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didn’t read lol
I did that shortly before I posted my last comment.
your current filter.Easy enough, when you believe you’re right no matter what.
Called it!
Not surprised you’ve stooped to tuning out entirely and accusing me of what you’ve been doing (apart from the bits you just plain made up), but as said, you’ve long shown me that the truth doesn’t mean a thing to you. Anyone paying attention and being honest with themselves can see that your arguments and conclusions are iffy at best, if not outright false.
Enjoy your echo chamber, I guess, if that’s what you need to do to get through life.
Heh, scratch that last bit. Someone must have added one while I wasn’t looking.
I know, right?
@Background Pony #536E
@Background Pony #536E
@Background Pony #536E
your current filter.Wow! Just wow!
That was like a violent train crash; It’s horrible but I can’t avert my eyes. When you realised you’d need three comments for this, did you not just step back and consider that maybe, just maybe, you might have been doing something wrong? It’s not as if there’s any more substance to it than any of your other comments. If anything, there’s probably much less. How can anyone say so much and mean so little? You should be a politician, mate, you really should.
At any rate, there’s no way I’m going over this one point-by-point. I have better things to do than spending the rest of eternity pointing out that we’re going in circles. Instead of wading through this mire of reiteration and supposition, I’ll just summarise. Throughout this thread, and in these comments especially, you:
-Repeat already-addressed arguments ad nauseum and beyond
-Treat your assumptions as proven facts
-Misrepresent my position
-Misrepresent your own position
-Make complete non-arguments
-Engage in what I can only interpret as Psychological Projection
-Completely ignore/fail to understand points I’ve made, even as you respond to them
-Beg the question
-Argue from incredulity
-Hurl entirely baseless accusations at me
That’s not even an exhaustive list. If I added all the failings you only displayed once, I might not be done till new year. The only real reason I haven’t left already is so as not to give the impression of dishonesty and cowardice. Since you seem so intent on smearing me regardless, however, this will probably be my last salvo before I bow out.
You say you’re open to the possibility of being wrong; I’m not so sure you are. I don’t doubt that you believe you are, but from what you’ve told me of yourself, you don’t seem the type. You don’t seem to trust that people could honestly believe something different than you, that the people you disagree with might actually mean what they say. That’s not a healthy mindset. On top of that, you don’t seem to realise that people can believe something for multiple reasons, which you characterise as two-facedness.
To be frank, even your actual politics seem fairly suspect. I may be a young SocDem with no love of the Republican Party, but your lack of confidence in the humanity of your countrymen is still disquieting. I’m not even sure we mean the same thing when we think “Alt-Right”. What I’m saying is, you could really stand to observe the principle of charity.
I know I may have come off as scornful at points, which, I assure you, was not my intent. Part of the reason I wanted to stop was because I knew things were getting heated. Honestly though, your “Literally everything is political” attitude really hasn’t helped matters. I’m not so in love with dictionary definitions as you have stated, but there is one I think you ought to bear in mind:
That’s a quote from Evan Esar, though it is often attributed to Winston Churchill.
Now then, I’m going to see if there’s an “in the comments” tag that fits this image.
your current filter.Good times.
We’ve been over a lot of things that you just can’t seem to come to terms with.
Which would leave a disappearance/murder behind, even better!
Seriously, though, the easy-target thing sounds much more plausible, and I’d like to think she could just use the same sneaky skills she would there on the mane 6, but if she got close enough to do that while they were sleeping, it’d probably be smarter to slit their throats.
Even going that route, though, this would mean that she either tested it on one pony and jumped up to six, or, again, tested it on several ponies (which could make a mess on its own), was happy with results, and then moved forward with the plan.
What do you call it when honestly describing someone happens to coincide with insulting them? It’s a similar situation with the current US president, as I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate.
I saw this image, watched the linked video, agreed with the sentiment, and explained why to those that took issue with that. Of course, in your mind, where Chrysalis is competent, yes, I’m sure this would look like I was just attacking her. I disagree with the word choice because in that, and many other things, you’re wrong.
How much of the American alt-right have you been unfortunate enough to witness? Because these people don’t seem to have much in the way of beliefs, just intent (that being; literally anything to ‘own the libs.’) They swear up and down that one right-leaning politician absolutely did not do a thing they’re looking increasingly guilty of, then change their argument to “But even if they did, it would be okay because of all these reasons!”
Roy Moore was accused of creeping on underage girls in a mall, his supporters loudly insisted that he never did, more and more people came forward, and eventually it was “Well, I’d rather vote for a pedophile than a democrat.”
They changed their tune while completely sticking to what they wanted to do all along, going with “It doesn’t matter anyway” when proven wrong. Sound familiar?
Indeed, and it’s partly because of this kind of attitude that I remain open the possibility that I’m wrong; I don’t think one can learn anything if they believe they’ve already got all the answers.
On that same note, do you think it’s even possible that you’re only defending Chrysalis because you’ve spent the past few years thinking she was a great villain, made a strong impression on you, and you don’t want to admit you might have been wrong? Because again, I used to think she was one of the best in the entire series until someone showed me how I was mistaken.
I’m aware that I might come across as disrespectful, yes, possibly because a lot of your sentiments don’t really deserve respect. Seriously, have you seen some of your own posts, including this one? Do you think you haven’t been condescending and hostile several times? Or is this only a bad thing when other people do it?
