Fan Art Makes Me Happy (and miscellaneous) · 10:16pm Jul 4th, 2014
Eeeee fan art makes me so happy! I can't draw. Actually, my aunt, mom, and sister frequently remind me that it's not so much "can't" as "won't," because drawing is not some kind of magical skill that rains down from on high and everyone can get better with practice, and blah blah blah, this is my drawing of a horse.
Pssh, yeah, it helps to have decent eye-hand coordination, and, I dunno, talent.
So ACTUAL FAN ART by ACTUAL GOOD ARTISTS makes me insanely happy.
First, by Carranzis, a scene from Good Morning, Beautiful: 
And two, TWO, pictures from Swear on Camembert by CycloneDusk.
I mean, LOOK at those, with that nice Western sunset. Awesome.
Incidentally, rumors of the demise of CheesePie are unfounded. I see new CheesePie fanart and fanfic all the time. It was an interesting trip down memory lane to re-read the predictions that everyone would have forgotten about it in a week.
Stories that I probably won't write:
Twilight Shoves Flash Sentry Off A Cliff: only if they're doing it for the cameras, and even then, I'd prefer for them to be reenacting the ice floe scene from Way Down East.
But that would make it "Flash Sentry Almost Goes Over The Waterfall On An Ice Floe But Is Saved In The Nick Of Time, and who'd read that?
The one that isn't called Leaving Las Pegasus:
Cheese Sandwich hasn't seen Pinkie since throwing Rainbow Dash's birthaversary party. He wakes up in a trashed Las Pegasus hotel suite and Pinkie Pie staggers out of the bathroom and throws up about a million cupcakes. To their mutual horror, they have been married at a trot-through wedding chapel by a stallion Sapphire Shores impersonator.
Why I won't do it: This one was tempting, but I realized it wouldn't work. Because even if their affections lie elsewhere, even if one or both of them is gay, between Cheese's admiration of Pinkie and Pinkie's determination to make friends, the actual conflict would be over in about ten minutes. Figuring out what to DO about it--that might take longer, and it could even be painful if one wanted to stay married and the other didn't. But the way these comedies always work is that the couple can't STAND each other and hijinks ensue. Eh, I don't know. Maybe someone else could make it work.
Tempting, but probably not:
A Flea Up His Rear: Cross gendered casting of the French bedroom farce A Flea In Her Ear.
Flash Sentry is married to Twilight, convinced that she is cheating on him. She seems "distracted," ---oh, let's call it what it is, uninterested in bedroom activities---and on top of it, someone has mailed a package addressed to "PRINCES TWALIT SPARKUL" to the castle, containing two pairs of--
"Socks," Flash said grimly. "And you know why ponies wear socks."
"To keep their hooves warm?" said Cheese.
Flash rolled his eyes. "Honestly. Don't you and Pinkie know anything?"
" 'Everything is better with balloons.' "
"Excuse me?"
"I said, 'no.' "
This one would be hilarious, but it's so unbelievably complicated and it would take too long. Plus there are actual adulterous couples happening in that play, and I'd just as soon not. Implied naughtiness that turns out to be harmless is about as far as I want to go.
Possible: A sequel or spinoff from Looking Glass World, but I want to see how that goes first.
Likely: A CheesePie fic I'm calling "Triple Slam," and I'm not giving any spoilers. If I've talked to you about it, please don't!
A Mirrorverse fic. Could be more than one, but I really think I have to write "Princess Trixie and her Magic Dragon." Just because.
Definite: The Looking Glass World, and while I haven't directly promised it, more cute CheesePie. Those just happen.
Hope you're all having a very happy Fourth of July! (which is Fourth of July all over the planet, whether you're celebrating something or not.)
Pre-chewed or intact? With a party pony's digestive system, it could be either.
Also, here's a thought you may have had: what do you think happened to the Mirrorverse Cheese Sandwich?
2258095 He's a traveling mortician, depressing ponies wherever he goes as he carries out his lugubrious functions. Ponies aren't really glad to see him coming, but then they are, because somepony has to conduct funerals. Ponies don't seem to have open casket funerals, so the grossest part of the job isn't necessary.
