Siren Wrong · 5:17pm Oct 13th, 2015
“I’m so out of shape,” I say, wheezing and huffing as I make my way up yet another stairwell. It’s not true, of course. I’m in great shape! That shape is just small and cute instead of optimized for physical labor. Like lugging heavy objects up all these stupid stairs! “Epiphany! You’d better be up here!”
“I am,” she calls back, as I add another colorful bit of first person descriptive text. We’re in the center of the FiMFiction central server, with all the subgroups laid out around us. A beautiful hub of pony culture, and here I am lugging heavy objects. Thinly veiled racist allegory. Ugh. “Up here at the top.” Yeah, thanks.
By the time I reach her, I’m sweating and panting, and don’t even have the energy to spend another two-thousand words describing what the space around us looks like. Not that it bothers Epiphany. She’s sitting right up against the railing.
“Epiphany!” I say, dropping the heavy mailbag that’s been draped over my back. That takes a little bit out of me, and I pause for a moment to catch my breath. She doesn't look at me, but one of her ears swivels back. “You’ve got mail.”
“Mail?” she asks, curiously, and I pull the bag up to her side. After a second, I sit down next to her, with the bag between us. So she can get to it.
“Yeah, mail! Your story hit the front-page two days ago. You remember, the Changeling one?” I rip the bag open, letters spilling out onto the walk in front of us.
“I got all this in two weeks?” she asks, surprised and a bit wide-eyed, leaning back to take in the heavy mail bundle.
“You got three of these in the first day,” I say, grinning. I opened a few for her in advance. You know, for her own good. Just to make sure they weren't creepy or anything. Also I lick them to try to steal her power. “I only brought up the first one. Take a look!” I say, sliding the envelope over to her.
“Dear Epiphany,” she reads aloud. Epiphany reads pretty slowly, sometimes stopping to sound out the words. “Would It Matter If I Made This Group?"
Epiphany puts the letter down.
“Isn’t it great?” I ask, keeping my voice encouraging, upbeat. I know she’s just going to get all magnum opus dissonance about this if I don’t stop her. As is, she’s probably going to be one of those horsefamous twits who actually answers every fave. “They’re all like that! Good writers think you’re an inspiration, bad writers want to rip you off, and everybody else is thinking about clopping to your Fluttershy cover art.” I blush a little when I say it, but come on, it’s true! “I’ll bet you there’s an audio reading proposal in that bag.”
“But... why?” Epiphany asks, and right on cue, I hear her getting all serious. "It was a crappy Season 2 fic!" Time to nip that in the bud.
“Oh, relax. It’s not actually all that personal. I used to get these from time to time when”—Equestria Daily had no standards—“my fics were a little hotter. They need somepony to read on the subway and you're entirely adequate.”
“But—but, I'm not!” Epiphany insists, getting agitated. “There are all sorts of amazing fics on this site that didn't get half that much attention! Contraptionology! Immortal Game! Lost Cities! Friendship is Optimal!” she shouts.
“Whoa, calm down,” I say, raising a hoof. I was expecting her to take it a little rough at first, but not that bad. “Nobody's actually read Immortal Game. It's just like, that copy of Paradise Lost you have on your shelf to look cultured. What’s wrong with you today?”
“What’s wrong is that there's a group specifically to contain spinoffs of one of my stories, and honestly, the original story kind of sucked! I want my writing to inspire people to be creative, to think, or to make their own creations! Not to... I don't know. Build a shrine to Flutterling?” Epiphany yells, her voice and pitch rising as one. “That’s... that’s messed up!”
“Okay, okay, no more fan mail!” I say, turning the bag away from her. Eech. That wasn’t even one of the creepy ones. “Just... relax. Relax. It’s only like twenty six writers. They got overly excited probably.”
“Probably!” Epiphany snaps, her tail lashing to and fro. She turns away from me, ears focusing back down on the frontpage.