“A place it doesn’t belong”? Literally everything is political, because nothing exists in a vacuum. Every piece of literature, every picture drawn, every building constructed, every conversation everyone has ever had on Earth is connected in ways big or small to the lives and events of the planet as a whole. Your politics are determined by who you are in your day to day life, which is where we are right now.
You don’t need to meet someone in person to see their behavior, and yours has been disingenuous, hypocritical, and willfully blind.
Do you really think I’m annoyed with you ‘just for disagreeing,’ or is that just how you block out what you’ve been doing here? The idea of shooting down falsehoods, for me, is that it discourages behavior like yours; people making up their own realities, picking and choosing what is and isn’t ‘real’ based on what they want, not what’s right in front of them, because that, I think, is the kind of behavior directly responsible for most of what’s wrong with the world today.
Evangelicals that support the practice of children being locked in cages, torn from their biological parents, and sold to ‘good, Christian’ families, for instance, tell themselves that they’re doing the right thing. Slave-owners centuries ago used similar logic; that taking these ‘savages’ from their homes and putting them to work was a good thing, because it was teaching them about Jesus. Religion is not the only thing to have been exploited like this, people claiming to fear ‘illegals’ because, no really, they’re raping and murdering people all over the place!
I could really go on and on, but the numbers in all cases indicate that all of their arguments are built on lies, excuses used to cover their real, less noble reasons for wanting these things. There are plenty more examples than in just recent history, but do you see the logical connection? People getting used to being able to say and do things for reasons other than the ones they really have in mind, getting into the groove of rewriting reality in their own heads, is, as far as I can tell, what enables this kind of evil to go on.
“Abortion is wrong and evil! Save the babies!”
And yet, the same people don’t seem to care at all once the child is actually born, or when yet another classroom is shot up. Almost as if they don’t actually care about the unborn children, but want the excuse to essentially punish women for having sex, especially when so many say things like “Well maybe just close your legs, then.” when told that contraception doesn’t always work.
That’s the kind of vibe I get from you, just on a much smaller level, one that I can only hope doesn’t grow to theirs if you keep doing this for long enough. You, and everyone else that’s responded with a bone to pick about my initial comment from weeks ago, have all tried to quash the notion that Chrysalis is an incompetent villain and a fucking loser. Is it because you just don’t think that’s true (which I think is normal; most people would probably speak up if someone went around insisting that concrete was great for making shoes), or because you like Chrysalis and don’t want to believe she might have some substantial failings? Is it even about that, or are you just really bothered by the idea of losing an argument?
I don’t expect you to answer me honestly, of course, but maybe you’ll give it some thought one day.
Bearing in mind, again, that I might be completely mistaken, I acknowledge that what I’m doing could very well be pointless, especially knowing what people are like, but I once heard “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
I would like to see everyone being honest with themselves and each other, even when the truth hurts, and when they come specifically asking me, like you did, I intend to answer in that spirit.
I’m sorry, do you think I was implying that she was stupid, not just bad at the changeling shtick in general? Incompetent. The word we’ve been addressing, over and over again, was incompetent. Bad at things. Like sneaking into a national hero’s place. Something we already know can be done, unless operating under the assumption that Twilight’s place is secretly an impregnable fortress only Starlight possibly-a-freak-of-nature Glimmer could get into.
Since I know you like dictionary definitions…
in·vis·i·ble
inˈvizəb(ə)l/Submit
adjective
unable to be seen; not visible to the eye.
If you’re referring to that bit where Starlight and Trixie hide from the changelings, did it occur to you that the wibbly-wobbly blue stuff was so that we, the viewers, would know where they were? Because the changeling’s face was inches from theirs and it didn’t notice them.
You make it sound like Chrysalis, a shapeshifter who could easily take the form of any of her friends/associates likely to be seen near the castle, is a common burglar who would have to resort to earth pony methods. Powerful enough to make six living clones, but not enough to do the go-to changeling thing long enough to stake the place out, wait for an opportunity in which the place was as vacant as she felt safe trying, and going in for a look around?
Again, it kind of sounds like you’re saying she just wouldn’t be very good at this stuff.
Sorry, I wasn’t aware you had no imagination (assuming you’re not just desperately scrambling for counterpoints) on top of your word difficulties, but if you need to hear possible methods to paint a picture in your head, I’ll try to be more specific: She could trick them into telling her what they know about it by posing as someone genuinely curious, she could get them alone and mind-control them into telling her right before either sealing them up in a goo-sac (unless she can’t do that on her own for some reason?) or addling their minds so badly that they don’t remember anything, pouring some form of liquor on them for good measure, and she could stalk them from a distance (with or without hearing-enhancing spells, which are as likely to exist as anything else) and wait until they share something helpful (though that may take a while), just off the top of my head.
You think everyone everywhere will only know the exact same things? And this still assumes that everyone in Equestria somehow just has barely any idea what’s going on with the regular crises. I know there are people that tune out the news in real life, but I think ‘we all almost died again’ is something everyone else would be talking about for a while.
If she didn’t know this vital detail about her own people, despite being in the most likely position of anyone to have that information? Not a good look for her, but if nobody at all could have known, if there was no sort of indication that such a thing was possible, I’m wondering where Thorax got the idea to share love in the first place (something he was talking about when Spike found him in the Crystal Empire).
So you apparently assume. Again.
