Ten minutes away from Bryant Park in New York City, just around the corner of Times Square, is a Miniso, a chain of stores that sells all sorts of ‘fandom’ merchandise—toys, dolls, figurines, accessories, and crucially, blind boxes.
There are dozens of these, of all sorts of characters and shows and media, including sometimes My Little Pony blindbags. They can come in small, medium, and large boxes. Regardless of what they are, it is so rare to see a MLP blindbox that I make a point to buy one every time I see one because I have both a badly controlled gambling streak, and because I wanted a Rarity figurine.
The last time I went there with a friend, my collection back home consisted of two Pinkies, one Applejack, and one large Twilight which was the one time I left the store delighted. Once inside, we found four of these boxes—they were large, shiny, and expensive. As a graduate student, I had to weigh the option of spending my little money on what I was resigned would likely be a third Pinkie Pie. My friend with me, who like Rarity is endlessly generous, offered to buy two of them so I’d get double the chance to finally get her.
As we were looking at the boxes, we noticed one had been clearly opened and then shoved to the back. I peered inside and let out an unholy gasp at the prominent flash of purple I glimpsed. Delighted, I bought that box and unpacked her, delighted to finally have her.
I also had a thought. Small and tiny. I pushed it away and tried to let it die, but it was dragged back up from its depths when someone else pointed it out.
I had been wishing for that figurine for so long, and the only reason I had it in my hands was because someone else opened that box, saw it was Rarity, and promptly put it back. It could have been for a number of reasons they did that. It could have been positive, negative, but the fact remained that what I most wanted was someone else’s leftovers.
I tried not to think of it again.
But, in the wake of Rarity and Applejack’s exclusion from G6, I’m thinking of it now.
Just Not Marketable Enough
by MonochromaticIn a white and endless expanse, Rarity and Applejack sit on two of six empty thrones in a circle.
“You know,” Applejack says, “we never did sit on these much, did we?”
In the middle of this circle is a large round table with a map of Equestria.
Applejack fidgets a little, feeling an urge to fill in the silence her companion is imposing. “Always a bit too cold. Reckon’ that’s why we never sat on ’em much.” She smiles at Rarity. “Should’a had you give us some your fancy pillows!”
Rarity, usually so eager to talk and opinionate, says nothing.
She stares at the map.
Applejack takes a breath. It comes to life at the bottom of her lungs, right near her belly, and she feels it live its life slowly up her lungs, stretching them out, until it reaches her lips and dies of old age in a soft, almost imperceptible breath
It is not a sigh.
It just is.
This is not Applejack’s first rodeo. This has happened before. Different lives she hardly remembers, same soul, same name, different context, but this feeling in the pit of her stomach is not unfamiliar.
She wants to say it feels like peace, but that’s not it, of course. It’s not resignation, either. It just is, like when summer ends and winter begins.
Out with the old, in with the new.
She never thinks about it until here, and that’s possibly because this is the only place she can think of It—this limbo in between—and she wonders if this is why she was a farmer.
The life of a farmer lives and dies—heh!—by exactly that.
Crops grow and wilt, but feed while they’re alive.
Feed the big critters and the little ones.
This is not her first rodeo.
But this rodeo is different.
And this rodeo is not solo.
“Rares…”
Rarity still does not reply. She sits in her throne, still as ice, and though her ears twitch, they twitch only just.
Funny, the one time Applejack thought hysteria would be warranted, and instead it’s been this: silence.
Never thought she’d say it—hell, even think it—but what wouldn’t she give for screaming? For yelling. For whining, and complaining, and indignation.
She looks at the table, and she’s never really noticed how big it is. How… distant it makes everything feel. Distant from each other, the literal whole of Equestria separating all six–
Two.
All two of them.
And separating them from Equestria.
“Rarity?”
In a white expanse, Rarity and Applejack sit in two of six empty thrones, and in between them rests a home they are no longer deemed fit to inhabit.
Rarity’s eyes scan the table, the holographic landmarks, its mountains and oceans, villages and cities, within and beyond its borders.
