I'm the Type of Pony Everypony Should познакомились? · 9:21pm Feb 11th, 2013
So, yeah, The Lessons of Eternity went up on Equestria Daily earlier today. Doesn't actually have a "story" tag at the moment but I'm going to see if I can fix that.
More importantly! (Well, more excitingly for someone who's known EQD had accepted the fic for like 4 days, anyway), I got rec'd on Darkpony.ru, which I had not heard of until today, and went there to find not only what seemed to be a rather spirited (if unintelligible to me) conversation about the story (Google translate suggest it dwells a lot on whether writing immortals with massive characters flaws makes sense--rather like the debate here, ugh--but that's okay), but that some enterprising individual had translated the entire story into Russian.
And I was all: 
And then:
Oh my God someone cared enough about a thing I wrote to translate it translating is hard work oh my God...
So uh, if anyone actually speaks Russian, I'd be super interested to know, like... how it came out. In Russian. Does it work? Are the comments about interesting stuff?
Meanwhile, I'll just go back to running in circles out of pure excite.
(So glad I left myself room to write more self-aggrandizing blog posts...)
I have a vivid mental image of you doing just what that girl is.
...people are seriously debating about that? I mean, it makes sense to me that they'd have just as many flaws as any other character. Habits get ingrained in the personality; the longer you do it, the harder it is to not do it. Still, it sounds like you've heard enough about that kind of thing, so I'll abstain from saying any more.
818286 Well, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but yeah more or less. I can buy someone not believing/liking the characterizations of Celestia and/or Twilight, which may have been what they were getting at--I wondered myself as I was writing if it really sounded like Twilight would sound if she were 370-ish years old and venting 100 years of bitterness. Twilight isn't a passive aggressive person in the show, after all (the realization I was writing something inherently against her grain is basically why I dropped the story for months). I debated having Celestia muse on that and possibly blame herself for sort of steering Twi down a path where that sort of passive aggression became normal (if only because the Princess's lover yelling at someone the way Twi does in the show would probably be taken as an act of war), but I ended up not going there, in part because that would mean Celestia was taking responsibility for anything.
But yeah, there's a contingent of people who were arguing that either Celestia should have predicted the end result of her relationship with Twilight, enough to know not to start the relationship in the first place, or that she should be too mature to act the way she does in the fic, or that Twilight should have been able to handle the struggles of immortality better than she did. They are, to a certain extent, valid points, but they're also more about the premise than the actual content of the story. The story was inherently a bit of a "what-if" scenario, being built on several things which happened in the distant past of the characters, and while not every "what-if" premise is necessarily created equal, I feel like rather than criticize anything specific that I did, those comments tended to make sweeping statements that "immortals" would approach relationships form a perspective of such wisdom that these sorts of things would simply not happen.
To which my only response is: if that were the case, they'd be super boring to write about. Who wants to read a story about immortals who don't have enormously destructive breakups and stay mad at each other for centuries?
(I mean, yeah, there's something to be said for writing immortal characters who think in ways totally alien to the human mind, but for right now at least, I'm way more interested in what happens to the "human" mind stretched over centuries instead of decades. I mean, the old pantheons of Greek/Norse/Roman mythology are filled with incredibly petty characters)
818048 Ready to have your mind blown?
The girl and the duck are THE SAME PERSON. (Watch Princess Tutu it's the best magical girl show ever, and yes I have seen Madoka Magica, and no, I haven't seen that many other magical girl shows, but I still don't think Madoka is that great so there)
I'm going to see how long I can carry on doing all my reaction shots as Duck/Ahiru. It's... a challenge, considering I do not actually have my Tutu DVDs and have had to bum those screencaps from the interwebs. But you know, just to say that I was liking a show with an insanely girly title before it was cool (although MLP is "girlier" in content than Tutu).
1166528 I have waited a stupidly long time for someone to have that response to one of these blog posts!
Tutu is one of my favorite shows--parts of it are kinda eh but when it's good it's completely freaking amazing.
I'm actually close irl friends with the people who made Princess Tutu Abridged (the one that actually finished). It's pretty awesome if you've never seen it, though it takes them a few episodes to fully find their feet.