Addendum to Influences on My Writing -Part II · 5:08am Aug 27th, 2014
Here is a FIMF writer I left off my list.
Cold in Gardez has written a number of good MLP fanfics. The one that means the most to me is a mood piece, unusual in that its characters are cities and its component stories really histories, told in the confluence of events and the relics they have left behind. we learn of Derecho of the Pegasi, the Heartspire of the Unicorns, Lith of the Earth Ponies, and the city which rose where the Everfree rises now.
Lost Cities has been a lode I've mined for so much background ... connecting the story of Derecho with the Coming of the Wendigoes and the Middle to Late Crystal Empire and the family background of Fluttershy; mentioning the Heartspire as the location of a library Wind Whistler might search for the lost lore of Discord's first advent; and Lith as one of the places (along with the Crystal City, Derecho, the Heartspire and Trottingham) where powerful Lawful magic made it difficult for Discord to penetrate during the millennium of his rule; and the Royal City mouldering beneath the vegetation of the Everfree.
Really excellent work -- everyone should read it. And I'm adding it to my original article, too.
I'll admit it's interesting. It's like Dark Souls. Not that I like that ultra-bleak setting.
I like Lost Cities too. The Princesses destroyed the city of the Unicorns for their wickedness.
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I also like the way in which the Unicorns of the Heartspire became evil over time. They were good at the start -- it was a slow corruption. I envision them heroically holding off Discord's influence for century after century, but in the process becoming more inward-centered and decadent, until even though Discord was defeated, their society was shattered by the strain. I also suspect that there are any number of mad secret societies tracing themselves back to their royal line, convinced that they should by right be the masters.
The larger theme here, applying to all the cities, was that everything -- even if it was good and successful at the start -- will eventually fail, given the passage of enough time. That success is ephemeral, even if it lasts for centuries.
That's a very important truth.
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Lost Cities isn't so much a different version of MLP:FIM as it is an expansion pack or a scenario module. It adds some mid-range to long-range historical depth.
If you look at my chronology, which was inspired by your Generation Transitions & Origins, everything listed here takes place within the last 3000 years. All of it started after the Great Migration. Some of it is older than the Age of Discord, but none of it older than the Cataclysm. The most recent lost city, that of the Everfree, was only abandoned within the last millennium.
It's long historical time, but not deep time.
Ah, Lost Cities. I love that story, even if it's both creepy and incredibly depressing at times. Probably because of my love of real-world archaeology, writers of the Howardian stamp, and what I suppose can be called 'alternate reality' works about lost civilizations, some of which can be beautiful even if not always very believable. (But still, David Hatcher Childress and his dinosaur-herding, diamond-mining, Assyrian colonists riding mokele-mbembe in Central Africa? How can you not love a writer with the guts to try convincing you of THAT?)
But Lost Cities itself is a really well-done work on how the history of these places began, advanced, and finally fell, both physically and ethically. The author does an amazing job of using setting and description to tell a story with no characters whatever.
But that said (and please forgive me), I still love his story about Twilight and her scientifically-accurate erotic novel even more. It is one of the most utterly hilarious stories on the site. Whenever I really need to laugh, I read it. Just poor Twi's scene of utter humiliation at the coffee shop (with Cheerilee, her parents, Celestia... Let's be happy this was before Discord got redeemed, he'd probably have made 3-d holograms to illustrate it) and then the ending when Dash realize who Spectrum Blitz is? The author is a great writer with a wide range and worthy of all the attention they get.
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Heh ... IIRC, the Cutie Mark Crusaders wandered in to the reading, too. It was just one long disaster -- I wrote a comment about it in deliberate parody of the style of Lost Cities, too, about how long Twilight's embarrassment would be remembered. I don't have time from where I am posting this but I'm going to look for it.
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I might be wrong, but I can swear I remember a line where, as Cheerilee is trying and failing to say something to Twilight, one of the fillies yells, "I wanna be like
RarityUnique (you remember, the sadistic and sex crazed bisexual unicorn mare with the white cot and purple mane and tail; how Rarity must have loved reading that) when I grow up!" And poor Cheerie leaves the room in horror.2407464
Here were my comments:
and
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I re-read it -- it does not identify the CMC specifically, but given who was shepherding the group of Impressionable Young Fillies, there's a very good chance they were there.
It perhaps would have been too horrible if they had been there and the one calling that out had been Sweetie Belle.
Seriously, the story is hilarious, but in a very socially-sadistic way. It's sheer genius to have Twilight Sparkle be the one writing the (really bad) softcore porn fic, because it on the one hand is so alien to her normal character, yet so believable for her to write if she got a sudden enthusiasm. The only characters who it might be funnier to have writing it (Applejack or Fluttershy) would never do it (AJ's too moral and Fluttershy's too shy); Rarity might write bad softcore porn, but she'd never read it aloud (she knows how it would be received). Rainbow Dash would write an action story with the heroine beloved of all these really cool fliers because she's a really cool flier and the love story very secondary. Pinkie Pie would write something so alien that it would cause SAN loss to read or hear read aloud.
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