But First, We Need to Talk About Parallel Universes

You guys are the BEST! I can't believe this won.

For anyone unfamiliar with this meme, the line comes from very famous YouTube video in which the user pannenkoek2012 explains how he plays a level of Super Mario 64 while avoiding pressing the A button as much as possible.

The video, while long, is a masterpiece of human ingenuity and makes me feel that humanity is ready to venture into space. Please watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A

Alternatively, here's the moment where he says the line.

>>Baal Bunny

the best case scenario is that I end up with a piece about a Rainbow Dash who's a perpetually unhappy and frustrated pedophile. Is that a something anyone wants or needs? I can't imagine that it is.

I need to answer this question by pointing to this radio story: This American Life Episode 522. Please listen to it before deciding not to ever release this.
Pedophiles—particularly the kind that are trying desperately hard not to act on their impulses—get very little help in modern society. No one wants to talk about them or give them the kind of psychiatric they need.

A story that explores a pedophile's worst fear and then showing them triumphing and safely getting through it without acting on that impulse? That's powerful stuff! Fictional examples of someone overcoming a trial like that could help people like this.

By all means, please put a "Warning: Rape, Pedophilia" on top of the story. You may need to spoil the story to give a proper warning for it. Probably put it under the M tag. Perhaps post it under a pseudonym. This is not a story you want everyone stumbling into. (It's not a story I would have read had it not appeared on my slate). Just don't think there isn't an audience for a story where a Pedophile doesn't act on their impulses, because there is.

With our modern world, people have so many mental health problems and everything in between, there's an audience for every story. Even if that audience is just a few people with a very specific trial in their lives.

And if you don't want to edit it and it's 80% there, just do like Hank Green does and get it out there.

If anyone is having trouble coming up with a prompt, please consult this list of names for all 326 endings for the video game Shadow the Hedgehog.

Any one of those will do.

I feel somewhat responsible guilty proud that someone wrote this beautiful Shadow the Hedgehog fic.

I have to give props to the author. I have terrible OCD when it comes to my writing, and I think I would be entirely unable to write a single sentence of what's in this story without feeling actual pain.

Hmm... TBD...

That could be interpreted in whatever acronym the author feels like using right?

To Be Determined
To Be Derpy
To Buy Diamonds
Terrible Big Dragon
The Bidding Demon
Treats By DiamondDogs
Tumbling Bumbling Dr.Whooves
Tired Boring Demigods


Hmm... Could be fun :)

I had been sitting on a bizarre short story collection for several months and I just couldn't figure out how to end it. And then the prompt was "Here at the End of All Things." And suddenly I had 3000 words and an ending. There's just something about the Writeoff and getting me to write.

If you guys want to read a weird short story collection, it's up on Fimfiction.


You all had a lot of fantastic feedback and criticism. Rainbow's voice not changing as she went through the transformation was an issue, and I think the final version fixes most of that.

And Discord's voicing was off, that's true. Instead of fixing it at the end, I added a lot more of his original voice to his chapter in the short story collection. I tend to give my reformed (billions of years later) Discord's much different voices than on the show. Mostly because I felt like he had the most to grow and change, while everyone else kept most of their voices throughout the trillions of years because they actually didn't need to change that much from where they are now.

>>MrNumbers
Out of all the feedback, this stung the most. Mostly because I spent a long time trying to figure out how to solve it and my brain just did not come up with a good solution.


Oh well... at least I shoved it out there instead of letting it rot in my google docs like I do with most of what I write.

Thanks everyone ^__^

Thanks for everyone that commented! If more than one person thought something was a problem, I made a bigger effort to change that in the next draft.



>>Morning Sun

One nitpick : IMO you should have Twilight interpret the message in a paraphrased form; she has pictograms to go from after all, from what I see. And paraphrasing it would let you put a pony spin on it.

Yeah, I wanted to have some solid basis for the crossover. But you're right. It's changed in the next version.

story seems to imply he escaped multi-dimensional collapse but that Equestria may be a recreation of his civilization on a 3 dimensional scale. Would that be correct?

Yep! :D
Well... (I'm debating on this still), I was thinking of Equestria as a 2D universe. Discord does several tricks to make it feel like 3D, but it is actually 2D. (And the war that Discord initially tried to escape from led him to drop down Equestria into lower and lower dimensions, and not even a Black Domain completely protected them at certain times)

It's an interesting enough idea, although you could arguably posit that once the collapse hits a certain point Discord could retreat to pocket-Equestria and wait. Potentially, if done right, he could do that with everypony,

I kind of feel like this is a problem with Death's End. The story ends before this happens.
I added a bunch of backstory to Stranger to explain why this won't work.

Thank you SO MUCH for helping explain this story in the comments because I wasn't able to.

>>FanOfMostEverything

Again, I did enjoy it.

:D

>>Remedyfortheheart

This piece could have the very same effect on it’s readers without it’s ending being there by fading everything to black in a pony’s perspective of life. This can emphasize the termination of said life and show that the world was sacrifice and still keep that trait of curiosity intact.

See... the end the Three Body trilogy did that. I kind of have a berserk button when it comes to stories not ending happily. I demand a happy ending. And if there isn't one, I'll make it myself. And stories I write which don't have happy endings, end up with "pretend" happy endings, even though everything still sucks.
I understand where you're coming from though.

I really think you have the makings of creating a different piece and add that “creator of the universe” spin on it. I assure you you’d do remarkable on creating such a story.

