@Background Pony #9403  
It is suuuuper dead. These are years old. Can use desu archive to try and track down the post numbers.

is the thread 404 by now?  
if not can someone link?

@NounVerb
 

 
well, if monogamy was necessary, then non-monogamous lovers would tear our civilization asunder. people have even been cheating on each other, yet I’m not running out of bullets protecting my canned goods from roving bands of mutants. I think civilization is gonna be fine.
 
what you’re trying to say is that monogamy is a good idea almost all the time, which I agree with. but it sure is kind of creepy.
 

 
so why isn’t he getting wooed by potato sack, the earth pony from podunkyville? no, his weird qualities just happen to be exactly perfectly what the moon princess and goddess of the night has always yearned for.
 

 
what I meant was without anon, she “is frightened to desire things” and “a lonely pony who cannot dream.” she’s not getting together with him because she wants to. she’s getting together with him because it hurts if she doesn’t. she basically said that the only thing that really bothered her during her thousand year exile on the moon was that she didn’t have a man like him around.
 

 
I did, and now nobody cares about me, and I’m forever alone. sorry.
 

 
“I feel that it could be possible to build fantastic dreams together with you. not just for equestria… but for you and I.”
 
it’s a metaphor for getting married.
 

 
“I believe you could do wonderful things for my subjects and equestria in general.”  
“your ideas, your attitude, and your resolve could help every being in equestria.”  
“you have much to offer.”  
“your dreams are wondrous. like fireworks of color and light they shine out to me across the dreamscape.”  
“night after night I have found myself watching, entranced.”  
“you are passionate, but remain earthly, with a sense of humor.”  
“you have a hidden self, ready to bloom.”
 

 
I don’t think princess luna greets every pony by telling them, “you have a hidden self, ready to bloom. I see it, potato sack!”
 

 
if she’s trying to tell him everyone is a special snowflake, then why is she only interested in anon? she’s saying that stuff to distinguish him from others, who she feels do not have much to offer, to show him why she wants only him as her lover and no one else.
 
that’s why monogamy is creepy, because there isn’t one person who’s better than everyone else in the world. there are many people who have much to offer, who can help everyone, who are just as passionate and funny as anyone else. but in the eyes of monogamy, there is only one to which everyone else is far inferior. it’s a lie to make us feel better, a burden that all the rejected and left behind have to bear, so that couples can be happy in their wedded bliss.

@redweasel  

 
Care to run that one by me again, chief?
 
Assuming you want to have anything remotely like civilization, monogamy is absolutely 100% necessary.
 
Regarding the other problems you’ve picked with the image, I think you’re deliberately misunderstanding this to sound self-righteous and insulting. On the slim off-chance you aren’t, let me provide an alternate reading of this.
 
>Anon is special  
Because, in the story, he’s a fish out of water. Literally swapped realities through some freak event no-one can explain. He’s unusual for that. If you want an explanation for the dreams, one is that there’s some minor side effect of the reality swap. Another is that human dreams seem different to a dreamwalker than the normal pony dreams. Another is that she just really likes Anon, so spending time together in a dream is like spending time together on a netflix binge watching random stuff. The company is the key.
 
>I cannot bear to live without you  
Luna can. She’s gotten to know Anon over time as she’s worked on figuring out what it was that pulled a Negative Space Wedgie on reality, and they’ve hit it off. Bonds can form over time when compatible personalities interact with each other. Try it. You’ll find that you just might like it. Luna, after returning from banishment, feels like a fish out of water in a new world. Anon is almost a literal fish out of water in a new world. They’ve got common experiences, and it makes sense to bond with someone who’s gone through something similar to you.
 
>Marry me, you manly whatever you are!  
Never mentioned. You’re pulling this out of your fantasies, not what’s actually written.
 
