professor Gonzalo diTantalo:

“There are many philosophies and paradigms expressed and published by the varied races of the world, but few are those that dare to actually cite evidence in the world of their validity. Zebrican wisdom and self-discovery? Inconsequential. Gryphon cunning and charisma? Self-indulgent and superficial. Equestrian tolerance and friendship?” *snort* “Idealistic and immature. The only true virtue with any real influence in the world is the power of the individual. No one, no matter what they believe, accomplishes anything without hard work and inner strength. Success comes from the ability to push yourself past failure, to make the connection no one else has, the ability to outsmart or outperform your opponent, and the drive to overcome all obstacles. Many of the cultural virtues we’ve discussed are encompassed by this, and any others, such as the ponies’ friendship, are entirely peripheral to what truly makes an individual, community, or civilization great.”
“Professor? If that is so, then how is it that Equestria has always managed to defeat stronger individuals such as Discord and Tirek with just the power of their friendship?”
“Are you really so gullible as to actually believe the ponies’ spoutings about the far-famed ‘power’ of their friendship? Discord and Tirek and their like were defeated by the Elements of Harmony, powerful magical artifacts that can only be wielded according to certain requirements of active, positive relations between the wielders. Even though these artifacts’ power is unrivaled, giving the Equestrians the position of preeminent world power and becoming almost objects of worship, the fact that they are activated by friendship says nothing at all about friendship itself. In the end, Discord and Tirek were defeated by greater individual ability. They both proved their own inadequacy by fatally underestimating their opponents. Call it ‘the power of friendship’ if you want, but in both cases Equestria was saved through the actions and decisions of an individual, namely the Princess Twilight Sparkle. A group of friends didn’t stop Discord or Tirek, it was Princess Sparkle bringing together the key components of the Elements of Harmony - through her own efforts, not those of her friends, mind you - to win the day. The method of the magic is irrelevant; as I said, her friends were merely spell components, and the actual magic is not powered by the strength of their relations with one another, like the ponies are so fond of preaching, but merely activated by them. For the rest of us that don’t rely on mysterious, arbitrary magical artifacts to solve our problems, the ‘power of friendship’ alone is not much help to us.”
“But what does it say about the value of friendship as a virtue that the most powerful beings active in the world are also its greatest promoters? Doesn’t that imply some cause-and-effect?”
*Chuckle* “Implications are far removed from actual evidence. It is true that the princesses make great effort to be ‘friends’ with as many figures and nations as possible, but whether they do it because they actually believe in the principle or they merely wish for the convenience of being surround by friendly, cooperative neighbors, the fact remains that they don’t have to. They are not the most powerful players in the world because they make friends, they are the most powerful simply because they are the most powerful. They’re alicorns. They control the very heavens! Who among us can stand alone against them? Yes, we are all their friends, but many play along only because they don’t dare to be seen as enemies. The mere existence of the Equestrian princesses proves what I’ve been saying all along: that the strongest will always prosper. That they themselves denounce this only exposes them as the greatest hypocrites this world has ever known.”