Ten Outta Ten · 6:55pm Feb 15th, 2016
So, Would Bang is finally out of the Featured Brox, which means I get to talk about it. And I fucking bromise to y’all, if you make a single “bro/bruh/breh/brah/brother/brotha/whatever iteration of the thing” comment in this blog, I’ll give up and cut off my nipples with a nail clipper in front of my neighbors. I’ll be crying. They’ll be screaming. There’ll be blood. The two girls on who live on H310 will probably high-five, as they hate my guts.
Please don’t do that, is what I’m trying to say here. Yes, I get it – I had like a hundred comments that were just “bro” and variations thereof in the story. Joke got ran to the ground so hard I harvested it and now I have enough crops to survive the winter. The farm will be saved. Thanks for that.
Anyway – so, yes, Would Bang is out of the box. Hi, new followers I got because of that. How’s it going. Good? Good. Hope you like the place. There's peanuts by the corner, but they're coated in plastic, so don't eat them.
Usually, when a story o’mine leaves the box, I take a few words to talk about how the story came to be, and, in case the fic has no real story behind it (if I just sat down and wrote it without thinking about it, for example) then I just describe my buttcheeks for three thousand words.
Unfortunately for you, Would Bang has a surprising amount of meta information that you might like, if you enjoyed the story. I mean, I’ll still talk about my buttcheeks – come on, how couldn’t I – but the main meat of the thing will be why and how I wrote Would Bang.
Spoilers, obviously. Story’s like 4k, and much less “BRODUDE” than it sounds like, so go check it out before reading this. Or don’t – this should still be a peek to the process behind writing a story that ended up not being my worst. I’ll try to make this blog shorter but I don’t promise anything.
I’m going to start this out with some acknowledgements, because if I’m not sucking any dick by the start of the blog, then what am I? A respectful writer? Hahah wow no. So let me point in here at the two best comments I’ve got in a while:
Mad props for Soge and Jade Ring for making me laugh in the comments section of my own story. Of course, MrNumbers’ comment was also great – but then again, this is MrNumbers. Half the comments he makes in my stories are better than the story itself, so we’ll just ignore him.
Didya know he wrote the title and the description of the story? He tends to do that. I suck at titles, and my editor, Maskedferret, just said that “Bro” was a fitting title, so I ran crying to MrNumbers, who, as always had the greatest idea this side of the Mississipi.
The cover art was picked by me, though, that’s a rarity. Then slightly modified by Selbi so the colors would pop up more. I like the juxtaposition between the cutesy art and the title+description combo—I was confident that the story would grab the reader, but first I needed people to click on the darn thing, and this is certainly clickbaity enough.
So! Would Bang. You know, for a story with a title like that, the origins are surprisingly complicated. Sure, I wrote this in one go, blasting shitty music (do I hear “a cappella version of Telephone”? It is “a cappella version of Telephone”! Hooray!) while being sick of my stomach. But I didn’t improv this thing. It had been lurking ‘round my mind for a while.
Y’see, it all started with a sentence I realized I wanted to write all of a sudden. I have a ton of those – most of my stories are just thinly veiled excuses to make a single joke or to write a single sentence – and in this case it’s the very first thing you see when you read the story. I found the idea of having someone talk about “absolutely destroying Pinkie Pie” as a synonym for sex incredibly hilarious.
So that was the start, around a month ago. I even wrote it down for a friend, saying “idea for a story: this is the starting line”. The friend kindly asked me to shoot myself in the spleen. I assume he loved it.
But that was just a joke. Here’s where it gets interesting, and way less funny. To make it through the following paragraphs, please assume I’m dressed like a giraffe and singing the famous tune, “Sweetly Camelopardin’ 4 U”. Goddamn treasure from the mid-nineties, that song.
Anyway, so the ones of you with bad enough taste to have read other stories by me know that my humor is mostly dialogue-based, and prone to escalation. This, of course, means that I need to have characters that fit a particular role, because you can’t have a cool enough dialogue without characters to give it an angle.
There are many ways to make a character. To me, the process tends to be around thinking of one trait first, and then filling up the blanks. To give them enough punch, their personalities have to be somewhat excessive – nobody would really act like that, not in real life. The logic the characters follow is warped, be it because they have no morals or because they’re goddamn idiots, and so comedy happens.
I’ve done that a thousand times, but most of the time, I make sure that the reader hates the characters. I enjoy the “love to hate” thing, because my mother never hugged me as a kid or whatever. But here, I wanted to do something different.
