How monstrous do you have to be before you can no longer earn forgiveness?
Listening to the soundtrack for The Last of the Mohicans as I type both this essay and the story that follows. It…fits. Don’t ask me how or why, I’ve actually never seen the movie from start to finish, but the soundtrack is beautiful and sad, and what follows is certainly one of those things. In particular, “The Gael”/"Promontory" is a tune that feels like it keeps trying to rise up and become more than it is, only to be continuously beaten down by its own nature.
I didn’t want to write this. I actually kind of hate myself for doing so. It doesn’t feel great, being That Guy who can’t just unfollow a story that I no longer like and leave it alone. I mean, I can…I have, in fact. There’s been stories that I’ve lost interest in, or which took plot turns or made characterization choices that I couldn’t jive with, and so I dropped them quietly and without rancor. A standout example of this is probably the otherwise excellent fic Sunshine and Fire, which I dropped due to a line from Celestia – up to this point, acting in all ways like the canon Celestia we knew and loved – to Twilight, who was distraught at the idea of having to kill to survive and get home, saying what amounted to “Oh, Twilight, sometimes you just have to pop a cap in some nigga’s ass.”
Still, I just left the reason for why I was leaving in the fic and left. I didn’t go off and write an entire fix-fic for Sunshine and Fire, and honestly I don’t think it needs it – it’s a pretty good story, it was just one particular line that somehow managed to ruin the whole thing for me, and I fully admit to that being my problem.
But for some reason I can’t do the same thing here, with A Foreign Education. I guess I was just more emotionally invested in it, and the series it was part of (The Third Wheel and Courtesans). So when A Foreign Education took such a nose-dive into dark territory and, more, left me with the impression that I was stupid for having expected it to go any other way, it hit surprisingly hard: that my failure to anticipate where it would end up going was my fault for getting my hopes up, for actually believing in the ideas put forth by the previous two fics, particularly Courtesans, with its themes of forgiveness even for the worst of monsters and how that forgiveness can change them, earning your happy ending in spite of all you may have done, and ending on a positive note that things will eventually turn out alright if you just try hard enough.
Pulling a tonal shift in a work of fiction isn’t easy. It can be done, and done well. Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Til Dawn is a good example of this, a crime thriller that, at exactly the halfway point of the movie, suddenly and without any warning or possible way to see it coming, transforms into a vampire survival horror movie. It pulls it off because the turn is so out of left-field that you are left just as gobsmacked as the characters, utterly unprepared, and then it fully engages and revels in the dark, comedic absurdity of its change.
But probably the best-known tonal shift in modern storytelling is the shift in the Star Wars series from A New Hope to The Empire Strikes Back. A New Hope is a schlocky sci-fi fic, optimistic to a fault, where the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (and even have the decency to dress like Nazis so that we know they’re bad), and in the end the good guys win and the bad guys are sent running. The Empire Strikes Back is by contrast a much darker film that starts off with Our Heroes having already lost their secret base and scattered across the Galaxy, then one by one all the characters lose essentially everything they have except for their lives. Friends betray friends and the Empire is stands triumphant. Yet, at the same time, the movie ends on a hopeful note. The Empire has won, but the Rebellion continues. Han is captured, but his friends will find him. Luke lost badly to Vader, but has learned from the experience. You are not punished for having believed in the tone and theme and message of A New Hope. Whatever you invested emotionally in the first movie is tested and beaten and bloodied and bruised, but by the end of it you are at least left sure in the knowledge that it was right, and that you will see everything pay off in the end.
A Foreign Education doesn’t do that. It’s my understanding that GaPJaxie intends for his next work in the series to more properly follow up on Courtesans, and in that sense A Foreign Education is basically like the Empire Strikes Back of this series. But in that, it fails. Partially, it fails on a technical level. GaPJaxie has, to put it mildly, stumbled in his world-building, creating an intractable geopolitical situation that cannot have a believable happy ending behind it, and which further should never have come into being in the first place assuming that the various nations of his world were run by even average leaders. GaPJaxie has gone out of his way to establish that Cadance is inept as a ruler, but by logical necessity this must apply to any nation’s rulers that borders the Northern Changeling Hive, but especially Equestria and Celestia. In historical fiction circles we call this a “wank” (Yes, the double meaning is intentional). GaPJaxie has wanked Queen Amaryllis (here, I’m not certain the double meaning isn’t intentional).
