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anothermonikan · 9 months ago

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hate that the character I dislike most in G5 is the one I have the strongest headcanons about. Talking about Hitch Trailblazer yeah

Look I don't like this pony, I have not forgotten he's supposed to be 'The Cop' of the group, I am happy they've been leaning on it less because some of the earlier MYM and TYT episodes are borderline unwatchable because they lean so much into 'oh he's a GOOD cop :)) He loves following rules and keeping ponies safe!' and it's just a little bit disappointing after everything that the G5 movie was supposed to be about that they just let Hitch go back to being a cop and not only that but then they put so much emphasis on how "good" of a cop he is in the show up until like. Sparky's introduction. He's kind of just the dragon dad character now, I can't remember the last time him being sheriff was even mentioned in TYT, I would complain about how inconsistent that makes his character but I honestly would just prefer if they didn't lean on the good cop thing ever again so I won't

BUT. Not ignoring that but it's irrelevant to what this post is really about, um. Hitch has to have some sort of blood relation with Fluttershy right?? Like okay here is my evidence:

Appearance wise, Fluttershy's family has a pretty consistent thing with the colours yellow and green

Like I know none of them have green manes specifically but colour throughout family in MLP is weird. This is probably my most flimsy piece of evidence BUT I think it's interesting when in conjunction with these two other things:

Hitch can talk to animals and

2. I don't really understand what they're going for with the whole cutiemark magic thing in G5 but like. All of the mane cast ponies have different elements that align with their cutiemarks or something and you know what Hitch's is? Kindness. And it's the only one that has a G4 counterpart with an Element of Harmony

I only really started putting this together in my head after the second season 2 episode of TYT when they say their cutiemark magic things out loud and I was like. huh Kindness. like Fluttershy. and then the piece started to fall together in my head and I was like. Oh! Okay! I really hope that's intentional!

#sorry that I can't talk about Hitch without like a whole paragraph explaining that I don't like him and why.#thus alienating like the entire target audience for this probably. I have little hater disease. yeah it is terminal thanks for asking #It could be worse I used to not be able to even stand him being in an episode because of how badly they leaned into the cop thing #I can tolerate him now that he's just. The one with the dragon. most of the time #If this turns out to be intentional and is confirmed I'm gonna get a good grade in media literacy.#which is normal to want and possible to achieve #asdhsdhhsdf #I'm pretty sure that's not actually what media literacy means so I actually get a point deducted for that one #I just cannot think of the word I mean...nap time for me now ehe #MLP #MLP ANG #MLP G5 #MLP TYT #MLP MYM #Android.txt

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stabletwooriginals · 4 years ago

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CHAPTER THREE: Guidance

LittlePip wakes up to a brand new day. Which she never experienced before and we get some fun observations from her about.

I knew this was coming but I’m so relieved LittlePip finds one of Rarities dresses in perfect condition inside a locked chest.

The comment, that the dress is the prettiest and most cheerful thing she has seen since leaving is striking to me. She has had one terrible string of bad luck so far, but there are amazing things still waiting to be found.

Which is undercut somewhat by her discovery of the dead cats hung over where she slept. Absolutely terrifying. That doesn’t seem just for shock value, as it preoccupies our (and LittlePips) mind as she accidentally activates a land mine. Oops.

Watcher making his first appearing here, giving LittlePip life saving advice.

Raiders attack again. And we get LittlePips naive interpretation of grenades through a childhood memory of someone bullying her. This explains to us why she focuses on throwing the granade back next… killing her first pony.

We don’t get a lot of rumination on that yet though, as we get a scene break and LittlePip has managed to sneak out of Ponyville. What are these segmenting parts called, actually? Is it “Dinkus”? That’s a fantastic name.

The retelling of escaping Ponyville sounds like a stealth sequence in any video game, which I find amusing.

After a brief first encounter with a Bloatsprite - the mutated version of the Parasprites from the show - we reunite with Watcher and LittlePip get’s to have her first friendly conversation so far. (You might wanna count Velvet at the very beginning, but that’s up to you.)

“A friend.” I raised an eyebrow. “Okay, a passing acquaintance. But one that doesn’t mean any harm.��

This back-paddling is interesting. Why isn’t the “Friend or Foe” distinction enough here? My interpretation is that FoE takes friendship quite seriously. Since it is adopting “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”, in which friendship is the key to change the course of history, just the word “friend” has a lot of worth and meaning that can’t just be thrown around lightly. We don’t know it yet but the core mechanics of MLP, namely friendship and the Elements of Harmony, are still intact in this story.

Finding my apple, I levitated it up. “Thank you. And thank you for the warning about that… thing in the ground.” “Mine.” I blinked. “Y-you want my apple?”

I just want this on here.