A beautiful tiny model of her homeland, like a doll house, and she knows if she steps up and tries to touch it, her hoof will go right through.
Her eyes flit from landmark to landmark, town to town, house to house, until it lands on that stupid crystal castle rising up into the heavens and ending in a familiar star.
She can only bear to look at the star for only a moment before it’s too much, far too much, so her eyes go somewhere else, that mountain over there that is green and big and ugly.
She can feel something deadly burning inside her, coiling around her heart like a snake that has bit into her heart and is slowly filling it up with poison.
“Rares, will you please talk to me?”
Finally, she looks up, stares at Applejack sitting there, hat tucked between her body and the throne’s armrest, her eyes full of a genuine empathy Rarity can barely stand.
The words that come out next are precise, controlled, the best she can do considering she knows—she knows—Applejack is not there out of her volition either.
“Talk about what?”
“You know what about,” Applejack says.
“The weather?” Rarity replies, and when Applejack replies with a frown, and Rarity feels herself about to say ‘Rainbow would have laughed’, she immediately looks back down the map. That stupid star. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“That ain’t true.”
Of course, Rarity knows Applejack is right, and of course, Rarity knows Applejack knows this, too.
“What do you want me to say, Applejack?” she asks. “Lay before me what you wish to hear, and I will repeat it back with a flourish because I personally have nothing to say about the matter except for perhaps, c’est la vie.”
“Who are you bein’ polite for?” Applejack looks around. “Just us here, sugarcube.”
Rarity bristles. “I’m not being polite,” she snaps back. “I’m not being anything! And might I add that you’re being extremely rude right now.”
Applejack raises an eyebrow. “I am?”
“Yes, you are. Questioning me over and over and refusing my answer!”
Unfortunately for her, Applejack is detestably patient.
“I just want to know what you’re feeling.”
“What I’m feeling? You want to know what I’m feeling?” The snake constricts around her heart, the poison seeping out of her veins, into her lungs, up her throat, until she’s spitting it out: “Why? My feelings shouldn’t matter because I clearly don’t.”
And there it is.
Some of it, there it is, enough of it for her to realize, to clamp her mouth shut, and when she looks at Applejack, that pleased smile makes her wish she had something to throw at someone.
“Now, was that so hard?” Applejack asks, teasing lilt, pleased.
Again, just like before with Rainbow, a remark comes full throttle, but this one she isn’t able to stop.
“Stars,” she hisses, indignant, “you’re just like Twilight.”
Applejack sits with this a moment. Then says, “I know you said that as an insult,” she said, and Rarity’s affront bleeds when she adds with not an ounce of insincerity, “but there’s no pony I’d be prouder to have rubbed off on me.” She winks. “‘Reckon she’d say the same thing ’bout me.”
Rarity looks away, feeling her fury subsiding and grasping at anything to keep it there. Her eyes land again on that star, and this time, she keeps her gaze there like a defiance. I don’t care. I don’t.
“Where is she? Why isn’t she here?” she says, and the more she says it, the more she means it, the more the snake feeds. Twilight Sparkle, Queen of Equestria, who’s done the impossible before. “Why hasn’t she fixed this yet?”
“She can’t,” Applejack says. “You know that.”
“I don’t, actually,” Rarity replies, tone ever so light, so polite. “I don’t know that.”
“Rarity—”
“Don’t they care?” she continues, voice rising, inadvertently opening a box Applejack isn’t ready to broach yet. “If they cared, they would have fixed this already. They wouldn’t have allowed it, they—”
“Sugarcube.” Her voice is sharp, cutting in. “Of course they care—”
“Then why are we here?! Explain it to me because I’ve spent the last sun knows how long trying to understand how this has happened,” Rarity snaps, and is furious to feel stinging in her eyes. “It’s always been the six of us!” She gestures to Twilight’s throne, for the first time in a while daring to look at the symbol on it. “Even Twilight’s bloody cutiemark has six stars! Or was all that talk about bonds by destiny and friendship forever lies?”
“No—”
“Then what’s wrong with us?”
“There’s nothing wrong with us,” Applejack insists.
