All for You: The post match analysis · 8:32pm Dec 2nd, 2014
Firstly this will contain spoilers for the entire fic, with maybe a few hints for the sequel, and almost certainly have a fair bit of rambling so you may want to avoid this one if you haven't finished the fic yet. I may even get out the tactics truck, you have been warned.
So where to start? Not going to lie this fic was an utter bastard at many times so that I actually finished it was kind of amazing, but it probably also accounts for some of the mixed reactions and not just the ones from the angry Shining Armour fans.
As you know from the chapter one author's notes I got the idea from anowack when he was speculating about a Twilicorn/Cadance fic called Addicted to Love before deciding with that title it would work better with Chrysalis instead. At the time what little Cadalis there was it was all heavily grimdark noncon Chrysalis on Cadance and so I took that a challenge. Could I make it work, and also have Chrysalis not be the instigator?
There were probably other ways, but in the end Cadance making the choice to save Equestria still works for me to have it fit into the canon time line. Any earlier and you've either changed so much it's less satisfying or risk it being Stockholm syndrome and any later I'd argue it's even harsher to Shiny than it already is.
So I wrote the first chapter as a total experiment and found it to be entertaining enough to give it a proper try. Honestly at this point I had no idea where I was going with only the idea to not have it get too dark, a couple of scattered scene ideas, and also thinking it would be interesting to do something a bit different with the changelings given how they're portrayed in the show compared to everywhere else.
All my other fics I've had a pretty good idea of the basic shape of the story, here I just let the characters see where they wanted to take me, and bloody hell did they have problems fitting into the comedy tag I'd originally added... Now personally I'm convinced that there's more than enough humour in the fic to still justify one from beginning to the end, but I'll also more than agree a fic with so brutal of a conversation between Cadance and Shining in chapter 6 a comedy tag would also be wildly misleading in terms of the expected tone. Personally I thought I nailed that conversation hard, but it was the tipping point where I realised I'd get a lot more satisfaction not ducking the hard implications of Cadance's implications and instead confronting them head on.
Mental manipulation is heady stuff and as Twilight Sparkle demonstrated so well in Lesson Zero it can mess you up hard even if you're not on the receiving end. Combined with when Three's a Crowd came out showing that Cadance has something of a liking for danger along with forming some ideas to set up for the sequel led her to some darker places than I originally thought that I would.
My other problem was that with that while trying to do changelings properly as well when you consider them seriously they're kind of nightmare fuel which is a bit of a problem when you want to keep things light.
Speaking of dark let's talk about Twilight Sparkle. Writing free form without a set direction is fun, it can feel a lot more natural as characters aren't there to service the plot, but it can easily lead to a corner and finding it tricky to get back out again. Originally the plan was her to try the spell when the announcement was made of the impending marriage... And not going to lie I flinched away from that. Just couldn't do that to her. It was hard enough back in Random Elements when she was confronted by a possible reflection of herself and finding that she hated it. So having her inadvertently hurt Chrysalis in front of the princesses and all her friends... Yeah just no way could I do that.
Thankfully there was the broodmother who I mentioned a few times but not really intended to use. She bailed me out of the corner hard allowing me to have Twilight find out where her path was taking her and still avoid the humiliation of her actually carrying it out. Plus it led to the guests moment at the wedding which was a very, very late addition that I loved.
Leading on from Twilight I need to talk about Dusk/the swarm lord. Really I never had any idea what I wanted to do with him or what his character was. Didn't really want to ship him with Twilight and Firebrand worked out far better in giving the disgruntled changelings a voice. So in the end after him getting stuck in a cocoon I'll admit to breathing a sigh of relief and just leaving him there.
So now I need to talk about the huge stonking mistakes that almost killed the fic entirely: introducing Trixie and the Gleaming Shield plan.
Originally I knew that things were shortly going to be getting heavier with Twilight's actions and dispensing of Shining Armour so I figured right I need some light relief to keep up the fluffy amusing levels. Trixie had always worked wonders for me in that department so I got out the crutch once more. Her observation was going to be lot bigger thing at the end about why just because it's an unconventional ship compared to say Twixie it doesn't mean it can't work anyway. Glad I changed that as that would have been really heavy handed. So yeah given she was on the rock farm which is a long way of the palace and how Fluttershy's and Rarity's reactions to Gleaming had been really fun back in chapter one so I composed a wacky scheme of them enlisting Trixie to help turn Shining into a mare.
At which point both of my pre-readers independently asked what the fuck I was doing.
Just about manage to salvage the subplot after having to do some heavy rewrites and giving Shining control over the sash was just a fantastic idea as imo it led to a ton of fun along with giving him some kind of happy ending while not letting what he lost be minimized. I could have forgot about him after the big conversation and while it would have been a far tighter fic I'm still glad that I went in this direction.
Of course then I had Twilight reacting like she should and having Fluttershy and Rarity reacting like they were due to being somewhat traumatized and the light subplot also started getting heavy. Yeah, the characters were getting away from me, and I had to follow along.
On other what could have beens. Moondancer was going to get with the actual speaker post wedding, but literally when I was in the middle of writing chapter 9 the idea of a changeling terrified of changing was too beautiful to ignore and led on to the changeling part of the epilogue which I think is just great. You may recognise the names from Coincidences and I'm glad to finally be able to give those ideas their proper spotlight at last.
The two hen parties was always going to be a major event, but originally Twilight would have been present, Rarity would have ended up with Applejack and there would a table of changelings as Spitfire, Daring Do and Gilda trying to work out exactly there were going wrong with Rainbow Dash 
In comparison the wedding itself was barely going to get a mention as I wasn't sure if I could make it interesting after everything was resolved. Given the wedding is now one of my personal favourites in the entire fic I'd like to think I was wrong about that.
