#tw sensitive

TW: TOPICS ON GROOMING, ABLEISM, VICTIM BLAMING, ETC. VIEW AT YOUR OWN RISK

Rarity redesign + some mlp au stuff!!!

bit of concept-context for 2nd art: while going through infection stages, blood fully evaporated from her body. as any other pony, she wasn't supposed to stay alive after last phase, but due to the magic of elements of harmony she did survive. now through her veins flows crystallized substance and she's crystal alicorn. she's not mortal being anymore, and never will be one again. crystal liquid also flows through her butterfly wings, making them more stronger and resistant to Sun.

i'm still not sure about lore of this AU, though. i was thinking about making Celestia (she gonna become Daybreaker :)) and partly Luna as some sort of antagonists, like the main sourse of infection?

i also had this idea where Twi just went down the path of evil, becoming the villain of the story (it's not really about infection tho, but can be turned into infected au too. i still remember episode where Twi went insane and forced all the ponies to fight for the toy????). at some point she understood she's going to witness all her friends dying (the last friendship lesson, yk), since she's quite immortal, so... using elements of harmony, she did turn them into immortals too (very friendly of her!!)

Interestingly, Fitz had always needed and wanted to reach out to the Fool specifically about Bee, about parenting, about his doubts, and he’d missed him as a partner and as a confidant in more ways than one. Throughout the first book, the Fool’s absence for the past years, decades even, and the fact that he could never share Bee with him (except in his mind and in letters he burned immediately after he’d finished writing), was something that caused him so much regret. Yet when they meet again, and the Fool claims his parenthood of Bee, Fitz doesn’t react well to it. That the only friend he’s wished to be involved in his parenting of his daughter over the years, more than his own other daughter, is suddenly revealed to be an actual parent, and that Fitz refuses that to him might sound hypocritical to some. Especially when Fitz had already abandoned his role as Nettle’s father to Burrich and knew that despite that, he’d never stopped feeling guilt and longing to be with her and know her and protect her. 

I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to Nettle’s case though, because there are ways in which Bee’s case is totally unconventional and different. Fitz was fully responsible for Nettle being conceived (unless we believe the theory that Nighteyes did that, sorry for reminding you), acknowledged her as soon as he knew she was born, and he actively made choices to protect her, even if those included him not being part of her life. Bee’s case is rather like his situation with another child, right?

A child could not have two fathers. An unwelcome memory intruded. Dutiful had been conceived by Verity’s use of my body. Did Dutiful have two fathers? Was he as much my son as Verity’s? I refused to think any longer about it tonight.

(From Fool’s Quest)

For the longest time, Fitz’s excuse for not recognizing that Dutiful is his son is that he wasn’t there. That he had no conscious part in his conception and that he didn’t even remember it happening. He wasn’t there, so it wasn’t him. Never mind that Dutiful looks like Fitz and has his Skill and his Wit and every part of his appearance is a reminder of their link. All of this is absolutely true of the Fool with Bee; they didn’t fully resume their existence as individuals after merging, their bodies had become extensions of each other, but he did not consciously participate in the making of a child; he had not the slightest idea of her existence, he couldn’t even believe Fitz had a kid at first. But she exists, and she looks a great deal like him. The Fool fully acknowledging Bee as his daughter (rather than just Fitz’s child going through a mutation because of their very close contact) probes Fitz exactly where it hurts. If he recognizes that the Fool got a daughter through him, without having an active role in it, he can no longer deny that he, too, had a child with Kettricken, and that Dutiful is no less his son than he is Verity’s. He can’t pretend his way through that whole mess anymore, as he has been doing for a good forty years. Accepting that Bee is the Fool’s daughter as much as his, and still pretending that he is not truly Dutiful’s father (which he still does) would be hypocrisy. And illogical.

Worse than that perhaps, is that the Fool framed his role in conceiving Bee —  how he and Fitz switched bodies and never wholly returned to a state of separate individuals, in an ambiguously, consciously sexual way (I was with you). The way the Fool says it feels like he had a child with Fitz, created by his bond with him, and not through Fitz, and that’s a quite important detail. Or are you seriously thinking to make the patron saint of denial face an event he had refused to think about for two thirds of his life, and have him acknowledge not only a possible lack of consent but also borderline incestuous implications? Yes I didn’t think so.

Fitz applies the wolf principle that ‘if you stay still no one will see you’ to most if not every aspect of his life. If he does not acknowledge a fact, it does not exist. He has been pretending his way through life in a way that makes his quarrel with the Fool in GF almost (or maybe fully) uncharacteristic; that he would go out of his way to violently break their bubble of pretensions and point out the elephant in the room he’s been purposefully avoiding all this time (aka the Fool’s feelings for him) is something that goes against how his character revolves around confronting the uncomfortable by ignoring it (even the Fool calls him out for it, both with Jek and to his face, telling him he’d always known what he felt for him and kept pretending he didn’t). Yet even that quarrel had a somewhat disappointing resolution, because you’d think that Fitz creating a confrontation for once, no matter how upsetting, could be seen as something of an improvement, and yet they somehow fell back almost to that same dynamics of ignoring the elephant in the room they had previously. In the third trilogy more so than in Fool’s Fate, if I may add. With comparison to their situation in Fool’s Errand, it is hard to say that confronting things caused any kind of evolution in their relationship and dynamics, or any special openness about feelings and attraction. And so in a way, as disappointing as it is, maybe, just maybe some part of himself was uncomfortable with the implication that he got a child with the Fool. Maybe it’s the no-homo striking again. But, as it seems a lot more logical to me, I tend to believe that what he is truly pretending his way out of this time are the implications of this parallel on what he is to Dutiful, to Kettricken, and more importantly, on the meaning of his bond with Verity, a relationship beyond sacred to him. And worst of all, all the dimensions of wrongness that their lack of boundaries had ultimately created, the possibility that he had been involved in a borderline incestuous situation, and all those other possibilities that a similar lack of boundaries with the Fool as well as the Fool‘s easy acceptance of it could force him to examine.