Author Interview » Feo Takahari's "How Equestria Was Made" [Royal Canterlot Library] · 6:02pm Oct 9th, 2015
In today's story, reach back to the fundamental core of My Little Pony: The fertile imagination of horse-loving children.
How Equestria Was Made
[Tragedy] [Sad] [Human] • 14,778 words
The base and the glass are no different from any other snow globe, but it holds an endless void inside it. When two young sisters jokingly request for it to show them its magic, it gives them the power to fill it as they please. Within that dimension, they might as well be goddesses--but to the world at large, they're still confused, frightened children.
The younger sister, bitter and lonely, thinks it's a chance to make a better world than our own. The elder sister just feels responsible for protecting the innocent pastel quadrupeds they've created. But can two children really be the goddesses the pony race needs? And when monsters begin to threaten the ponies, what must the sisters sacrifice to create the Equestria they dream of?
FROM THE CURATORS: We speak from experience when we say that this story will surprise you. "I've just never seen a creation fic done like this before," Present Perfect said. "I've seen humans as princess-goddesses, I've seen Celestia and Luna make Equestria, but this is in a league of its own."
Even though How Equestria Was Made quickly earned comparisons to our previous feature In The Place The Wild Horses Sleep, the surface similarities — children's imagination letting them construct and enter a magical land of ponies — conceal a wealth of surprising yet smooth worldbuilding. "Far too often, we see 'six virtues' crop up in a creation story and know where things are headed, and yet not once did I suspect that was the path the narrative was taking us on," Present Perfect said, and Horizon agreed: "The story kept surprising me (in positive ways) with its mythological choices. The tale of Brunhild and Hearth Flame by itself makes this worthy of a feature." Chris cited another of the story's many novelties: "The entire Nightmare Moon reveal and resolution wasn't just powerful, it was surprising and original, too."
But there was more here to like than just clever ideas, such as the authenticity of the children's portrayal. "The relationship between the two sisters struck me as very real," AugieDog said. "The way the two of them come together with all their faults and virtues to create, nurture, and interact with Equestria reminded me of a much more serious version of the 'let's pretend' games my siblings and I used to play." Serious indeed, as Horizon pointed out: "It deals effectively with some very adult questions of responsibility."
What all that added up to was a small fic successfully executing on big themes. "This is really making me reconsider the relationship between fanfic, reader and author," Present Perfect said. And while not every scene worked for every curator, "the ending blew any doubts I had right out of the water," Chris said. "Here's an author that mined genuine pathos from a couple of girls making ponies with a magic snow-globe. That's amazing."
Read on for our author interview, in which Feo Takahari discusses flowing stresses, memory lapses, and everything from Lemony Snicket to lemons.
Give us the standard biography.
I’m young, so I don’t have much to tell. My family’s mixed, one side full of working folks with a tendency towards alcoholism and the other side formerly rich before my grandparents squandered their fortune on psychics and lotteries. I went to a nice high school, took eight AP tests, went to a nice college, got a suitably impressive degree in Business Management Economics, and am now trying desperately to find a job. (Anyone got a position for an office assistant?)
If there’s one thing you need to know about me to understand my stories, it’s that I spent three years as a designated scapegoat at a school full of rich kids. It’s a bit hard to bring the hammer down on a brat when his daddy was on the cover of Time Magazine, so the teachers forged an unspoken understanding that one student in every class would be the target. So long as that student was the only one who was bullied, and so long as the bullies never used physical violence, the bullies would never be punished or made to stop. It looked like a perfect school from the outside, organized to make sure almost all of the students learned and had fun, and that’s why I write so many stories about the worms at the heart of seemingly benevolent systems.
I guess I should also add that I’m genderqueer and I have an immune system that hates me and wants me dead. So if you’re wondering why I write so much stuff about voluntary transformations, with characters changing their bodies to match what they want to be, there’s your answer. A little escapism isn’t too unhealthy, right?
How did you come up with your handle/penname?
It was originally Feodor Takahari, a silly but plausible combination of names inspired by Lemony Snicket. That was long and ungainly, so I shortened it.
Who's your favorite pony?
