World Building: Silver Spoon's Family · 12:54am Apr 17th, 2014
So, I've been working on developing the character of Silver Spoon without doing anything about the character, Silver Spoon. I decided that I was going to remedy that. This is a brief that I wrote while at lunch and then again briefly while I was supposed to be working on a test for school (finished ahead of time...) and finally polished a little more into this rough nugget of definitely fluid information (as in details may change.) This represents some new thinking, but also retouches some old ideas that had been floating around without necessarily being put into a note or otherwise expanded upon with a physical medium.
Name: Silver Spoon
Full Name: Silver Spoon, the Second
Familial Name: Silver
Mother: Silver Chalice
Occupation: Socialite, Deals Broker
Father: Silver Tongue
Occupation: Lawyer, business and contract law.
Age: 13
Brief history of the Silver Family:
A noble house with roots during the dark days following the banishment of Luna, it was founded by Silver Platter. At one time, the Silver family had also been the Spoon family, after the revered and well regarded matron who joined the two families in marriage before the time of Discord's rein.
The Silver family broke from the Spoon family after a bitter rift between the eldest scions of the Silver/Spoon dynasty. Since then, the Silver family has done far better than the Spoon family. Even though the two families have reconciled, there remains an underlying tension in relations between family members.
Silver Spoon was an attempt to smooth over relations by naming her after the last well regarded member of both families. In a further attempt to keep Silver Spoon from taking up the ways of her myriad cousins and becoming a true Canterlot Snob and potentially threaten the inter-family relations, Silver Chalice and Silver Tongue move to Ponyville to raise their daughter in a countrified setting so that she might pick up their rustic charm.
Things do not go according to plan, exactly. She's not a Canterlot Snob, but she's fallen in with the only pseudo-noble family that Ponyville has to offer, the Rich family. Their daughter, Diamond Tiara is a spoiled young filly whose manipulative streak quickly puts the lonely Silver Spoon under her hoof. Both consider the other a good friend, albeit in very different terms.
Parents:
Silver Tongue, a lawyer by trade, is often away on important cases being tried before the Royal Court in Canterlot or too busy to take the time to tend to his daughter's rearing. He's ruthless in court and brooks little argument from his daughter. He can come off as cold and uncaring, but he cares deeply for his daughter, and will let go of the courtroom mien when he feels like he can relax to have fun with her. These times, Silver Spoon adores.
Silver Chalice, a socialite and deals broker, is often away on business putting together deals for some of the richest and most famous ponies in Equestria. Sapphire shores has been a client, as has Filthy Rich; though the bill he received for services rendered quickly convinced him to try the less reputable but cheaper services offered by Flim and Flam. Since she is often with her husband in Canterlot or away brokering back room deals with celebrities and other nobility, she has little time to spend with her daughter. She does regret this since it was how she was raised, but with their branch of the Silver family no longer in Canterlot, it takes a lot more work to maintain the family's social ties and networks of business partners.
The only daughter:
She's pretty smart for a filly her age and loves to read. Her parents have hired tutors for her to coach her on etiquette and protocol, she is nobility after all, and she can be quite the little lady when she wants to be. However, she finds it rather boring and all she really wants to do when cooped up with her tutor is go outside and play. She is apt to forget or ignore her lessons when it suits her because they are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Who cares if the salad plate is to the left of the oat bowl? She'll put it on the left if she wants to! Celestia's Mane, you ponies are picky!
That her parents have so little time to rear their daughter is a shame, but she's holding on, barely to some sliver of herself while being mostly willingly manipulated by Diamond Tiara. They are friends, after a fashion, but Diamond Tiara is definitely the leader and takes every opportunity to subtly remind her of that fact. However, there is still a solid core of strength that not even Silver Spoon realizes is there. When she gets pushed too hard, she'll realize that there's a part of her that will not bend and fight back.
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Terminology:
Familial Name: A sort of honor name passed down from generation to generation, similar to a last name, except it doesn't have to come last (Burnished Silver, a Lieutenant of the Canterlot Guard, is an example.)
All of the Family bear this name either in front of a given name or after, dependent upon the custom of the branch and, to be quite honest, the clumsiness of naming a child Spoon Silver would have been laughed at.
Author's Note None of this will necessarily be mentioned or even touched upon in the tagged story. It's simply the subtext I'm using to write from Silver Spoon's viewpoint. Little hints, mental cues, verbal tendencies, and flavor text will be influenced by her history and her family and who and what they are. It's not all that Silver Spoon is, obviously, but it is a part of what makes her, her.
