Not_Interesting
The Munchkin of Megastructures
- Location
- In your walls(the walls between realities)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It would be funny, if she ended up becoming an Anti-Alicorn due to her disposition. Demon Queen Sunset when?
Illuminating Invitation (MLP: FiM AU)
- Thread starter Alivaril
- Start date
- Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Saphire
Lurking dragon
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And the mysterious missing element: Celestia's Love
Hang on you forgot the most important step!
Denial 2 electric boogaloo
Denial recursion
And of course
Denial so hard it becomes love.
This is absolutely going to become a heart warming story of sunset slowly opening up to others. It's happening on screen every single chapter right in front of you. Her hatefully hurting cadence on purpose was instead ALMOST friendly banter this time, and she even intentionally held back from being as vicious as possible. She may have explained it away, but she understood the emotions of the animals and wanted to spend her own time to help them not feel bad anymore. Changing your entire worldview is not something that happens over night. It takes time.
Her support group FINALLY realizes how bad things really are and what they have been doing wrong before, and they have tentatively added two more people to said support group in the last two chapters. In this chapter celestia is off hunting more prospective recruits. Soon sunset will have a bunch of friends!
As for believability, like I was saying in my other post, the author of this story also writes a ton of QA stories where she slowly warmed up from an alien killing machine. In those stories the progress from a ruthless genocide engine to a cuddly little sister was too fast and unbelievable because the gap was just so large and the intermediate steps were too close together. It left me always rooting for her to disobey their helpful advice and slaughter the setting. For the first time I am on the side of wanting the cute cuddles, because it is more possible and believable here in this story than it ever was before.
alot of us, maybe only when we are a certain age, want everyone to love us, or for them all to die instead, and sometimes, tragically, when the ultimatum fails like all ultimatums always do, for ourselves to die. QA only ever wanted the death, while sunset only ever wanted the love. so they are both pieces of things we have felt even though they are diametrically oppossed in their core goals.
I thought I might have been the only one! finally, someone else said what I was thinking!
Enthusiast#117
This is not the Profile you are looking for
- Location
- United States
I saw Denial at the top of the list there and my mind immediately went somewhere else:
1. Denial
2. Resentment
3. Obsession
4. Ambition
5. Cowardice
(I recently picked up Darkest Dungeon II if you can't tell)
These make... far too much sense for Sunset.
I wonder what the secret 6th ingredient would be?
You know what they say: keep your friends close and your enemies closer
Did she ever assume that, though? I expect Sunset can tell via empathy if someone is dishonest.
This I feel is where the cognitive dissonance will truly come to roost.
Sunset feels Celestia's emotions and just assumes it is just her Alicorn nature and power. Why? To assume otherwise would mean that Celestia, the person that she looks up to the most, is very much not infallible. All the times that Sunset was forgotten, delegated, pushed aside, or put down happened when Celestia was already loving her. That means that attaining Celestia's love isn't a cure-all that Sunset hopes for, which has to be both heartbreaking and terrifying to her on some level.
If Celestia already loved Sunset, yet inadvertently hurt her all the time, then how does she fix things? Going and becoming an Alicorn, it's the only way. Makes you think of why it is such a focus on ascension, almost like she might even unconsciously know the answer already, but doesn't want to face her fears. For Sunset, that has got to be the greatest mental issue to get past. Easier to assume that Celestia doesn't love her and thus things will be better when she does.
Last edited:
I figure that Cadance is going to have to rope in Twilight to provide proper rigour in her proof to Sunset that yes, Celestia really loves you.
- Location
- Somewhere and Nowhere in a state of super-position
It seems she was the chosen one. She had the innate powers, she had the societal-position.
Except rather than being corrupted by the darkside, in the OTL she was hurt badly by the failings of individuals and gave up as anyone else would logically do at such a point.
Also with how much Cognitive-Dissonance I am reading (when she removed the pendant) I both feel like this whole situation is still a tragedy despite the worst case scenario having been thoroughly avoided and I feel concern.
I overcame my own maladaptive delusion because I was willing to thoroughly question my own beliefs and give up said beliefs if my beliefs were both false and that getting new beliefs would give a personal advantage.
However, I am used to failure: from that comes my ability to *accept* a loss and try something else.
Sunset is not used to failure. She is used to pain and disappointment, but not outright failure. Thus rather than thinking on things and preparing herself if she is wrong, she's digging her psyche deeper into this pit out of a sense of pride and self-righteousness.