For those concerned that due to the subplots Cadance and Chrysalis didn't get their due in their own fic... I kind of agree with you. I could say that their relationship is still a process which is going to get a lot more revolved in the first sequel, and then two of the later sequels I'd like to do involving the crystal games and Sunset's plan will be a ton more light-hearted and fluffy, but yeah while I will try not to go full dark (which is going to bloody hard with Sombra around) they're not out of the woods yet. I will say categorically though that Trixie will not turn up for the crystal empire arc so that's hopefully something and I will be planning out more which should result in a tighter fic.
Related to Chrysalis and Cadance, yeah so Chrysi’ given her a bodyslide massage... Look all I’ll say in my defence is that I had a whole bunch of exposition to get out and if Game of Thrones has taught me anything then you really should have something going on while you do that!
Personally for me the triumphs of the fic were everything with Luna and Pinkie as I already mentioned, while they didn't get up to much AJ and Rainbow Dash got to do some entertaining supporting stuff, the end of chapter three and the sneaked in wingfic is probably the Cadalis highlight of the fic and it's a small thing but I am impressed that I kept the chapter naming convention going and actually got it to fit everyone of them.
In the end the big question, do I think this is a Dark tagged fic?
No.
Maybe I'm scarred from The Night that Never Ended, Fallout Equestria, Project Horizons or even the Sweetie Chronicles, but this fic just doesn't scratch the surface of that kind of dark. Yes, darkish events take place and both Cadance and Twilight make questionable decisions, while Firebrand wants something monstrous, but in the end everything manages to work it self out for the most part by talking out their problems rather than resorting to violence or even darker solutions.
I may just not know what fluffy is as I thought the wedding was pretty damn joyous in the end, but yeah, that's what I think and whatever you think is entirely also valid, even if you're wrong 
I wouldn't say that the story is Dark (even though that is a wide spectrum in and of itself). Teetering between strange and serious with the occasional comedic bits, sure. If anything, it felt like it handled the whole situation realistically. You have all these characters working at cross-purposes (wanting to keep order, wanting to fight, wanting to take advantage of the situation, wanting to get that special itch scratched, wanting to make everything go back to how it should be...) and they're running all around and getting in each other's way. There's a lot of good to be said about allowing your characters to act the way that's natural for them rather than trying to force them into moving the plot along. (If anything, I consider it a trait of a bad writer to use characters as blunt tools and not consider how their personalities affect their choices and actions.)
Changelings can be handled in so many ways. Some stories have them as an alien menace that cannot be reasoned with, only fought and eradicated. Others have them as just like ponies with pony-like behavior and society and the whole 'emotion-eating shapeshifter' tacked on as an afterthought. The canon ones have always felt somewhere in between. This story was probably closer to the latter than the former, but you did a good attempt to capture the otherness in their reasoning processes - i.e. for example how they didn't want to give up their full nature, and such. Alternate mindsets can be an interesting concept to explore.
And I rather liked Trixie's little side story as a breather compared to the more serious goings-on. (It seems even canonically she's cursed to get into trouble even when it's not her fault, if the comics are anything to go by, so it felt oddly appropriate.) I think the story benefited from having some lighthearted stuff mixed in. Likewise with Lyra and the girls' earlier scene in the catacombs, and Shiny's bouts of 'experimentation'.
Like I said before, the ending didn't quite feel like what it could have been, but going that direction would probably have taken a lot of rewrites of prior chapters. Besides, it was the logical outcome of having the characters go their own directions and eventually getting their individual ducks in a row, as it were. Real life tends to be sensible rather than dramatic, I find.
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Thank you for your wonderful comment. With some of the misunderstandings I'd been worrying, so that's very reassuring that someone can see exactly what I was aiming for with this fic.
We were a little more polite than that, I hope.
But in all seriousness, it seems that those side plots were a large part of how you kept the process of writing fun for yourself, and keeping writing fun is how fanfics get finished instead of fading away. They're not what I would have done, but having the story wrapped up so well was worth it.
Congratulations on finishing!
I certainly never expected anyone to take that off-hand joke and turn it into a 65k+ word story...
I still kind of want to see the pure crack comedy I envisioned at the time, though I'm hardly one to talk, since my own musings on that idea ultimately turned into an entirely non-comedic story that I wrote one too-dark-for-my-own-taste chapter of before abandoning it.
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Oh absolutely
Pretty much yeah on the keeping things fun thing. Going back I'm really not sure I'd have done it the same way either, but I think it kinda works, so hey could be worse and as you said I did finish it and that's what matters.
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Yes, I wasn't quite expecting to get my longest story out either! Okay technically Random Elements with the sequel included is longer but even so.
It's a tricky one isn't it? You either have to bring the mind whammies in, completely sabotage Cadance's character and/or have to do horrible things to Shining Armour in one way or another.
I really only had two complaints about All for You.
1)Dream-sequence
2) Last Chapter didn't have quite enough oomph. (though that Epilogue certainly did).
I think the easiest way to solve the second one would have been to insert about one more good comedy sequence into the last chapter. All for You is basically a romantic-drama but it's one that uses humorous elements and that would have been a good place for one, since you'd already wrapped up most of the drama.
Otherwise it was enjoyable and I look forward to the sequel.
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I can probably guess, but which dream sequence did you mean as there are two
If you have a suggestion for a scene I'll probably give it a go. I do think that the Gleaming, Dash and AJ scene is pretty comedic already, but I'm certainly open to including another one.
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A)The one I already complained about. Twilight's rampage. But it's not really a large complaint.
B) It was and it was funny (I also enjoyed Rarity fighting for the bouquet) , I was just thinking that if you could slip one more good bit in there, it might make up for the fact it's a bit of an anti-climax. Sadly, at the moment nothing particularly amusing springs to mind, I'll think on it.