But maybe that’s just me; I’m a student of history and sociology primarily. I realize that works of fiction don’t have to conform to reality (it’s not like Star Wars’ Empire makes much sense when you try and examine it), but generally the more “realistic” a work is intended to be, the less forgiving I am in lapses of that realism. Still, that is just basically nitpicking, and it’s something I could have learned to live with…but…
The other problem is tonal. A Foreign Education is predicated entirely on the idea that you cannot change who you are or what you will become, that happy endings cannot be earned unless they were destined to happen anyway and that the world can actually be worse for trying to pursue them if they weren’t “supposed” to happen, and that there are things you can do that cannot be forgiven even if you only did those things because you were incapable of making other choices, for reasons of circumstance and information available to you verses things you did not and could not be reasonably expected to know. Monsters will always be monsters by their very nature, ignore that a running theme of My Little Pony since literally the first episode of the Generation 1 cartoon has run counter to that.
In sum and to pull on some bad memories from my past, it takes the message of Courtesans, and actually My Little Pony as a whole, like they were a childhood toy and then stomps on them like an emotionally abusive parent, breaking them, disciplining you for having had the audacity to actually believe that nonsense.
As you can tell from the phrasing up there, existence of this essay, and the following fic, I may have had a bit of a problem with that. And while a later fic may attempt to reverse course on this and restore us to where we were at the end of Courtesans, it will always run into the problem of A Foreign Education existing, lurking just behind it and saying “things only turned this way ‘cause the author willed it, otherwise you’d still be here with me.” That is, things can only change at this point as a result of deliberate and obvious authorial contrivance. A change to a more positive tone cannot feel natural. Obviously every story is the result of the will of the author, but a good story progresses in a way that feels natural. Bad stories progress because of transparent author fiat. A Foreign Education ensures that this is the only way the series can progress.
So, I’m trying to fix that. I don’t expect this fic to really even be noticed. I don’t expect a grand uprising or boycott of GaPJaxie, who otherwise was a good author until A Foreign Education (you’ll note that, tainted by association though they are, I still have The Third Wheel and Courtesans in my “favorites” folder). If it gets noticed at all I actually expect it to pick up far more hate than praise, on the grounds of this whole thing being what amounts to an eloquent temper tantrum by a guy who just doesn’t like that a story didn’t end the way he wanted it to. Still, I actually feel that on principle it has to be written. I have to reject what GaPJaxie did to the fullest extent of my ability and I have to try and deliver the ending to A Foreign Education that feels right, the kind the characters deserved for what they’ve suffered. So, here it is, and here we are.
Oh, and on a tonal shift note I’m also making one minor edit completely unrelated to my beef with the story or GaPJaxie, but rather it’s just something I noticed as I was gearing up to write some changeling stories of my own a few months ago: changelings don’t have nostrils! No, seriously, check them out: no pre- nor post-reformation changelings of any kind are ever depicted with nostrils in any scene or official image, despite most other creatures (ponies, griffins, yaks, dragons, etc.) clearly having them. Weird, huh? Maybe officially they don’t have a sense of smell or something (have we ever seen a changeling smell something?), though I’m going to depict them as having one, but it’s much weaker than a pony’s, and they smell via their mouths and tongues rather than non-existent nostrils. Again, unrelated to GaPJaxie and not something I’m in any way condemning him for, just something I noticed and feel kind of special for possibly being the first one in the fandom to notice, so I like to include it in changeling stuff I write.
…see how much that paragraph took you out of where we were emotionally and psychologically? That’s what I’m talking about with tone.
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Haven't read the story yet: I think a lot of readers let their love of Light Step/Double Time blind them to the overarching setting. Way back in The Third Wheel, there were always hints of things "being not right" but people shrugged off because it fit the narrative of 'Light Step, rebel without a cause'. Courtesans simply confirmed (and then tripled down) on that fact.
Huh... this is unexpected, and having never read anything by the original author your riffing on I'm not even sure what to think of this either. It's clear enough that you have strong feelings on the matter though, and I can't really blame you for that... I've been there before myself with a few different stories. So if this is what you think you need to do to cleanse your pallet, well then, good luck.