"No, wait," I correct, as more letters appear in the bag. "Twenty nine. Wow, okay, maybe this is nuts."
Just a little.
The price of notoriety, man.
Heehee. Thought some of us have standards. We would never build a shrine to Flutterling.
Ours is a cathedral, duh.
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A wee smidge.
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Oh, I'm enjoying this while it lasts. But it is objectively bonkers.
This is true. You go to re-read Twilight Sparkle Gets a Free Salad and think "I should read Immortal Game!"
You do not read Immortal Game.
It's true; even I haven't read it, and I reviewed the dang thing!
Luckily, since nobody else has read it either, I was able to copy-paste an old summary of Moby Dick in place of the review, find-and-replace whale with horse, and call it a day. It's been more than a year, and nobody has called me on it yet!
I love the delicious parody here! It says a lot about a man to poke fun at themselves every now and again. (Source of the parody for those unfamiliar)
However, at risk of being That Guy:
The implication, based on this and on the original source, is that Epiphany is looking to the frontpage to take her current worries off her mind. That is, she's concerned for the social impact that Would It Matter has caused, and wants to look to the new inspiring talent to reinstill her with hope.
Three of the seven fics in the Featured Box are about butts.
I lol'd.
I've never tried to flip a journal post before, tho. I'm not reading any more of these, just so we're clear. :V
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Oh thank god, it's not just me.
3467144 Would it matter if a changeling was in your bed, eating peaches?
#BlamePav
I'm going to be the fancypants fun-hating grumpyhooves who admits she read Immortal Game. I really had nothing better to do with that time.
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It's all his fault.
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Ooooh. Was it as good as all the critics say?
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You know damn well I'd write that.
B-but I read it. It was all 'woah' then all like 'bang boom' then all like 'I belibe in you anon' then it was 'we did it'
In all seriousness it sits there in my Google Play Books alongside F:E, Siren Song, and the other two AestheticB works, some JawJoe too. Many others but that's the ones that I reread regularly. It was the first fic I read on this site.
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No, not the peaches, please. NOT THE PEACHES!
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Would it matter if it were?
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*hand wiggle* It's by no means the fic of Jax's for which I am most to blame. That honor would either go to the fic of his I made him write as part of a charity auction or the episode rebuttal fic that he joked about making, and I basically kept shouting "Do it, filly!" until he relented. Then again, Would It Matter was heavily brainstormed between the two of us at Bronycon, and the I Blame Pav group is currently in the related groups for the Would It Matter group, so I'm hardly in a position to refuse blame, either.
Reading this blog and looking through the comments, I can't help but feel some kind of inception-esque thing. You make plenty of stories you pour your heart into and then this far-less intensive one takes the cake. Then you make a blog post about it, the whole thing a semi-narrative skit that talks about how you feel about it, and all people comment on is the off-hoof joke you made in the middle somewhere.
But for the record, I did read Immortal Game. Thrice. That's as many as three times.
And it was awesome.
Joke would be funnier if it was true.
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Your face.
When i finish eljunbyro I will tackle immortal games just to prove you wrong
3467396 Your mom.
3467233 Eh, take it or leave it, Pinkie Pie!
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Shit I got owned.
3467551 There's simply no beating 90s comebacks.
Batman.
3467301 It's true for me. It's still sitting on my Read Later list.
You know, the bookshelf for reading stuff later.
3467923 I asked about it in one of the Skype groups I'm in and was surprised to discover that most of the people in it had it in their 'read later' list but had yet to touch it.
GaPJaxie - 1
Vengeful - 0
3467937 That's the thing, it has a reputation for being among the best fics on the site... And yet it seems to either intimidate people or people want to wait until they're "in the mood" for it... I'm one of the later.
3468147 As someone who's read it multiple times, I can honestly say it's well worth reading. Just keep in mind that Nihilus is pronounced 'nile-us' like the first part of the word nihilistic.
