Fixing "The Elements of Excess" (and some status updates)

First of all, hi, sorry I’ve been gone for so long. I’ve been working on a project that may well not even go anywhere in the next few months. If it does, I’ll let you know.

It’s getting close to my birthday, and a year ago I set myself the goal to step up my game this year. So this is my last chance to add to my accomplishment pile for my self-imposed deadline. I’m hoping to update (and maybe even finish) “Disco Inferno”, add something to my blog-only “Personal Journal of the Human Twilight Sparkle” series, put out the first chapter of a new story, maybe even do something with “IM Sparkle”. Don’t hold your breath for the last sequel to “Perfect Little Village” series, though—I seem to be permanently stalled on that one for now.

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For the rest of this post, let’s tackle some analysis, because that’s still what I get paid to do for a living. Recently, I read the canceled fanfic “The Elements of Excess”, by cleverpun. By and large, I thought it was right that the author canceled that story, because he had written himself into an overly dark place for a story that started so light. Luckily for me, he provided a synopsis of where the rest of the story was meant to go after the point where he stopped. So I thought I’d try to find a way were this story could have worked, purely as an intellectual exercise.

So the plot of “The Elements of Excess” is that Season Two-era Discord has cursed the Elements of Harmony from within his stone prison, to make the Bearers into exaggerated versions of their virtues instead of their opposites like he did last time. For five of the Mane Six, this works out comedically: Applejack is so truthful that she causes the CMC to break out in tears from one of her criticisms, but is completely oblivious to what is wrong. Fluttershy is now a germophobe, Rainbow Dash—the best realized of the changed characters—is clingy and cuddly, and so on. This part of the story works—the more these five argue, the funnier the story gets, and any time a normal character tries to intervene, they instantly become the straight mare, making things even funnier.

In contrast, Twilight Sparkle soaks up so much magical knowledge that she decides that she alone deserves to rule Equestria, and sets out to assassinate Princess Celestia, who she considers to be incompetent. This is what I call the “Researcher Twilight” scenario, which is so obvious to fanfiction writers that it has played out in at least a dozen fics that reached the featured list in my memory. I’m not saying that it’s a bad plot, just an obvious one. The show itself hints at Twilight’s gross abuse of her powers on multiple occasions.

But I don’t feel that this plot works next to the comic characters around her. Basically, the contrast makes her actions all the more evil, to the point where she passes my personal moral event horizon. After what she does and tries to do in this fic, I don’t really think she deserved to survive to the end of the story to be properly remorseful to Princess Celestia at the end. And if you think Twilight Sparkle dying in a fic that starts as lightly as this one does is wrong, then congratulations—you have identified precisely why this fic deserved to be abandoned. Also, while I’m on the subject of Twilight, the process of her corruption was far too fast for me and her reasoning for why she had to overthrow Celestia was never reached in an organic way from her original worshipful stance. I mean, in the Researcher Twilight Tumblr series itself, the cause of her alignment shift was Celestia forbidding Twilight from researching dark magic, which I can easily see as being a reason for a research-obsessed individual to cry “Treason!” over.

Now one option to fix this is to make Twilight just as comically crazy as the other Bearers. Instead of pushing her into being magic crazy, you could go with making her friendship crazy, trying more and more absurd methods of solving her friend’s disagreements, and inundating Celestia with more and more absurd friendship letters. Or, have Twilight pretend to go power mad as her plot to defeat Discord—she banishes Celestia and Luna to the “dark side of the moon” (actually the Crystal Empire) and then starts issuing tens of thousands of new laws to utterly regulate every element of pony life, making Equestria into the most orderly realm imaginable. Discord would have no choice but to surrender. Now either of these plots would fix the problem with the story, but I think either would be as good as a story that successfully kept Twilight as the main dramatic figure in an otherwise comedic setting.

I think the fundamental problem here is an inability to properly wield comedy as a tool to heighten dramatic tension. Let me site two examples of where this is done well:

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, there are some guard characters that exist as comic relief. While Macbeth and his wife plot to kill the king, they are being incompetent morons. This is funny, except for the fact that their failure will lead to the murder of God’s anointed, the most horrible and blasphemous act imaginable to an audience in Shakespeare’s time. Which means that all of the laughter suddenly turns very sour.

In the 1981 horror movie An American Werewolf in London, a pair of wise-cracking friends fail to follow the advice of a town of superstitious folk, and find themselves alone in a foggy moor at night with a monster on the loose. Their jokes become less and less funny, and then suddenly one of them is bloodily dismembered by the werewolf, and the other only just barely survives with his life. Later, the dead friend comes back as a rotting corpse to urge the surviving friend to kill himself before he turns into a beast as well. David utterly fails to believe that what he is seeing is anything other than a hallucination, resulting in the funniest scene in the film as he mocks Jack for being a “walking meatloaf”. Fast forward to that night, and David is in the throes of his first, incredibly painful transformation. He says, “I’m sorry I called you a meatloaf, Jack.” That line, delivered as a punchline, isn’t funny at all. And those are his last words as a human being.

The point here is that it isn’t so much meshing comedy with drama/horror that’s good, but having that comedy deliberately fail in the face of overwhelming drama or horror. And that’s what I think should have been done with Twilight in this story.