I figured this out partly from Mirrorverse logic, but also because if you go back through the Cheesepie folders, you'll see a LOT of fics in which Cheese threw Pinkie Pie's funeral. In some of them, he was supposed to be upset, at least at the end, but in at least one, it was almost as though it was "hey! Having a funeral? Ask Cheese Sandwich!"
I briefly imagined something where somepony asked him about throwing a funeral: "Sandwich and Sons, where can I do you for? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Nah, I got out of the funeral end of the business. It was costing a fortune in anti-depressants."
Yes, I know--anti-depressants don't work that way. But that was part of an alternate reality in which he went back to Bayroan, Neigh Jersey, and a lot of other stuff happened that I'm not at liberty to discuss, because it was in the context of brainstorming another person's fic.
Actual adultery tends to be much darker because it can wreck marriages. The only way one can generally make that light-funny is if the married couple despise one another, and then there's the whole dark question of why they got married in the first place, or what went wrong. This worked better in commedia dell'arte because the general assumption in Renaissance to Old Regime cultures was that marriage was purely an economic and political alliance, with sex for reproductive purposes and any love or pleasure unexpected good fortune on the part of the couple -- "love" was normally adulterous. That doesn't translate as well to cultures more like our own, and Equestria is definitely a companionate / romantic / sentimental marriage-for-love kind of culutre -- like our own.
2258534 A Flea In Her Ear is a farce, and as such, it makes fun of a lot of stuff that would be tragic if done just slightly differently. Someone once pointed out that it has some of the same plot elements as Othello!
It's notable that for all the threatened adultery, there's only one actual instance in the play: the master's young nephew/secretary is getting it on with the cook, who is married to the butler. And that's a social class thing. Fussbudget butlers with hot wives can expect to be cuckolded, and an unmarried young man rushing off for hot afternoons with a married lady below him in social status "doesn't count."
The threat level, though, is high, including a husband who is so unreasonably jealous that he's willing to race off and kill his wife on the slightest suspicion. And all the wrong people are jealous for the wrong reasons, of course. Farce depends on acceleration and a certain element of terror (like falling off a building or mass murder), combined with the comforting certainty that we're at a farce and no real, lasting harm will come to anyone.
EDIT: And actually, the affectionate relationship between husband and wife is part of the problem. The wife is disappointed that her husband seems uninterested in her sexually, but actually, he's having a bad bout of psychologically-induced impotence and doesn't want to admit it OR fail. Her assumption is that if he isn't sleeping with her, he must be sleeping with someone else. This wouldn't be a problem if it were purely an economic arrangement. She cares!
It would be possible to clean it up to the point where it still worked, but I don't have the kind of devotion to the project to want to do that. Although the idea of Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash managing the hot sheet hotel because Dash blew her budget on a charity auction for a Daring Do plushie and Fluttershy being steamrollered into helping really amuses me, especially if you presume that both Dashie and Fluttershy have a very fuzzy idea of what is really going on, at best.
Beautiful stuff! Your horse pic sadly refuses to load but I'm sure it's beautiful in it's own way.
Also Cyclone's devart is here
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Even my Fluttershy -- who isn't a virgin -- is pretty darned naive, so yeah, she'd only vaguely get it. Rainbow Dash has a less-trusting sort of mind, though she's actually less experienced, so she'd suspect something wrong was happening there.
2258566 Thank you! And I'm glad you provided the link! I'd admired the cover art for "Bing! Bang! Zam!" before.
2258562
This makes me think of what I'm writing in Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason. In terms of all the present-day stuff it's pure farce: the reader presumably knows (from Twilight's Kingdom) that Discord isn't going to kill Bulk nor will Discord's friendship with Fluttershy be broken; there are other bad consequences which could happen but the worst of them -- Discord being alienated from Equestria -- actually does happen in Twilight's Kingdom and the heroes win anyway -- what's more Discord is even redeemed by the role he plays in getting the box open. And, really, I'm going to let you in on something you've probably already guessed -- nothing very bad's going to happen in Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason -- not in the present-day stuff.