Self-righteousness because ultimately this situation was a series of unfortunate events: Celestia didn't manage things regarding Shimmer correctly and failed to realize this anger was born of deep insecurity and hurt.
Right now, I believe part of Sunset's justification and rationalization for events is that she believes things were calculated on Celestia's part, that there is a point to her suffering: that there is in fact meaning inherent to Celestia's mistake.
Except that is not true: it was a genuine mistake and Sunset ultimately suffered for no one's gain.
When she is forced to confront this reality: that is what will make or break her.
Last edited:
Tha ka for the chapter!
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
Yeah, I figured something similar right after I posted, that's why I edited.
- Location
- OK
You know, I wonder how much of a psychotic break Sunset will have...
...If she feels Shining Armor and Cadence's feelings for one another.
- Location
- Oklahoma
Sunset's empathy only seems to work on feelings that are directed at her, so she probably wouldn't.
Regardless, I don't think she'd care much- except maybe internally (and probably externally) complaining about Cadance having another distraction from spending literally every waking moment studying magic.
- Location
- OK
Well, if she DOES feel it, it'll be a rather unfortunate nail in the coffin, if she has something to compare and contrast with Celestia's so called "Sun Aura"
I'm figuring that she would have to feel parental love from somepony else to really grasp that celestia's genuine
but think about how a lot of people around her perceive her: twilight feeling that vaguely-worshipful love of a child towards an unachievable ideal, cadence feeling that quiet respect of a student towards a knowledgeable teacher, flightly flame's... everything, void doesn't count, so on so forth. there's not really anybody available that would be qualified to take a parental role towards sunset, in terms of power or disposition, so this realization can't really be shortcutted.
- Location
- Oklahoma
Assuming this sun aura really is just her feeling parental love (personally doubt it, I'm sure she would have felt some other emotion from her at some point if that were the case), that still relies on romantic and parental love showing up identically to her senses.
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Not to be mistaken for Starswirl's Mirror'ing and the alternate universe on the other side.
If only Sunset could find somepony who actually knew dreamwalking in the modern era. Then they could spend sleeping hours studying, too!
I thought this before but didn't really bring it up, because ultimately I didn't think it would help. You could do all sorts of scientific experiments, with control groups and double blinds, separating the test subject from the sight and hearing of sunset to prevent cold reading, imbuing pure vs feigned emotions into objects and measuring their thaumic resonance, but I just don't think she would trust the data sets no matter what level of profesional scientific rigor you had. She would blame herself or her Equipment or the test protocol or the research assistants or the test subjects or the quality of the material or the ambient magic of the palace etc etc.
What she really needs is peer review to either verify or falsify her findings, but she does not have any peers. She cannot trust others because they are stupid lazy liars. Once she has a peer group that she respects their abilities and trusts their judgment it becomes alot easier to deradicalize her.
sunset would have unironically have been far better adjusted and happier if raised by luna than celestia. I get the feeling that they're similar enough to just get each other, in a way that sunset and celestia kinda aren't
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Luna, at least in her first appearance on Nightmare Night, did have that kind of intensity to things that Sunset somewhat shares.
Funny thing is that Sunset was about to fall into the same issue that Celestia has.
Problems in the garden? Let's investigate.
She could easily delegate, stop by a Royal Guard and mention her empathy and the animals feelings, and the Royal Guard is going be very motivated to investigate what might be wrong in the Palace, and they have more people who are probably trained for such work.
Even if they find nothing that still removes most of the easy things from the list and Sunset and Cadence haven't needed to 'waste' their rather limited time.
Problems in the garden? Let's investigate.
She could easily delegate, stop by a Royal Guard and mention her empathy and the animals feelings, and the Royal Guard is going be very motivated to investigate what might be wrong in the Palace, and they have more people who are probably trained for such work.
Even if they find nothing that still removes most of the easy things from the list and Sunset and Cadence haven't needed to 'waste' their rather limited time.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Like mother, like daughter.
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
Yeah, what was that quote from The Crow? "Mother is the first name of God"
To Sunset, all of the pain and suffering and abuse she went to had to have a purpose. Celestia had to approve of, or at least know about, what happened, thus making it alight, because otherwise, what was the point of it all. Like, everyone of her denials presume that Celestia is, at the very least, aware of what Sunset feels and knows, and she is just wearing a mask. The understanding that Celestia is just as fallible as any random pony is going to break her.