I wanted to make the narrative support deathism to the point where it didn't seem like an obviously false position to the reader. I tried to do this by making the deathist advocates the characters who the fandom associates with reason and wisdom, by making the anti-deathist advocate aggressive and uncompromising, and by emphasizing that most everyone liked the status quo just fine. I stopped doing this sort of thing in the last act. (In hindsight, "steelman" is the wrong term for what I did. Sorry about that.)
I think I was successful at the above. Readers who didn't start as transhumanists were unable to tell what my own position was.
Celestia is smart enough to use every dark art known in order to convince others
Smart enough, but not vicious enough. This characterization of Celestia wouldn't do anything she felt was dishonest. My intent was to show her as a tragic character doing the wrong thing for understandable reasons.
I'm still not sure why the new alicorns put up with Celestia's rules; once she resorted to threats of violence, it seems like it should have been pointed out she would lose a contest of violence.
Partly because they are happy colorful ponies and they prefer not to solve problems through force. Partly because Twilight still craves Celestia's approval.
Thanks for all your feedback; this is a useful conversation. I am strongly considering taking your earlier suggestion and adding the "it's just ponies" theme to the big confrontation with Celestia.
I don't think Celestia could be not vicious enough to fail to use dark arts of persuasion, but still be vicious enough to threaten a thousand years of solitude.
I agree that violence is not appropriate to the genre, but the threat is also inappropriate. Perhaps explicitly communicating 'we respect you, but we think that you are mistaken on this one issue' would help make Celestia seem like the Bad Guy in the end, for demanding banishment and other unreasonable things of the new alicorns.
I recently published Mortal, a novella-length My Little Pony fanfiction meant to introduce anti-death concepts to an unfamiliar audience. Short description:
This is a character-driven melodrama. It's not particularly rationalist, but it's very, very transhumanist. Unlike, say, Friendship is Optimal, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to people who don't already know the source. It assumes familiarity with the characters and the world.
I am going to talk about how I put together the story and how people reacted to it. This will contain spoilers.
This line exists so you can break out of the automatic "read everything on the page" mode if you want to avoid the spoilers.
This story was structured as something of a bait-and-switch. I watched the reaction to a previous transhumanist horsefic (yes, there's more than one), and I was struck by how easily readers matched the explicitly anti-death narrative to the "immortality is a curse" trope. Rather than fight against this trend, I decided to work with it. The first act is meant to look like a story about learning to accept the inevitability of death. Starting in chapter 3, I break further and further away from that mold until the protagonists finally rebel against the status quo.
The first chapters got a lot of people invested who I suspect would've been turned off by a less familiar opening. Once I was into the third act, I stopped being subtle and used every trick in the book to make the pro-death characters look like the unreasonable ones. Judging by the comments, there's no shortage of readers who were angry at having their expectations flouted, but quite a few seem thoughtful, and some explicitly changed their mind on the subject.