Unless somebody at the top knew, but wanted to maintain control, like a maniacal queen who only cares about ruling over as many subjects as possible. It would be in the best interest of changelings as a whole, but clearly not Chrysalis, because when it came to light, she threw away her chance to have that and still be their leader. It looks to me like she doesn’t want to be a leader, she wants to be a boss; unquestionably in charge of everything with total control, not a servant of those she leads like a leader is supposed to be.
Certainly fits with the rest of her characterization, but maybe we’ll hear a reason directly from her some day?
You asked ‘what physical evidence?’ There is overwhelming physical evidence. That contradicts what you wrote. I don’t know if it’s doing any good to tell you over and over again that the rainbow magic we see is powered by the friendship between the bearers, but that’s what’s happening.
Finding that not literally every detail was 100% accurate does not dismiss everything else. If she’s going to make an effort to learn about this stuff, deciding that she knows better and rejecting any information she doesn’t like the sound of is a really stupid way to do it. Again, the mark of a scholar could have helped her here, if she bothered at all.
I did; you never said anything about it being a matter of short-term before that paragraph there, just that her act was good enough. Kind of sounds like you come up with this, and some of your other arguments, later and tacked them on to make excuses when earlier ones fell apart.
Her failure with the clones didn’t completely screw her only due to dumb luck; that she didn’t get as far as Sunset before things blew up in her face. Her performance as the photographer, however, may still bite her later, because you might be surprised how many cases have been solved a decade or more later. I doubt it’ll be that long before Chrysalis gets caught, if she doesn’t do something stupid to get cornered even sooner.
Has it not always been a leader-figure standing at the center, acting as a conduit for everyone else?
There you go struggling with words again. I said it was triggered like any other spell, not that it was like a normal spell in its entirety.
Given your approach to what words mean, that could really be any saying at all, couldn’t it?
And yet, you seem to have no problems whatsoever assuming that she did so much preparation, on top of all the others.
You asserted that she couldn’t just brainwash them because it might have made them less useful. Disobedient clones are already not useful. See the logical connection there?
And yet, he still easily obeyed when she wanted him to and did what she needed him to do. More than can be said of the clones.
I’ll start with this one because it might save you some time and it seems you don’t read through these things in full before replying:
I agree that there’s not likely much headway to make, because I really can’t make things much clearer and you seem to be clinging to your broken arguments or insisting that ‘it doesn’t matter’ when not sticking to assumptions that favor your preferred interpretation while simultaneously shutting out others, consistency with the show be damned, and that’s when you’re not just having trouble with words.
I don’t think I will ‘reconsider my attitude,’ because my attitude is that, while it’s unlikely that you and those like you will ever concede that you may have been mistaken, I feel that, when questioned on my views, it’s not unreasonable that I should try to answer. Nor is it unreasonable that I don’t hold people who prove intellectually dishonest (and not terribly respectful themselves) in high regard. It may not ‘do me any favors,’ but clearly, neither does being completely unoffensive, and it didn’t seem to stop you, either. It makes me wonder if you’re being disingenuous there, too; calling for ‘civility’ while doing nothing of the sort yourself.
Stop responding if you want, imagine all paragraphs below this are just me putting a finger to my lips and going “BIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIBI,” I certainly can’t continue this by myself, but, again, when people specifically choose to talk to me (as you did), I generally try to answer.
Because it’s true. Your unrelenting denial doesn’t change that.
While she does have her share of blunders, that incident, and practicing a spell, does not make her incompetent. I guess it’s hard for you to keep things straight with your interpretation of how words work, but not practicing her clone spell, as just about everything to do with the caper indicates she didn’t, is part of what makes Chrysalis incompetent.
Also, it was you that said that for Chrysalis to get living, functional clones with ‘no deformities’ on her first try would be unlikely. Using the exact same logic, Twilight should not have been able to make an orange-frog by accident, don’t you think?
Because you can’t seem to grasp how inane your assertion is. Even though you’re most likely blocking it all out, I’ll try to break it down one more time, just for those keeping score at home.
The Element of Laughter has to do with laughter, joviality, mirth, a sense of levity between friends. The bearer’s behavior and the name leave no ambiguity about this. The same sort of system goes for the others, and if Chrysalis were to just wave this off, she would have to be an idiot.
As she would be if she really can’t connect these two dots herself.
Here’s something that may just blow your mind: I actually remain open to the possibility of being wrong.
The notion that being “sure” and “confident” is somehow indicative of correctness is fallacious at best, and the mark of a scholar is the ability to consider an idea without necessarily believing in it. I approach these things with the notion that I may be mistaken firmly in mind, so that if/when the facts (as sure as I can reasonably be that that is what they are) contradict what I thought to be true, I can easily adjust to the truth. Something you have great difficulty with, I think.
I think this is the second time you’ve dropped one of your arguments when it fell apart, claiming it ‘didn’t matter’ anyway. Unfortunately, the ‘Equestrian values’ one doesn’t really hold water either unless, like the delusional cartoon villain she is, she just dismisses outright the heroes’ way of life because it simply must be beneath her own. Or at least, because acknowledging and addressing it seriously could leave her seeing something she really didn’t want to; that all her struggles, all her suffering, and most of all her current predicament might actually be her own fault.
This would mean that, as I concurred with the above source material in my first post, she’s just a fucking loser.