Rarity’s risen from the throne and when her hoof slams down on the table, it slams down hard. “Then why aren’t we there with them?!”
The answer comes out calmly.
“Because we’re not useful, sugarcube,” she says.
Not an insult, not pity, just the truth.
Rarity goes silent.
Her mouth opens and closes, and something within releases, and she doesn’t dare try to find out if it’s because the snake is gone or her heart. She sits back on her throne, the sudden delicacy of her movements so jarring that Applejack, for a moment, loses her calm.
“No,” Rarity says, quietly but firmly. “No, that is not the reason. It has to be something else.”
“It ain’t,” Applejack replies. “It’s just the—”
“No, it’s not,” Rarity interrupts, sharply. There is a tremble in her voice. “It’s something else. It is.”
“Sugarcube…”
“Don’t sugarcube me, Applejack,” Rarity says, the tremble no longer contained to her voice. It is everywhere in her body, subtle but there, shifting emotions and feelings that she must ignore or else. Her entire life has been about a steady hoof, and she’s not about to falter now. “That’s not the reason.”
Applejack sits up straighter. Alright, then. “Rarity, being useless isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes—”
She can’t finish her sentence, because before she can even formulate the thought, Rarity’s voice rains down like a thundercrack.
“I make dresses for ponies, Applejack!”
Applejack recoils into her throne, startled not just by the tone, but by the look in Rarity’s eyes. Slits. The snake has eaten her all up.
“I know,” Applejack stammers.
“No, actually, I don’t think you do,” Rarity continues. “I think you are aware of what I do. I think you have ideas of what I do. But do you know what I do? No, you do not, so allow me to explain.”
Applejack says nothing.
“Every day, I wake up and spend hours and hours of my time making hoof-made dresses and outfits,” she says, “each excruciatingly thought-out and designed up to the smallest detail. Then, when my dress is done, I have to go out into a society that in its majority does not care for or use clothes and convince them to buy this expensive thing they do not need.”
Applejack bristles back. “Don’t say that about your work!” she protests. “None of that is true. Ponies need clothes!”
“Now, Applejack,” Rarity replies in sing-song, melodious and airy, her head tilting just so. “I didn’t realize your Element was just a title.”
“I mean it!” Applejack insists. Then a thought occurs to her, and she throws it out, pleased, “Winter! If we didn’t have clothes then, we’d all be frozen popsicles.”
“But that’s not my job, Applejack. You’re looking at my job the way you do yours, which is utilitarian. You provide a function. I don’t.” Again, and not for the last time, tears well up in her eyes. “I am a fashion designer. What I do, while it can certainly have utility, is simply aesthetic, so please don’t explain to me what useless means because I am well aware I’ve been useless my entire life! And furthermore—!”
For the first time, Applejack is the one who interrupts. “Stop saying all that. You have three businesses! You’re the princess’ personal designer!”
“But that’s precisely my point, Applejack! Don’t you see?” She’s up again, her forehoof stamping on the floor. “My entire life, it’s been negotiating and networking, spending time with wealthy ponies only to learn they’re all horrid, but guess what? As Twilight herself pointed it out, they were my biggest clientele. If I wanted to pay rent, if I wanted to succeed, I had to do it, and I did, and I tried to keep to my principles, and even if I failed at that at times—and I know I did over and over again—I still put myself through it. Through ponies calling me superficial. And social-climber, and ego-centric, narcissistic, prissy, bitch, slut—”
“Rarity!” Applejack booms, upset.
“What? What, Applejack? It’s over, isn’t it? You said it yourself: why be polite? Darling, please, you wanted confession, you wanted my feelings, well, here they are!”
Silence reigns.
Applejack is not one for subtle or tactful touches.
“If it was that awful, then why’d you keep doing it?” she asks.
Rarity stops. She completely freezes. Her eyes widen, the question a slap to the face, an unwarranted bucket of freezing water come from above.
“Because I loved creating,” she says, and again, again, again, tears fill her eyes as she notices the tense she’s just used.
