Several different sources converged onto this story.

The first and most important was Alfred Bester’s astonishing story [url=www.lunsfordnet.com/get/pdf/26205]“5,271,009”[/url], which I read, gosh, 30 years ago.  It’s about an artist who’s gone mad, regressed to childhood, and believes that his dreams are the source of his artistic inspiration.  It’s also the story of a mysterious art connoisseur with mysterious powers, who was the catalyst for this artist’s madness and now seeks to restore him to sanity.  It turns out, in the end, that this mysterious man is exiled from his home world for his own childish dreams, and helps this artist out of sympathy--though his help comes with a great cost.

The mysterious man leads the artist through a series of dreams.  The artist has only childish wish-fulfilment dreams.  The mysterious man starts taking over all of the characters in all of his dreams, Being John Malkovich-style, and disrupts them in humorous ways.  I ripped this scene off:

The General Assembly was filled when Halsyon entered. Hundreds of tall, gaunt, bitter diplomats applauded as he made his way to the podium, still dressed in convict plasti-clothes. Halsyon looked around resentfully.

"Yes," he grated. "You all applaud. You all revere me now; but where were you when I was

framed, convicted, and jailed ... an innocent man? Where were you then?"

"Halsyon, forgive us. God damn!" they shouted.

"I will not forgive you, I suffered for seventeen years in the Grssh mines. Now it's your turn to

suffer."

"Please, Halsyonl"

"Where are your experts? Your professors? Your specialists? Where are your electronic

calculators? Your super thinking machines? Let them solve the mystery of the Grssh."

"They can't, old whiskey and soda.  Entre nous.  They're stopped cold. Save us, Halsyon.  Auf wiedersehen."

Judith took his arm. "Not for my sake, Jeff," she whispered."I know you'll never forgive me for the injustice I did you. But for the sake of all the other girls in the galaxy who love and are loved."

"I still love you, Judy."

"I've always loved you, Jeff."

"Okay. I didn't want to tell them but you talked me into it." Halsyon raised his hand for silence. In

the ensuing hush he spoke softly. "The secret is this, gentlemen. Your calculators have assembled data to ferret out the secret weakness of the Grssh. They have not been able to find any. Consequently you have assumed that the Grssh have no secret weakness.  That was a wrong assumption."

The General Assembly held its breath.

"Here is the secret.  You should have assumed there was something wrong with the calculators."

"God damn!" the General Assembly cried. "Why didn't we think of that? God damn!"

"And I know what's wrong!

There was a deathlike hush.

The door of the General Assembly burst open. Professor Deathhush, tall, gaunt, bitter, tottered in.

"Eureka!" he cried. "I've found it. Goddamn.Something wrong with the thinking machines.Three comes after two, not before."

The General Assembly broke into cheers. Professor Deathhush was seized and pummeled happily. Bottles were opened. His health was drunk. Several medals were pinned on him. He beamed.

"Hey!" Halsyon called. "That was my secret. I'm the one man who on account of a mysterious mutant strain in my—"

The ticker tape began pounding: ATTENTION. ATTENTION. HUSHENKOV IN MOSCOW REPORTS DEFECT IN CALCULATORS. 3 COMES AFTER 2 AND NOT BEFORE. REPEAT: AFTER (UNDERSCORE) NOT BEFORE.

A postman ran in. "Special delivery from Doctor Lifehush at Caltech. Says something's wrong with the thinking machines.Three comes after two, not before."

A telegraph boy delivered a wire: THINKING MACHINE WRONG STOP TWO COMES BEFORE THREE STOP NOT AFTER STOP.VON DREAMHUSH, HEIDELBERG.

A bottle was thrown through the window. It crashed on the floor revealing a bit of paper on which was scrawled: Did you ever stop to thine that maibe the nomber 3 comes after 2 insted of in front? Down with the Grish. Mr. Hush-Hush.

Halsyon buttonholed Judge Field."What the hell is this?" he demanded. "I thought I was the one man in the world with that secret."

"Himmel Herr Gott,” Judge Field replied impatiently. "You are all alike. You dream you are the one man with a secret, the one man with a wrong, the one man with an injustice, with a girl, without a girl, with or without anything. God damn. You bore me,you one-man dreamers. Get lost.”

I didn’t capture the humor in that scene, nor the general humor of Bester’s story.

The second source was my dissatisfaction with the Biblical God.  Christians make a big deal out of God’s “love,” yet that love ends up tossing most people into a furnace for all eternity.  It seems to me that the guy who designed humans shouldn’t be shocked and horrified and blame the humans when they act like he designed them to act.  And it seems to me a real loving relationship would be one that likes or at least accepts something about the beloved, rather than one that is entirely conditional on the beloved adopting the correct attitude of respect towards the lover, and which declares that the “beloved” is so worthless that he “must be born again”, that he is so worthless that the very best thing even an almighty God can do with him is crumple him up, throw him out, and start from scratch.