Rarity blew me away from the start. The only “feminine” characters I’d ever seen in fiction who weren’t portrayed as evil or obnoxious were all motherly, nurturing types. Rarity’s the fashionable, status-conscious, socially adept sort of feminine, and yet she’s somehow allowed to be a likable character. I also love how the show has three main characters who’re the epitome of their race of pony, two main characters who have strange abilities not normally seen in their race, and a dressmaker with no awesome powers who can still keep up with them and be a vital part of the group.
What's your favorite episode?
If I may derail a bit, you’ve just pushed me to make an important discovery. I didn’t get into the show by watching it, but by reading Alan Back’s incredibly detailed transcriptions of it. Equestria Daily didn’t post any of them after season 2, so I assumed he’d stopped doing them, and I never made the transition to watching the episodes. But I just did some Googling, and I eventually uncovered transcripts for every season. I’ve got a lot of reading to do!
Anyway, since I’ve been out of the loop since season 2, I can’t give an opinion on a lot of fan-favorite episodes. I do remember really liking “A Dog and Pony Show,” though.
What do you get from the show?
I started reading those scripts at a point when A Song of Ice and Fire was the dominant influence on fantasy fiction. Richard K. Morgan claimed to have invented an entirely new genre of “f*ck fantasy,” The Prince of Nothing was nothing-ing it up, and everything I picked up seemed dark and hopeless. FIM had the guts to present an unabashedly idealistic view, not ignoring problems like greed or bigotry, but allowing for the possibility that they could be overcome.
We’ve seen Dungeons and Dragons become a generic setting that any fantasy author can easily riff on, and to a lesser extent, so has Dragon Quest. I think FIM deserves that status as an inspiration. Even if future writers don’t tell stories of heroic ponies, I hope they adopt the same idealism and the same sense that problems can be solved by means other than violence.
While I’m more of a world fan than a character fan, I should also note that every one of the Mane Six except maybe Rainbow Dash violates her archetype in a positive way. I read a fic once where Twilight hated fiction, and she eventually explained that when a character like her appears in a story, she’s almost always the arrogant rival who turns evil and is defeated by the heroine. (This was written before Equestria Girls, in which Sunset Shimmer matched the description Twilight gave in the fic.) Rarity wouldn’t be allowed to be a heroine in a normal fantasy series, either, and most of the other Mane Six would be one-note secondary characters. In a genre full of boring default protagonists, there’s something really powerful about a show where all sorts of different people could watch it and think “This interesting, multifaceted character is just like me!”
What do you want from life?
A roof over my head, food to eat, and plenty of books to read. I have few ambitions for personal gain, though I suppose I’d be happy if I wrote a book that a lot of other people read and enjoyed.
Why do you write?
Unlike most people who write stories, I don’t really enjoy the act of writing all that much. I tend to write the way I see things, laser-focused and only noticing the most important things in any situation, so it takes a lot of effort to figure out what a scene would actually look like and avoid a Featureless Plain of Disembodied Dialogue. But when someone tells me that they liked my stories, I feel happy to have made their day a little brighter.
Maybe that makes me sound self-centered, but I’m not looking for attention or trying to stroke my ego. I’ve been given a lot of advantages because of my father’s money, and a lot of time and resources have been invested in treating my various illnesses. I just want to feel like I’m giving something back.
What advice do you have for the authors out there?
People will give you all sorts of advice about story elements and plot planning, but don’t neglect how it feels to read your story. Do you split paragraphs when you introduce a new idea? Do you vary your sentence lengths so they don’t feel identical? Do you know how to use commas to speed up and slow down the pace? Try to read your sentences like you’ve never seen them before, and if they’re boring or confusing, start tweaking until they feel right.
Also, most writers who get described as “flowing” have a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The typical approach is da-DAH da-DAH da-DAH, like Shakespeare, but I’ve seen experienced writers come up with others. You don’t have to follow the pattern unswervingly, but if you keep to it most of the time, your sentences will probably feel smooth and even. (Rainbow Bob is a great example of this, though Cleverpun might argue the point.)
What guided the creation and inclusion of original myths, like that of Brunhild and Hearth Flame, alongside the more familiar, canonical Equestrian figures?