“Because I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
And because here, at the end of the line, Generosity offers to Honesty exactly what she asked for:
The whole of who she is.
“Because I wanted to make others happy,” she says, and thinks, thinks, thinks—of the girls in their gala dresses, of all the ponies who’ve thanked her for helping them love the pony looking back in the mirror, of the those manic sleepless nights in the throes of delirious inspiration, of Twilight in the dress she made just for her, of of of—
Why didn’t she stop? Because how does one stop what is tantamount to breathing?
Applejack is beside her at once, the gulf between them closed, the earth pony placing a steady hoof on the unicorn’s shoulder.
“But you did, Rares. You did make ponies happy.”
“But it wasn’t enough.”
The words shock Rarity as they leave her mouth, like a whip striking her back, and she jumps away, backtracks, past the thrones into the empty white void.
“I was foolish.”
A strangled laugh erupts from her mouth, alien and familiar all at once.
“Oh, Applejack,” she says, almost delirious, “I’ve been so stupid.”
“Stupid? Rarity, landsakes, will you stop that?! You are not stupid!” Applejack protests, her patience losing the fight against worried irritation. “Why do you think you’re stupid?”
“Because I thought I was different,” Rarity says, tumbling onto her haunches, blurry eyesight fixed on blurry floor. “I really thought—I thought I would be different. I thought I was—”
Chic, unique, and magnifique.
“Sometimes,” Applejack says, gently, “things just don’t work out the way we want them, hun.”
“But that’s not fair,” Rarity replies, looking back up at her friend. “I did what—Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do?! Follow our destiny?! Well, I did!”
Success after success, boutique after boutique, proving herself again and again against every obstacle, only for this to be how it ends?
“Everything I am is because I decided to follow my heart, Applejack. And so did you! So don’t you dare tell me we’re here because we’re useless,” she said, and when she looked up, her voice broke, “because if that’s true, then that means the reason we’re never seeing Twilight and the girls again is because we chose wrong.”
She can barely get the words out, but she forces them out regardless.
“And I can’t bargain with the universe if it was my fault,” she continues, “so we’re going to figure out why we’re here, and I will strangle the powers that be with my bare hooves until they take us to wherever they are, am I understood?”
After a moment, Applejack walks over. Every step echoing in the void is almost in rhythm with her pounding heart, and it is only right now and here, sitting before Rarity, the unicorn shocked to see tears in Applejack’s eyes, that Applejack accepts the time for the real rodeo has finally arrived.
“Sugarcube.” She lifts her hoof and brushes it against Rarity’s cheek, green eyes meeting sapphire ones. “The girls are gone.”
Rarity frowns. “Yes, I know that, Applejack,” she replies, aggravated, narrowed eyes seeming narrower when swollen with crying.
“No, sugar, I don’t think you do,” she echoes, even if the tone here is painfully warm as opposed to upset. “They’re gone, they—” She falters, her voice unsteady, and real alarm pours into Rarity’s eyes. “The… The girls we saw, they aren’t—That’s not them.”
“What—? What do you mean that’s not them?” Rarity says, grabbing Applejack’s forehoof and shaking it. “Applejack. Of course it’s them! Just because that new world they’ve been trapped in has changed their appearance doesn’t mean it’s not them.”
“No, hun. It’s…” Applejack hesitates, trying her best to think of how to even explain a concept such as this. She finally lands on an idea. “It’s like the mirror world, the one Twilight went to with the humans. The one she took you to. Remember you had your saddle in a slump over how the ‘you and her’ from that place weren’t sweet on each other like you are in Equestria? And she explained they weren’t actually ‘you’?”
“Yes, yes, because they’d had different contexts or something,” Rarity says urgently. “But that means that our girls are somewhere out there, doesn’t it? So we just have to figure out how to find them.”
Applejack’s chest constricts, a very heavy weight spreading over her as she forces herself to continue, explicitly so: “They ain’t anywhere, Rares. They’re gone.”
Rarity stands up, shaking, anger ripping through her. “Stop saying that. Just stop it! They are not gone! You’re here and you’ve gone through this hell before, haven’t you? So explain to me that.”