I don’t want to start an argument about that right now; my point is that I wanted to depict a better God, one who exemplified a God-like love.  That’s where the story began:  with a scene of a brony, dreaming a horrible rape fantasy about Luna, and getting caught at it by Luna, and her reprimanding him gently, but not being surprised or shocked, and then telling him, right then, that she still loves him.

The third source was, of course, the featured box.  I did research for this story.  I read second-person Anonymous stories.  They weren’t all that bad!  In fact, the Anon stories by darf and Crowley were a step up from the usual featured-box fare (though the one I read by Crowley makes me think there might be somethin’ wrong with that boy).  The soldier-in-Equestria crossovers might have been a more just target, but would’ve made a boring story.

Luna enunciates several “lessons” or “morals” throughout the story:

Dreams are meant to be shared with others and made real.  Her view is that dreams are the motive force in people’s lives; the dream must come first, the reality follow.

One can have only one dream.  The idea that you can have enough time and energy to pursue multiple dreams, or that you can pursue other dreams as mere entertainment that are rooted in a fundamentally different way of looking at the world, are things most people take for granted, yet in my experience seem to be false.

Shame is a useful fiction.  This needs explication, but roughly, Luna has seen into everyone’s heart, and the game-theoretic implication--mylittleeconomy could tell you all about it--is that while she still encourages people to spurn those whose shameful thoughts are exposed in waking life, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do the same to everyone whose shameful thoughts she sees in their dreams.  The usual social conventions don’t apply with her.  That is how she’s able to love from a God’s perspective.  That’s the prompt tie-in, BTW.

“Do as thou wilt” is the one true law.  That is, subject to some qualifications, not my own “belief” (I don’t believe in beliefs; I believe in statements that improve predictive accuracy), but a view which I think most people would be better off following than the dictates of any church.  All organisms naturally want to do what is, by some measure, good.  Humans and ponies naturally want to do what is good for the herd.  It’s certainly unpopular and useful enough to put it into a story, for the reader’s consideration.

The simplest summary of the qualifications I impose is that it’s meant for well-socialized humans, living under conditions in which group selection is a significant evolutionary force, in a state of evolutionary equilibrium with their environment (so that their instincts are guaranteed to be socially good).

I like to imagine Celestia as the yang, the bright encouraging leader everyone loves, and Luna as the yin, the keeper of dark necessary unpopular truths, so it seemed right to put those words in her mouth.  I was shocked and dismayed when I Googled “Do as thou wilt” to check the grammar and found it was a quote from Aleister Crowley, a generally unlikeable man.  But the brief reading I did on Thelema, his religion, indicates that he meant pretty much the same thing by it as I do, and then I was pleased that it had happened to fall to Luna, the only speaker of early modern English, to utter that line.

It is therefore not wrong to devote oneself entirely to pleasure, at least not in certain circumstances.  The modern world does not need everyone to pull together just to beat down the barbarians, as they did in the middle ages.  There was more on this that there was no space or place for in the story.  And who the hell is Luna, with her eternal youth and her crown, to tell some nobody to buck up and face reality?  Some people have the short ends of all the sticks, and it’s cruel to deny them the little pleasure they can get.

But, if your pursuit of pleasure seems unworthy and childish, it probably isn’t what what you really want, because “do as thou wilt” often works backwards.  It doesn’t necessarily mean “Do whatever you want and that’s okay”; one interpretation is “you already want, on some level, to do the things you ought to.”

The first thing I realized was wrong with the story, the morning after submitting it, was that I didn’t clarify why Luna cared.  A reader could easily say, “Here Luna is saying, ‘Do as thou wilt,’ and yet Luna is the one who became the Nightmare and nearly destroyed Equestria.”

Yes, that was the point.  Luna, like the reader, was following baby dreams, not realizing what was truly important to her, and the consequences were terrible.  She wants to keep him from making the same mistake she did.

The next thing I realized was that I’d split the point where the reader rides Luna from the point where she says she loves him, and maybe that diminished the impact.  I don’t know.  I also toned that rodeo scene way down.  I think it should be much more sexualized, maybe enough to get a mature rating.  (And ditch the lava; what was that for?)

I got a lot of good feedback pointing out other problems.

>>4490702 : this story’s target audience is people who read base second-person power fantasies, but these people are unlikely to be able to really understand the ending and cobble it all together.

I think the hard-to-understand things are secondary.  There’s that long bit at the end about shame, but that’s not the main point.  The hard part is showing, not telling.  Maybe the story can be easier to understand if it’s longer.

>>4491734  I think he did a good job evoking the feelings he was aiming for.  But here's the thing:  In doing so, he produced a story that I did not particularly enjoy reading.

That’s a problem.

>>4493147  Add that to the fact that nothing that “I” did is even remotely close to what I would do, and we have a story where I am completely incapable of relating to “myself.”

Somebody made a similar comment, to the effect that the “you” was kind of a jerk, and TD commented that his dreams were too infantile to be interesting.

I think I can make the protagonist a lot more likeable.  That’s the most-fixable problem with this story.  Maybe I can even hit TD up for advice on making more-sophisticated power fantasies.