Recap / Triptych Continuum The Remainders Of The Day

Twilight Sparkle loves being a librarian. Ever since her days terrorizing — er, overseeing the Ancient History section of the Canterlot Archives, she knew that it was the place she wanted to work. Even if life as the Ponyville Librarian has thrown her a few bumps and wrinkles, overall, she still loves her work, and even thinks it's help make her a better pony than the aloof, antisocial and rather obsessive mare she used to be.

Unfortunately, being a librarian who isn't working on the national book depository entails some rather unpleasant duties. Twilight has done her best to put those duties off as long as possible, but Mayor Mare has put her hoof down:

The Ponyville Library has grown ridiculously overcrowded, with far too many redundant and out-of-date copies for a town library. Twilight Sparkle is going to hold a book sale and trim down the collection to something more manageable. Or else.

Needless to say, Twilight has her own opinions on that. Sell books? Not on her watch!

Read it here.

This story contains examples of:

• A Wizard Did It: Ah-ha-ha... no, very definitely no. As has been firmly established for the Continuum, there are very strict and well-defined limits to what magic can achieve. Twilight considers a number of magical solutions to avoid having to sell her excess books, including shrinking them (wears off too quickly and would make them impossible to access), phasing them (even more dangerous than shrinking them), storing them in the between (she can't be sure she'd be able to get them back), making them sapient and capable of levitation so they can arrange themselves, and compressing all of the knowledge into one book. Each one is promptly and thoroughly rejected for obvious drawbacks so prominent that even Twilight can't countenance risking them.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Mayor Mare not only has the ovaries of brass needed to tell Twilight Sparkle off for cluttering up the library to her face, she then follows it up by ordering her to hold a book sale. And compounds it by not only standing firm through the resultant magical temper tantrum, but neatly shutting Twilight down in fear by reminding her that, even beyond going over Twilight's head to Celestia (or to Twilight's mother), Mayor Mare controls the library's budget.
• Berserk Button: Twilight actually has what can only be described as a territorial streak. The idea of selling books isn't so bad per say, she certainly has no problems with attending book sales, but the idea of selling her books, of having somebody order her around in her library, that's what ticks her off.
• Breather Episode: Zigzagged in chapter 3. It starts off quite heavy, with an emotional breakdown from Twilight about how upset and afraid she is, but it ultimately moves into a very emotionally cleansing and mood-lifting ending.
• Brutal Honesty: The rest of the Mane Six are not at all shy about informing Twilight in chapter 2 that her plans to get around Mayor Mare's decree by having them use their homes as branches of the library proper are ridiculous, and that the only help they're giving her is organizing and running the book-sale.
• Call-Back:
  • In chapter 2, Twilight shakes off the idea of using her connection to the Princesses to get Mayor Mare to stand down because, in addition to never wanting to do that, the time she invoked that kind of help with Luna didn't work out so well.
  • In chapter 3, Rarity refers to a certain enmity she bears the mayor due to an incident involving geese, which Twilight had unwittingly missed.
  • Chapter 3 has an extensive discussion of how far too many ponies allow themselves to be defined by their mark or think that the mark is all-important to doing a job, a conversation briefly touched upon between Pinkie Pie and Cranky Doodle during the events of Pinkie Pie vs. The Souffle.
  • The extensive conversation of chapter 3, in which Twilight unburdens herself of her emotional doubts to Rarity, who assures Twilight of her continued Character Development, is very much like something that occurred during Orange Is The New Blue.
  • That well-known and overly-printed book which everypony seems to have a copy of, but nopony can finish, is the same one which Celestia and Luna are trying to chew their way through in Multi-Factor Authentication.
• Character Development: Acknowleged In-Universe; 30 moons of dealing with actual library patrons instead of being what amounted to a glorified book collector in a misappropriated collection has smoothed out a lot of her original ineptitude with basic social interactions. Of course, she still needs a lot more work...
