Things that will make my heart explode. · 5:32pm Sep 10th, 2014
SorcerusHorserus's webcomic Dash Academy is goddamn adorable, and a couple days ago the most recent strip literally made me saw "Awww!" out loud at work, in front of coworkers and customers alike. I'm not a particularly emotional person, so stories and such don't usually hit me very hard, but this artist has something unbelievable in place. I've already updated my user page to reflect it, but consider Dash Academy canon for all NLL stories.
Below this line, there be spoilers, so don't look if you haven't read Dash Academy, Simply Rarity, Ask Glittershell, or any of my own stories from the beginning.
Right.
So, I have a habit of glomming on to fun canons to include in my continuities. I love all kinds of strange, fascinating new takes on the MLP universe, and inserting them where I can is fantastically amusing to me. For example, Simply Rarity's canon that Rarity's parents are not actually her parents, that she had a younger sister who died, and was adopted as an orphan by her now parents (this canon being somewhat altered to make it fit the current show canon), or the Ask Glittershell tumblr, which paints Snails as--at the very least--a confused, cross-dressing young stallion and possibly gay transmare. I love it. I love these incredibly deep, occasionally shocking sub-stories that give the largely undeveloped world behind the animation life. As an author, I like to create those stories myself, but finding a way to weave my favorite of other artists into my own worldcanon is an intoxicating experiment all its own.
The upshot of this is that it might seem sometimes that I'm trying to shoehorn strange elements into my stories where they don't belong. That is occasionally true, but the larger picture is that my worldcanon molds to my headcanon, and my stories are crafted in that canon, whether it seems plausible or not. So when I say Rainbow Dash once dated Firefly (which isn't so hard to accept) or that Snails is a transmare with a secret crush on Rumble (which is), it's not really up for debate. The impact or the implication can be, but not the overall concept. These things are true within the framework I'm crafting, and I do my best to make them make sense within that same concept.
On an unrelated note, someone once expressed concern that I was going to fall into the trap of making all my characters gay for the sake of my own fascination with the idea. While it absolutely seems that way (given that roughly 90-95% of all characters with a speaking role, and at least half of those without one who have been mentioned in passing ARE at least bisexual) I promise it's not the case. I already explained my take on pony sexuality, and that still holds true. The difference in this case is that because male/female pairings are pretty common--Ponyville being an Earth pony settlement, after all--they usually aren't worth mentioning in the story itself. If there is an earth pony who hasn't already expressed an interest in the same sex (and hasn't been vaguely foreshadowed as having one...::cough cough::), assume they're straight. It's a pretty safe assumption, and it holds true for all three species. Assume unicorns are gay until otherwise explicitly stated, and assume a pegasus has no preference either way.
Anyway, the original point. I don't make bizarre changes to canon without precedent, or for kicks. There is a broad, broad variety of unique personalities in MLP and in this worldcanon, and you're going to see a lot of them, from trans-species romance between Spike and Rarity, to a transgendered Snails, to a strange and long-standing affection between mares of vastly different ages, to outright incest (as yet an angle unexplored). So don't be surprised to find odd things cropping up from time to time. I mean, be surprised because that's sort of the point, but don't be displeased. I promise I won't just do strange things to do strange things. No "futa-Twist-lestia" or anything like that.
Unless someone writes it, and it catches my attention, and it's good...
And here I'd been watching Dash Academy on Deviantart; never knew it had its own page
This blog post made me chortle.
Well, guess what I just read through today.
In all seriousness, that is a very good webcomic and I will definitely be keeping an eye on it from now on.
On a more general note to the rest of the blog, it makes me wonder if you have read Xenophilia because I think it has some amazing worldbuilding which you would probably enjoy. It would probably not be compatible with a lot of what you write without major modification (as in pull everything apart and start over again, although I seem to recall you saying you were thinking of doing that with No Longer Lost anyways...), but it has a lot of very interesting ideas which it explores the consequences of in depth which I find fascinating.