And maybe she got in through one of those many windows that seem to be all over the place, as we know Starlight, like Chrysalis, can fly. If you have to operate under the assumption that her castle is essentially magical Fort Knox to convince yourself there’s just no way she could have gotten in, you can, but there’s nothing in canon backing it up. This is completely ignoring that, again, her old library hasn’t gone anywhere and doesn’t seem to have anything in the way of security.
It’s hilarious to hear you talk about dodgy assumptions when so many of your arguments are built on them. You seem to be thinking that Chrysalis would have to automatically know that one, maybe two tomes in existence could possibly point her in the direction of publicly-available knowledge and that it’s possible this book just can’t be found at all anymore.
She doesn’t need to just know about that particular book (or two, because in the pilot, Twilight started with one, than ran home to get another. Maybe more, because I think Pinkie found something just looking under “E” in the common library of a town mostly inhabited by earth ponies), because as was said earlier, the information she’s looking for would, if she put in that time, come up while she was doing the research you seem so sure she would have done, but simply couldn’t for one dubious excuse or another. Walking into any given library or educational facility and asking anypony about the Elements of Harmony would be a good start.
Hell, the Element Bearers have stained-glass windows dedicated to their adventures in the royal palace, you really think nobody would be able to tell her anything useful? That no sort of documentation and/or refresher material has since been written about the escapades? Possibly by Twilight herself?
One could go with the headcanon that everyone everywhere clammed up and knows nothing, the texts all lost somehow and no info about the Elements exists anywhere Chrysalis could have accessed it, but what we see and what we know of the characters and this world indicates otherwise.
@Background Pony #536E
Where do you get that from?
So, not like every other spell then? I really don’t know where you’re going with this.
I believe there’s a saying about brick walls.
Or her test results where misleading in some way…
Or this was just an exceptional case for whatever reason…
That’s the problem with making assumptions based on limited information.
Did you just forget the sentence immediately before this one?
Yes, he was lucid when he still had a hint of free will and could, and did, argue with “Cadance”. If she wanted their complete loyalty, it would have come at their competence.
We’ve been over this.
We’ve been over the acting point as well. Besides which, she doesn’t need to go through the whole song and dance of pretending to be a pony. She’d just need to find an easy enough target. Look for some tucked away, poorly secured house and take the hair from whatever pony lives there. Alternately, she could just abduct them and take all the hairs and photos she wants.
Not former, latter. My mistake. Sorry.
Polemic /pəˈlɛmɪk/
noun: polemic; plural noun: polemics
Trust me, I’ve noticed. Things aren’t much better across the pond, to be honest.
People don’t act like zealots because people can agree to disagree. People act like zealots because they believe their views are the objective, unquestionable truth. It’s even worse with politics because of how important the issues are. People become ever more entrenched in partisanship. They dismiss anyone that disagrees with them as a fool, a liar or both. It’s hard for someone to admit they’re wrong, even in the face of evidence, when they’re invested in their position, when they’ve spent however long telling themselves that dissenters are enemies, are morally degenerates, are going to bring forth a disaster if they get their way.
Mate, this is exactly what I mean. Listen to yourself! Do you have any idea how pretentious, egotistical and belligerent this all sounds? You’re taking the attitude of politics to a place it doesn’t belong. You’re already judging me, someone you’ve never even met, just for disagreeing with you. How is any of this helpful to anyone?
Look, we’ve been doing this for several days and I can already see this thread degrading into argumentum ad nauseum. There’s really nothing more we can gain from this. I don’t want this going on any longer than it needs to, so I’ll probably just quit if this goes much further. I hope you reconsider your attitude, or at least tone down the smugness. It really isn’t doing you any favours, mate.
Not a polemic, just pointing out the facts, whether her fanboys want to hear it or not. Also, you say ‘at least have the decency’ as though I’m the one stubbornly denying the blatantly obvious. The questionable decency ball has been in your court from the start, mate.
So you keep asserting.
I remember that it was an accident and that she was attempting to turn an apple into an orange. I remember that she was practicing with (i.e. Testing) the spell. But I suppose that makes Twilight an incompetent protagonist, right?
Mate, you’re missing the point. You think I don’t know that? We’re only having this discussion because you can’t stop talking (in circles) about names and the divine truth they supposedly contain. If the school and journal do not elucidate the connection between friendship and the elements of harmony, reading them will not make the slightest bit of difference to someone who wants to steal them, will it?
If you have to specify that you think something, then evidently there is a case to be made. At any rate, it’s irrelevant. This still comes under the “Equestrian values” bit I mentioned.
It was never specified how she got in though. Furthermore, Starlight Glimmer is insanely powerful. She could have found her way in through some ludicrously complex magical nonsense or Twilight just forgot to lock the door that day. Whatever it was, it happened offscreen. Meanwhile, there’s a dodgy assumption we’ve both been making this whole time that I ought to point out. Why should we assume that Chrysalis even knows the book exists, or that Twilight has a copy?
Intelligence doesn’t make you invisible and even invisibility doesn’t make you unseen. She’d have to know that there was no one in there (or risk alerting two extremely powerful magic users), disguise herself and make sure she isn’t caught trying to break into the (extremely public) dwelling of a national hero, right in the centre of town. You don’t think people will question why Twilight can’t unlock her own front door? You don’t think anyone will question who that weird mare is and why she’s climbing into the princess of friendship’s window?
