Notes for Chapter 21 of The Siren · 2:12am Jul 5th, 2023
These are the notes for Chapter 21 of my fanfic The Siren. Don’t read until after you’ve read the chapter.
Some of the dialog from this chapter was taken from the less-obnoxious parts of the screenplay to the episode “Spike at Your Service”, written by Merriwether Williams from a story by Dave Polsky. I’m sorry, but this was one of my least-liked episodes in the way it made the moral dilemma too easy by devolving Spike into a complete idiot. I’m writing an alternate universe version of the show, so I’ll allowing myself the indulgence of fixing some of the parts I didn’t like.
Applejack was surveying the orchard when…
The following is what would have already happened in the original episode: Spike is on his own for the day. He manages to get carried off to the Everfree by a hot air balloon. He’s attacked by timber wolves and saved by Applejack. He offers himself into permanent slavery to Applejack. She tells him to get Twilight’s approval, and he does, if only because she’s too into her assignment to pay any attention to what he’s saying. So, he heads back to the farm to begin destroying it with his utter ineptitude.
In this version, he finds himself in the Everfree by accident. He nearly dies until he's saved by Applejack, who takes him back to the library afterwards. He tries to tell Twilight how he nearly died and sees that she doesn't care at all about him. So, he returns to the farm.
Apple Bloom not wanting Spike to join the CMC
Look, I know that girls, especially at Bloom’s age, need a space to define themselves separate from males and their need to control everything. (I well remember how much of a jerk I was at that age.) So, I get why Spike had very few interactions with the CMC in the show. But I still think that they should have had some kind of significant relation with each other as kids in an adult world. So, this is my attempt to address that. I hope to do more going forward.
Dales School of Economics
Equestrian version of the Yale School of Economics.
Dusty Pages
Head librarian of the Canterlot library, from “The Point of No Return”.
The brainstorming session
There are few scenes like this that don’t really advance the plot or themes of the story that much. But they are scenes that I really wish were in the series, so I put them in here. This is my attempt to fix Twilight and Spike’s relationship much earlier than the gradual change that happened in canon.
Logo Gram and Gramma Logue
A logogram is a symbol that represents a word. For example, the symbol “$” represents the word “dollar”. A grammalogue is the same thing, but specifically applied to shorthand: the symbol “.” in Pitman shorthand means “the”.
