I thought Fluttershy was supposed to be that Nord who didn't particularly want to kill rats.
I thought so too, then revised my opinion for a few reasons. The main one is gender/race issues- Adorabella's friends were described as an orc in daedric armor and "some elves," and the notion of Awesomeicus being Spike made me think they might be gender-matched after all. The discovery that yes, there are NPC (or at least not immediately PCish) adventurers running around also made me wonder.
It's certainly possible that Fluttershy couldn't/didn't want to make it to Adorabella's duel, or that "some elves" was a generalization, and now that we're thinking Awesomeicus is a genderswapped Rainbow Dash the genders not lining up makes more sense again (though Dash has an obvious excuse for it, while Fluttershy doesn't). I'm really not sure on that front, though.
I kinda dislike the whole "PCs are ponies" theory. I mean, the theories I've seen seem to be looking for proof for the theory rather than the other way around. Especially considering the Balmora butcher- murdering random people for fun seems entirely out of character for any of them. Then again, I might just think that because I dislike MLP in general. Everything I know about it has been gained from osmosis. And I know a lot. It's like a frikkin plauge...
Well, that's how figuring things out works- you notice a pattern, then apply it elsewhere to fill in the blanks. The less you know or are certain of, the more haphazard your efforts to fill in the blanks are. If you think I'm grasping at straws, by all means say so, but you've got to admit there's an awful lot of ponyish behavior going on here. Plus we've been dreaming about them.
You're right about the Balmora Butcher- that one's been puzzling me/us for a while now. Part of the problem is that we don't know how serious/gamelike they're taking it as. Dash might totally get bored and start killing random things in a video game, for instance, but she'd never go around murdering people IRL. Even Fluttershy in berserk mode isn't
murderous.But then again, none of them are really the kind to run around killing things, but they probably couldn't function too well if they didn't. There may be some translation issues going on here, or maybe they do literally think they're playing a video game.
But speaking about the Balmora Butcher in particular, her (well, a Telvanni described as a lunatic by Yagrum who at least roughly matches her description) name is "SexyWithersXOXOXO." The withers is a ridge on the back of a horse. If she's
not a pony, what exactly is her name supposed to mean?
I'm starting to like the notion that this is the same general idea as the movie, where some rogue pony flees to another dimension and must for some reason be stopped. But then, I guess you don't want to hear about that.
AS TO ACTUAL PLANS, I think we should try and convince Awesomicus that our quest chain requires spying on the other PCs. Maybe say he needs to inform us of what they've been up to so we can figure out where the artifacts we need are. If he says he could just ask them, we could act like a gamey NPC who is locked into needing the quest to be finished in a particular way.
Of course, that plan has a lot of potential problems in it. It would be extremely useful if it worked, but would probably fail. If so, we could just tell him the exact locations of Sunder/Keening/Wraithguard, and how to get everything ready, so he just does the main quest for us. That would give us plenty of time to become a powerful archmage who rewrites reality on whim.
I'm not fond of this. Even if it works, if he's discovered for any reason (and let's be honest here- how subtle is he likely to be?) the others are going to want to know what we're up to. Which wouldn't necessarily be terrible, but probably not an ideal way to get to know everyone. At that point we might as well turn it into an escort quest or something.
And again, I'm wary of trying to cheat Awesomeicus, and we've certainly got nothing he'd consider a reward.
...
Unless a poorly-dried T-shirt of herself counts, which it probably totally would if she's Pony Rainbow Dash in an orc's body.
Does anyone else think fighting mudcrabs might be a better idea, because we could dart away when they attack, and run when we get beat up? I've barely ever played MW, and it was years ago, so I don't remember well.
Mudcrabs are the ideal foe, yeah. We do need to be careful when hunting for them, though, because there are more dangerous things in the swamp.
I think what we should tell him is that he has to gather a party of heroes, recover these artifacts, and then defeat Dagoth Ur to save the world (and recover the most epic loot of all time while being hailed as an incredibly hero for all of history).
Couple problems here. For one thing, we don't ourselves fully understand what's going on. We know the vanilla main quest line, but we don't understand how ponies factor into any of it, who or what the Nerevarine is or has to be, and so forth. Rushing for the three artifacts and a heart gank could end exceedingly poorly (or just stall) if anything's different. I think we should talk with the ponies (particularly Clover) and hear some more of what Dagoth Ur has to say before trying to solve a problem that might be radically different from what we're expecting.
For another, if we're going to try to get him to assemble his more serious, levelheaded friends to do stuff for us anyway, wouldn't it be more productive and direct to just talk to them? I suppose we could go for manipulating Awesomeicus to rope his pals into following him on a quest they don't really understand the importance of, but unless they're for some reason
averse to saving the world, I'm not sure I see the benefit.
I think our medium-term goal should be to ask Clover some pointed questions. Any of the ponies might or might not be very insightful, but if Clover really is Twilight Sparkle, she ought to know a great deal about the current situation.