Discord: Loot is all well and good, but your vice – what you'll drop everything to obtain – is not wealth. It's control. That was, among many other things, one of Elusive's most fatal misunderstandings, wasn't it? He offered you the world, but none of the work; none of the foundation. And worst of all, he'd robbed every ounce of your control to make it happen. So you punished him, for taking what was most valuable to you. But it wasn't just the Prince, was it? Even the red dragon…
Rarity: I-I was after his hoard!
Discord: You dared hope for a far greater prize: A dragon, tamed by words. But. You could prove me wrong right now. All you'd have to do is walk away, and accept whatever chaos this brings. Or have I truly revealed an aspect of your deep character?
Rarity: …Fine. GIMMEEEEE!!
Writing and portraying character flaws, especially melodramatic flaws, is tough. Everyone wants to go, "Who would possibly fall for THAT?" and it's your job to subtly yet laboriously plead the case that, yes, this character in this context would fall for these tactics, even if you the audience member wouldn't.
Now that I've written that block of text, it reads to me like I'm complaining about recent criticism. I hope you believe me when I say I'm really not. I'm still fascinated by everyone's takes on this whole arc so far, even (especially) those of you whose suspension of disbelief is getting stretched, across from those who are nodding their heads understandingly. This is the most intrigued I've ever been by a response to an arc of the comic.
I can totally buy this reasoning. I would even add the arc where they went to go find Applejack at that farm as evidence too. If I remember correctly, Rarity was one of the people strongly urging the others to investigate because she didn't understand what was up with Applejack and that bothered her.
What is chaos WITHOUT logic? Just nonsense. After all without a paradigm to subvert or logic to twist, it isn't TRUE chaos, now is it? It's just wacky random nonsense.
Not that there's anything necessarily WRONG with wacky random nonsense. But Chaos has standards! It's just those standards are as off the wall, flimsy and personally definable as chaos itself.
Discord has always used the appearance of wacky randomness to conceal the fact that he's very much a schemer. All we ever saw him doing before he befriended Fluttershy (especially in the flashback to when Celestia and Luna stoned him) was play angles; he just doesn't like others to recognize that he's playing an angle until it's too late.
Discord has some suspiciously deep knowledge of how Rarity's events were handled. I have to assume the GM's been sharing a play-by-play after-action report over the months of gaming, or they keep really good notes.
There comes a point in a well-developed character that they conquer their flaw. Where they find the inner strength to say "No, I'm not like that anymore." It is what elevates a character from the crowd in a story to the one we remember. We enjoy the characters who struggle with their flaws and defeat them because it gives us a sense of hope and satisfaction by proxy to see those efforts win in the end.
But today is apparently not that day for Rarity. :o
I still see her as a Flynn Rider or Castle like character. Which is odd, I wasn't an actual fan of Firefly even though I enjoyed the serenity movie. And, I don't even know the name of the actor that played the characters. I just one of those things that was on television and the character or persona of the actor made it the weirdly slick goofball dynamic work.
Now that I know the actors name, I will make the firefly soundbites from soundboard more enjoyable through the use of crazytalk animation software and Rarity's pretty face... The buy more guy/ CIA agent from the Chuck Tv Series could be Applejack and the doctor and his sister would be Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo. The comedian that played the pilot could be Sweetie Belle, and- I don't know if I could make it work now that I think about it.
I've played a few characters the other way, where their fatal flaw does, eventually, prove fatal. It can make just as good a story. That said, I have a rule that doing so should never, ever, screw over the rest of the party.
The way discord cursed the others did turn me off I'll admit, but this is a really fascinating and kinda genius way to go about it. It shows that Discord's a master manipulator, and this time not in a way that's bad. I like it, I like it a lot.
Oh no Spud I know plenty of players who would not only fall for this but would in some stupid way actually haggle with Discord until they gain nothing and he gets to do something thirty times worse.
My group released a demon for free without taking his offer of some kind of dark power. Knowing he was evil. But as long as he didn't give us anything it was harmless to unleash an archdemon into the world to raze and rampage.
If my previous stories haven't made it clear yet I've spent many a session with my head down on the table sighing in total defeat as a handful of idiots somehow make the world a worse place as they save it through sheer ignorance and stupidity.
Interesting. Rarity's player here recognizes the dilemma but her, in my reading, slightly sardonic response says to me that she's fine with roleplaying it. It's a perennial dilemma with tabletop RPGs... how do you separate not just IC/OOC knowledge but also perception? And how much is that desirable?
Yes, a genre-savvy player may see within 5 minutes that the real villain is the king's advisor, but would their character? Once you know, though, it's harder to visualize not knowing.
I have this problem myself (not strictly in RPGs, either): I see things coming a long way off. It's led to an odd writing style where frequently I don't know myself what the actual plan is. This typically requires some fiddling on the second draft so it doesn't come completely out of nowhere.
Not gonna lie, I've had a few sessions where I've basically said to the DM, "So, I know what this is. What do I need to roll, if it is possible, for my character to know what this is"... doubly for the doubt of being able to roll something to know exactly what something is ICly, like an entire subrace functionally dead and lost to the dusty forgotten tomes of "they all vanished without a trace" that I ran into a session or two ago.
Hey, I totally buy into this! I have exactly this sort of argument with my friends on both sides constantly! Sometimes trying to be the hero interferes with good character playing--and development--and other times we just fail to understand one another on who/what/how the character is. Discord reading Rarity like this is exciting! I'm not the only dweeb overthinking other peoples' characters! :D
I gotta give discord some credit here, he's done his homework in preparation for this session, and really learned everything about what's happened in the rp so far. This arc has been really interesting, I think I would be ok with rping with Discord as a GM, but I imagine not everyone would be, and that's ok.
GMs tend to vary in the amount of preparation and homework they do. And there's nothing like a super-well-prepared GM that blows you out of the water. I can see why Rarity just says, "...Fine."
I will be the voice of discord here (no pun intended).
I loved how AppleJack and Pinkie Pie were handled.
Here ... Not so much ... Rarity just saying 'Gimme' admiting Discord was right ... For me the fact is was right doesn't mean she has to fall in his trap. Now ... she isn't cursed yet ... So I will wait until she came bak with Twillight and the other before having a definitive opinion on how this character is corrupted.
I mentioned it on the other page, but the real trick here is that discord is presenting a false dichomy- remember the diamond is actually a rock, so giving it to any of her enemies wouldn't help them, and if he created a diamond to give out, when he was defeated all his magic was undone so the diamond would be caput.
The Trick here is Discord first convincing her that the two options were, she gets the diamon knowing its cursed, or it goes to an enemy and second, her confronting her with her flaw to both further disctract her from the trick and as I went on in the last page, convince her to roleplay her character as the manipulative figure she loves to do so as.
I bet the curse, will be something like having the others only told about the diamon being a rock via notes or something, So rarity being the consumate role player keeps acting up and the others don't know why
Now that I've written that block of text, it reads to me like I'm complaining about recent criticism. I hope you believe me when I say I'm really not. I'm still fascinated by everyone's takes on this whole arc so far, even (especially) those of you whose suspension of disbelief is getting stretched, across from those who are nodding their heads understandingly. This is the most intrigued I've ever been by a response to an arc of the comic.