It’s funny that you ask about Brunhild and Hearth Flame, because that’s the one myth where I have no memory of how I wrote it. I wanted to have Hearths’ Warming and Discord because those were major events, and I wanted to have one minor myth each that demonstrated what kind of goddesses Annie and Polly were, plus a myth that showed them failing at something. To take the bat pony myth as an example, I went -> Annie is kind of goth -> bat ponies were her idea -> Annie likes heroes and fighting -> bat ponies were meant to protect other ponies -> and so on and so forth, thinking it out logically until I had a shell for the myth. But I have no idea how I got from “Polly is a goddess of hearth and home” to “this is how griffons and ponies interbred.” Maybe I read too many beast-and-beauty stories.
What do you think should guide the use of power by those who have it?
The easiest way to doom yourself is to see it as power over others instead of power for others’ sake. Act among them as a friend, not above them as a god, helping them as you’d want them to help you. Listen to what they ask for, and have some faith in their ability to make their own decisions. And above all, don’t assume they’re wrong or stupid just because they have different desires and values from you.
When I’m reading MLP fics at random, my #1 reason for staring at the screen in horror is authors trying to legitimize and excuse abuse of power*. I’ve seen it as power of gods over mortals, power of rulers over subjects, power of “superior” races over “inferior” races, power of males over females, and even power of soldiers over noncombatants. However you frame it, it’s ugly, and it makes this fandom worse.
*My #2 reason is complete disrespect for the concept of bodily integrity, but that’s a different rant.
What inspired the urban legends in the later part of the story?
I didn’t want the snow globe to exist in a vacuum. I wanted a reason for its existence and a history of past use, even if Polly and Annie didn’t necessarily know all of it. I had ideas for multiple previous users and the worlds they made, but I decided the sisters only needed to discuss one in detail to understand the situation.
In some ways, the sisters are one of the better possibilities for who might find the snow globe, so by way of contrast, I tried to think of the absolute worst person who could discover it. A typical protagonist from a bad erotic fantasy story on Literotica.com seemed to fit the bill. (I used to write for the fantasy section of the site, so I’ve read a lot of godawful erotic fantasies. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, they’re not all that different from bad HiEs.) Anyway, I worked out what sorts of things he might do, drawing parallels with a particularly despicable character in Mass Effect 2 who also tried to live out a fantasy of submissive harem women, and I figured out how it could backfire in horrifying fashion. Then I glossed over most of it to try to keep my story from going completely grimdark.
You mentioned you were planning a sequel. What can we look forward to?
From the ending of the first story, it’s clear that one of the canon characters has much more power than she thinks she does, and potentially much more power than she can safely control. Add in the destabilizing influence of the Tree of Harmony, and she’ll need guidance and training to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself or others. Who better than the Princess of the Night to keep a good pony with dangerous magic from going down a dark path? But that magic is more subtle than either of them realize ...
Expect accidents, whimsy, angst, cake, gay pony smooches, and maybe an explanation of what the hay the snow globe was supposed to do in the first place. But don’t hold your breath for it — I don’t intend to start on it until I’ve finished up my other obligations.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I’m working on an article about the real-life experiences that inspired How Equestria Was Made. I’m hoping to publish it with Cracked.com. I’ll blog about it once I’ve got it up somewhere.
Also, my publisher would be displeased with me if I didn’t promote my book. It’s got a superhero with plenty of heart but no powers to speak of, a hyperactive magical girl who watches way too much anime, a social Darwinist werewolf who isn’t nearly as wise as he thinks he is, and a Lovecraftian horror that’s stalking them all. I’ve got the beginning up for free if you want to check it out.
You can read How Equestria Was Made at FIMFiction.net. Read more interviews right here at the Royal Canterlot Library, or suggest stories for us to feature at our Fimfiction group.
A few more bits and pieces:
I'm a Utilitarian, which is always an awkward position for a writer to be in. So very many works of fiction, whether books or movies or video games, are about the dangers of Utilitarian thinking and urge rigid moral codes as the only safe haven. I see it from the reverse perspective. If you value every life, even the lives of "bad" people, it's harder to designate someone as an acceptable sacrifice. I've written more about this here.