I think you'd love—

This being MLP seems like it didn’t mix very well.

Oh. Yeah... I have that problem a lot.

I'm much more comfortable writing original fiction. But for some reason I only feel "motivated" when it's pony fiction :/

I do need to work on some original fiction... I have a lot of ideas on existence design, cosmology, eschatology, and the duration of eternity. I just need to uhh... do it.

In fact one of my biggest concerns is asking “why” Discord has been so calm in this story. ...I would have love getting to know Discord’s exact emotions rather than guessing it along with Fluttershy and Celestia. I wanted to feel bad for him, because he had to tear down all his hard work.

I think I did a much better job on this in the second draft.

I don’t really like it when two ideas collide, because it takes much more work making both of them sensible with each other.

That's understandable. Thank you so much for your thoughts!


>>horizon

Beyond that, this is surprising and thought-provoking

Thank you! Your thoughts mean a lot to me.


>>Posh

Then why wouldn't she take the time to say goodbye to Rarity? Or Rainbow Dash?

My original reasoning was that she wouldn't want to talk to them because she would have a hard time not letting them in on the secret. (And I really didn't want to write in any more characters than I had to).
But I did add a line in the new version suggesting she visited more of her friends.

These are vital details that should go into the next draft.

Pretty please.

Done.

>>Bachiavellian

Celestia's bits also seem like they're preparing her for an important role in the story, but she drops out entirely a few paragraphs later.

Thanks for the feedback. I was wondering whether or not to just axe that scene during my first draft. In the current draft that scene is from Discord's perspective, so there's less POV shifting.

which makes the piece as a whole feel less like a story more like a idea-bearing vehicle

This is one of my failings as an author. I think in terms of ideas rather than characters, and the idea is always my go-to starting point for stories.

>>The_Letter_J

First of all, I have read The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, but I haven't gotten to Death's End yet.

What? Nooooo.... you're the one person that shouldn't have read it D:
Sorry.

If the message had said "we have a way to save everything," then even Discord probably would have agreed, as we later see.

Stranger gives some reasons why the message is the way it is in the 2nd draft.

Second, I feel like Equestria Girls kind of ruins this entire thing.

YEP! Not touching Equestria Girls with a ten foot pole.

Third, what benefit does being saved in a mathematical constant even have? Clearly it didn't do much for that pi culture. This is a minor point, but it does lead to me wondering why this process of sending cultures forward in atoms hasn't been going on since infinity.

While writing this thing, Stranger just said that line and I was all: "WWWHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
This is now part of Stranger's backstory.


And also, this is a really good starting point for a short story/novel. No really. Here me out. Imagine, if you will, artificial intelligence research gets pretty strong. One branch of the research (of many) is into calculating pi. The numbers actually act as code that will SQL inject into the Artificial Intelligence. The AI gets stuffed with an initial blast of a single member of this alien race, and then once the first AI gets infected, more members of race spread to more AIs as more digits of pi are calculated.

This is far fetched, because computer systems across species are different. BUT assuming that the next universe cycle will have trillions of possible intelligent life, and that this pi decimal SQL injection thing only needs to work ONCE, they have a pretty good shot of transferring over to the next universe cycle.


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Also, no one commented on this. But I have to point it out as I laughed for three days straight after it happened:

“Spike, I’m going to start babbling what’ll most likely be random nonsense. Can you write it down?”

“I’ve been doing that for years.”

SAVAGE

>>horizon
This is an incredibly well written thorough guide. Thanks!

Sounds like this was the story version of a fun D&D campaign.

That's not a bad thing. (Most of my recent writing has been journals and backstory for my own campaign) And using frequently used vocabulary like "Paladin" and "Adventurer's Guild" is a good way to establish that quickly. However, if you ever publish this, you may want to switch it to be a specific fantasy world of your own creation; switch around some of the titles (Paladin -> Knight), and include more details that will differentiate it from other fantasy worlds.

This didn't really grab me, but you still did a very good job! I especially liked Yseult's efforts of breaking Fox stereotyping.

This was a nice slice-of-life story.

It's the day in the life of an old farmer. I think you captured that mood and that life quite spectacularly.

This story isn't from a genre that usually grabs me, but I think people that like this sort of thing would enjoy it.


----
(Side rambling that's pretty much unrelated featuring me trying to figure out my stance on the entire genre of realistic fiction)
This is my first original fiction round so it's interesting reading all these non-pony stories. However, I'm running into a weird personal problem where I find realistic fictional humans... not that interesting. For some reason if this was a nonfiction round I think I would be more interested in stories like this, because then at the end there'd be an actual person to talk about and appreciate.

I guess I've just been spoiled by podcasts like The Moth and Lore. If something is going to be normal, I'd like it to be a true story. Because there are just so many fascinating stories that are true that deserve to be told.

But then again, fiction is just as worthy to be told as non-fiction. (Please don't let someone on the internet tell you what not to write!)

And while I say that I don't like realistic fiction, I do have a counter-example that I did like: The Fault in Our Stars. I think it was because it told the story in a very intriguing way. It was a representative story that encompassed a lot of aspects of problems cancer patients face. And shed some light into that problem.

But didn't this story also shed some light into a problem? That the nature of modern agriculture is changing, and probably for the worse? Then again, that really wasn't the focus of the story, so maybe that's why it didn't really excite me?

Okay, I didn't have an opinion when I started writing, but I think I have one now. Except in rare circumstances, I don't usually like realistic fiction. So I am biased. Sorry about that. But at least I know what my bias is now.