Great stories worth checking out · 3:25pm Jul 28th, 2014
I just wanted to do some boosting here for some very fine stories written by another author on the site who has been exceptionally decent to me, Jordan179 and his 'Shadow Wars' setting which serves to tie them all together. Like me he bases some of his background off of Alex Warlorn's Pony POV, but he takes it in different yet equally entertaining directions.
Hie first great story was an idea so simple it's amazing it didn't occur to anyone else before (but that's typically how genius works), Nightmares Are Tragic. It's simply a retelling of the events from the first two episodes of the show/ From the viewpoint of Luna when she's still Nightmare Moon. She's watched the world change from a quarter million miles away for a thousand years -- and then she's freed and returns to battle her sister's six champions. One of whom looks so oddly familiar.... Very well done for its characterization of Luna/NMM, and amusing with her at-times severe misunderstanding of what she's seeing. Rarity as Celestia's assassin? Oh dear.
Her also gives us a story where we see what the Great and Powerful Trixie was doing on that Night That Almost Never Ended, An Extended Performance. Trixie gets a shot at doing a performance the night before Summer Sun, which will end with the dawn. And when the dawn does not come, what does Trixie do? Why, turn it into the chance of a lifetime, of course! If only it wasn't for those pestiferous Nightmare Moon cultists out to kill everypony... He does a great job of showing both Trixie's egotism and shallowness on one hand, and her decency, brains, and even bravery on the other.
He also has an arc of stories focusing around everyone's favorite painfully-shy butter-yellow pegasus, Fluttershy. One shorter and very sad one is A Robust Solution, in which Rarity learns a terrible secret about her best friend, and how much Flutts has been hurt in the past by a thoughtless pony, and works to help her through it. Be warned, of you like Fluttershy at all, or have been involved in a relationship with a manipulator, this one will hit hard.
Dragonshyness is another 'unusual' take on a canon episode. In this case, when the Mane Six had to convince the dragon who was smoking Ponyville out to please move. This time we get the whole story from Fluttershy's point of view, and oh dear, the poor pegasus. We all know how this one ends, but it's still a very well done look into Fluttershy's mind, and of how she overcame her fear to save her friends from tshe angry dragon.
There are many, many more stories with these in his list, he's done far more than I have as yet. I hope you enjoy them all.
My apologies on taking so long to get back to you and thank you for this -- I've only been able to snatch time in the mornings and evenings to handle this website since I took a full-time job at the end of June. Nevertheless I should have made time to respond sooner.
Thank you tremendously for your appreciation of my work. This means a lot to me because one of the things which encouraged me to get into this writing and stick with it to the point of producing completed novella-length fanfictions was the example that you and Ken set me. You also showed me how I could take all the characters seriously and represent them as beautiful, fun, awesome individuals, even when they were being silly.
I felt Nightmares Are Tragic had to be written after I read a line in My Little Balladeer where John pointed out to Twilight Sparkle that the reason why she had had time to use the Elements against Nightmare Moon was that she refrained from striking as swiftly and decisively as she might have done. And I realized that Luna was very obviously battle-experienced and trained, so that this required explanation. I forget which character pointed it out -- maybe Pinkie -- in your tale, but it boiled down to Luna not really wanting to kill Twilight or the Mane Six. And I wondered why. And that's where the idea came from.
I wound up writing An Extended Performance because I got the idea from watching both "Boast Busters" and "Magic Duel" that Trixie was not so much a villain as an anti-hero, and of a fairly benign kind. In "Boast Busters" she definitely enjoys humiliating hecklers, but she really does nothing worse to them than Ponies do to one another in friendly pranking. She boasts, of course, but this is her stage act -- thinking about it I realized that Trixie's whole method was based around deliberate confabulation; creating a fantasy-version of herself who was an awesome heroine and letting the audience into her fantasy. This isn't the method of somepony who is evil.
There was also the evidence of her treatment of Snips and Snails. In "Boast Busters" she does nothing to hurt them. She accidentally inspires their fetching of the Ursa Minor, but nopony in their right minds could have predicted that they would respond to her obviously tall tale by bringing a kaiju into town to watch her fight it! She then displayed serious courage and decency by sticking around to try to save the two colts from their own folly, instead of using her skills as an illusionist to cover her retreat while the Ursa Minor squished the two idiots. Nopony gives her credit for this in the episode either, but she stands up to a giant monster to protect the two idiots who have brought disaster on her. I think she deserves some admiration for this.
I got the rest of her character from Warlorn's version of her and from the Lunaverse version of her. From Alex Warlorn I got the idea that she was one of a very large family and that she had four identical sisters, which gave her the drive to be special and unique. From the Lunaverse I got the notion that she was a sour, cynical mare, rather repulsed by most other Ponies and especially by their sexuality and constant displays of affection, but good underneath.
I decided to give her a past love interest because I saw her as (I didn't know the term yet) demi-sexual rather than asexual, and I worked out Piercing Gaze's personality because it had to be a Pony who was both a charmer and an extraordinarily-competent show-stallion himself, so that Trixie would respect him enough to feel attraction for him. Piercing started in my mind as possibly an exploiter of her, but his character kind of grew on me to the point where I decided he was more of a Snark Knight -- a basically noble character who was a bit sour on society. This made him a fitting match for Trixie, who has similar attitudes. And meant that there was no way he didn't love her back, at least a little.
