Author's Notes:

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.