The answer comes out calm.
“I’m what took over, sugarcube.” The new harvest where the old one died. “The ‘me’ from before is gone, too. Just like the ‘Rarity’ you were before is gone, too.”
“The me from before? There is no me from before, Applejack!” Rarity protests, anger turning into fear. “It’s just me.”
“That’s funny, Rares,” Applejack says, not unkindly but firm, “I thought we were done lying?”
Rarity steps back, shaking her head, refusing to confront one of the many truths she has been avoiding all along: that she’s been through this before.
That not only is she useless, but she’s not even unique.
“This is just your first time being skipped,” Applejack continues, and because there is no point in cushioning the horror they are going through, she adds, “and even if somethin’ changes, even if we get taken with them, well… that Rarity and Applejack won’t be us, either.”
“So, what are you saying?” Rarity whispers, the only thing she can manage, her heart gone, her mind disposable, her soul not actually hers. “That even if we’d been good enough, we still wouldn’t see Twilight and the girls ever again?”
“Yes,” Applejack quietly says after a long pause.
“No.” She steps back again, blinded by tears and fury. “No, that’s not right. That’s not fair.”
“I know, hun,” Applejack replies, all the effort in the world stopping her from hanging her head in defeat. She has been through this before, hasn’t she? Why is this time so much worse? “But sometimes life just isn’t fair.”
“Applejack. Applejack.”
“But it’s okay!” Applejack says, grasping at something, some speck of hope that will somehow keep them safe and afloat until they land wherever comes next. “We might still be picked, and even if it’s not this season of us, it’ll still be a harvest that came from us.”
“But I don’t want that, Applejack!” Rarity yells, the echo of her hoof slamming on the floor filling the void. “Why would I want that? Is that how this ends? How it is? To be a—a—a plaything, a toy, a doll? To be branded as out-dated and have my stuffing taken out and filled with something more appealing, every limb of me, every thought, every part that makes me who I am, replaced over and over until a power that be deigns itself to say I’m finally good enough? Now that I’ve been stitched back together according to whatever heartless criteria they deem perfection to be? All of that? All of that only so that when I finally get to stand in front of Twilight again, it won’t even be me? And it won’t even be her?”
It’s as she says this, as it bleeds out onto the floor, that only then does she finally understand more than she ever did what Twilight was trying to show her when they went into the other world across the magic mirror.
“There could be—and probably are, depending on the theory you ascribe to—millions of Rarity and Twilights out there in millions of universes,” Twilight had rambled on, with that smart voice and smug grin, ever the lecturer, ever the scientist, ever the eager unicorn Rarity would pay with her life to get to see again.
To get to scold her for staying up late again, to throw synonyms back and forth at each other, to argue over stupid things, laugh over silly things, to just be with each other, lying on a couch, Rarity reading out from a corny romance novel while Twilight rolls her eyes and giggles.
“And as much as modern and classic literature has popularized the notion that ‘true love’ should be constant across all universes, the fact of the matter is that I don’t care about any of them because they’re not you. You and I are versions of us that will never be replicated ever again. There will never be a Rarity that makes the choices you have.”
Choices that, in the end, condemned her.
“Just like there will never be a Twilight that makes the choices I have. Who you are is why I fell in love with you.”
Choices that, in the end, are the reason her life mattered so much.
“Well, I don’t want that!” Rarity continues, because there is nothing else she can do, because this is the only thing she can do, this or a fate worse than death. “I want our Twilight, Applejack! I want our Pinkie Pie! Our Fluttershy, our Rainbow Dash! I wanted it to be me! I wanted it to be you.”
And finally, when she falls to her haunches, face in her hooves, it’s for the final time.
“I wanted it to be us.”
What was the point of coming back if they were all gone?
Applejack forelegs feel warm around her, a tight hug that is perhaps the only thing she has left in this world. She lets herself be held a moment before her own forelegs find their place around the earth pony, her face buried in the crook of her friend’s neck.
As Rarity weeps, Applejack finally lets herself think of them.