We get some info on the Bloatsprite - mainly it’s name and that it is the result of something called Taint. Which, uh– and Watcher’s name. He is not a Spritebot himself, but located somewhere else and just hacks into them to interact with remote places of the world.

Finally he gives vital advice any newbie RPG player can use: Find better gear, learn about the world and make some friends! What? Yes, there it is again. Friendship.

For guidance LittlePip returns to Ponyville. Watcher told her a copy of the Wasteland Survival Guide should still be at the Ponyville Library. Twilight’s home! (Remember, we’re sticking strictly to the first season.)

I was convinced The Wasteland Survival Guide was a reference to an older piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, but nope, it seems to come from the famous quest line in Fallout 3. At least, that is what dominates the search results when I try to google it.

Quite some time is also spend on the horrific decoration, namely desecrated ponies. Mutilated and in pieces, stuck to the walls and hung from the ceiling. These displays of gore are reminiscent of how Super Mutants tend to gather in places with such bloody decorations in Fallout 3. That game reduced the Mutants personality from a faction, as they were in the previous titles, to little more than orcs. Which is a shame, as they mostly exist as canon fodder now. And help us get over killing them, it shows us with lootable sacks of gore that they deserve it.

The raiders here get painted in the same light and fulfill a similar role. As clear bad guys and somewhat as cannon fodder. Their psychology never gets explored much beyond “the Wasteland drove them mad”. They often even have ridiculous cutie marks, implying they have been born into being raiders and that being cruel is their special talent. Which, besides painting the saddest existence, is a shame, since they clearly form groups among themselves, can talk just fine and are/were, by all accounts, just ponies like anyone else. Except, they’re not. They have gone insane, mind you. They live in their own shit and sleep under fresh, dripping intestines. Because they’ve gone mad, you see!

My point with all that is, that the excessive gore in this scene takes away from my immersion, as it raises questions with no answers, and raiders holding slaves and killing ponies (without putting their corpses on display), again, would be fine enough to convince me of their evilness.

Watcher was playing LittlePip a little, as he knew it was also where a couple slaves are kept in cages. One of them is implied to have been sexually assaulted, which - while still despicable - at least makes more sense for raiders to do than the gore fest described earlier.

LittlePip glancing over the bottle caps the first freed slave offers her without a second thought is a fun touch.

Then a fight breaks loose!

I hadn’t just killed a pony–these raiders had given up any right to the title! These were not ponies, they were sick monsters that needed to be put down!

Which implies choice. Something I can’t imagine, choosing to be a raider like this, but fine. I’m sure plenty of FoE side stories go more into detail with raiders, FoE itself seems mostly comfortable portraying them as orcs most of the time. Until it doesn’t. But we will cross that bridge when we get there.

I didn’t realize until that moment, but I was mad! The pure evil of this place had shaken me to the core… and my core was furious!

Regardless of my feelings towards the raiders, Littlepip’s reaction to them has always been inspirational to me. I know, it leads to… problems later on. But joining in with unbridled rage of LittlePip is cathartic in ways I haven’t yet seen replicated somewhere else.

(what do you know, they do shoot with their tongues!)

Figuring out how horses shoot firearms is… it’s own entire discourse I am not very interested in. But it’s fun to see what ideas FoE brought to the table. And it’s even more fun to see high quality concept art of tongue-triggered pistols for the Fallout: Equestria fan game Ashes of Equestria.

The fight is fun, with brisk and clear descriptions and punctuation of humor (“Shouldn't you ponies be smarter than this? You live in a library!”).

LittlePip gets shot but finds the Fluttershy branded medical box. Love that decision. Also our introduction to healing potions – they work like Stimpaks from Fallout, but are actually more believable because magic actually exists!

I was even more pathetic with melee weapons than I was with guns.

Love that RPG progression being set up here.

It was a zombiepony!

Don’t be mean to ghoul Ditzy Doo. Don’t ever be mean to ghoul Ditzy Doo.

I can’t really place the note about why someone might need binoculars in a library. I assume it’s a MLP reference but I’m lost on that one.

After another short lived meeting with mines the fight is over and LittlePip decides to loot the bodies for armor. The bloody, tattered armor. To be fair, it is the best armor she has come across so far and we do stuff like this in RPGs all the time.

She finds bottle caps again and chooses to ignore them this time. Great tease. Love it.

She finds and identifies radigator meat. I’m not sure she should know their name at this point, but whatever. The narrative framing allows it.

Lastly, she confronts the sniper that has been on the balcony of the library the entire time. Here we get a better glimpse at AngeryPip, surprising herself with her audible confidence and malice. It feels like a different character, but since this is portrayed as a extreme situation this seems more adrenaline fueled to me, rather than pathological.