>Anon being OP  
I have absolutely no idea where you’re drawing this from. My best guess is that you’re mislabeling the “you have the ability to help others if you want”. That’s literally the most generic “you’re a good person and you have potential” line out there, and it shows up in every “people are inherently valuable beings” story or motivational work ever. Maybe it refers to coming from a different world and having a whole new set of ideas to contribute from a more advanced society. That’s valid enough, and doesn’t require Anon to be inherently better than anyone.
 
 
I do believe that your discontent and hostility is coming from within you, and has nothing to do with whatever you’ve read.

@Background Pony #7A1B
 
yeah, but all those characters were total assholes, and they sure had eyes for a lot more than one guy who’s totally not a loser.
 
when writing wish fulfillment fantasies, just remember that triumph over adversity is way better than a match made in heaven. and maybe remember that as an author you can have their backs, and bring things back from even when all hope seems lost, so don’t be afraid to have bad or risky things happen. they’ll make the fulfillment so much more fulfilling when it comes.

@redweasel  
I suppose it depends on the god. When I look at Greek myth–there are aspects of the world that seem to be a bit Hellenic to me, and Pegasus, the original winged horse, was a god’s steed in Greek myth–I see only two examples of goddesses marrying mortals, and both would appear to be in the “exception that proves the rule” category.
 
Hebe, Goddess of Youth, daughter of Zeus and Hera, married Hercules after his death. And Hercules was a legendary hero who also happened to be a demigod, being the son of Zeus himself. The Greek gods were apparently not greatly bothered by incest.
 
And Eos, Goddess of the Dawn, married a Trojan prince named Tithonius, who was the victim of a cruel prank by Zeus, who gave him immortality but not eternal youth, so he shriveled away as the years passed, unable even to die.
 
Zeus fathered a whole lot of demigod babies with random mortal women, but married a goddess, Hera. This seems to be more or less normal for the gods of antiquity.
 
And when I look to Norse myth, I see even less. There was Freya, who for a time took a human named Ottar as a lover, as a reward for his great piety, but she didn’t marry him in most versions of the legend. And depending on the specific version of the legend, and the translation, Ottar may or may not have been Odin in disguise in the first place. Norse myth is like that. There are many alternate spellings, nicknames/cognomens (“kennings”) for the various figures and it is rarely 100% clear who’s who. In this instance it is not altogether clear whether Ottar the Pious is the same as Otr the Dwarf, or whether he is the same individual as a semi-legendary Norse chieftain who was called Ottar the Furious, or whether any of these was a form Odin took while visiting our world, Midgard. Note also that in the Poetic Edda Loki claimed that Freya had had sex with all the Norse gods, including her brother Freyr, as well as all the Elves in Alfheim. Freya was the Norse love goddess, among other things, and I suppose that if any of the goddesses in that pantheon was going to get involved with a human, she was the only likely one.
 
In Celtic myth, Brigid, the Goddess of the Dawn, wed King Bres of the Tuatha de Danaan, but he, too, was only half-mortal, his father having been the mighty demon-prince Elatha of Fomor. Otherwise neither the Morrigan nor the Badb nor any other goddess had any intimate dealings with humans, in any versions of their stories that I have found.
 
Unless you count Epona, oddly enough, given the subject matter:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_sacrifice#Irish
 
But that particular set of legends is open to interpretation–the white mare is not necessarily regarded as an incarnation or avatar of Epona herself–and in either case it’s really not nice to marry a goddess and then kill her and eat her flesh, even if the people DO make you a king afterwards.
 
Some Japanese folktales say that the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami for a time took a human lover, and their grandson, the warrior Ninigi, was the great-grandfather of the first Japanese Emperor, Jimmu. But I can find no reference to the human himself with whom she conceived the child. Perhaps she lost his phone number.
 
And that’s really about it. Goddesses seem to be rather pickier about their lovers than gods are. I don’t know whether it’s the same with talking pony goddesses, of course. And for me, these flights of fancy about talking ponies are an escape from a real world that seems darker with each passing year, so I hope that I may be forgiven for writing about them in a manner not wholly conforming to the expected psychology or cultural of early 21st Century American humans.
 
