lopoddity
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Beauty, Ain't He
🕑 Added 2021-05-09 21:55:55 +0000 UTC"Crikey, he's got a mouth like a bear trap! An' just look at the size of these chompers! Reckon he could rip my whole foreleg right off!"
"And he's only a juvenile! Look, the cartilage in 'is ears hasn't stiffened up yet!"
"Daaaad.....?"
"Relax, mijo. The Allgoods are expert creaturologists, they're just a little excited is all! Now they paid good money to observe you in your natural environment today, so just act like they aren't even here. You can do that for your old man, can't you, son?"
~~~~~~~~~~~~
y'know, sometimes when i write an MLP character being an asshole (eg. Blueblood, Starlight, Daring Do, etc), I get accused of hating the character and just using them as a cheap villain. It's an accusation that always perplexes me, cuz if I hate a character, I generally don't funnel time and energy into drawing and writing them over and over. Want to know a character I genuinely can't stand? Moondancer, Twilight's old friend from the episode Amending Fences. How many times have I drawn her? Not once. If I draw a character from the show, it's typically because I really like them, or at least find them interesting.
except right now. I absolutely do hate Scootaloo's parents, and I am using them as cheap villains here, lol
(I also tweaked their color palettes to be less washed-out and grody) Rest assured I won't depict them as any more tactless and self-obsessed as they are in canon....I mean, just read the comic they appear in. I feel so terrible for Scootaloo, thank goodness her aunts are confirmed as her true (adoptive) parents.
Jane Allgood (i'm calling her Jane because "Mane" doesn't make sense as a pun, if the writers are gonna use a ponified version of 'Jane Goodall" they need to make a version that isn't so....lame) is a conservationist and a cousin of A.K. Yearling/Daring Do. Snap Shutter......might just be a long lost Carcharodon, he's already got the accent and the god-awful parenting down pat. Montezuma knows the Allgoods as a doggedly obsessed combination of intrusive questions and zero sense of boundaries. To Jane and Snap, Monty’s feelings/autonomy are just sort of a cute concept, they really view him as a neat specimen to observe that just happens to talk. They wanted to extensively document him and then publish their findings for fame and profit, but Monty ran away before they could progress far with their research. The Allgoods consider this a terrible tragedy, as they’d already settled on a species name for him- Allgood’s Cryptosphinx. What a shame.
Comments
cactus bastrop
i'm a real life conservationist (wildlife biologist) and i'm definitely not offended--the entire conservation field has, unsurprisingly, a pretty racist history (particularly when it comes to native peoples). in this instance, however, the allgoods seem more like old-timey racist "anthropologists"--after all, monty isn't some random creature, he's a fully sentient being with thoughts and intelligence, not unlike the tribes that were "studied" by european/white anthropologists back in the day. the issue with the allgoods, imo, is that they don't see monty as a being with agency equal to their own. so as a conservationist, i can certainly recognize them as pretty messed up lol
Lopoddity
He’s about 17 here, so he’s nearly done growing. He’s about double the size of an average stallion, yet smaller and less bulky than Smokescreen, and pretty dinky compared to Ahuizotl. He’s roughly the same size and weight as Pandora, though his body isn’t as long as her’s.
Melody Williamson
Wow Monty was that big as a teenager? How big is he as an adult compared to the average pony?
SmilesPerHour
Your art and storytelling are on point as always, Lop! I'm always happy to see more of Monty :) I wonder if any real conservationists would be offended by the characterization of Scoot's parents. It's okay to be fascinated with nature and animals, but the key element is respect. These are wild animals with real thoughts and feelings, not stuffed animals to be poked and prodded and abused at your leisure. This is nothing against your story, mind you, it's perfectly in character for them. I'm just objecting to the general behavior of Scoot's parents, even setting aside their neglect toward their daughter.
Alyx
Not to mention, Moondancer could have made literally any attempt of her own to connect?? Yeah there is fault in Twilights personality, but she's not alone LOL! I hate the one sidedness fault of that episode. My favorite thing about Lops art is that it shows both sides of the issue that the writers of FOM seemed to have steamrolled over in favor of the easy to swallow lesson lol.
D
Also the “Allgood’s Cryptosphinx” part hits like a punch to the gut. What a couple of right blokes. I don’t know why the themes in your stories always hit so hard (other than being really well written and constructed) but they do. Maybe bc they’re cutesy ponies
D
Oh my god, not to detract from the amazing art and headcannons here, but I’d love to hear your take on Moondancer (from the show). I’ve always been perplexed and fascinated by that episode, I used to love it, but after some thought and rewatches, it almost borders on being... dare I say it, r/niceguys -ish? That’s probably going a bit too far, but I do find the moral so odd, where it’s framed like Twilight has to apologize for not going to Moondancer’s party and also take responsibility for the fact that Moondancer never made more friends because of her. Like, what? There’s almost like there’s this weird entitlement to it, like Twilight is framed as a bad guy for not going, even though she was busy, you know, saving the world from a supervillain from the moon. Anyways, I haven’t seen it in awhile but I just remember it feeling... weird. Do you have any thoughts on that episode or headcannons of her that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
Lopoddity
I don't think the Allgoods would claim to have "discovered" Monty, rather they were trying to be the first to extensively study him, and thus lay their scientific claim on him. As for classifying species and hybrids....hmm. I mean, if we were being realistic, it's extremely doubtful two species as different as a sphinx and an ahuizotl, or a yak and a pony, or a dragon and a changing (etc) could ever conceivably create a viable offspring. Buuuut MLP is a fantasy world teeming with magic, and I think that magic lends itself quite well to the creation of entirely new species. I think what constitutes a species would be a hotly contested topic in Equestria, with most scientists insisting that to be a species, individuals must be able to successfully reproduce. However, hybrids with reproductive difficulty, such as mules, would argue that this is a restrictive and exclusionary vein of thinking, and claim that a species is created when there are enough individuals to form a population. The issue is further muddled as hybrids are still largely uncommon in Equestria, so the question of "can this individual reproduce" can often only remain speculation, because a dragon-yak hybrid is kinda stuck holding her breath if she's hoping for another rare dragon-yak to show up and test whether they can successfully breed. Is Smokescreen a hybrid, or a new species? Could he reproduce with another of his kind? It's unknown, because as far as he knows, there's exactly one other dragon-changeling hybrid out there.... and she's his younger cousin, Smolder and Ocellus' daughter. So, not gonna happen. Still, some would argue that Smoke and his cousin are a species, since there's more than one individual. I imagine this is all tricky stuff in a world of talking animals. The Allgoods are uncertain if Montezuma could reproduce with a similar hybrid, or reproduce at all, but they'd argue that he is a member of a new species (or perhaps a subspecies) because he displays entirely unique traits and magic unseen in his parent species.
Scyllarus
...I now have a question about species and biology in your MLP headcanon. It seems like mixes aren't entirely uncommon, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Allgoods were either all too happy to capitalize on their "discovery"/if Monty's background wasn't publically known, but...he wouldn't be a new species, right? He's kind of a one-of-a-kind hybrid. How...how does the classification of species even work in the Pandoraverse???
