Fandom Classics Part 117: Mortality Report

To read the story, click the image or follow this link

I was Youtube surfing yesterday, and came back across this gem from early 2011.  Boy, that takes me back... none of the pony videos were in HD yet, PMVs were still novel (and rare) enough that you could reasonably watch most or all of them, and Dash got designated the "happy boy" because there were barely any male characters in the show yet.  Ah, good times; that video still puts a smile on my face.

Speaking of old stories, here's one from 2012!  Three whole years; in ponydom, that's practically forever!  And it's about oldness!  Triple-confluence!

...Anyway, click down below the break for my take on Bad Horse's Mortality Report.

NOTE: This review contains ending spoilers. Don't worry, they're behind a spoiler tag you have to click to read... but since I can't figure out how to put multiple spoiler tags into a single post, that means that today's star rating is unspoiled. Just FYI!


Impressions before reading:  Bad Horse is an author I've had mixed experiences with; he's written at least two stories that I really loved, and several more which, for different reasons, were various degrees of misses for me as a reader.  But I know he's perfectly capable of writing something good, and I know he likes to write about/with Big Ideas, which I'm generally on board for.  So, despite the Sad tag and description, I'm pretty confident (and really hoping I'm right) that this isn't just another "alicorns angsting" fic.

Zero-ish spoiler summary:  As an elderly Twilight lies on her deathbed, Celestia composes a letter to her Queen, detailing what the death of her latest student has taught her, and what she intends to do about it.

Thoughts after reading:  Yup, this is a Big Ideas fic.

To start with, let's get the details out of the way.  First, this is from well before the end of S2, so set your expectations for what was canon/was known about canon appropriately.  Second, there are several minor editing issues (a couple of missing spaces, a quill mysteriously turning into a pen halfway through the letter, etc.) which, despite occasionally occurring in highly-visible spots, don't impede comprehension.  Third, the story's got both line breaks and indents for each paragraph, if you're one of those people who gets worked up about that sort of thing (you strange person, you).

The story itself is interesting primarily because it's told entirely from Celestia's perspective, and there's a lot of ambiguity regarding how reliable (or at least, accurate) her understanding and decisions are.  I'm going to need to break out spoilers to discuss that, however.  If you don't mind knowing about the ending, click the link; otherwise, let's let "the most interesting part of this story is the ambiguity" stand.

So, Celestia and Luna are the only two immortals on the planet, sent to "elevate" Equestria to the point where they earn immortality for themselves over the course of many generations, and Celestia has decided to give Twilight her immortality because she believes Twilight would be better for the ponies than she is.  There's a pretty clear logical thread to this: Celestia loves the ponies too much to see them suffer, they need to suffer to achieve immortality, and she knows that Twilight will have enough "greater good" in her to make the hard decisions Celestia won't.  So from a character standpoint, the logic holds up.

The interesting questions revolve around Celestia's assumptions.  First, is immortality actually the gift she thinks it is?  Despite praising the ability of ponies to "live in the moment," Celestia unambiguously thinks that death is a Bad Thing.  This assumption is never touched on in the story (being outside of its purview), but obviously one's view on the relative merits of living forever are going to determine whether this is a sad story (as the author has it tagged), a bittersweet one, or a straight tragedy.

Even if one settles on an answer to that, though, there's the question of how much suffering is justified to eliminate death.  Celestia is clear that "elevating" the ponies requires suffering and pain on a multi- (and, one might assume, massively multi-)generational scale; is it just to effectively punish an entire population without their consent for the benefit of their descendants?  Again, the "good" of this is never questioned, because Celestia does not doubt it, even though she can't bring herself to do what she knows needs to be done; thinking about how much truth, if any, girds her assumption, and further speculating on what Twilight would be likely to think of the matter, is the real appeal here.

Oddly enough, the biggest problem with this story is Celestia's characterization.  I say this is odd because the story is more-or-less a character piece about Celestia; 4000 words about the complex cauldron of loyalties and desires that bind her.  The problem is that the genesis of issues which by rights should have been visible since, or even before, she came to Equestria, seem to be shoved into the space of a single decision point by her need to enunciate them all in the letter she's writing.  To a certain extent, of course, this is a reasonable storytelling shortcut--the reader needs to find out those issues somehow, after all.  But when Celestia's spending time explaining her centuries-old decision to give ponies Cutie Marks to a Queen to whom she's nominally been sending reports for hundreds of years, it leads to the impression that either the conceit is being overlooked, either because Celestia should have mentioned this "lesson" earlier, or because this problem should have come to the fore long before Twilight was about to die.  The former suggests a weakness in storytelling structure; the latter, a distressingly static view of the world outside of that story.

That notwithstanding, this story is basically an explanation for Celestia's decision at the end, and that decision is basically a vehicle onto which one can project one's own interpretation.  That's not a kind of story for everyone--plenty of people prefer a more editorial take on Big Idea fics--but as a means to invite consideration, this story works.

Star rating:  ★★★☆☆

Mortality Report is, in a lot of ways, a very limited fic; its one that has little beyond, perhaps, a mild enjoyment of the "twist" to offer a distracted or lightly invested reader, and the wheels on the vehicle which drives it are rather too obvious for a more attentive one.  But with that said, this story does reward attentive (or rather, thoughtful) reading; the amount by which one can chose to read between the lines here is basically unlimited, and the openness to interpretation is excellently set up and maintained.

Recommendation:  If you like a story which gives you just enough of a frame to let you fill in the painting on your own, this finds that spot brilliantly.  Readers looking for something more clear-cut or narratively focused will probably find it less interesting, however.

Next time:  Eternity, by DawnFade