Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.

It's so nice that if you combine the words Alicorn + Twilight you get "let's make everyone else immortal, too" independetly of the universe in question.

This seems to be a genre now. I dub it transponyism.

I responded on fimfiction here, but I'll copy it here:

First question: do you want Celestia to have good points, or not?

Celestia should probably argue that ponies are adapted to the cycle of death and rebirth; the trouble with immortality for everyone is that now ponies still have the drives to procreate, conquer, and replace their elders. Luna was Celestia's first student that she elevated to immortality; things were fine for a hundred years, and then Luna grew tired of being perpetually number 2 and rebelled. Twilight was elevated only because she understands social dynamics enough to be okay with being perpetually second-tier and because she genuinely likes Celestia much more than Luna did. If Twilight spreads immortality to everyone, the result won't be a complete reduction in deaths, but a transfer of deaths from age-related disease to murders, and Celestia is pretty sure that will lead to less harmony and happiness.

(Note: Faust has commented that she always planned for Twilight to be Celestia's successor. If Celestia is immortal, she hardly needs a successor, but that's how deeply ingrained that pattern is in the human psyche.)

She can also call on the destructive impact of family on civic society; Celestia banned cousin marriage, with the result that ponies couldn't depend solely on their families, and had to have wider social networks. With immortality, families can grow much stronger than possible with no cousin marriage and old age, leading to clannishness, vendettas, and a collapse of social trust.

You can also put in technical constraints easily enough; if there's a finite amount of life-extension magic to go around, then the conversation becomes a very short "why don't we give everyone mansions?" "Because we can't." "Oh." (That's what I will eventually do with my fic: Princess Twilight is just as mortal as her friends, brother, and sister-in-law, and is encouraged to research longevity if she wants to stick around.)

Argument: Harder to keep the populace in line, if everyone has more power.

I think you're missing the existential risk inherent in Alicorns or how precariously Equestria is balanced on the knife edge of extinction. Here's a short list of possible extinction events: Nightmare Moon, Parasprites (Twilight enhanced), Discord, King Sombra, and god-knows-what from Star-Swirl the Bearded's library. 'Mere' civilization ending events are Smarty Pants Doll (enchanted), Parasprites (unmodified), Windegos, Changelings, and the duplicating mirror. This is a world with Cuban Missile Crisis going on every other month and a rogue AI power-equivelent popping up every year . Imagine if Twilight had accidentally made parasprites carnivorous in addition to eating non-edibles? Game over, for everyone, forever. It's not a world made safer by having more Alicorns. God-tier magic seems to override other Got-tier magic; in all God-tier confrontations, victory always goes to the initiator of each round of any fight. TLDR; offense > defense.

Also, you need to look at what Celestia herself has to gain. Right now she's the God Empress of ponies. The only people capable of challenging her are her sisters and other deity class entities. If the world were to be eaten by omnivorous Von-Neuman parasprites tomorrow, she could teleport to another planet and (presumably) re-start the pony race. She'd be sad, but life would still go on. The only way that ponykind could experience a true extinction would be if she and her sisters were to die. For every pony that Celestia decides to uplift, she makes herself a little more vulnerable. What motivation does she have to do that?

Celestia is very selective about who she uplifts, judging by Twilight. Notably, Celestia makes sure that Twilight benevolent, very grounded with friendship, selfless, understands the nature of when (and when not to) use magic, understands the existential risks of magic (firsthand), has dealt with god-tier entities and understands their limitations. There's a musical number about how Celestia's been testing her to see if Twilight's the kind of person who'd kill or enslave everypony if given limitless power. Twilight only gets uplifted when she passes all the tests.

Here's a related question: You have just been uplifted by an immortal, Friendly AI. How do convince it that you should start uplifting everybody who asks instead of people whom the AI deems non-dangerous? ...and why do you even want to convince it?

I don't think this is the right place for fiction advice, but I'm upvoting anyway because your question is interesting independently of the fiction. That said..

On the one hand, you shouldn't expect to find a very convincing argument for deathism. Given that it's the status quo, if there were good arguments for it you would probably be a deathist!

On the other hand, there are arguments specifically against being turned into an alicorn which would also apply to most realistic real-world ways to prevent death.

Specifically, you get turned into an alicorn, which is not the same race you've been the rest of your life. If you're a pegasus, you gain an additional sense for magic and probably lose a bit of maneuverability, if you're a unicorn you gain wings, and I hardly need to explain why the poor earth ponies might object.

That, alone, is probably enough for many people to postpone the process for a while.

Other possible arguments...

• It would reduce diversity. Well, it would, though that seems rather selfish.

• Alicorns are scarily powerful, being able to move celestial objects around and all. Some analogies to nanotech-powered antiagatics here... Equestria might end up destroyed in short order, or you'd need much stronger internal monitoring to prevent that. It's easy to come up with downsides along these lines.

• It might easily cause the greatest economic recession in history, as it attempts to adjust to vastly altered outlooks and changed capabilities. In particular, if earth ponies lose their 'talents' they might lose a lot of their industrial base; controlled magic can probably replicate it, but not everyone will have the intelligence for that, and in any case it'll take a while. Still worth it, but it'll be a hard few years. Or decades. Eventually people will realize they have decades.

You might be better off asking a deathist.

• Nothing in canon suggests that there's any sort of religion in Equestria. Even in fanfics I've read, I've only read one fanfic where someone made up an afterlife that some ponies believed in, and in many more that I've read, Celestia's name is actually used in place of God in various sentences, like "Oh for Celestia's sake!" Thus, it's unlikely they'd believe in an afterlife: Both in canon and the majority of fanon, the closest thing to a God appears to be Celestia herself.