For the most part, I consider myself a writer in the grotesque tradition. Quite a contrast with MLP, you might think, but I don't think their forms of idealism are entirely distinct. A good grotesque never punches down, never makes the outsider a monster or an enemy. If they're strange or different, the problem is with the society that made them an outcast, and the true grotesques may well be those society warped into "acceptable" shapes. And a great grotesque never allows horror or anger to turn into cynicism--even a broken world can be changed for the better, so long as we never give up. Some of my favorite works in this style include Deadman Wonderland, Tokyo Ghoul, and Digital Devil Saga.
My favorite book is Ender's Game, which shows Utilitarianism going wrong in the worst possible way and still has the guts to defend it. My favorite movie is Pulp Fiction, for some of the best dramatic irony I've ever seen. My favorite show is Princess Tutu, which challenges the tropes of tragedy in the most awesomely girly way possible, and my favorite song is Lover I Don't Have to Love.
FIMFiction.net is my favorite fansite, with Beach City Bugle as its only close competition. I love how it's organized, I love the fic spotlights, and above all, I love the fans. Thanks for everything!
I remember pre-reading/editing this for Feo, and I too found the story to be very original and enthralling.
You forgot 'Power of parents over children'.
I concur, but it's more a problem of humanity in general, not just fimfiction's userbase. I'll always use Xenoblade as a reference for how to use the theme of 'power over X' in a way that showcases the good one can achieve if they truly want to. If you're reading this, Feo, check it out. Or at least marathon the cutscenes if you don't want to bother with the game. I think you'll quite like it, especially the ending.
It is scientifically proven that such a concept is impossible.
3455149 Ah, I just missed your comment.
3455158
"I'll always use Xenoblade as a reference for how to use the theme of 'power over X' in a way that showcases the good one can achieve if they truly want to. If you're reading this, Feo, check it out. Or at least marathon the cutscenes if you don't want to bother with the game. I think you'll quite like it, especially the ending."
I wanted that, but it doesn't run on the old models of 3DS for some reason. It felt weird to buy a new 3DS when my old one still works.
3455199 It doesn't work on the old models because they needed the little extra power the New 3DS affords to make it work.
Maybe you'd get lucky and find either a reasonably-priced bundle or a copy of the Wii version for sale online. Otherwise, the cutscenes are available to view online for free. Like right here.
3455149 A fellow utilitarian!
3455149 I've seen enough painted grotesqueries to know that I love the form, even though I can't emulate it to save my life (either in art or writing). Anyone who can pull that off gets a gold star in my book.
3455149 MUST. NOT. PHILOSOPHIZE.
Ok. This is all fine. The problem with "utilitarianism" is just that it discards everything except happiness as nonvaluable. So people aren't really mad at being told the many outweigh the few, or that we should judge actions by how they end up, but more that we should just cast a magic spell to make everyone HAPPYHAPPYHAPPY all the time rather than actually give them nice lives.
3455149 Also, your story sounds amazing and it's going on my to-read list.
3455830 I once saw a lecture by a philosopher who claimed to have found six "moral tastebuds" people have, with the caveat that not all people have all those tastebuds. He would outline a situation like consensual incest or cleaning a toilet with an old flag, giving tons of context to try and eliminate all logical grounds for objection, and lots of people would still object because those things "tasted bad" to them. He seemed to have never heard of the is-ought problem, so he declared that all the "tastebuds" are equally important and any moral system that lacks even one is incomplete.
Myself, I go the opposite route. Almost everyone agrees that promoting happiness is a good thing, so you don't need to try to convince people that they ought to promote happiness. If you want to add in, say, "people should worship God," you'll get nowhere with anyone who doesn't have the instinct to do that already.
As for the rest of your objection, I don't really get where you're coming from. I suppose you could make a Utilitarian argument for something like giving poor people drugs, but that would really stretch the meaning of "greatest good." Outside of science-fictional ideas that I'd really rather leave to science fiction, the best way to promote happiness right now is to give underprivileged people the means to decide their own lives.
3455908
I think they're arguing a bit from the same point made in the Baby-Eating Aliens story - I mean, if one sees 'Greatest happiness' as the maximum good, then one can conclude the greatest good is a state of perfect, unending bliss.
