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The first run was five hardbacks of progressively increasing girth. The stack is hefty, but the books are comfortable. Each chapter has chapter art too, which I consider a plus in all fantasy books.

I still think the 5-volume split was the best option.  It’s a big damn story.

Original Fallout Equestria was written by someone known as Kkat who I’m 90% sure is a woman and the story only has some PG-13ish scenes at worst (you know, aside from the violence and gore that comes with a Fallout setting.) Project Horizons was written by a guy known as Somber, who I remember him mentioning in the post-chapter notes that he got fired for failing the wrong student once and the fic itself includes multiple explicit sex scenes.

So there’s been a lot of talk of how good Rose is compared to how villainous, and I feel like that all misses the point. She isn’t good, or evil, she is essentially a child forced into responsibilities and expectations she doesn’t want and isn’t ready for from crappy parents who fundamentally don’t understand her, and into situations she emotionally reacts to viscerally, both positively and negatively, which wind up having dire stakes. She makes mistakes, because every situation is a situation she was never ready for and has no experience in.

She doesn’t have the perspective that other gems have, the ones who existed for long times and know what consequence and risk really are. Rose follows her heart religiously, and this is most clear when we got to see her compared side by side to Bismuth in her episode. On Rose’s end, her controlling parents are forcing her into something dull when she’d rather enjoy her life and the beautiful things she sees in it instead; inspiring other gems to rebel from their purposes is intimately and already combined with saving the earth for her. She sympathizes by analogy to herself, likening her experience with the diamonds to that of other gems.

Rose doesn’t want to shatter gems, to the extent she’s willing to imprison one of her closest allies, but is this because of her strong sense of ethics or is it because death scares her, that she’s never had to deal with it before, and that it’s a new and horrifying byproduct of simple and innocent sympathizing with other gems that nobody likes responsibilities forced upon them by their parents, and the necessitated need to fight violently for the earth? For Bismuth, all of it is real. She’s essentially an adult and at least seems to be older than Rose anyway, with her talking about toiling away building towers for intellectual gems like it’s just part of her life. Life, death, war, and, particularly, the consequences and terrifyingly real possibility of both aftermaths the war might have, are all in her mind when she’s urging Rose that it’s a simple truth they will almost certainly lose everything with a defeat or at least countless even more friends going for Rose’s clean victory, if they don’t cross some social and ethical niceties. We can’t know if Bismuth’s voice shook as she watched herself speaking those words, the words of cruel meaningless realism, but she was unafraid to stare grisly truth in the face while Rose could not. Rose hates the idea because she never wanted to find herself in a reality of war, and she holds tight to some remaining semblance of denial of that horrifying reality being the one she is in and is objectively responsible for, by silencing Bismuth.

out of context AI: The Somnium Files