  • Twilight's development is discussed extensively in the third chapter of the story, where she admits that even now, when she's still so very broken, her older self from before she moved to Ponyville is someone she can visibly recognize was worse.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Downplayed, discussed and justified; being friends does not mean blindly supporting everything that a friend does, and sometimes, one has to do what a friend doesn't want in order to do what they need you to do. Twilight learns this during the story.
  • During her reflections in chapter 3, Twilight admits that Princess Celestia was doing this when she assigned Twilight the role of librarian in the first place: she had wanted to become a researcher, but Celestia realized that Twilight, so recently scarred by Clear Coordinator, would just use that position to lock herself in the lab and never come out. So, she made Twilight's research grant dependent on Twilight holding down an actual job.
• Cringe Comedy: It's painful to watch Twilight going through what she does, but the fact she's doing so over books makes it kind of funny, as well. Plus the slapstick she gets into as a result of her efforts.
• Drama Bomb Finale: In chapter 4, Twilight reveals part of the reason why she hates the idea of destroying books is because she upholds the idea that a deceased author lives on through their books. Thusly, so long as somebody's still reading their books, that author is still alive in the minds of their readers. But, inevitably, books fall out of public interest and are forgotten about. This is heavy enough In-Universe that even Rainbow Dash finds herself a little shaken when Twilight talks about it.
• Five Stages of Grief: Twilight goes through them as part of the story. The second chapter highlights this by titling itself "Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Denial, Denial, Denial..." as a reference to how Twilight won't allow herself to progress through the stages properly.
• Foreshadowing: With perhaps a dash of Hypocritical Humor — in the first chapter, Twilight idly mentions to a patron that ponies tend to judge "normal" by themselves. Sure enough, we get to see that principle in action in the second chapter, where among other things Twilight is seen lamenting to herself that she "gives other ponies far too much credit" and that "rational behavior was almost a contradiction, and common sense wasn't".
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Chapter two reveals that Twilight deliberately overstocked the library to this fashion in the belief that this could be used to push Mayor Mare to grant Twilight's desire to start expanding the library with more buildings, just like the Canterlot Archives.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Chapter 3 has a lot of negative commentary from both Twilight and Rarity about their perceived personal flaws.
• I Hate Past Me: At one point during her self-recriminating rant in chapter 3, Twilight mentions she's glad she already "wasted her one shot at Time Travel", because she's realized that she and her pre-Ponyville self are so different that neither could hope to understand each other.
• Jerkass: Somepony named Thistle Burr apparently insinuated to Twilight Sparkle (or outright told her) that Ponyville's old librarian was fired to give Twilight her place as the new Ponyville Librarian. Rarity assures Twilight that the last librarian had genuinely retired a little while before that Summer Sun festival, and notes that somepony really needs to give Thistle Burr a good kick someday.
• Omniglot: Cranky Doodle, as mentioned when talking about the large amount of foreign language books in the library, knows almost every language in Equestria. Ancient Crystallian is the only language he's confirmed as not speaking.
  Twilight Sparkle: "Cranky ... do you know how many languages he speaks? He can just look at a page for just about anything and rattle it off in Equestrian!"
• Power Incontinence: Upon being told that she has to hold a book sale, Twilight's corona immediately flares into life and grows steadily intense out of sheer outrage at the idea.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In chapter 2, Twilight mentions she's not going to try a spontaneous working to fix her book problems, because she doesn't want the books trying to eat each other.
  • In chapter 3, Rarity mentions her greed and how it caused her disastrous actions during the quest to evict a snoring dragon.
  • During chapter 3, Twilight references her disastrous attempt at time travel.