“One way or another”. I’m glad you’re being so specific. Otherwise it might give the impression that your expectations are poorly defined and unreasonable. Wouldn’t want that, would we.
Seriously though, it doesn’t matter how many randomers she questions if they’re all working from the same information.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. At any rate, she didn’t. No one else did either. For all we know, Thorax was the first changeling in history to discover that. If anyling had known beforehand, there would have been post-metamorphosis changelings from the start. It would be in literally every changeling’s interest to spread that information as far and as wide as possible.
So, where does the friendship part come in? Nothing in there contradicts what I wrote.
I certainly don’t remember any foals being eaten, do you?
My point is that historical accounts don’t mean a great deal in this case. Some parts are crass exaggerations, others are missing entirely. If the “evil foal-eater” bit is false, why should Chrysalis, who would be disinclined towards trusting Equestrians anyway, believe the “wields all six elements of harmony at once” bit. Perhaps one of those omissions was a group of five other element wielders. Perhaps there were no Elements involved and things played out completely differently.
She can’t see through time and knows Equestrian historians can’t be trusted. It would certainly be a good piece of propaganda wouldn’t it? Having your immortal god empress personally defeat a cannibalistic monster with the power of friendship would certainly make one popular with the establishment. Even a more sedate telling would just sound like a more plausible lie. Less “Hitler should have built more wunderwaffen”, more “Hitler should have listened to his generals”.
You should pay more attention, mate. Her disguise was a good as it needed to be. It’s the “connect-the-dots afterwards” bit that doesn’t matter.
Except she did fail and it still doesn’t matter. Whatever lead they might get from a hypothetical investigation would be completely outdated. It would be like going to the Bundeswehr and saying “I have information on Napoleon’s battle plans”. The battle’s over! You’re too late! Move along, sir!
We have established no such thing.
I won’t talk about Sunset here. She’s not really relevant and it will only fill space.
I’ll take a look at your other comment later. If you still insist on continuing this inane polemic against a fictional character, could you at least have the decency to wait until I’ve done that? I would certainly appreciate it.
Ignoring that Twilight (who has a horn) apparently directs these things every time while her friends stand close? Seems pretty straightforward to me that, given the all-important bonds they share in their hearts, the spirits of the Elements only need The Spark to ignite the existing Friendship™ power available, the rest happening from there.
I feel like it’s worth noting that none of the humans in the other world generally have horns either, and even when they do, manage to cast spells without them just fine. Almost as if this omnipotent Harmony magic isn’t limited to biology, if we’re not assuming the wielders’ actions are always a coincidence when the Elements decide to activate.
The subject here was how the Elements work, something you act as if Chrysalis just had no way of knowing. The stuff learned at that school is how they work, neatly answering what the power is and where it comes from, the power apparently released like that of anything else even if, again, they don’t decide exactly what it does after that.
Especially someone who consistently makes tons of them.
Which would confirm that she didn’t do much, if any testing first. Probably none at all.
Yes, because clones that don’t obey her anyway would totally be a help in her plans.
Shining seemed pretty lucid to me when he was telling off his sister for not trusting the bride, right about at the same level as everyone else, and without that green-eyes enchantment cue. Pretty impressive for a vegetable to keep a shield over the whole city for so long, too.
I just giggled like a dolt at the mental image of “City-Wide Forcefield: Runs on a Potato!”
More efficient to have six little monkeys she can’t control jumping on her bed? Maybe it’d have taken more power to warm up the spell six times, but as her plan hinges on these things doing what she says, I’d think it would be worth it.
Looking at the ‘weak and starving’ angle again, I kind of wonder why she wouldn’t have enough power in the first place. Surely such a skilled and resourceful shapeshifter and mage wouldn’t have trouble feeding just herself, unless she were any good at the mimic-and-love-feed routine without her minions to fall back on. It’s not like she was Thorax and refused to drain unwilling targets.
Meaning there would be multiple incidents of that terrible performance and she not only wasn’t getting better with practice (unless what we saw was the good version? Her earlier attempts, if they happened at all, must have made for one Hell of a blooper reel), but left a trail of suspicious incidents.
Then she would need six more hairs and photos. I think we’ve covered why this happening in a way nobody notices is iffy?
There are other things I could be doing than correcting people, but the reason I invest the time at all (even when the post just goes poof twice in a row) is because I think correcting falsehoods is worth the that time and effort. Do the people I argue with change their minds? Almost never, but I think the truth is worth addressing, even if it’s usually a long and tiresome process, because if nothing else, plenty of other people can see the reasoning themselves.
Dismantling the nonsense (bunk, I dare say!) means, I hope, that people will see and acknowledge the truth rather than retreating into whatever make-believe reality they’ve attempted to will into existence. If you’ve ever beaten Persona 4, you may see where I’m coming from.
This extends beyond fanon-canon stuff, obviously, but the reason I have such a bone to pick with people insisting on lies is that, near as I can tell, the attitude of disregarding the facts and making ones’ own reality is a big part of what’s wrong with the world today.
I hate to bring politics into this, but have you seen the United States the past few years? There are legions of people willfully blind to their Dear Leader’s failures, stupidity, treason, etc. and swear up and down that the previous administration are nazi pedophiles and conspired to turn the frogs gay, with more such idiocy every week. Complete garbled nonsense, blatant disregard for simple facts that anyone at all can see, all given room to fester into that in the first place because, I think, the attitude of ‘agree to disagree’ even on things that were never a matter of opinion, has gone unchecked for so long, allowing people to pick and choose what they believe to be ‘real’ rather than what the facts and a little thinking shows, because too many people value their own opinions (“Chrysalis is a good villain” being a very minor example, comparatively speaking) more than spun gold.