And yes, I will admit to finding Celestia very attractive, and to writing wish-fulfillment fantasies pertaining to her and a human male, which I have occasionally posted on a certain imageboard that shall not be named. But I will say that I refrain from making her a slave to her passions, or making the human self-insert a god among men. I generally rely on depowered/sick/injured/amnesiac Celestia trapped far from her people and alone with the human as a plot device, when I don’t just go directly into the made you look. It is a terrible thing to have such thoughts, and I ought properly to be ashamed, I know.

@Background Pony #7A1B  

 
well… no, not at all. some gods will only wed the champion who has bested them in combat, but others just want someone to love.
 
but I wasn’t complaining about him being OP in of itself. I meant that he’s made that way specifically for the purpose of ensuring that no one else can compare. it makes the author look really insecure, like they’re afraid of even thinking about their OC not getting laid. she can’t just like his dreams. “they shine out to me across the dreamscape.” she can’t just be in love with him. “I have never been in love.” he can’t just be passionate, earthly and humorous, “you have a hidden self, ready to bloom.”
 

that’s the other thing, is I don’t really care for royal romance. it’s all about how better they are than everypony else, and never about how good they are for each other.

@redweasel  
Well, to be entirely serious–or as serious as we can be when we’re talking about fanfiction for a cartoon about talking pastel-colored magic ponies–the Princesses are living goddesses, or as close to that as exists in their world. To be worthy of either of them, Anon–or anyone else contemplating anything beyond worship from afar–must be godlike himself, must he not?
 
There are a pretty small small number of ways that fanfiction writers contort themselves around this particular point of psychology that fanfiction writers employ when they want to tell a romantic story involving one of the Princesses, and those of us who read a lot of fanfiction see them over and over.
 
Godlike Marty Stu Anon is one.
 
“You’re the only one who treats me like just another pony instead of cringing at my hooves” is another.
 
Pretty Pony Princess depowered and trapped on Earth/on a desert island/in a pocket dimension/in a cave/in a featureless white room alone with Anon, possibly injured while he takes care of her and tends to her wounds while slowly day by day she falls in love with him for his kindness to her and his gentle hands, is another.
 
Or, less romantic and more perverse, “The Princess is just that pervy and uninhibited and has Anon chained in her dungeon/is visiting him in his dreams with lustful intent/has summoned him from another world magically to slake her mighty thirst,” which skips over the emotional stuff more or less entirely and gets right to the CENSORED.
 
This last one is perhaps easier to write for those in a hurry to get to the clop scenes, but makes the character of the Princess in question more difficult to establish as attractive. A large part of what draws me to them is the personalities they display onscreen, and neither one seems likely to abduct or imprison a human for sexual purposes. And I think we all agree, even good erotic fiction needs first to be good fiction.

@Background Pony #7A1B
 
I don’t think many men fantasize about skipping out on child support… but it is a fair point.
 
I just don’t ever see confessions that aren’t obsessive power fantasies that enshrine anon as some kind of god among men, and her a slave to her desire for him, so that he never has to fear her having any life beyond him.
 
monogamy is so creepy.

@redweasel  
You aren’t wrong, but this sort of thing is not an uncommon fantasy. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s right up there with
 
>you’re a tattooed bad boy on a motorcycle  
>you make my loins wet because evolutionary psychology has wired me to seek out potential alpha males instinctively  
>I’m sure I can tame you and make you pay child support, because I believe I can change you  
>I’m sure that once you give up drug dealing and bar fights you’ll be a CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation in no more than a year or two  
>I’m sure that you aren’t much more likely to be back in prison instead  
>I’m sure my love can change you and save you, and add thirty points to your IQ as well  
>white picket fence and 2.4 children 4ever, vacation cabin in the Poconos optional

 
every time…

Who says 4chan can’t do good stuff?