Except I'm pretty sure most people would recoil at the thought of being in an eternal mental orgasm of infinite duration and intensity.
3456354 On the one hand, I stopped taking Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously after he compared calling yourself a Christian who doesn't support intolerance to calling yourself a Nazi who doesn't support genocide.
On the other hand, it's true that a lot of Utilitarians don't seem to get that there are diminishing returns on happiness. They act like giving a rich man one dollar and giving a poor man one dollar are exactly equivalent. I think Utilitarians ought to focus on helping people who need help most, and forget this fantasy of making everyone perfectly happy all the time.
But back on the first hand, I think a lot of philosophers who value things like pursuing intellectual growth could stand to meet a dog. Dogs aren't any less happy than us because they can't solve math problems or build inventions. Dogs are satisfied just rolling around in fresh grass, and I think we can all learn a little from them. If I want to read stories because that makes me happy, that's fine, but that doesn't make me better than a dog, nor better than a person who'd rather jog or practice karate.
In conclusion, I need more hands.
3456586
Oh, Less Wrong is certainly amusing for its silliness (the Basilisk always makes me giggle), but I do get the horror at least on the idea of being forcibly changed to be some drugged-out Bliss Monster. As for the dog, well - 'better' is certainly a subjective argument, and while it's easy for a dog to be happy, I'm leery on calling that as high-quality as other forms of it.
3455908 Hmmm... speaking of "tastes bad"...
So basically, I think the "nasty" corner cases of hedonic utilitarianism are a lot less science-fictional and rare than you do? Like, I totally agree that you can most easily repair utilitarianism by saying, "Well that's not what I mean by happiness" or saying, "Well it's not just about happiness, but we can factor in those other things we actually feel strongly about once everyone is already pretty happy and ok as a baseline." But I feel like there's an issue where, for example, a surprising amount of real people will actually go and say stuff like, "Utilitarianism says we should just kill people with disabilities, especially babies, because they're actually suffering so horribly it would be better if they weren't alive at all to suffer."
I mean, I read about how many countries have instituted eugenics policies and things like that on exactly this basis, and it strikes me that "happiness utilitarianism" seems to still allow people who are just malicious underneath plenty of opportunity to justify "solving" people's problems by destroying or overpowering the people rather than by actually helping.
To give a not-quite science-fictional example: imagine we had "gender conversion therapy", which will actually brainwash you out of being gender-queer, or trans, or whatever, and just make you perfectly happy and satisfied with being your socially-assigned gender and inhabiting only its gender roles. It seems like, as a system, happiness-utilitarianism itself says that as long as "gender conversion therapy" is cheaper than gender reassignment surgeries, we should use the brainwashing rather than the surgery. I would say, an accordance between who I am on the outside and inside is part of what of what I really value, and so is being able to construct my own identity and relationships as I please, so "happiness" aside, we should give people the surgeries rather than the therapy.
So utilitarianism feels uncomfortable to me as a moral system because it seems like basically good people will know exactly what we "really mean" by utilitarianism, while there can be startlingly many justifications for things we don't "really mean" within the system of utilitarianism that end up giving bad people moral-sounding excuses to keep being bad people.
3458284 I don't expect Utilitarianism to ever become a popular moral theory that a lot of people subscribe to. It's just not as catchy as religious moralities that promise a reward for following them. (This is part of my complicated relationship with Christianity--it's like being a member of the Green Party and reluctantly supporting Democratic candidates because they can actually get elected.)
I'm not really sure how to respond to the statement that killing disabled people was justified on Utilitarian grounds. That's not a subject I'm knowledgeable about. I suppose that if Utilitarianism is used to do more bad things than other moral systems, that's a Utilitarian argument for promoting those systems over Utilitarianism. But I already believe that seriously trying to convince other people to be Utilitarians is a waste of time that gets no results. When I talk about this stuff, it's more to think through and evaluate my own beliefs so I can be more open to change.
For what it's worth, Christian morality was used to justify imperialism, and I don't condemn it for that. After all, Lenin thought religion was terrible and tried to get rid of it, and look where that ended up. I think the most you can do to protect against abuse is to let morality be flexible enough that people are capable of thinking about the situation and saying "This is wrong."