I don’t know if I can do justice in spelling this out, so I apologize if what I’m saying is at all hard to understand, but I think starting at the small levels, correcting even ‘little white’ lies, should have been done rigidly as opposed to letting people go on being wrong more and more, spreading that wrongness to anyone that would listen, and, like a sickness, weakening every body it infects.
I try to correct what I think is nonsense because I think the truth isn’t something that should just be ‘eh, agree to disagree,’ even at the small levels, whether people are actually listening to me or not, because I’ll have done what I could to make a difference. You’ve already firmly shown me that the truth doesn’t especially matter to you, so if you want to stop here, I can’t make you continue.
Only to someone who isn’t paying attention, like an incompetent villain who, in their arrogance, thinks they’ve already got everything figured out.
Remember when Twilight made a living hybrid of orange and frog? That’s what the magic in this show can do, even on the first try. I can appreciate that in the real world, substantial change is hard and takes considerable effort, but in Equestria, you can apparently do pretty much anything if you’ve got a horn.
I wouldn’t have thought someone could miss the point this hard without being willfully blind, but that is the only way most of your arguments work. Nothing was said about them learning to cast spells or draw that kind of power from it, they are learning friendship. Which happens to be magic itself, in its own way. In addition to the warm, cuddly companionship stuff, that way is also where the rainbow lasers come from.
Maybe some, but I think there have been enough centered around the subject matter that there’s still no case to be made here.
Even sticking the the dodgy assumption that there are so few copies of this book, we know that Twilight (known scholar quite likely to have made notes somewhere about the magic that changed her life so much and of which she is the standing princess) doesn’t have much in the way of security because again, Starlight did it apparently without a hitch. Was even comfortably sitting there with her feet up with Twilight got back.
Are you trying to say that she doesn’t have the skill for this after all? What would that make her? Because otherwise, there’s no reason she couldn’t, right?
Any given pony off the street? Maybe not, but I don’t think gathering information just stops after asking just one or two people, and if she had the diligence for research, she could either keep at it beyond that, or find one way or another to get the information out of those who were at the heart of it. But she doesn’t, and she didn’t. Apparently didn’t even know about her own people enough to share love, if she isn’t just so utterly evil (which, if true, is not a sign of incompetence, just odiousness) that she knew and consciously chose to keep that info from her swarm to better control them.
How many world-healing waves are we up to at this point? Discord’s chaos magic undone in seconds, the Plundervines (I think was their name?) being wiped out in a blink across the country, and the magic being returned to each and every pony in the country seconds after Tirek went down are the first examples to come to mind. I agree that some of what they do doesn’t seem especially conductive to friendliness, but it does maintain the Harmony, one way or another, usually by curb-stomping things it finds to be truly evil.
Provable bunk. That is what we call things that all came true before she started allegedly looking for info. Interesting.
Call me crazy, but pattern recognition tells me that if a few ‘myths’ have consistently proven to be true, maybe that ‘mythologized’ history is worth a closer look.
Kinda seems like you’re changing your argument from “Her act was fine/believable” to “It doesn’t matter anyway,” which tells me that either she’s a lousy actor anyway or too impatient and foolish to take things slow and sensible.
If she dismissed the possibility of failing entirely, banking the future on her unbridled success? That’s the kind of move an incompetent Saturday morning cartoon villain would do, which Chrysalis practically personifies. The kicker here is, even if she had gotten what she wanted out of that venture, even if she’d gotten perfectly working, obedient clones and they could use the Elements, she’d still be screwed in the exact same way Sunset was, because she just didn’t know what she was dealing with.
I can understand Sunset not knowing anything about the Elements (indeed, it’s her knowing anything about them at all that looks like a plot-hole), but Chrysalis, as we’ve firmly established, doesn’t have much of an excuse.
Meaningful is correct. Very clearly is not.
That wasn’t what I meant. That the clones should function at all without prior testing simply isn’t plausible. It would be like creating Avatar in one day on Windows Movie Maker. If this were her first batch, they would probably have the intelligence of wild animals or just drop dead instantly. It seems more likely to me that she tested it beforehand. Maybe she based her conclusions on misleading results. Maybe the conditions changed in a manner that threw everything off. Maybe there was a housefly in the other transmitter pod. Again, we don’t know why Chrysalis’ cloning spell went wrong.
From what we’ve seen of the friendship school, the point is to teach about friendship, not how it relates to magic. You remember the bit about Equestrian morality? Spreading the Equestrian value of friendship was the point. Same goes for the journal and we have even less to go on with that.
I’m saying that some of them aren’t happening.
Because Twilight took it with her, there wouldn’t be a copy in her old library. The new one is the current residence of Twilight Sparkle, a very sensible mare who can at least match Chrysalis in a fight. If you think her photographer guise was suspicious, imagine Chrysalis trying to break into a national hero’s palace. A laypony’s understanding of current events and recent history wouldn’t tell her much about a highly mythologised past either.