I don't make Trixie warm and fuzzy. She's not. She has heroic ideals, and is fundamentally decent, but she's also sour, rude, obnoxious, arrogant, has a hair-trigger temper and a serious tendency to overestimate her own competence and power. One of her saving graces is that when she does love somepony, she loves them strongly -- but she doesn't love easily at all. And she is far too fond of her grudges.
Most of the really bad stuff Trixie does that everyone thinks of when they think of her as a villain was under the influence of the Alicorn Amulet. Which is basically the Pony version of the One Ring of Power. That doesn't make her bad in my book -- after she's had it off for what looks to be a few hours, she comes back to Twilight and thanks her for saving her from the Amulet -- which means that Trixie came back to herself and realizes that she was behaving evilly, under the influence of something that probably would have corrupted her soul in time. There's no evidence in canon or semi-canon that Trixie hates Twilight at all after this, though I assume she's probably still jealous of her Twilight's ability, fame and popularity, and even more so after Twilight's Ascension. But jealousy isn't the same thing as evil.
Mind you, she was foolish enough to seek out the Alicorn Amulet in the first place. But then I never claimed Trixie was wise.
Fluttershy is a remarkably complex character, and fans tend not to see her depths other than the obvious one that she is by no means as cowardly as she -- or many other ponies -- imagine her to be.
Forget my accretions for a moment -- in particular, that she's an heir to the Old Mandate and also a Changeling Princess. I based them both on hints from canon, but I don't think that either was really the writers' intentions. As for Nosey, that was Bad Horse's observation, which makes a lot of sense given Fluttershy's particular appearance, personality and weaknesses -- and the psychological state she is in when she is introduced in The Elements of Harmony.
Fluttershy is painfully shy. And rather innocent in a lot of ways, mostly because she avoids most Ponies.
But she is also very manipulative. This may not be conscious on her part, but she acts in such a way as to indirectly induce everypony else into giving her exactly what she wants in any given situation. This could be called "passive-aggressive," but Fluttershy rarely uses this to hurt anypony -- instead, she just uses it to act, so I prefer to describe her as "passive-active."
The main limitation of this technique is that it only really works on Ponies who are decent enough to be shamed into doing what she wants. That includes every member of the Mane Six and Spike; it does not include Nosey. Though, interestingly, her technique works just fine on Discord, which proves that he has some decency.
Fluttershy is also a highly-sexual creature. This is not immediately obvious -- one has to look at the series as a whole. She essentially seduces three beings during the course of the series -- Rainbow Dash, Discord and Bulk Biceps. It's not obvious to what extent they are her actual lovers, but they are clearly enamored of her and their fascination is at least subconsciously sexual. What's more, she seems to have active romantic relationships of some sort with all three of them during the latter half of Season Four.
This is very unusual behavior for any of the Mane Six. I know that everyone's thinking "But what about Rarity?" -- but Rarity, for all her flirting and romanticism and obviously strong sex drive -- isn't actually paired with anyone other than Spike. And she's probably not Spike's lover (yet) because Spike is still too young for her (by my chronology 14 to her 22 by the end of Season Four). Rarity clearly wants romance and sex, but she doesn't seem to actually get it. Or be polyamorous.
I'm not saying that Fluttershy is promiscuous. She isn't. For one thing, she's so shy that the list of beings she would feel comfortable expressing sexuality toward is very short. Probably limited to the three she's actually being sexual with right now, with the possible addition of Rarity (but Rarity's straight). For another, she hasn't actually had that many lovers, even if we assume that all three of them are her lovers, and we toss in Nosey as a one-night stand.
What's more true is that Fluttershy is very strange. She hasn't been normally-socialized and that is very obvious from her behavior. My explanation for this was that her mother was crazy and the rest of her family rejected her. She counts on Rainbow Dash to help her get out of physical danger, and Rarity to advise her on avoiding social danger, and that's pretty much it. And she only understands their attitudes imperfectly.
Anyway, I find her adorable. But odd.
I hope you like the stories I'm writing, and I really appreciated your blog post.
First of all there's no need to apologize for not responding sooner than this, especially due to getting a job. When it comes down to a choice between real life obligations and fandom, Real Life has to come first. But thanks for responding, I do appreciate that.
Given how much I like 'Nightmares are Tragic, thank you so very much for telling me that I played even a small role in inspiring it (I'll be sure to tell Ken too). That's one of the reasons why I wrote it, in the hopes that it would make other folks want to write something even better, as well as turn some new fans on to Wellman's work, which I've also done.
Thanks too for the explanations about your own takes on Trixie and Fluttershy. I like your 'Flutterarc', even if I'm unsure of some parts of it, like Fluttershy having a romantic relationship with Bulk. They just seem like such opposites! Of course that may well be the attraction.
Anyway, I really do enjoy what you're writing, and I hope you do more with Fluttershy in particular. I've also started to read that story 'Traitor' based on your recommendation, so thanks for that.
Take care!