Fortunately, I now have enough arguments against alicornification to turn the fanfic into a good fight while still having the world the way I originally envisioned it. I doubt many people are going to say I’m making it too easy, what with all the arguments about social pressure, overpopulation, and potential for magical abuse. Plus, I’m adding something that we don’t see often enough: At the beginning of the fic, the protagonist is simply WRONG. Twilight’s belief is “We should charge ahead and turn everypony into alicorns as quickly as possible” and to me, that’s actually very stupid. My own belief is that the best way forward involves care and caution, making sure things will work on a societal level before taking significant steps forward, and that’s the belief Twilight will eventually take on.
(I know that it’s a big warning sign to have my protagonist have the same beliefs as me, but I can’t avoid it, since I want Twilight to be rational enough to eventually reach the right conclusion, and I obviously think my belief is correct, or else I’d believe something else. So, hopefully this helps with that problem.)
But thanks very much for your initial point, it definitely made me think much harder about the world, and how I wanted it to work. I likely would have taken your advice on if I hadn’t received so many good arguments. In fact, I was originally going to give other ponies Celestia-like powers to counter this author bias until I was soundly defeated in a debate about alicornification with that prior, which therefore made me decide “Okay, it’s not being too easy on myself to make alicorn magic a force multiplier, it’s being too hard on myself to make every alicorn Celestia!”
Fortunately, I now have enough arguments against alicornification to turn the fanfic into a good fight while still having the world the way I originally envisioned it. I doubt many people are going to say I’m making it too easy, what with all the arguments about social pressure, overpopulation, and potential for magical abuse. Plus, I’m adding something that we don’t see often enough: At the beginning of the fic, the protagonist is simply WRONG. Twilight’s belief is “We should charge ahead and turn everypony into alicorns as quickly as possible” and to me, that’s actually very stupid. My own belief is that the best way forward involves care and caution, making sure things will work on a societal level before taking significant steps forward, and that’s the belief Twilight will eventually take on.
(I know that it’s a big warning sign to have my protagonist have the same beliefs as me, but I can’t avoid it, since I want Twilight to be rational enough to eventually reach the right conclusion, and I obviously think my belief is correct, or else I’d believe something else. So, hopefully this helps with that problem.)
But thanks very much for your initial point, it definitely made me think much harder about the world, and how I wanted it to work. I likely would have taken your advice on if I hadn’t received so many good arguments. In fact, I was originally going to give other ponies Celestia-like powers to counter this author bias until I was soundly defeated in a debate about alicornification with that prior, which therefore made me decide “Okay, it’s not being too easy on myself to make alicorn magic a force multiplier, it’s being too hard on myself to make every alicorn Celestia!”