Close... less 'there is no such thing as friendship or happiness and there is no purpose' and more 'there is nobody in charge and absolutely nothing you can do to control the chaos'.

It'd be kinda neat to see AJ's Control Freak qualities played up outside of getting herself in over her head, and I know I'm not the only one who thinks it'd be interesting to see how she handles the idea of mortality. My guess is she's religious, or tires to be.

edited 12th Aug '13 8:16:34 AM by kegisak

Yeah, AJ seems to really want something to believe in.

I wonder if Applejack would be the kind of person who would choose to believe in a concept of heaven because it would be too painful to think otherwise.

@Kegi: It honestly doesn't seem that difficult to differentiate the girls shadows. Another aspect about the shadows is that they also take aspects that they may be ok with or motivations that seem fine and twisting them into something negative.

I think it also has to do with imposter syndrome.

Mistaken for snack

A what syndrome?

I don't think that's a consistant element of shadows, just something that applies when the person is generally worried their altruism is less than... well, altruistic. The only cases I can think of in P4 are Yosuke wanting to be the hero because he's bored with his life(OR, according to the anime, because he hates that he's getting blamed for his Dad's store and wants to do something great so people will like him) and Chie thinking that she 'helps' Yukiko out to make herself feel better in spite of her flaws.

The only one I can think of that applying to is Rarity worrying that her generosity is really just a matter of trying to buy friends. But yeah, like you said, and like I demonstrated, it's certainly possible to differentiate based on their core motivations.

Another reason I want to finish this game is so I can follow it up with the anime adaptation.

It doesn't even necessarily need to be about altruism.

In an early draft of a crossover I was (and kind of still am) planning I had Dash's Shadow essentially state that her motivations for coming to ponyville was so she could feel powerful again after a long set of failures in Cloudsdale, by essentially surrounding herself with country yokels who would easily be impressed by her tricks and be an easy source of adoration. She wanted to feel like a big fish, so she went to a small pond, and all of her ambitions are just her trying to make herself look bigger.

All this talk of crossovers reminds me that I really need a pony project to work on.

Say, do they even have televisions in Equestria? How would they get the Midnight Channel?

School's back in

Through a magic mirror?

edited 12th Aug '13 8:59:41 AM by AceOfScarabs

In varies P4 crossovers I've seen books have substituted for the TV. Others have had TV appear as a relatively new invention.

I was going to have it be radios, until I moved away from being a straight Persona 4 crossover into being a much more general Persona crossover with elements from all of the games including 1 and 2.

edited 12th Aug '13 9:02:05 AM by Mio

I'd go with the idea that projectors and radios are recent inventions, around 30 years old and still experimental. Most folks in Canterlot own radios and it's slowly creeping into other cities, but they still remain somewhat expensive.

Maybe a lot of ponies brought wirelesses to listen to Princess Twilight's coronation.

Probably. I can imagine many families huddling around their bulky wirelesses listening to the coronation.

And yet they have video games. Equestria is weird.

To be fair, video games were first developed on oscilloscopes, so it's possible that if their society had different values then video games would develop before film became truly popular.

Radios seem to be in reasonably common use? There could be a tune that lulls ponies to sleep and then they wake up in The Other World.

Yeah, Equestria's Schizo Tech setting causes all sorts of problems. Especially for people who're writing fanfiction.

edited 12th Aug '13 9:30:46 AM by CDRW

So true.

The only thing we know for sure is they don't have space travel. Unless you count Celestia's banishments.

I think Schizo Tech means you can pick pretty much whatever tech level you feel like.

I tend to think a good cut off point for what technology Equestria would have would be a sort of Diesel Punk. Though depending on traditions, demographics, I'm not surprised that tech levels can vary so wildly.

The Rainbow Dash micro comic sort of has TV. There's a news reporter with a "PNN" cutie mark and there's a homage to the news montage segments of The Dark Knight Returns, but we never see an actual TV. Just sepia-toned screens.