What physical-world-effecting evidence? The Elements of Harmony, even if they were seen in action, could easily be construed as powerful magical artefacts with pleasant sounding names, since their only public uses were to banish and petrify. Doesn’t sound particularly friendly from where I’m sitting. Why should someone like Chrysalis think that it was the magic of friendship responsible for that?
@Background Pony #536E
“This stuff” being Celestia’s use of the Elements, remember. To be frank, she probably couldn’t “know” that even if she had read it. The history of Equestria is extremely mythologised. Before Nightmare Moon’s return, people believed she was a whimsical fiction, a foal-eating bogeyman to frighten the youth. Before he escaped, no one had even heard the name Discord. Why should Chrysalis trust Equestrian popular history when it’s so full of provable bunk?
Chrysalis put her plan in motion immediately. If all had gone as planned, and I’m not saying it could have, Chrysalis would have made of with the Elements on the very same day. All she had to do in her disguise was get what she needed and leave without getting caught. Since her plan failed, it doesn’t matter how much the Mane Six know about it. It would be like telling Luigi Cadorna how to win the battle of Cannae.
How? Only two of them have horns, how could the other four even know how to “fire off” anything. Obviously they gave to will the Elements to function, but that’s about it. From that point onward, it’s all the Elements’ doing (The magic, obviously. No body hijackings are necessary). Compare that to the Alicorn Amulet or Inspiration Manifestation Spell, both of which functioned like other spells and where channelled through the horn.
They aren’t taught that this trigger’s them though. Not that we’re aware of, at any rate.
Yes, a mistake. The kind that anyone could make.
She obviously didn’t know they would be so inept before she created them. Besides, if they came out properly, they might have been more valuable as they were. We’ve seen what too much mesmerising can do. Shining Armour was practically a vegetable by the time the wedding came about.
I’d imagine it was just more efficient to cast six at once. At any rate, she’d have taken the hairs from whomever she was attempting to clone and photograph them with the functioning camera that she shapeshifted into existence.
The former, I would imagine.
Look, I think we should just leave this conversation off here.
These posts are becoming impractically long and far too time consuming to write. I have other things to be getting on with, which I’m sure is the same for you. I doubt that either of us will change our minds over this. It would probably be better to stop.
Two ideas being proposed here, I think:
Which one makes more sense to you?
Nobody just rips out hairs when trying to touch up someone’s look, any odd detail could help them sniff her out, piece together what she’s up to, and how to stop her, and connecting that the shapeshifter who swore revenge on you not so long ago might be related to the imposter at this place the suspicious person in recent memory said she worked is not the massive leap you seem to think it is.
And yet, they don’t act on their own, their wielders consistently choosing to fire off the rainbows each time, even if they don’t control everything about the outcome. Unless the Elements are secretly hijacking their users each time and nobody’s mentioned how they lose all control of themselves for a minute?
The spirit needed to be able to trigger them is what Cosy Glow and everyone else learns at Twilight’s school, which is apparently simple enough that gradeschoolers can literally teach a class on it.
Forgetting something important is called a mistake. This is consistent with Chrysalis being incompetent in general.
It apparently didn’t occur to her to spawn them one at a time and beam them when they popped up, either, or to have some kind of incapacitation spell ready if she’s so good with magic, or to make sure her spell was cast in a location they couldn’t escape if she couldn’t beam all of them at once, like setting heavy cages around the spots they’d be spawning or something. Unless it just has to be cast for all six at once, and if so, where did she get the hairs and photos the first time to figure that out? Does it have to be these same six mares because they’re the ones she wants, or would any six do?
Which seems more likely, that she confronted all of these issues while working out the spell and still suffered the pitfalls, or that she just jumped in with the assumption that everything would work out? Seems like she wouldn’t proceed with a plan she knew had so many problems, if she was such a great ‘planner and strategist’ and not a desperate fool at the end of her pitiful rope.
Okay, third time’s the charm!
Going with the short version.
These names are very clearly, objectively meaningful. There is no case to be made otherwise.
The deformity was their personalities, the only thing that would have mattered in using the Elements.
It’s weird that they would come out as the opposite of the normals, actually, it suggests that she did try to tamper with their minds, flubbed it completely, and failed to even make them obedient. You’d think that would come up in R&D; “Are my clones listening to my commands at all? Can I even use them if they do get the Elements?” Almost as if it was her first time firing it up and she just rushed her way through it. The alternative means she’d have needed pictures and hairs for every single test, so, if she did any prior testing, either she got those offscreen with a different method and did something different for no reason this time, or tried it on other ponies, also through methods we can only speculate on, decided her results were ready for prime-time, and proceeded with what we saw. This raises a lot of questions about what happened with the other hypothetical clones, if she didn’t just rush it.
The friendship lessons ARE the source of power she’s after, as she’d have to be a complete dunce to not know by now. That is what Cozy Glow was learning in Twilight’s publicly open school, and what was published for all the world to see. It’s about as close to a how-to guide to the Elements as you can get. The failure of all those ponies to grasp the lessons is not a point in Chrysalis’s favor, it just means they’re all idiots.
If you’re trying to say that the spontaneous songs aren’t really happening, they’ve been directly referenced in dialogue multiple times. No sale.
One might argue that the Harmony magic is helping ponies harmonize with such ease, but I don’t think there’s any proof.