On the other hand, Luna's extended flashback is pure tragedy. It's about three good beings -- Celestia, Luna and Dissy -- who are caught in a love triangle essentially because they admire each other's virtues -- Celestia and Luna love Discord because he is funny and kind, and he loves both of them in different ways for good things about them. Because Discord is romantically-drawn to Celestia rather than Luna, young Luna gets jealous and considers doing something downright evil in order to get what she wants (here's a hint: it's a variant on what Lysa Tully actually does to Petyr Baellish in the backstory of Game of Thrones). Because Luna is ashamed at her original intention, she doesn't inform the others of what she's seeing in Discord's dreams, which is why they get blind-sided by his sudden transformation into a hostile Chaos God.
This is why Luna fears that Twilight will despise her when she finds out -- she was attempting something very much against both Luna's code of honor and Twilight's (which are similar in this regard -- both of them would regard such an action as a variant of rape).
The outcome of the past events are utterly tragic. Discord's evil side becomes dominant; he turns on the Sisters and the Ponies of Paradise Estate, killing some, scattering others and forcing the others to flee. He then wreaks a thousand years of chaos on the world, causing untold suffering.
In terms of the three beings in the love triangle, none of them get what they wanted. Celestia rejects the now-evil Discord, and is broken-hearted. Luna doesn't get Discord either, and is tormented by the first of multiple severe mistakes she makes in this incarnation. And Discord becomes a lonely tyrant, who pathetically-tries to play with his old best friends by tossing attackers at the Sisters, whom he very much does not want to kill.
So I must wonder what it is I'm writing? A tragedy with elements of comic relief? But the tragic parts are all backstory. Or is it a farce with a strongly tragic background? I'm not really able to decide.
2258566 Thanks for letting me know! It's . . . well, if I were four, I'm sure my mom would put it up on the fridge.
2258095 Hmm--I'd been thinking pre-chewed, but intact is always possible. Whichever it is, it's not exactly delicate. Cheese is quite literally a party animal, so I don't think he'd be as grossed out as Rarity or I would be, but a barfing party pony where you don't expect anypony to be is still worrying.
2258575 Dash can have temporary moral tunnel vision when something she wants is concerned. The disloyalty would irk her, but if she didn't give the "married couples" element any thought, that part wouldn't bug her. And I also don't think it would occur to her that any of her friends could be involved, plus all Fluttershy has to do is stay in bed and be a decoy (no doubt squealing "oh, dear.")
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You're right -- Rainbow Dash would in particular never suspect Fluttershy of doing anything sexually sneaky -- even to the extent that Fluttershy might, because Rainbow Dash idealizes Fluttershy. In the case of my Rainbow Dash, she might imagine that my Fluttershy was doing something sexual, but if she wanted to know the truth, she'd just ask Fluttershy (direct communication totally ruins a farce) and Fluttershy would be completely honest with Rainbow, whom she (with good reason) trusts more than she does any other Pony in the world -- even more on the average than she trusts Rarity (with whom she would also be honest).
My Fluttershy is capable of being sneaky (in fact she's incredibly good at it, when she wants to be, because she can cloud minds and become almost unnoticeable) but she doesn't like to be sneaky for its own sake, and she's not very good at lying directly.
Well, the "moo" at least makes it an ungulate ...
Drat. Well, we'll always have Twilight Punches Flash Sentry In The Face
I can see your reasoning. Usually a situation like this is indeed a romcom where they would hate each other for some reason, because then shizzle goes down. Usually they end up realising how much they love each other in the end, so that could work for CheesePie, to an extent. The problem I'd see is why they'd hate each other in the first place. I'd say an Alternative Universe where Pinkie leaves Ponyville prematurely on that day, not realising how much her friends meant to her, and how good Cheese was actually trying to be. The result would mean she'd hate his guts hard, and he'd feel... normal about it. Might be a bit hard to pull that off.
Not gonna lie, but I laughed when I read that PRINCES TWALIT SPARKUL. Of course, we both know this would get those down votes because of Flash. I think you write him very well, and when combined with Trend and/or Cheese, it makes for some hilarious stuff. Still, doesn't detract from the common fact. I don't think you'd lose followers though.
