Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction

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.

Hmm. I think it's dubious that someone would go insane and not care about anything anymore after watching their friends die. That might or might not be altering the facts of the situation, and therefore providing evidence that isn't part of the deathist position either in real life or in the story.

But witnessing death driving people insane doesn't seem like an argument in favor of death to me.

Ponies knowing about the big rip wouldn't make sense, also I don't think the author intended for it to be a part of the universe. So to the extent that this is supposed to be a fair treatment of a position in universe, it's kind of wrong to bring the big rip into it. To the extent that this is supposed to be a fair treatment of a position in real life, it also doesn't make sense to bring endless torture because of the big rip into it, because in real life there couldn't be any indestructible immortals.

I know. I wanted to rule out a different set of facts about immortality than there were in the story, because deathism under those conditions would basically be a different position from deathism in the story, or deathism in real life. Changing the subject of the argument to make a side right is not steel manning that side, and it's not required by any reasonable rules of fairness.

Also, does it really matter if the deathists are too wrong in our eyes to make a good story? I would think that they just have to have a reasonable position in they eyes of the audience. By making this something of a genuine conflict from the perspective of LessWrongers, maybe you've made it settled in favor of deathism from the perspective of a large fraction of the readers.

Thermodynamics isn't the obvious objection IMO, it's the big rip. Alicorns may be able to create matter around them, but perhaps they are the only things that can't be torn apart by expanding space. And maybe they can almost be torn apart, but not quite. So an eternity of feeling like you're suffocating, being almost torn apart, and almost frozen, and being alone awaits every alicorn eventually.

Hopefully the physics in this world are sufficiently dissimilar from real life that that won't happen.

I only bring up the second law in nonfictional contexts; clearly, the cosmos behaves in the manner that Celestia tells it to, so we shouldn't have to worry about the stars going out.

I've speculated on this in the past. I was reading a book and it mentioned that one of the things used to help autism spectrum people learn social skills is something called Social Stories (TM); read through the article and some of the linked materials or look at Google hits, and tell me that MLP doesn't sound a lot like how one might design a maximally-appealing 'Advanced Social Stories'...

Hypothesis / speculation based on personal observation only:

MLP is similar to anime.

For various reasons, this demographic tends to be overrepresented among anime fans in western developed countries, partially (I speculate) based on the facts that watching anime requires 1) learning about it and being interested in this esoteric, nonconventional form of entertainment (this demographic tends to be more adoptive of nonconventional entertainment), 2) finding information about the anime shows to watch, which implies spending quite a bit of time on the internet for the vast majority of cases, and 3) actually finding versions of the anime shows one can watch, because for the vast majority of anime, if you don't speak japanese, you need to find a borderline-or-sometimes-outright-illegal version of it that was modified to add "fansubs", or fan-made subtitles translated in another language (e.g. english).

Most of the above is stuff that involves delving deep into the less-mainstream corners of the internet, or at least having a modicum of google-fu and the patience to learn the basic vocabulary of the genre.

Just that right there should tilt the numbers so that the base viewership contains a disproportionate amount of this demographic, and thus even if they were no more or less likely to enjoy it than other demographics, they would be much more numerous in its fandom.

But why would these people be fans of MLP?

• 4chan. The story is documented on KnowYourMeme.
• The show is honestly quite good.
• Periphery Demographic (TVTropes warning) is not all that rare a phenomenon.
• Early on Hasbro made the wise decision not to take down episodes when they appeared on Youtube.

I affirm, in all seriousness: watching cartoons has made me a better person. Does this seem so unlikely?

(Though I did wonder if - rather than the narrative content - it was due to some sort of premature activation, by sheer volume of cuteness, of the whole have-children-lower-testosterone-become-domesticated thing I read about on Gwern's site somewhere.)

Also, its art does not lean on its intended virtuousness.

I'm working off observation, not theory. I've heard speculation on the subject, but nothing that sounds convincing and nothing that makes testable predictions.

Looking at the statistics here, it looks like the fandom is even more male-dominated than I had thought. The smof are pretty much all male; I can think of only one exception. The show's writers are mostly female.

The average MLP fan is a good deal younger than the average LWer. Both are very likely to be white.