I've always thought that it was Unicorns with the strong tradition of a gentry. This is based on the Hearts Warming Eve episode where you had three pretty strong implied cultures.
Unicorns = Nobility
Pegasus = Military
Earth = Democratic/Plutocratic
While I'm sure there has been a lot of crossover after untold centuries of interaction, you still sort of see this backstory play out. So if you want to make Silver Spoon a 'noble' she might do with some unicorn relatives. It could even be used to show some divisions between her and Diamond Tiara.
Filthy Rich is almost certainly a wealthy plutocrat. Which would possibly make him 'new money' compared to a unicorn nobles 'old money'. Infact, if you wanted to make Silver Spoon like a distant niece of someone like Blue Blood that would probably be kind of cool.
Like a lot of the other stuff though!
2017246
Good points. There's a reason why this is marked as a fluid document. I haven't had the normal amount of time to sit and cogitate on it yet.
I'll take that into consideration. Perahps great, great-umpteen greats granny Silver Spoon was a unicorn and, by marriage to a member of the Spoon family, tied the two families closer together in the time after the migration to Equestria.
It would be that kind of a time, when reconcilliations would be made and families would join together by reaching across the bounds of tribal limits.
Clover The Clever and Princess Platinum, along with Smart Cookie and Chancellor Puddinghead may have even encouraged the marriage (if they were still around by then... I haven't really decided yet if it's near prehistory or if maybe it would be something that Celestia and Luna would have blessed and, with that blessing, created the new dynastic family.
To be quite honest, I haven't even settled in my head the matter of Celestia and Luna's ascension/birth whathaveyou and whether it came about long before Discord or came about because of Discord and their journey to find the Tree of Harmony is what gave them their ascension or if they were the incarnations of the Moon and the Sun, brought to Equestria to reign in chaos.
I think I will lean towards it being just prior to Discord's rise and blessed by the ruling nobility at that time, regardless of Celestia and Luna's own blessings. It doesn't seem to me that they would interfere much with the nobility so long as the nobility continued to ... do whatever it is that they do in Equestria. Own land, I guess, and manage it for the crown.
2017372
Or... I may just cut out the nobility all together. Why complicate an already complicated past?
I could just say that the Silver family got their start several generations ago as silver miners and have progressed in wealth and status until they are wealthier than most nobility, though lacking in the status that goes with being of noble blood.
That would still leave room for the parental occupations and a lot of the backstory still. A socialite and deals broker would be a good job for a pony with a name like Silver Chalice - chalice of wine, fancy parties... places where the rich and powerful gather. And then Silver Tongue... something every successful lawyer needs.
Explaining the wealth: there's no massive background expenses that come from manors, obligatory social gatherings and near mandatory upkeep on lands and properties that tennants will demand. No standing guard, no ... well, much of any of the expenses that go along with being a noble.
2017339
Well those are huge other parts of world building. And a landmine fraught with error if the show writers ever bother to address it.
I have no fixed head canon. One story I'm writing has Celestia/Luna as Ponified versions of the Norse mythology concerning the sun and the moon. Another, Maia come from Middle-earth.
As far as what might be 'canon'? Who honestly knows. Though Luna/Celestia appear to function much like the English monarchies have. Normans/Germans/Scots/Whoever come in and take the crown, but the native Anglo-Saxons keep their traditions and land. Though if Celestia is a halfway decent ruler she'd have very subtly grabbed all the land away from the unicorns. Because land ownership is a quick way towards headaches down the road if a bunch of nobles run it for too long. She could have done this without commie styled land redistribution with a sizable death tax or property taxes etc. etc. Basically how the brits stole off all the land from their actual anglo-saxon nobles.
2017362
Cut out nobility?
Good sir, clearly you cannot do such a thing. Nobles do not allow themselves to be 'cut out' They endure, no matter what. Though it is of course your story. I thought the idea of doing a new vs. old money battle for a schism between Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara sounded interesting to me. Especially if it's Silver Spoon who is the Old Money (who generally take a dim view on the New).
And not all old money families are just sitting in the money pile. Especially if Celestia makes things hard for the ones who just want to be the landed gentry ala my lower post.