Because it was history, revived when Nightmare Moon came back in the flesh. Even if we assume Twilight has one of very few copies, is there any reason the supposedly clever shapeshifter couldn’t sneak into one of Twilight’s libraries (the one she lives in or the one we’ve seen is just collecting dust) to look for info at the source? Or just ask around, since pretty much everyone should know what happened within the last few years, if her ‘spy network’ didn’t tell her anything about what was going on back when she had them? Just taking a normal pony form and chatting up any of Twilight’s friends, if not Twilight herself, would do the trick, if she weren’t such a lousy actor.
She has no excuse for total ignorance, but that’s what we see from her. That is why it makes more sense to me that she just didn’t do her homework.
This demands that Chrysalis treat all available info about the Elements like it’s just pony propaganda, dismissing all physical-world-affecting evidence to the contrary. This only makes sense if she’s a stubborn moron, which might explain why she abandoned her hive on the grounds that her scheme was foiled, even when they’d just secured an essentially limitless supply of love and she had the chance to stay their leader, nothing whatsoever said about a punishment for what she’d just tried to pull.
Testing!
EDIT: Okay, I’ve tried to reply twice now and the site ate my post both times. Not sure what’s going on, hope to be able to get back to you soon, sorry if you’ve been waiting for a reply.
Edited
your current filter.Names can be misleading. We’ve been over this.
You mean the journal from season 4? The one that the mane six wrote their friendship lessons in? The one they used in the period where they could not access the Elements of Harmony at all? The one that they published two seasons later as a means to spread their friendship lessons, not as a how-to guide on the Elements of Harmony? The one that everyone went mad over and completely missed the point of? Do you mean that journal?
As for the songs, I’ll just leave this here:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalWorldHypotheses
So without even testing her spell once, Chrysalis managed to create, on her first ever attempt, six living, breathing, sapient clones, so similar to their originals that the originals themselves cannot tell them apart, hampered only by their personality defects. That seems like a remarkably, almost implausibly successful first attempt with a major experimental spell. You’d think that they’d have some sort of grotesque deformity or simply fail to develop at all, but apparently not.
In my eyes, however, that doesn’t seem plausible, especially when your other claims are taken into account. Chrysalis herself said she’d “been planning this for quite some time” and that was after a season-and-a-half of absence. Time which, I do not doubt, was spent developing her cloning spell. Let’s not forget that she wouldn’t have any use for a cloning spell unless she had already formed her plan to seize the Elements of Harmony, so she’d also be researching where to find them. But since you propose that Chrysalis’ research was minimal and her spell was rushed, what do you proposed she did with all that time?
You assume that Twilight’s book was easy to get a hold of. Why? We’ve only seen the one copy and it belonged to Twilight Sparkle, a bibliophile who is far more likely to possess old and rare books than most ponies. Not to mention the fact that the histories it describes where dismissed as legends until Nightmare Moon’s return.
Try to imagine how that would sound to someone who actually lived in Equestria. Friendship is basically the core of Equestrian morality. Any talk of the magic of friendship would sound like a promotion of Equestrian values rather than an actual form of magic. It would sound quite like how the US uses the term “freedom” or how a communist state would use “the people”. Of course, there is the matter of the occasional villain being publicly defeated with the Elements, but there’s no reason to assume the name “Elements of Harmony” isn’t just the name of a powerful magical artefact. That would apply even moreso for someone like Chrysalis, who has no love for Equestria.
Chrysalis is acting in a manner that suggests she does not possess a piece of information. This information can be found in a book. The book is old and obscure, therefore it is likely out of print. A book that is out of print is harder to find copies of than a book that is still in print. Therefore, the information in that book is less likely to be available. Therefore, Chrysalis is less likely to possess a copy. Therefore, Chrysalis is less likely to possess the information.
Conclusion: Chrysalis is acting in a manner that suggests she does not presently possess a copy of the book.
I hope you got all that, mate. There’s a quiz later.
Given that we don’t know how that meeting was arranged, why she was late or whether Chrysalis’ pony form is fictitious or not, I think we can leave her lateness off the table for the moment. She gave an explanation for her erratic demeanour (“Now I’ll get out of your manes. I know how busty you are.”) and her hair pulling (“Let me just pretty you all up!”). As for “what her cover would have needed”, she was posing as a photographer. She needed photos, she got photos. There’s no reason to think it goes any deeper than that.
As for the Canterlot Historical Society, it’s irrelevant. Let’s say they do, on the off-chance, decide to check out the Canterlot Historical Society and find things amiss in some manner. Let’s also suppose they don’t rationalise it away, as people are wont to do, as them simply remembering wrong. Why should that be a problem? It still doesn’t prove that Chrysalis was ever there. Just as likely it was some common impersonator, faking association for their own reasons. But what if they do deduce her involvement? Chrysalis only needed to keep up the guise for a few minutes. By the time anyone could check her background, she was already long gone. What could they do with that information anyway? Make her even more of an outlaw?
Do you? It was explicitly explained that the elements had a degree of autonomy and did not work “like any other spell”. The episode was Shadow Play part 2, I believe.
No rational reason, no.
One might suggest, however, that given the stress of the situation, it simply didn’t occur to her. Hunting down six obnoxious clones was her primary concern at that point. Thoughts of “Also, I’d better mesmerise them when I find them”, would tend to get lost in the stream of consciousness. She couldn’t just brainwash them from the start either. They have self preservation instincts. The second she started on one, they’d all scatter.
Hit the nail on the head.
your current filter.