iceman comments on Friendship is Optimal: A My Little Pony fanfic about an optimization process - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (145)
This is quite good. I like how you managed to make the ponytopia both extremely attractive and more than a little creepy at the same time. I feel like you presented the situation without trying to argue it was either good or bad, leaving that decision to the reader, and I quite like that approach.
From a storytelling perspective, I only had two real complaints. One is your beginning. There's no conflict until halfway through the first chapter, when Lars and Hanna start arguing. You do a good job setting up the premise before then, but it still makes for a slow start, and I can easily imagine myself recommending this to people with a "no, really, it gets better, stick with it" disclaimer. The second is that there are lengthy stretches where the story consists only of talking heads, with no action or movement. Chapter 4 was the most notable example.
I also found myself wondering about the ethics of creating a sentient being like Butterscotch tailored specifically to the desires of someone else (assuming they weren't lying about her sentience; I don't know how you'd test that). I realize you can't fit everything into the story, but I thought that might have been a cool topic. You made me think about the ethics in ways you didn't directly discuss, so you're clearly doing something right.
Grammar note: the possessive form of "Light Sparks" is "Light Sparks's," since his name is a singular noun.
Wonderful job with the MMO aspects of life in Equestria. After the "what the literal fuck" line, I had to step away from the computer for a minute to savor it before I could keep reading.
If/when you submit this to Equestria Daily, feel free to let me know. I'm one of the prereaders, and while I wouldn't feel comfortable judging something I feel this philosophically invested in, I'd at least try to make sure it didn't get discarded for lack of pony in the very beginning. (We receive, and reject, a fair number of stories that are about bronies rather than ponies. This is a borderline case, but the pony content increases as the story progresses, and I can tell people to look at the post-uploading chapters before deciding.)
If you think it's slow now, it was much worse before. There used another (long!) chapter between 1 and 2 which had some AI related speculation, but was really a six page Take That at Feeling Pinkie Keen. It got cut because it didn't really advance the plot.
Also, I didn't use to have a prologue. The current prologue used to be in what is now chapter 2 from the perspective of Hanna and company watching their alpha testers. I moved that scene into the prologue because a pre-reader in a previous round wondered if the way to make a brony audience buy into the story was to show some gameplay, though what I did differed a bit compared to his specific suggestion.
Do you think the current prologue's benefits outweight the lack of conflict? Removing the prologue would get the reader into the main story quicker, but I worry about not having an immediate hook.
The prologue serves an important function, so I'd leave it in. Fittingly, you've got the same problem as the tutorial level in a video game: you establish a lot of important information, but it's dull and low-stakes. It would help a lot if you rewrite the scene with a conflict. It could be in the game (you can surely have a more exciting tutorial than walking around looking at plants; maybe make the playtester settle an argument between NPCs or solve a puzzle), or better yet, in the real world (maybe the playtester is a corporate spy, or she's there with a friend who she's having a fight with, or something).
The conflict could actually really be easy: she's trying to figure out whether it's being run by AIs or not, which both explains her various musings & even lets her bring in the Turing test.
Why? Maybe a bet with a cynical geeky friend - "it couldn't possibly be as good as they're claiming; tech demos never are! It must be smoke and mirrors like an actress or really big scripts in the first level."