2017381
I admit... It's part of what drove me to the backstory in the first place. It would be an interesting subtext conflict. One of the 'new money' having an 'old money' noble daughter under her hoof, especially since I'm sure that Filthy complains about it a lot. He's just as rich as the nobility, why can't they just let him into their fancy clubs... etc etc... in front of Diamond Tiara, and then here comes this 'old money' noble family trying to escape the snobbery rampant in Canterlot with a daughter, alone and afraid in a town she doesn't fully understand.
Being the clever manipulator that she is, it wouldn't have been hard for Diamond Tiara to get Silver Spoon under her hoof, I'm thinking. And subtly, coming in as a friend with a bribe of friendship so long as the friend does what she wants to do.
Sound about in character for a spoiled little brat like Di?
2017396
Most certainly. Which makes Silver Spoon even more sympathetic, which I admit is actually a subversion of what you usually see with those stories. You're basically doing Great Gatsby in reverse, kind of.
2017400
That's... a big expectation. Except... This is only subtext to the plot of recovering a lost cutie mark and, eventually, my story with Diamond Tiara - which is going to start off about the middle of Chapter 3 of this story, chronologically speaking... So I've already got a sequel planned and I haven't even written the chapter that starts off the sequel's events.
Breathe... Breathe... Eeeehheeee... *thump*
So much to try and balance and plan and adjust with every little change.... not to mention remember. And... I just discovered a plot hole.. Sort of. I forgot Silver Spoon's saddlebags... Which she put on in the morning, but never took off when taking off her cloak. Ugh... Time to go fix that. Where's my plot putty...
2017425
As long as you haven't published it you're alright. It also helps to write down a lot of your planned for plot somewhere. Just making little notes in fake chapters in your story tends to do the trick. But planning is always good, you can never do enough.
2017428
I've got an Evernote account, a tablet and a phone with Evernote, a computer with it also, a google docs account, an app that I can use to access that on the fly...
My evernote account has 17 notes for this story (out of 54 total) and growing. Plot, thoughts, writing exercises... it all goes into the notes.
All I really know about DT's story is the rough direction it will take and the start. I need to figure out where I want her character to be before I start outlining the events and hurdles to get her there. So.. Yeah. Lots of planning going into these two fics. And then I have a third one, a double-ship spectacular between Spike and Twist and then their daughter (20 years down the road) and her journey of discovering just who she is.
Good lord... I think I may have just slightly a lot on my plate at the moment.
2017441
I know this feel. Though it is probable that you plan even more obsessively than I do. For the most part I'm concerned with where I want the story to end, where i generally want it to go and then let the characters 'speak' to me. Then I just write out according to the flow of events while remaining in IC.
2017445
Obsessing certainly comes into it... I'm not so sure about the planning. I have so many notes in part because if I get stuck on a scene, I will sit down, ask a question and then write answers and followup questions and speculation and on and on until I feel like I've adequately resolved, if not answered, the initial question or at least come to look at the problem differently enough to come up with a different solution.
I have a rough skeleton of the plot - beginning, midpoint, and end. The rest, I fill in as I go along pretty much. Stepping back to look at the whole from time to time and maybe filling in a little ahead or getting a scene somewhat sketched out that I'd like but may never use. Etc, etc...
Is that planning? I suppose maybe it is. I find that I tend to have a different notion of what 'planning' is than other people. But maybe that's just because I'm odd.
2017494
For me I don't generally get stressed about scenes. The most important questions, in my opinion, are a couple simple ones.
What is the story about? Is there a 'theme' that the story can be boiled down to? (A revenge story? A character arc? What is the nature of the conflict?)
Then, after that. I figure out what I want the ending to be. Figuring out the ending is very important, it puts everything into perspective. How you get to the ending is obviously the story. But if your story has no clear ending, you will end up rambling and having a uncoordinated story.
Then I try and figure out a way to tell that story in an interesting way. Because there are only so many 'stories' that can physically be told. I sort of mix this in with the first step, since it sometimes is started out rather plainly. I'll be like. "Man, I should tell a story about Cadance and Shining Armor running the Crystal Empire. And discuss all the nitty gritty details of running a country and what it would entail." or "I should write a story about Celestia falling in love." Which ended up becoming a very complicated story.
Once you have the theme and your ending nailed down the question of how you get there becomes surprisingly easy. Every scene and part of your story should have a point. It should lead towards the ending, somehow or someway. You tease out details and backstory as flavoring, but move forward towards an end. Then scenes don't seem to difficult, and if anything I find myself trying to not move too quickly.
That's just my process, anyway.
