Things have sure changed. · 5:21pm Sep 15th, 2014
The way The Story of a Royal Guard: A Shield Contingency has gone sure wasn't what I expected. I had expected some romance and shipping at some point, though not in the way it's gone so far. In my last blog post I stated I wanted forgiveness to be a core lesson, however that's not totally been the case and probably won't be. Instead there's just lots of good stuff scattered instead of focusing wholly on one lesson, which is good I believe.
Some things that were different in my head at first would be the character Alfred Wright, who right now has not much 'screen time', though already quite a bit of character. Originally I intended Swordulan to simply run into him and they'd chat for a while with Alfred giving some life long advice, but that wasn't the case. Discord has been a bit more involved, and I've mostly justified that to myself by thinking Discord doesn't have much to do in his 'off time'. In the show he's friends with Fluttershy and shows up in some important events in Twilight's life... that's it. So I think he pops around in other pony's lives he finds interesting, such as Swordulan's. Swordulan is a bit unique to him because he doesn't like Twilight all that much, and he's had a rough time because of her. Maybe Discord is interested in him simply because he's one of the Royal Guards who isn't a boring background type. His sword's previous power also definitely had to do with Discord's interest.
Story and development wise, I'm not sure where to go from here. This story doesn't really have any plot arcs to it like the previous one. There's a few possibilities. I could just have some big events happen that show parts of Swordulan that haven't been seen before, or events that change who he is or how he views himself. We'll see how it turns out, because ultimately I don't plan everything with his story ahead of time. It's a flow process. I am a gardener writer after all, not an architect.
I'll finish this blog post with a little thingy I wrote. It's a screenplay for the trailer of The Story of a Royal Guard, or at least how I would have it go. Here it is. Beware, screenplays read very differently from prose. Very different to write for me, so the format probably isn't 100% correct either.
It's not really going to happen as far as I'm concerned, but if I ever get enough money to commission some animators for it, it probably will happen. Probably. We'll see.