I don't think this is an eloquent temper tantrum, I think this is a pathetic one.
If you don't like a fic, this is where it ends, with you writing an essay condemning it and pointing out why. Writing your own fix with the same characters and situation but going "Ah, but I will fix what went wrong and show him how it was done!" is some weak shit.
Look, I even disagreed with him over the nature vs. nurture aspects of this. There are things I would criticize about it, and in the end I didn't particularly like it, but man, this is just sad.
Also, uhm:
[censored here, not in the original]
Are you black? Because even if this is a direct quote, and you give no indication that it is, that's not a word you just casually drop, let alone a phrase that's incredibly stereotyping.
I suggest avoiding The Last of the Mohicans, too. It's a mess of noble savage/white Indian tropes and uncomfortable to watch.
From Dusk Till Dawn was not a good movie. Yes, it comes as a surprise. It derails their lives a bit like you might expect from an unexpected encounter with the supernatural to be, but it spends forever being one movie and then changes into another, and the investment from one never really pays off. You could try to pass that off as cinema vérité if you thought you were being cute, but everything about it is so gratuitous and pointless that you really can't. If that's your idea of a "good" tonal shift then I shudder to imagine what your opinion of this story indicates.
I'm sure as heck not following you any longer.
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He's not really doing anything Fanfic authors don't already do. Do you know how many Canterlot Wedding and Anon-a-miss stories there are on this site?
I had a lot of the same issues with A Foreign Education. It's not so much a tonal shift as a bitch slap to the face that the author even lied about saying it was going to have a happy ending and calling what happened a happy ending despite how much the Tragedy tag should be on that story yet isn't.
I know why he's so adamant, it's not because the story didn't end his way it's that the story doesn't end it's own way, it spits in it's own face and despite how he tries to phrase it the author refuses to care about there being such glaring flaws with easy fixes that could still go the same way with the same message just handled better.
There's a golden core of amazing emotions and drama written in all those stories. The details is the only terrible part. If someone thinks your story sucks and is beyond salvaging they just won't give you criticism beyond saying it sucks. If someone tries to articulate what they feel is wrong as clearly as possible they think you have something there that might just need polish. If you just ignore it and continue making the same mistakes it's really frustrating seeing an otherwise perfect work caked in mud cause the author refuses to acknowledge they didn't handle a part of their story believably.
Personally I just took offense to how the author outright lied about a happy ending the way he did. The story telling you one thing and then slapping you for believing it is one thing, to have the author themselves do it in tandem is another. At this point I don't think there's anything to be salvaged from the series going forward, the author already lied twice about waiting for future stories to fix things so I took the slap to the face for believing him then as a lesson and dropped The Last Changling from my list and stopped giving the author any criticism. The first two stories are still in my personal favorites list despite one or two aspects of them I didn't like and the 3rd and 4th are just on my Have Read shelf.
The reason for good critique is always to make a story shine within it's own intentions not to make it end how you want, but to still end the way the author wants just handled better.
I have to disagree with your assessment of A Foreign Education here.
The big setup for it, that the grub left for Cadence and Shining in Courtesans would grow up to be a weapon for Amarylis unless they could raise it well enough not to be, never happened. That was the subversion, and it's over by the end of the sixth paragraph, when Cheval tells her biological mother where to go. It's not some big struggle through the story, it's all resolved before the story's barely began. If the story didn't go through the rest of its narrative the way it did, then it'd be, what, just a tale of a princess' stay at college in a different country? What would be the point? Cheval is selfless in her decision to leave so Flurry isn't upstaged, and never regrets it. She says all the right things to get by just fine in her new setting. We see her lessons in detail only once, when they talk about love versus power. There's no struggle, no conflict, no drama. And it says, in that bit near the beginning, that Amarylis' plan fell apart, so we're not really expecting Cheval to be weighing up which path she'll follow through the story as her character's central dilemma.
Her gradual, unwitting fall towards darkness is the whole point of the story. That's what makes it interesting. Imagine a redemption story in which the central character starts off a villain, then goes through a whole learning experience of realising the harm they've caused and making friends and gaining a better understanding of how people should be treated. Only for them to remain a villain by the end.
