Friendship may/may not be some kind of Magic: Chapter 36 Release! · 11:45am Dec 5th, 2014
It's like they made that green button so nice on purpose. Once you finally switch it from that yellow "Incomplete" to that green "Complete", man, what a feeling!
I usually don't release these blogs so late! 5 days after release? Well, it is exam season I guess.
Well, here is the release of the final chapter of Equestria: A History Revealed! Loose Change concludes her essay in the only way she knows how! What, you didn't think this would go out peacefully with semblances of logic, did you? Loose Change pulls out all the stops for the big finish!
Chapter 36: Conclusion - The Future and Beyond
And check out the completed bibliography too! The last time I'm saying this, I suppose!
One thing I wanted to convey was the sense of scope and scale of the fic. We really have gone through a lot, haven't we? I wanted to quickly go-through some of the topics we all went through in the beginning before we really get to concluding. I really am happy with how the fic turned out. I covered exactly everything I wanted to cover, and I couldn't be happier.
It was a very ambitious project, one I knew would take blood, sweat, and tears (well, probably just the second thing), but I wanted to see it through. And now here I am, writing the final chapter's author note. Well, the author notes technically aren't over yet, there's still some more stuff I'd like to cover for those who would be interested in the fic's behind-the-scenes and history, but you know what I mean.
In fact, not gonna like, when writing the last few lines of this final chapter, I got a little teary eyed. This was my first fanfiction, and at 120,000 words, damn if I'm not proud of it. In the end of the day, this silly little fic really does mean a lot to me.
And to everyone who read it too! thank you all for following me this far! Thanks for all of your support and for everything! It always means a lot to me!
I'll save more of the thank yous and sappy stuff for a more definite blogpost down the line. Let's get to final chapter discussions!
Note: this blog post has not technically concluded yet.
The story was always planned to go up to the end of Season 3, but things kinda changed once Season 4 came and went. Of course, it gave me a lot more material to work off of, and I'm glad I was able to make it compliant with what was revealed from Season 4, but then that left me to problem of dealing with the big events of Season 4. I imagined Loose Change writing this essay shortly after Twilight's ascension (which is why the bibliography never extends past the summer of 2013), so of course, the events of Season 4 wouldn't have happened yet, and Twilight's princesshood would've been the most recent thing to occur. So I decided to have a little fun with the whole thing instead, as you can see here in the Conclusion. Let's just chalk this up to Loose Change's somehow impeccable foresight. A broken clock is right twice a day right? Or in Loose Change's case, more like twice in a million.
I think if I ever did decide to approach Season 4, the theories presented would be exactly what I'd run with. (A cookie to whoever caught that Rainbow of Darkness reference) But I'm not so certain there'd be much to expand upon, and a lot of the fic already relies on Loose Change's knowledge of Season 3 only, so I decided to leave it like this. And in a way, I think this was the perfect way for me to tackle Season 4 in the end. I'm not sure if I could come up with something with as much substance as I needed to for fullblown chapters, so Loose Change's quick and general crazy take on those events worked out well in the end!
Now Loose Change didn't exactly end in the place she wanted to be (thought she probably would only be truly happy if she was sitting as the head of Equestria with Celestia's head on a spike), but I hope I gave the character the proper ending she deserved. That even though she's still in all sorts of insane, she's found her own form of happiness in her own way.
Something I always wanted to make clear in the fic was that while Loose Change had some problems in her past she had yet to overcome, a lot of the things that prevent her from happiness come from herself. Her reckless blaming and grudge with Celestia, her arrogance, bigotry, and generally insane behavior are all major obstacles stopping her from ever being happy. (whether Loose Change really has mental problems is more up to debate; she's obviously mental in some way or another and the drugs certainly aren't helping, but I always thought things like her IQ were just a result of her not trusting tests and doctors. Which makes one wonder how she managed her way into Canterlot University in the first place) And in a way, she's sort of to blame for a lot of her own problems. But at the end of Chapter 35, she comes to a sort of realization, and even though it may be small, she may have grown, just a little. And in that sense, she deserves a little bit of happiness.
Of course, she's still all kinds of screwed up, and she may stay that way for a long time. But as she said, she's comfortable where she is now, and in that sense, she's achieved a sort of happiness for herself. Even if it still consists of yelling of racial epithets than one would expect in a normal life. But with Loose Change, she never expects the normal, and that's kinda alright with her.
And something I'm glad people noticed was that Crazy Larry, from what little we know of him, actually seems to be more sane and level-headed than Loose Change herself. And given his name and former occupation, that's saying something. But it just highlights Loose Change's insanity. And that Crazy Larry, while Crazy and given his fair share of faults, still looks miles more sane when compared with Loose Change. Maybe in that sense, they are a good pair.
A big reveal at the end (probably not really that big, but I thought it was.) was that Larry was behind all the chapter names. A big thing I loved when reading history books (it seems I'm one of the few who really likes reading them) are the chapter names. I always found it cool (again, probably one in a million) how historians would come up with cool names to define an era. If you can tell, my username, Hoofry_poneigher, was based of Henry Kissinger. Mainly taking inspiration from his book, Diplomacy, which I loved. To define periods of history with cool names like "The End of Illusion: Hitler and the Destruction of Versailles" or "Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday Machine". Maybe its just me and my history love, but don't those things make history sound absolutely epic?
As you can probably tell if you look up a table of contents for Diplomacy, many chapter names of this fic were inspired by this. Anyways, it's something I always wanted to do when writing a history fic like this, and I'm glad I was able to justify it in my own way. And I always thought it acted as a kind of mystery. Loose Change isn't the brightest pony around, so at the end of the day, it's of course revealed it wasn't her writing the chapter names. Instead, it was another pony you wouldn't expect, Crazy Larry. Again tying in with the whole idea that maybe Crazy Larry is more smarter than we think. Technically, he also acted as a defacto editor for Loose Change. He might even be more academically oriented than Loose Change!
And I liked that juxtaposition in the chapter names too, Loose Change coming up with wild and crazy theories pulled out of drug-induced hazes, tying them together with insane leaps in logic, yet the chapters still have cool academic scholarly titles. That's one of the little things I put in there that I always liked. I hope you appreciated it too!
So Loose Change doesn't exactly end victorious, but she ends in her own way, satisfied. And things probably won't go the way that she planned (especially in regards to the success of her essay, in which her professor almost certainly failed her on academic merit, despite his overall amusement, broken wing aside), but as she said, she'll take it as she comes, she found her own happiness in her own way. Despite how screwed up she mighta been, I felt she still deserved some kinda "happy ending" in her own way (of course, how happy it truly is is up for debate, it's not really that happy of an ending to begin with). I guess I felt that throughout the 120,000 words I've been with her, I felt she deserved that much at least. But not everything, she still is of course kinda terrible. But in her own way. So she got an ending, in her own kinda way.
i hope at the end you noticed that Loose Change went from saying "Crazy Larry and me" to "Crazy Larry and I". Just a small touch there. Maybe Loose Change did grow a little! Key word being little. One step at a time I guess.
I've got some exams now (that's a common theme in some of my older blogs), so I guess this will be the last blog post for a while. I intend to release two more big ones; a final fic overview and a note on the future. Don't miss out!
Note: the blogpost has now concluded.
Glad to see you through, Sir. Hope things go well for you, and that Change and Larry have a happy life together.... Once, of course, she manages to get out of the dungeons.