Totally loving that Good Morning, Beautiful artwork. Pinkie's reaction sends a green light in my head.
Now we just need one where they play Twister.2259259 Oh, no--I was thinking of a scenario--AU from my continuity, but not necessarily from the show--in which Cheese went on his merry way after the birthaversary, both vaguely thinking slightly different versions of "well, that was fun!", but didn't stay in touch. And then months later Twilight and the rest of the girls go to Las Pegasus, and Cheese also happens to be there, throwing a massive party, and he and Pinkie bump into each other and have a really fun time and the end of the night is kind of a blur, and THEN they wind up waking up in a trashed hotel suite which neither of them recognize, along with some paperwork that says, "guess what, you guys got married." So really, Pinkie didn't leave Ponyville with him at all, and somewhere in Las Pegasus, her friends are waking up in their hotel, thinking, "what the heck happened to Pinkie?"
At that point, they'd have to figure out what to do next, and I have no clue what divorce law is like in Equestria, but I'd think that considering they were on a massive sugar and/or snack related high and it's not clear whether or not they even consummated the marriage, and considering that Pinkie has serious connections, it would be pretty easy to work something out from the legal end of things.
We know Pinkie doesn't like to break off friendships, but I can't see her feeling the same way about a dumb, unintended marriage as long as Cheese was still her friend, and in this scenario, there's no reason she'd want to keep on with it. Personally, I think that even if he did have a massive unrequited crush on her, he still wouldn't want to hold her to it. And then we'd have no plot. If there's no legal way to get out of it, they still don't have a conflict unless one of them wants to marry somepony else, because Cheese and Pinkie could both pick up with their separate lives as usual.
These plots almost always involve a massive amount of contrivance anyway, and when you toss in a couple of characters who are basically good-natured and like each other as friends, you just don't have much of a plot.
What exactly? I think she looks surprised, but definitely not upset. It's very cute artwork. Carranzis has LOTS of fanart she made for Sketcha-Holic, with AU Cheese.
2258689 Well, since Dash and Fluttershy would be temporarily running the no-tell motel, she'd know Fluttershy wouldn't be up to anything, and I don't think it would occur to her necessarily that it would involve married couples cheating, or even if it did, that any of HER friends would do anything like that. If any of the other Mane Six showed up and some kind of cheating was in the offing, Dash would be pretty surprised and upset, and her lack of filter would mean she'd have no hesitation about asking what the hay was going on.
Pretty much, yeah.
Umm.... I can tell it's a horse. Heck, I can even tell it's Cheese! Hehe, he'd totally say "moo."
Yeah, receiving fan art is just one of those things that makes you giddy. It's like "wow, my fic and/or character was good enough to prompt fan art?!" I've run around the house in excitement more than once when I found out about fan art somebody drew of The Rock Farmer's Daughters or Tomato Sandwich.
There were rumors of CheesePie's demise? What?
Come on, it obviously has enough support to keep floating for awhile, whether or not Cheese returns!
Tell me about it, it took me until the 8th grade to draw and four legged animal without sucking,but even then it takes longer to draw ponies than the human body. Although I do admin my favorite creation of MLP work I did was a Twilight VS Tirek scene (http://fav.me/d7jpfrl) and a Cheesepie artwork in a Lady and the Tramp scene (http://fav.me/d7g27yl) those seriously comparing to greater work this is plain average for me (but I'll get there someday).
Don't worry even if drawing may not be your thing, your a great writer than I'll ever be.
Interesting story premises, although still can't figure out how that works.
You could always subvert the trope:
Cheese Sandwich hasn't seen Pinkie since throwing Rainbow Dash's birthaversary party. The two of them meet up in a Las Pegasus casino and, in a blur of sugar-fueled mayhem, decided to get married at a trot-through wedding chapel by a stallion Sapphire Shores impersonator. To their surprise they discover that they can't be wed because Cheese Sandwich is already married... and he has no recollection of the event.