That's what A Foreign Education would be, if you took out Cheval's fall. It's a corruption story. That's not just what it does, that's what it is.
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I actually discuss that in a later comment. Hang on, I’ll just repost what I said.
All that aside from the above, however, since I’ve stepped back from reading these stories as a fan of GaPJaxie and started to look at the series more in the sense of analysis and critique, I’ve since realized a number of bigger flaws with the story from a storytelling perspective. Namely, that for the story to even occur, at least four named characters (and a number of unnamed background ones that must exist) need to make four major mistakes:
1) Cheval has to choose to go to Griffonstone (an unfriendly foreign nation) instead of someplace else where she could have access to love easier;
2) Cadance and Shining Armor have to agree to send her to Griffonstone instead of somewhere else;
3) Cadance and Shining Armor have to send her there alone rather than with some form of guard detail (even a single crystal pony to act like her friend around others, or a Badlands changeling that I’m sure Thorax would be happy to loan out, or something) which represents a failure not only as parents given Imperial-Griffon relations but also failure as her lieges since she’s a potential heir to both the Crystal Throne and to Equestria (compare/contrast the guard details that surround Presidential children at school, or the guard that Kim Jong-un has at school in Switzerland even when there in secret);
4) Cadance and Shining Armor and Double Time had to not inform Cheval that she might be a Queen (the story makes it explicit that they suspected this in chapter 7), nor prepare her for what that would mean. It’s directly analogous to not giving your kid “The Talk” plus expecting abstinence-only sex education to work, with a side order of a sixteen-year-old getting shiny new mind control powers apropos nothing, while starving in a foreign land with no one to help her.
It’s rather difficult to view Cheval as being corrupted into a villain when the author had to do this much just to start his “corruption” story. She’s a victim just as much as anyone she hurt.
Jaxie recently resorted to “a wizard did it” (“there is no explanation, stop asking”, in layman’s terms) as a defense for the impossible speed at which the Crystal Empire advanced and populated over just 22 years since its return. Ever since he did I’ve had the start of a rather grim joke floating in my head: how many wizards does it take to screw up a narrative?
I don’t have a punchline yet. But for the record, this series is currently standing at around 20 wizards.
9660684
I think you missed a mistake in there:
5) A very nearly adult mare, knowing the kind of nourishment she would need to remain healthy, deliberately deprived herself of that nourishment when it was sent to her as a gift. This is not presented as a mental illness, like an anorexic, so for reasons never fully explained, she was starving herself to the point of desperation.
Oh, and this one:
6) Despite having someone around watching her molt reveal that she was a queen instead of a drone, Cheval refused to believe it, refused to act on it, and refused to try to understand what it meant. It is not stated explicitly that she's aware of what abilities a queen has, but her family history would lead to her being aware that at bare minimum, changeling queens have the power to fry someone's brain and force them to obey. In counter to 4, it wasn't only that she wasn't given information, she actively chose not to seek it.
I'll also say that I understand where you're coming from, although not with this specific work; I feel like A Foreign Education was an excellent work, tonally consistent, and made few if any of the mistakes you allege in your multiple tirades directed at GaP. But I have most certainly been in the place of not only being highly disappointed with a work but being actively sobbing-at-my-keyboard traumatized by an author's zeal to turn what was a fascinating idea into a grimderp wankfest. But while I understand the feeling of being badly angered, disappointed, and hurt by a work, I'll never understand the impulse to rant at an author for material that offended my sensibilities, much less presume to inform them that not only did I hate what they did, I was going to "fix" their work and appropriate their characters in service of this fixing.
And all of my fix-fics are on my hard drive. Unpublished, and always will be. It doesn't make me a better person, of course, but I like to think that it means I understand the struggle of going all-in on a work I love to create and lack the impulse to revenge myself on others for displeasing me. All of that said, GaP was more gracious to you than you deserved and just as he was eager to see what you chose to make of his premise, I am just as curious to see if your revenge against him measures up to the work you're dunking on.