Leaving the library, LittlePip has a combat shotgun, an assault rifle, a revolver (which gets lost in the next scene), a knife and now a sniper rifle. Impressive for this early in the story.

An alert flashed on my PipBuck. Checking it, I discovered that it had labeled the gazebo in front of me: The Macintosh War Memorial.

First, harrowing. Love it. Secondly, I love the inclusion of the gazebo, which has to be the one we can see in the show. It’s cool to see how many elements of the show actually made it in here. Pretty unobtrusively too.

The Memorial specifically names Big Macintosh and his sacrifice. It’s obviously unclear how much of the story was prepared in advance, but the way the war started 200 years ago must have been among that. We get to learn later what Big Mac’s role in the war was.

And we end with LittlePip picking up “The Wasteland Survival Guide. By Ditzy Doo…”

Level Up! New Perk: Bookworm. Kinda nice how we went to the library this time, got a book out of it, the quote at the beginning was “Books! I’ve read several on the subject.”… So, this one feels more than earned.

#fallout equestria #reread #reading #fan fiction #kkat #ponyville

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thegeneralsnotebook · 3 years ago

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #215: Queen Novo, Sea Sovereign (Yellow/Blue/Pink Aggro) [Core]

Queen Novo, Sea Sovereign

The Seapony & The Alicorn

The seapony and the alicorn Were fighting for the crown The alicorn beat the seapony All around the town

I expect very few folks reading this will understand the origin of that little rhyme, but it’s one that’s familiar to me, and one that seemed quite appropriate in a deck with Celestia, Novo, and a real Crown in Crown of Grover.

I wasn’t expecting this week’s deck to be much of anything to write home about, as this Mane has historically been only about average in terms of its individual impact. But I resolved to take the opportunity to look at some new cards and see what I could do. This week would be the week of Vapor Trail, a solid but not spectacular UR from Fond Memories. Vapor Trail is a card that’s kind of like a mini-Day Shift, in that we get a free move whenever a dilemma enters play, but there’s actually even more value than that, in that she also gives Friends at dilemmas +1 power. This makes her particularly great with any card that generates tokens, and you might notice that there’s quite a few of those in here.In fact, with a slightly different Mane (i.e. one that doesn’t flip so easily and might require Yellow entry) the Professor Fluttershy might be a very good choice here.

With those free movements, both from Novo and from Vapor Trail, I decided that I wanted to branch out just a bit into Pink to get Crown of Grover. Admittedly, most of the Friends here are cheap, though to some extent that’s better as a 1-cost reduction is a bigger percentage of their total cost. I made a conscious effort to keep the Pink requirements on all of the cards lower than 3, since that would enable a single piece of entry to necessarily access any of the Pink cards. Bloodstone Scepter is of course the preferred method, though it is noteworthy to keep in mind that your Mane is sometimes going to be on its Start side, at which point Bloodstone is not helping.

Since the deck had branched out to Pink, I included Pony Pet Playdate as a way to generate a big pile of tokens so that I could reasonably include High Noon. Notwithstanding the fact that I would love to include the Celestia tri-corn in any deck that I could, she still is one of the weaker of the three-colour URs, so it’s also good that we have the opportunity to put her into play with a huge discount if we activate Novo with a Crown in play. (Which, I’ll have you know, very nearly happened in one of the test games that I played.) Also of note given the many tokens available is Shoeshine, the queen of triple- or quad-confront turns.

As I’ve said before in other posts, Yellow also just has the best utility effects in its cards, so we’re able to include six pieces of Resource removal and a lot of anti-Troublemaker effects in here without sacrificing deck space form core cards. As I alluded to earlier, you probably flip your Mane over on Turn 2 or otherwise in the early game for relatively little effect, trusting that at some point later you’ll be able to play a Tempest Shadow and flip Novo back for a big turn that will usually be a guaranteed DFO.

After three games of practice here, I think that I’m ready to adopt the same description that I used for Vapor Trail at the top of the post for the deck in general as well: solid, but not spectacular. There’s a lot of great synergy in here and the deck absolutely can hit the same amount of punch that you would expect from an average aggro deck. But unfortunately I think that the Mane is still overall a drag on things compared to others that are out there. For example, given that all the Yellow Friends here are multi-colour Blue/Yellow, you might be better off running a Blue Mane and including a few more Blue/Pink cards like Angel Wings and/or Spitfire. Still, in a casual environment if you’re just looking for a fair and functional deck, I think that this one has you covered.

Me and the RNG are on the same page right now, so much so that you might accuse me of playing favourites. But I swear I rolled the dice fair and square. Next week, we will be revisiting a Mane we covered very recently here. It’s Princess Celestia, Royal Tutor once again!

#adventures in deckbuilding #mlp:ccg

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