That's it! Now I've got to write one of these!
Immortal Game is such a good fic though homework for all of you is to stop whatever you're doing and read it (I've read it twice (so good though))
I admit to not reading Immortal Game. It's on my large read later list.
But I did read your Bioshock crossovers and they deserved more attention than they got.
Welcome to the world of "Writing a changeling fic even once."
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Oh god. I remember when the "x pony is in your bed" fics were going around. Funny, but it got old quick.
But Paradise Lost is like the ur-fanfic, just about Satan. It's all about how horribly wrong going against a God-moder is.
Yea, it's definitely ridiculous how much attention your story got. Seriously, I don't see the appeal of writing a story based on some random question for no reason. And did we really need a group for these? Who in the right mind made that?
By the way, it's only 14 writers. When a story's in 2 folders, the group will display it as 2 different stories. In the Main folder, you can see there are only 15 stories, including the original.
In all honesty, I don't find this sort of thing all that surprising or objectionable. Really, when you think about it, the surprising thing is how rarely this kind of recursive fanfiction takes off.
We write fanfiction because we want to tell other stories within a setting we enjoy, to suggest our own answers to questions, examine new perspectives or just write new adventures. In cases like MLP where it becomes a community of people not just sharing their love for original body of work, but also celebrating the better parts of themselves, turning those exploratory urges onto fanwork should come as no surprise. I think it's pretty cool.
Nobody's actually read Immortal Game. It's just like, that copy of Paradise Lost you have on your shelf to look cultured.
It's funny because it's true.
I went to put Immortal Game on my read it later shelf and you get no points for guessing what I discovered
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Really? I'm not sure how much of this is sarcasm, but if you truly haven't read it, you should definitely go and do so. Like right now!
It actually sat in my Read It Later folder for ages, mainly because I was afraid to start it because it seemed so dark (and long). When I did start reading it took about three chapters and I was so hooked that I read the entire thing in one go. Well, I think I had to make a pause at some point because it was 3am, but apart from that I really read all 300,000 words straight through. Then I sat there for half an hour and thought about what I had just read.
So yeah, no matter what you're doing right now, drop it, and go read that story!
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It wasn't sarcasm per se, it was a form of irony.
(Warning: I'm about to kill the joke by explaining it.)
Immortal Game is long and the first third or so of it is relentlessly bleak and destructive. I mean, it starts with Celestia's brutal murder at the hands of her parents and Twilight Sparkle being ridden by a demonic copy of herself and then scales up from there. But it's also very famous and popular as a story. This has led to a dynamic where despite being widely read, it is also famous as a story a lot of people mean to read but don't read. A lot of people look at the length and go "I'll start this later, when I have a free weekend" and others start it, get three chapters in, and then nope right the hell away. So you can make jokes about how nobody actually reads it.
GapJaxie was making a very, very inside joke using wry observational humor. Like he does.
3502388 That was actually not what I meant.
I was fully aware of the joke itself. I have noticed this phenomenon myself. Whenever people talk about The Immortal Game in the forums, there are always so many people who have thought about reading it, but haven't yet.
I also had it on my Read It Later for month and didn't start it until I was totally bored and had no other promising stuff to look at.
The sarcasm jab was more aimed at Chris' Moby Dick comment. I'm also pretty sure that at least one person here has read the thing, but claims not to, simply to support the joke.
But seriously, I can't state it enough, read that story.
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Hey, I read Moby Dick!
3505894 Sure you have
Well, if you did, is that book actually worth reading?
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Not bad! To me, though, it sorta falls into the trap of certain classic books or film, where it was groundbreaking at the time, but later literature has evolved since then and so a modern reader has to appreciate the story in its time. I did really like the character study of Ahab and using Ishmael as the framing device, but the pacing is just sooo slooow.
Hey, I read immortal games. Alright, alright, I'll admit, I didn't read it, I listened to Raven Feather's reading of it, twice.