She thinks of Twilight, and those sunny days of sitting under trees, talking about nothing and everything, grounding each other no matter what is thrown at them, the two always aligned in a way they won’t be again.
She thinks of Pinkie Pie, of that infectious laughter as bright as the dawning sun, of their weekly ‘family’ dinners in the farm with pastries she’ll never get to eat again, the likes that rival Granny’s apple pies.
She thinks of Rainbow Dash, that silly smug grin and raspy voice, the pegasus never one to shy away from any help Applejack needed, especially less so if it meant another one of their stubborn competitions she’d never get to gloat about winning again.
She thinks of Fluttershy.
Stars, she thinks of Fluttershy, and her beautiful eyes, and her soft laugh, soft coat, the way she buries herself into Applejack when Apple Bloom is telling scary stories, the way she makes kindness feels like someone everypony effortlessly deserves and owes, and the way her singing is sweeter than apple, truer than the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, and Applejack is never going to see her again.
See any of the girls again.
Granny Smith, Big Mac, Apple Bloom, Sweetie, Spike, everyone else she assumes is on the same boat as them, she will probably see again, if she stays, but the girls?
The girls. The most important ponies in her life, a part of her so wholly and completely that if she believed in soulmates, she’d think they were all just a single soul split into six, well…
Well, she still has one, doesn’t she?
Applejack looks down at Rarity and thinks of her. Of her passion and creativity, of her theatrics that are as likely to amuse Applejack as they are to drive her crazy, at their arguments and their differences, at how they’ve never once failed to make up, never once failed to be there for each other time and time again, friends until the very end.
And this is an end.
“Do you…” Rarity says finally, defeat in her voice, sniffling, “do you think it would still be better if we were picked to be with them? Even if it won’t be us?”
Applejack’s forelegs tighten around her.
“No,” she says.
Rarity pulls back. “No?”
“No,” Applejack replies as she rests her hoof on Rarity’s cheek, “because I don’t want to lose you, too.”
Those big, sparkling sapphire eyes well with tears again, but this time, for the first time, it’s not tears of pain.
“Oh, Applejack,” she whispers, her hoof finding its place on top of Applejack’s. “Oh, darling, I couldn’t bear to lose you, too. But… But what if we don’t have a choice?”
“Well then…” Applejack grins and offers a wink. “I reckon’ we better make the most of our time together, don’t’cha think? Go into whatever comes next together.”
“Together,” Rarity repeats, and hope crests at the top of her winning smile. “Just two useless ponies marching forward hoof in hoof.”
Applejack laughs. “Eeyup! On to wherever comes next.”
Mischief glints in Rarity’s eyes. “You’ll be the one to make dresses next time.”
“Now, let’s not go that far, sugarcube.”
And when Rarity laughs, and Applejack leans in to nuzzle her, she knows why this time was different. Why this hurt more than the rest.
Because this one mattered.
Because they mattered.
And, separated from the girls or not, no power that be in this world can ever take that away from any of them.
There’s a lot that could be said about this moment. I think at this point it’s fair to say I have gone through every aspect of this fandom, from the very best to the very worst, and as much as I could say that who I am now, where I am now, what I am now, is because of the show, that isn’t really true.
The show got me started, the friends added a lot, but the show has ended and many friends have left ages ago, so I know neither have kept me here. I want to say it was the mane six, and while that’s not untrue, it’s not true, either. I can’t even say it was Twilight.
It was Rarity.
No one teaches you how to mourn something that isn’t living or tangible. I could be logical here, rational, and say that obviously what I’m mourning isn’t a fictional character who’s being rebooted, but the memories and affection associated with her.
But I’ll do it anyway. It’s over now, anyway, isn’t it? So why not be honest?
I do mourn her. My writings are often what I use to understand the world, and there is no one that I tried to understand the world more than through her. My creative persona and my personal persona are one in the same, and it is because of her that I’ve become who I am, that I think about writing the way that I do, the reason I keep following my heart and my passion even as again and again the powers that be that rule this world make me and so many others feel that there is no point to following your dreams.
