Wyrmlysan Follow-Up · 2:09am Mar 15th, 2014
Well, here's my slightly-delayed follow-up to my new fic, Wyrmlysan. After finding out it was scheduled to go up on EqD, I decided to hold off until after it was posted there, and here we are. This post is mostly going to explain the process this fic took from conception to finished product, so if that doesn't sound terribly interesting to you, no hard feelings. For everyone else, major ending spoilers ahead! If I were you, I'd read the story before reading this post, but hey: your choice.
Wyrmlysan started its journey to existence about a year ago, when I had an idea for a story which had the same dragon-misinterpreting-a-prophecy angle as the current incarnation, but several major differences. First, the story was about Celestia, not Luna. Second, it was set about a decade before the show. And third, most importantly, she rescued the egg at the end, and it was explicitly supposed to be Spike.
After rolling that idea around a bit, I discarded it; in my opinion, it lacked punch, and brought up more questions than I felt comfortable answering in a fic the length of the one I was envisioning. And that's where things stayed, until a few months ago.
That would be when AugieDog announced his Luna contest. I wanted to participate, because hey; doing stuff for an author I respect, and the possibility of a sweet prize to boot! It was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, I didn't have any brilliant ideas for the story itself. But, a few weeks after the writing period began, I came across that discarded Celestia/Dragon idea, and realized that it could make an excellent character piece for pre-NMM Luna, depicting her as she's falling to darkness. Sadly, setting the story a thousand years in “the past” brought a whole host of new questions, and I didn't have good answers for all of them.
Then, a few weeks before the (already extended) deadline, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: what if story stayed the same... except that the egg wasn't Spike at all, as Luna would brutally demonstrate at the end? I thought it brilliant for several reasons: it meant I didn't have to deal with a lot of the implications of the egg actually being Spike (like explaining why road-to-darkness-Luna would save it in the first place...), and it gave the story the direction and punch it was lacking. The story had always been about the dangers of prophecy; allowing the reader to believe that the egg was Spike, and then (literally and figuratively) smashing that assumption at the end, would not only make for a nicely dark twist, but would reinforce the intended narrative.
I finished editing the story perhaps two hours before the submission deadline, but (thanks to some heroic last-minute work by Pascoite) felt very good about how it had shaped up. It didn't win the contest, but then, the contest gave us both Philomeanie and Thou Goddess,, to name my favorites, so that's not much of a surprise.
There were two big suggestions of Pasco's that I didn't really address. First, he felt it wasn't obvious enough to the reader that the egg “was” Spike. I felt like I was walking a delicate line there; there's a difference between letting the reader make an erroneous assumption and just dicking them around, and I didn't want people to read the story, get to the end, and feel like they'd been lied to (I love it when stories surprise me; I hate it when they drag me to the wrong idea and rub my nose in it, then mock me for not catching the twist). I made a few small changes to make the suggestion that the egg was Spike a little stronger, but judging from some of the comments, I could have gone farther on that front.
The other thing was the Anglo-Saxish (for those wondering, the foreignisms aren't actually Old English, but they are made from Old English roots, a few of which have some nice double meanings that might count as an obscure (and probably miswritten) form of bilingual bonus). He didn't like them; I left them in. My logic being that 1) as a reader, I'd have liked them, and 2) that they made sense in context, as they're used either for titles or for words which don't have precise translations (and those are explained in-story). Although a few people enjoyed them, the weight of the readership seemed to think they were a distraction. In retrospect, most of them probably could have been excised without any damage to the narrative. I still think that they give a pleasing hint of the larger world in which the story is set, but I understand why it didn't work for a lot of readers. Mia culpa, guys.
Anyway, thank you to all of you for reading, and for all the great feedback. This story was a challenge to write (aren't they all?), but when all's said and done, I'm satisfied with how it came out, I feel like I've learned a bit for next time, and I'm ever grateful to you guys who keep reading my fics.
(Oh, for the record: as far as I'm concerned, it's entirely possible to read the prophecy in such a way that Spike's already fulfilled it by the end of the show's pilot. But the funny thing about prophecies is that they're only obvious in retrospect, and often not even then. To the readers who felt that the story implied Spike will become King of the Dragons, or that the Wyrmlysan was Twilight... I'm not about to tell you you're wrong!)
I've now seen you and Augie among others refer to this story as showing the early stages of Luna's descent into darkness. And I have to say I didn't get that from this story at all. And now since I've heard that mentioned by an authority on the subject (namely, Augie), I still don't see it. Sure, she's brusque with her guards, but it's not uncommon for writers to give her a bit of a standoffish personality anyway. And her decision to smash the egg, while certainly violent, was a reasonable response to the dragon's crimes in any circumstance. I guess I can see Luna's annoyance at the guards' presence as indicative of its being unusual, as if Celestia only recently thought her sister needed guarding, i.e., plausible deniability in keeping an eye on her. But it doesn't change my interpretation of the story at all, so no harm done!
I actually rather enjoyed the Angle-Sexist... Angler-Saxophone... That italacized stuff. It made the ye olde setting feel more authentic (something you always seem to excel in, Chris). For how much I enjoy it, I wish I could muster the drive to actually learn enough to use stuff like that in my stories.
If I might indulge my ego for a moment, did you happen to read my story in the contest, Darkness? It was submitted under my other profile name, Ion-Sturm.
For the record, I never thought the egg was Spike. In fact, the egg's color made me confused about what was the intent, given that it sent me conflicting signals.
The first reason was because I knew from the start that the story was set more than a thousand years before the first episode, and I didn't think a dragon egg would stay unhatched that long. It seemed too far fetched an idea, to me at least; to get me to consider that possibility I would need some hints that, in your Equestria, that kind of long wait before hatching was indeed possible.
(And, even if I didn't knew from the start when the story takes place, it would still be the only logical possibility that had a whisper of chance of the egg being Spike.)
(Well, before reading the prophecy, I actually thought the egg was Spike's mother, making him that dragon's grandson
)
The second one was because I found the prophecy too... Twilight. And even if it wasn't Twilight — I didn't actually think it was Twilight until the very last line of the fic — it didn't feel like Spike. It might be just the way I read those things, but even if I was actually thinking that the egg was Spike, the prophecy would have dissuaded me of that idea. If the idea was to misdirect the reader, insinuating one possible but false outcome while leaving the real one open, the prophecy had the opposite effect on me.
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For me, it was not, for the most part, the guards — I can even see present day Luna behaving that way if she is having a really bad day, apart from the threat of making an example of anypony that questions her orders — nor the act of destroying the egg per see. Those merely reinforce the rest, but alone I wouldn't take them as indication that Luna was already falling into the Nightmare's grasp.
Rather, it was Luna's motivation to destroy the egg — she seemed to be afraid of the part of the prophecy about the triumph of the Light, which is reinforced by her whisper denying such fear even as she takes the step to prevent the prophecy from coming to fruition — and how she scanned the landscape, eagerly trying to find ponies awake. Two emotions, fear and desire, that seem to perfectly match what is at the core of Nightmare Moon.
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I'd say it's just the very beginnings of Luna's feelings of inferiority, before it even becomes a 'descent into darkness'. Mostly the bit at the beginning where the guards don't trust her knowledge of dragons, and put more weight on Celestia's orders than her own.