I think this gives you useful material to work with. Just because immortality doesn't cause Celestia problems doesn't mean it wouldn't cause problems for everyone else. Celestia is divine, they aren't. She can claim, without coming across as too unreasonable if you manage it well, that the fact that she's lived such a long time without becoming bored or depressed simply doesn't generalize to ponies that aren't gods.

Also, considering that becoming immortal appears to go hand in hand with learning magic, she can take the position that not everyone who wants to live forever can be trusted to be responsible with that sort of power. She can be trusted with that sort of power because she's a benevolent deity, and she trusts herself to decide whether or not to trust a particular pony with that power, given time to observe and make a judgment, but she does not trust ponies in general to decide for themselves whether they are trustworthy.

I’m writing a similar fic*. My solution to this problem: if the debate between mortality and immortality doesn’t provide a deep enough conflict, then use something else. (In Mortal, the core conflict is that Twilight is forced to choose between Celestia and Rainbow Dash.) Less centrally, I set my story in a world in which immortality is irreversible, and made it clear that Celestia’s first attempt at spreading immortality led to that “eternal night” thing.

Other arguments I used for Celestia:

Argument: If they don’t die, older generations will accumulate power and status at the expense of younger generations.

Response: Even if true, this is less bad than death.

Argument: What if there’s an afterlife?

Response: There isn’t.

Is the argument for deathism really that weak?

If immortality became provably achievable tomorrow, do you think arguments for deathism would sway anyone? I guess people who believe in immortality via afterlife might still be persuaded, but that’s about it.

*That draft is somewhat outdated, but the canon-compliant version isn't publishable yet.

For what it's worth, I'm now taking pro-alicornism arguments, having strengthened the anti-alicornism side significantly. Anti-alicornism arguments are still acceptable.

If the argument is one-sided because one side is obviously right, you could change the facts. Invent some downside to alicorns.

For example, maybe being an alicorn gives you access to offensive magic much stronger than the defensive magic it gives you so that any alicorn has the power to kill everyone, even if everyone is an alicorn. Maybe any alicorn has the power to bring the sun crashing down on Equestria? (I've always imagined the Equestrian sun as being much smaller than the real sun, but still big enough to cause terrible, terrible damage).

But that might be too strong, because assuming you can't spread alicorns throughout space or something (and not have too many of them in one place to be hit by a celestial body), I think that would actually win the argument for mortality.

You could make it uncertain whether this will happen, but you don't want the whole debate to be speculation about how likely it is and how much risk is acceptable.

Maybe any rogue alicorn could still cause destruction, but on a smaller scale? Something like real-life mass shootings. Maybe make Celestia swayed by the availability heuristic and news reports of occasional mass-murders? Twilight could argue that ponies who would go on killing sprees weren't really that common, and old age was killing way more people. There are rationality lessons to be told here about shutting up and multiplying.

If there are less ponies who would go on killing sprees than humans, increase the number of alicorns that alicorn magic could kill before they were brought under control accordingly.

This might've been mentioned but Celestia can argue that she is in some way different enough that immortality doesn't take a toll on her but that it would on most ponies even if they become alicorns. I don't know much about mlp but this seems like an easy way to let Celestia use arguments like depression and boredom etc. opposing immortality for anypony.

Why not talk about all ponies simply becoming immortal instead of alicorns?

I admit to only having watched scattered episodes and the pilot, but assuming that the alicorn transformation can only be granted to ponies one could argue upraising the entire population would have a negative effect on the other sapient species such as Gryphons. If she held that position she could even support transponyism inherently, but oppose immediate application until a parallel can be developed for other sapients.

Some possibilities:

1. Comparing their own capabilities and lifespans to that of alicorns could demoralise the other races.
2. While the danger of alicorns to ponies could be mitigated by general upraising or internal policing, the danger to other races could not without the implementation of alicorn rule.
3. As a combination of the above, an alicorn ruling class is innevitable and such as situation might produce individuals Celestia would not trust with alicorn powers.
4. If Celestia upraised trustworthy individuals, she would have to be sure to only select those who would be willing and able to only select others also willing and able to select trustworthy individuals to upraise. This extends to your closest friends and your own children. Upraising individuals on a large scale might lead to a deterioration of the sort of society she is cultivating to maximise happiness and safely make the transition to immortality and greater power at a later date.

You could think of some in-universe arguments. Along the same lines as Dumbledore's talk to Harry: what if souls really do exist? In the MLP world, what if alicorns have some downside that is not yet known to Twilight? Maybe they are in constant agony after two years. Maybe turning someone into an alicorn requires a hidden sacrifice of the soul of your friends? Maybe there is a proven tendency for new (attempted) alicorns to go insane if they are not sufficiently ready for it, and for them to turn into monsters. Chrysalis, Sombra, Luna and even Discord could be examples.

Argument: Harder to keep the populace in line, if everyone has more power.

Taking what Baughn has said further, you could postulate that the normal 'pony's life is about ' is inverted for alicorns: Concepts are .."embodiments" of alicorns. By which I mean that, .. Applejack has a life which is about apples, whereas the moon and stars' existence and state is about Luna. This would imply that every alicorn needs phenomenal self-control and forebearance to avoid disturbing the structure of everyday reality. (and also perhaps that the sun, stars and moon had 'previous owners' and behaved differently.)

That may be -too- powerful an argument, even if it doesn't pertain directly to death. It is somewhat vulnerable to Jossing, as I'm sure in the next two episodes there will be some discussion of what it means to be an alicorn.