2017522
I'm always interested in hearing other author's thought processes. It helps me to put my own into perspective and even give me some ideas that I might not have otherwise had.
2017528
I also try and avoid 'forcing' actions on characters. The process is much simpler when you have a fully realized image of a character. Then you don't need to ask, so much as know what a character will do in any given situation. For me it almost is like speaking to them, once you understand the basic personality and quirks the actions through a scene come very quickly.
Like when you fully understand (maybe just your version) of who Silver Spoon is. You can present any situation to her, and then know what she'd do. Or what she might say. etc. etc.
2017540
And I think I have a good picture of what she'd do... and she's in the middle of a huge change, so that's hard to get a handle on both the before the change, the during the change, and the after the change has occurred Silver Spoons. Now I'm struggling to get Diamond Tiara under my hoof as far as what she'd do. Also Cheerilee and the CMC. They're a bit more established than the complexity that is Diamond Tiara and her manipulative streak, but they're still easy to characterize poorly if one isn't careful.
I almost ran into a stump on that with Cheerilee before I realized that I was trying to force her to do something she wouldn't do. So now I'm re-writing her part in all this.
Silver Spoon before: Meek when alone, sticking by Diamond Tiara when not and following her lead.
Silver Spoon during beginning: Emotional, weaker, but resilient still. She hasn't yet been bent to the point where she can no longer bend.
Silver Spoon during later: she's reached her break or snap point, and the hard core of her inner strength won't let her break, so she's going to snap back.
Silver Spoon after: Tempered, stronger, but bent still... It will take time and effort to get her fully back in shape, but what's there is stronger for the bend, not weaker.
2017559
On the subject of nailing down a characterization. I find motivations to be the key. What a character wants, in any capacity will best reveal how they'll act. So if Silver Spoon is motivated to want acceptance and friends, but only through the lens of how she's been raised you'll have...well, how she's sort of portrayed on the show. Though certainly with more sympathy and back story than has been shown.
Figuring out why characters might do something helps all the rest. Also while it might not be strictly realistic a lot of writing conventions allow for characters to change very rapidly after one critical point. Something that can best demonstrate a quick change climatically. Then you can move onto another aspect after the revelation.
2017581
That's been the sort of motivation I've envisioned for her. She doesn't want to be alone in life. Her greatest talent, her special talent, revolves around other ponies. Without them, she isn't able to utilize one of her strongest traits. I see her and Diamond as almost opposites when it comes to talents.
Complimentary talents, though. Where Diamond Tiara is a manipulator, finding a pony's weak points and then pushing until she gets what she wants, Silver Spoon is also a manipulator, but by helping them to see and accept harsh reality by showing them that not all hard truths are without a silver lining.
I see her as, sort of, a counselor. She's forgotten that she's good at that because of the influence of Diamond Tiara and her pushing at her fear of being alone to get her to do what she wants - make other ponies feel inferior to her.
That's where I started at at the beginning. "What motivates Silver Spoon?" She doesn't want to be alone. And now she's bullied so many and lived under the hoof of Diamond Tiara for so long that she's afraid that if she didn't have Di, she'd have nopony.
Now I need to sign off for a bit and actually go do some writing.
I love this entire post, plus the commentary. I agree with a lot of this and in general a very interesting idea for Silver Spoon's history, connections, and overall life.
Flim: Although our prices have nothing to do with our reputation.
I get it... It's not your fault?
Flam: We've never claimed that we're professionals.
Flim: You get what you pay for and we've always warned you first when we think you should really hire some pony else for a specific job.
Flam: Indeed. If only to save our own hides.
Flim: We have been told our debate is indisputably charming. Mesmerizing, even!
Flam: Quite frequently! Alas, deal brokering is a little different and only something that we do on the side, because we can.
Flim: And cutting costs always has drawbacks.
Flam: Sometimes experienced in produce thrown. Other times... well, there are worse results.
Filthy Rich:
Flam: We didn't say that, although we are expecting you to pay us.
Flim: They did sign it. *levitates over the paper work* Incidentally, sir, you, uh, might not want to show your face over there, for a few days.
Filthy Rich: *tosses them a small bag of gold bits* Yes. Fine. You can go now. I've heard enough. I'll let you know if I need something else. Or if I've found a better broker.
Flim and Flam: *catch the bag, tip their hats, and leave without another word*
Filthy Rich: ... There has to be some pony better. I'm not trying hard enough.
Or something... I'm tired and should go to bed.