So, let’s start by getting Spike out of the way, because without him, Twilight’s fall probably would never have happened. Have him come down with a really nasty intestinal flu, which would be Discord’s revenge for Spike’s part in his earlier downfall. Make it so bad that Spike has to go to the hospital.

Now, instead of going down the “Researcher Twilight” route, have Twilight go insane. You can easily argue that this is what she had coming to her after all of her mind-control spells. Give her nightmares that she can’t distinguish from reality, nightmares where she’s forced to kill a Nightmare Sun in order to save Equestria from another extinction event. Have her daytime sanity get weaker and weaker as she tries to keep from sleeping for days at a time. And she’s ashamed to admit her problem to Celestia because her fantasies tell her she will be rejected by her mentor for the slightest sign of weakness.

Under these circumstances, and with the specter of “Lesson Zero” hanging over the town, most ponies would be afraid to confront Twilight with her strange behavior. And then you throw in Twilight’s other friends acting wacky. The tension that you want to induce in the reader is that when you narrate the funny stuff, they want to know what’s happening to Twilight, but at the same time, what’s happening to the others is the only break from how grueling Twilight’s ordeal is. And anytime the friends try to actually do something to break Twilight out of her cycle, not only do they fail, but so do their jokes.

Finally, the demon that has been tormenting Twilight all this time succeeds in taking her over. I don’t think Discord himself would work for this—either Sombra, the Nightmare or else some generic evil demon. Possessing all of Twilight’s power, it makes its move on Canterlot.

This brings up the subject of Celestia. In the original story, Twilight accuses Celestia of being a petty tyrant. The thing is, the story refuses to come out and say if the accusation is correct or not, and I think that is a mistake. Either Twilight is a power-mad hypocrite who would be a much more corrupt tyrant than the saintly Celestia, or else Celestia really is a sadistic chess-master, who only remains in power because all of the other options are worse. (I think my stories have made it clear which side I’m on.) In the story as written, Celestia’s part is redundant—she takes over for Applejack in the role of “leader of the band of idiots”, but frankly she’s nowhere near as good at this as Applejack was. No, I think Celestia’s best being firmly in the serious Twilight plot, being terrorized by the possessed unicorn. Also, she shouldn’t automatically know that this is all Discord’s fault. Better to have the bickering Elements engage in a pie fight right in front of him, liberating Discord and that suddenly makes clear to the characters what we all learned from reading the story synopsis. And of course the possessed Twilight would then turn on Discord, because Tirek is hardly the first bad guy to have the idea of betraying his partner.

I think that would be a much better story than the one we were presented with, and one that would be worth finishing. Of course, I was no more able to find a place for Luna in this story than cleverpun was, and there’s also the matter of the missing Spike—maybe he can show up to smack some sanity back into Twilight, walking into a raging inferno like a bad ass or something.

Well, that’s my opinion at least, coming from someone who almost never reads horror stories, and who has no interest in writing one.

Comments

[cleverpun]

If nothing else, I think you've hit on why this story was canceled. Above all, it lacked focus. The plot meandered, each individual character didn't receive much attention (past their introduction chapters), and it was unclear whether it wanted to be Dark, Comedy, or a Dark Comedy. Further, the way Discord's magic corrupts each pony is not consistent; AJ has her element taken to a weaker extreme than Rainbow's, and Twilight's insane logic has little to do with being the element of Friendship/Magic.

I think your proposed solution (/alternate direction) suffers from the same problem, though. It assumes that all the elements of the story will mesh well. It doesn't give each one room to breathe. Using comedy to heighten horror is all well and good, but your version (using the main five to highlight and contrast Twilight's behavior) doesn't give each set of characters enough screentime to work properly.

This is especially true if you are going to cut Spike for conservation of detail. I've done just that in a different story (I Am Not the Actor) and his absence drew too much attention to itself. Using the main five as a sort of b-plot would only make that problem more noticeable.

I think to fix this story it would need to be completely taken apart and boiled back down to it's original concept; a comedy about the Elements going overboard. The Dark parts would need to be cut entirely; they were more a result of my meandering plotting style (or an absence of plotting, period), not as an intentional contrast to the comedy.

The better way to handle it might be to split it into separate stories, one for each of the main cast. That way each character would be given a chance to shine and a lot more comedic opportunities interacting with each of her (normal) friends. It would also remove the problem of reconciling the different degrees of exaggeration; each story could use a different setup so consistency would be less of an issue. Maybe Fluttershy gets stung by some strange magical animal, Twilight messes up a spell, etc. The obvious problem there is the six stories taken together would be repetitive. Perhaps it could be refined further by picking only one character to exaggerate (probably Rainbow Dash or Fluttershy), or perhaps two if the author was really good at Two Lines, No Waiting.

The Elements of Excess was a mess. While I liked your analysis, I think it missed what made the story fail. Trying to reconcile the darkness and comedy could be done in the way you're suggesting. That disconnect, however, is only a symptom of the story's real problem. It doesn't cure the disease, only slaps a band-aid on it. To "fix" this story would mean excising the parts that failed and giving it a clearer goal, not trying to redo it with a similar-but-different setup.