• Reassigned to Antarctica: A figurative case; during her early years in the Canterlot Archives, Twilight was "assigned" to the Ancient History section simply because it was the least-frequented and most disused part of the Archives, thus ensuring that the "creepy little unicorn" would neither scare off patrons nor disrupt the sorting efforts of the other sections.
  • Chapter 3 goes into more detail about this. Apparently, she was initially assigned as a receptionist. That job lasted all of two hours.
• Serious Business: Books and being what she considers a "proper" librarian are this to Twilight. As in, at several points, she thinks of the idea of selling them off as blasphemous. She slowly starts to accept the necessity of getting rid of the excess books by the end of the third chapter, although the idea of burning the worst of them is still enough to make her wince.
• Spiritual Successor: To "100% Move = 50% Fire", with a little of "Twilight's Escort Service" thrown in for good measure, being about how Twilight's neuroses lead to a clash when forced to interact with the way the world actually works, all of it played for laughs and surprise drama.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Really, this story might as well be called "Triptych Continuum: Surprisingly Realistic Outcome".
  • No matter her feeling on the subject, a librarian has to work in the budget she is given when it comes to stocking new material. This was a particularly nasty shock to Twilight In-Universe.
    • Consequently, they who control the budget control the library, no matter what the librarian thinks.
  • The needs and options of a small town library are distinctly different to those of the national archives.
  • Physical space in a library is a premium, and this is why a library needs to regularly hold book sales. This point is emphasized in chapter two, where Twilight is forced to concede that there's just no way to physically make more space; they need their personal chambers for themselves, the library-tree can't survive having more of its inner wood removed, and there's just no space to either add more shelves or to add the counter-measures needed if they increase the size of the shelves vertically.
  • One could argue that the entire story is making the point that a bibliophile with an obsessive personality is probably not the best choice for a librarian, albeit by playing the scenario for Cringe Comedy.
  • As much as Twilight's friends want to help, that doesn't make them perfectly suited for it. Pinkie Pie tends to go off on weird tangents, Rarity is easily distracted (especially by dust or fashion-related topics), Fluttershy keeps getting called away for various animal emergencies, Spike doesn't have Twilight's stamina (and gets snarky when he thinks she's overworking him), Applejack can clash with Twilight due to her combination of strong opinions & Brutal Honesty, and Rainbow Dash... well, patience isn't exactly her strong point.
• Take That!: In chapter 4, the Mane 6 discuss an absurdly popular but awfully written book that was all the rage recently, lambasting it for reasons varying from Purple Prose to an incredibly bad case of Strangled by the Red String. It's implied that they're talking about the Equestrian equivalent of either The Twilight Saga or Fifty Shades of Grey — probably the latter.
• Tough Love: When Twilight turns to them for help in the second chapter, the rest of the Mane Six decide that they have no choice but to force Twilight to throw the book sale; they know it's going to hurt her, but this is a personal lesson that she needs to learn. Rarity even makes an apologetic comment about having "enabled" her in getting so overstocked in the first place.
• Trash of the Titans: In the sense of "impossibly vast clutter". Twilight's obsession with turning Ponyville Library into a replica of the Canterlot Archives has led to her purchasing more books, in terms of both new acquisitions and redundant copies, than there is physical space to store them in. She has resorted to making room by physically stacking books up on the floor, creating towers high enough that there have already been several pony-burying "avalanches". Which she herself ends up on the wrong end of several times.
  • The sight of Twilight's private lab, crammed full of excess copies of books, is enough to make Rarity faint at the end of chapter 3. Twilight is too embarrassed to mention the fact she's got a whole storage unit full of books in addition to everything in the library proper.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: In essence; Twilight explains in chapter two that she wants to make Ponyville library work like the Canterlot Archives because she feels it will prove she's doing a good job as a librarian.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Twilight really does love being a librarian, even noting at one point in the first chapter how, despite her difficulties, seeing someone actually develop an interest in reading is immensely rewarding. However, in pursuit of being the best librarian, she can be a little...crazy.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: During her discussion of Ponyville's past librarian, Rarity notes that whilst she did hold a regular story-time as part of the library, she would never have allowed for guest readers the way Twilight has done, which shows how Twilight isn't quite as awful as she thinks she is.