MLP: The Next Level Of Your Studies

Vaniver

The first four chapters of my MLP fanfiction are now online on fimfiction.net. Unlike Friendship Is Optimal (fim link), which focuses on how MLP might impact the trajectory of AI, or Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me (fim link), which focuses on how a rationalist might impact the trajectory of Equestria, I wanted to ask: what would the MLP Way look like? How would MLP impact rationality, and what would rationalist MLP look like?

This has been over a year in the making, off and on, and I've received significant help in writing it. In particular, I'd like to thank the pre-readers and editors who have helped polish it, and everyone who's shown interest; that has been a great help in motivating me to work on this rather than other projects.

There's much more to come; I should be able to maintain at least a chapter a week for the medium term, and hope to post more frequently than that. If you're interested in pre-reading / editing chapters to come, let me know!

Some of the time-skipping confuses me ('One Day AR'?); I liked Night Light as an expy of Diogenes; the first chapter seemed to copy a bit heavily from MoR but on reflection I'm not sure that's a bad thing; the writing itself seems to flow at least as smoothly as Myou've or Friendship is Optimal. So it's a slow start but good enough that I'd subscribe to it if Fimfiction.net didn't seem to be somehow broken right now.

Random copyedit:

“You know,” Perry Pierce said, “we all swore on our magic to never reveal the secrets of the Moon's Hand. She claimed to not use magic to hide her identity, but what if she had been a spy all this time, and is just leaving now because she thinks we're beaten?”

What is the Moon's Hand? Surely not the unknown mare in question?

What is the Moon's Hand?

Their secret society dedicated to facilitating the return of Nightmare Moon, of course.

0Vaniver13y

Thanks for the feedback! [...] That one is a bit obscure; it gets explained in the chapter obliquely (it stands for "after return"). I'm never quite sure how much to tell people up front and how much to leave mysterious / explain along the way, and so it's helpful to hear reactions either way. [...] For quite some time, the first chapter was not the first chapter for that reason, but I ultimately ended up deciding that the end of The First Question was the best early hook that I had, and that it was better to choose chapters based on their hooks than to try to differentiate this from HPMoR. And now that I've chosen that plan, other benefits are coming to mind: it smooths the transition from HP to MLP for any MoR fans that decide to give it a try, and it requires all readers to have at least some tolerance for Twilight's personality and style, but presents it in a much warmer way than Celestia's Request. [...] A typo, thanks for catching it! If you see the word 'hand' or 'foot' or so on, it's almost certainly a mistake on my part. (I should also note that I edited Deep Field's earlier comment to fit with the terminology that I switched to; he became the Horn's Tip, not the Horn.)