But I did. I am, and a fact that will remain true now as the day I die is that any success I ever achieve creatively will all be owed to her.
So, in your honor, Rarity, I will try my best at it. I will push, and pull, and cry, and whine, and continue to do things I am told are not marketable or right or bankable or whatever asinine criteria the powers that be decide is what sells, and when I inevitably I find myself on a talk show explaining the lore behind the film adaption of my WILDLY successful novel, and of my own volition explain how I got my start and how it was all thanks to her, I will think of that Rarity left behind in that Miniso and be sure then as I’m sure now of a very true fact:
When it comes to who’s the best horse, I have the most correct and most fabulous taste.
GG, Rarity, girlie, and Applejack, too, you mattered to me.
Don’t make me cryyyyy
Oho trust me, we all do.
Boy. That has to inspire some complicated feelings.
This has fascinating implications.
Which is deeply fucked up. APPARENTLY, Rarity and Applejack will be in the show later (I refuse to call it G6, it’s not.) but, the idea of NOT including them from minute 1 is such a wild choice.
Rarity. Come on.
OHO yeah.
They matter more than you could possibly imagine.
The trick is to be complete sincere and authentic at all times.
Trust me, we’re ALL pissed.
Which is bullshit, by the way.
Oh no…
Have I mentioned that more people should love Applejack? Because more people should love Applejack.
I swear to fuck, woman, if you make me cry…
I’m with you on this, you deserve better.
That, is existentially fucked up on a level I do not have it in me to process.
You’re right. It isn’t.
The Pony of Theseus.
You double spaced.
This, this feels so Rarijack coded and I’m so happy.
Adnroid 16: LET’S NOT GET CRAZY!
Hades: YOU ARE CORRECT, SIR!
That’s all that can be asked.
I love everyone in M6. Without honesty and generosity, it all becomes hypocrisy and selfishness. Perhaps the My Little Pony series didn’t fully showcase Rarity’s brilliance, but you did, Mono. Your writing truly brought Rarity to life. Because of your fan fiction, I fell in love with Rarity, and also with the emotions and thoughts behind your words. A pearl may sometimes be covered in dust, but it will ultimately shine.
Sorry if there are any grammatical errors, please ignore them, as I am using a translator.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Rarity and Applejack weren’t going to be back. I saw the promo art and figured they just weren’t in the release images not gone all together, I’m still a little excited for the new show and I like the new designs but the girls being back without Rares (and AJ)? Don’t know if it’s something I’ll get into.
This is genuinely such a beautiful heart wrenching story. Grief is so nebulous sometimes, and yet you’re able to crystallize it as such that I can hold it in my hand, feel every surface of it. It makes me mourn with you, in a way, and I think l, sad as this all is, that that’s wondeful. Rarity may be gone, but I feel like she lives with you still
This was a wonderful vent piece that did well to channel the frustrations with life through the characters. The descriptions were great, with that line about Applejack’s breath at the start particularly standing out. Admittedly, the later acknowledgment that Rarity and Applejack may still end up in the new generation muddies things, and there are nitpicks you could make about the mechanics behind this reincarnation, but Rarity’s concerns about her worth still apply.
Oh, this is lovely in every way. I love how you explore the what if themes and whether it was one party or another.
Great story and it was really delightful to see these particular two together.
it’s so lazy and frankly evil what hasbro are doing. i have no problem with them reusing older characters, hell like said in this piece, applejack has been in pretty much every generation and it’s been absolutely wonderful, but it’s so damn obvious that hasbro are trying to milk g4 for all it’s worth, they did it with g5 while giving them absolutely no resources and spat on them when they failed and they’re going to do it to g6 too. people say it’s an issue of keeping copyright and yeah, that’s part of it, but it’s the clearest thing in the world that hasbro doesn’t want to put any real effort into their IPs and we can clearly see that by them removing the two most complex of the mane 6 (imo), and i guess the least marketable. g4 used g3 names out of necessity, g5 was connected to g4 to keep milking its success, and now g6 seems to be even more the corpse of g4 being brought out again to make quick cash. im so mad.