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Eh, (5) I can be much more forgiving of if we want to keep in mind that Cheval is a teenager. Teenagers make stupid and easily avoidable mistakes all the time because of pride, short-sightedness, or other such things. While Jaxie did a poor job of showing Cheval as really being all that "teenager"-like in The Last Changeling, he was more-or-less on the money for most of A Foreign Education, save the final chapters where Cheval and Flurry both suddenly have the psychological and political abilities of Descartes mixed with Machiavelli...and yet walk into stupid choices anyway.
(6) is I also think something that can make a reasonable amount of sense based on the fact that most of Cheval's decisions were made while she was starving. Again, while it's difficult to accept that a supposedly intelligent person would make those mistakes, it is possible.
In any event, A Foreign Education ultimately ended up only being a start of darkness for the series ("darkness" in this sense meaning "being bad". I like dark stories, or I can, anyway. Stephen King's Pet Semetary, and the film of The Mist, are both extremely depressing and end in very dark places, but I like both - in fact I prefer the film The Mist's ending to the original short story's, which while arguably more bleak overall is certainly less so than the movie's for our main character).
However subsequently in The Virgin Princess Jaxie dropped the ball completely by actually establishing what he meant with his idea of what I've termed "Hellicornhood"...which is applied haphazardly and inconsistently to Twilight in that story and thus fails to explain anything about the condition, and even were it consistently applied makes it difficult to reconcile the condition with how Cadance is handled in The Third Wheel and Courtesans verses her actions in A Foreign Education and The Last Changeling.
And The Last Changeling fails utterly to maintain narrative consistency not only with the series it's part of, but even itself. The Crystal Empire is too strong, Cadance remains is a milquetoast doormat rather than the proactive doer she was in the first two stories, Twilight loses one fight with Flurry and so decides that it's Flurry's right to slaughter her own people and the changelings, Shining Armor's development in Courtesans is tossed by the wayside just so that he can die on the field of battle in The Last Changeling, failing to prevent poison for the third time...Hell, even the last two chapters aren't free of mistakes, as the epilogue establishes that the borders between the Crystal Empire and Equestria are closed prior to Flurry's abdication yet somehow she had a train cross all the way from the Empire to Ponyville without anyone noticing.
When I pointed this out Jaxie said that "Flurry crossing the border isn't illegal", to which I pointed out that his own story said the border was closed so yes, in fact, it was by his own narrative - or even if not illegal, certainly something Celestia would have been informed of, and who then has no reason not to inform Twilight, and so Twilight should have had hours at least to prepare Ponyville for Flurry's arrival, including letting Cheval and the ponylings know. So he deleted both comments and his own comment on the matter, then started mass-deleting everything I posted.
I have a blog post that served as a final review of the series, and basically the problem boils down to this: Jaxie had a story he wanted to tell, and he didn't care what got in the way - even if it was his own story. So Cadance is proactive for the first two stories because it's convenient, but then she becomes a doormat for the next three because if she remains active she'll get in the way. Twilight is trapped in Alicorn Hell, but what exactly this means changes from scene to scene. Jaxie needs Cheval to skip 52 years so he has her petrified, but he needs almost all changelings to die so he does not make any of them consider petrifying themselves and waiting for a new queen. Jaxie needed Flurry to be in a position of weakness so that Cheval could tell Flurry what she needed to do to try and get forgiveness so he puts her on a train that either has a cloaking device or can travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
And so on, and so forth. The series overall has plenty of good scenes, but a collection of good scenes do not a good or cohesive story make.
But Jaxie didn't care. He had a story he wanted to tell and damn anything that got in the way of that.
Heh. Felt good, reading this. I don't think I could have been this honest with myself and just admit 'the story duped me' instead of 'oh I must have missed something'. But yeah. We all were there. The series starts off nicely, aaaand then it's suddenly back to WH40k/WoW BFA levels of absurdity. Some just refuse to see or admit it, or maybe aren't intelligent enough to notice something is indeed amiss. And so the downvotes pore in.
I didn't read the actual story though. Sorry, but I don't believe this could or should be salvaged, even I'm certain you gave it an honest go. Mister GaP should have just been abandoned in his tiny little kindgom of Circlejerkia, forgotten forevermore.
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It’s kind of weirding me out that this story is popping up in the “Similar” tab of Trouble in Tiatarta, since the only thing the two stories really have in common is that I wrote both. They’re otherwise going to be dramatically different in every possible way.