See, the four protagonists of Would Bang were, by design, “bros.” The story starts with them discussing which one of the M6 they’d bang. That is really, really easy to make hateable. The idea of a “dude” or a “jock”, the kind of fella who’s an idiot and only thinks about sex, is a very old one.
But I thought: nay. I want to portray the other side of that. I wanna talk about the good parts. The brotherhood itself, this extremely stupid yet undyingly loyal bond that is the stereotypical, 80s-movie male friendship. This is what the show is about, after all, right? Friendship.
So make no mistakes – I think that this story is fit to be set on the show's two main verses. Magic of Love Ya Dude No Homo Well A Little Bit Of Homo. I chose the EQG one because gave me a highschool setting, and from there on, it was all about making them likeable. The trick was, again, to give them an extreme personality – Soarin punches a car and starts talking about kinship and destiny before fist-bumping an old man – but here’s the kicker: it’s alien enough to surprise the reader, but realistic enough to make the readers think it’s logical.
It’s a fine balance. They have a really consistent inner logic, all of them, a logic that’s not shared by the reader. But when you read it, you feel that’s a real thing – that people could act this way – because, in a way, it makes perfect sense.
(Or, in a way that doesn’t make it clear that I have a huge ego: “HEY, I’VE FINALLY LEARNED TO WRITE CHARACTERS THAT DON’T ACT LIKE COKED-UP SLUGS”).
So when the characters hear Big Mac’s two sentences about love, they’re immediately willing to risk everything to help him. Why? Because they have no other option. This is what brothership is about. This is what “friendship” really means. When Curly Winds reveals his adventures with his boyfriend in the best way possible, given the situation, he earns their immediate recognition. For that was sweet, man.
I don't know. I like this pompous circumstance, this gravity that everything has for them. Dusty Book cries when remembering the high-fives of youth, for God's sake. (He also remembers something else. Eh? Eh? Eeeeeeeheheheh. Yeah. *Pistolfingers*.)
Of course, giving this definition of bro – a cool guy who’s unconditionally there for you – and giving what the show tells us, there’s no way Rainbow Dash wouldn’t be a bro. That came to me instantly: they need the help of the Greatest Bro that Ever Lived, and her identity is clear to them all immediately. Silly things like “gender” or “magical wings” matter not. Of course a girl can be a bro, God dammit, it's 2016. Rainbow Dash is a bro. The Greatest Bro. End of story.
So that’s the characters and the sense of logic. The story is not about Big Mac and Cheerilee, it’s about what a REAL FRIEND would do when SPRING BLOOMS IN HIS HEART and A TRUE LOVE STORY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. I’m sad I couldn’t have a dance-off scene at some point, where they battle for Big Mac’s honor, to prove he’s worthy. One day, for sure.
‘Course, I made sure to write this in a way that made it easy to read. There’s no point to think about all this stuff if the reader can see through it. Good writing is making it look easy. Making it look obvious. Or at least that’s what I try to do – most of the time, you can see the strings behind my puppets, sadly.
You might also have noticed that the story is considerably shorter than most of my last fics. That was also on purpose – I have severe word diarrhea, so I told myself that nay. This would be short. This would be quick.
That took a lot of effort, actually. I had to lower the stakes, make the story happen in just one day, so it would flow seamlessly. I experimented a little with space and time, so every scene would describe only what’s really important. “The benches” are mentioned, but I give no other detail, so I let the reader imagine whatever. Time is not addressed at all. Characters teleport from one place to another off-screen.
It all happens quickly, is what I mean. I didn’t spend seven goddamn hours writing forcefully witty narration to make it readable, and I think the story is much better for that. Also, I made sure to play it all as straight as possible: the narrator is not making fun of anything that happens. For the characters – and the story itself – everything is serious, important. The laughs come from narrating the silly in a serious voice.
Of course, this was all thought before starting to write the story. Once I got the characters all thought-out (“Okay, so Soarin is bombastic, the kind of hot-blooded guy who cries easily and yells easily. Norman’s a robot; his words and his tone never match up. Curly Winds is the closest thing to the voice of reason, but he’s bound by the laws of logic that populate the bros. Big Mac is Big Mac.”) the jokes came on their own, in an almost unstoppable pace.
Thing is, usually I don’t plan my stories. If it’s a really long project, I’ll just have a long-term thing in mind, chapters and all, and then let the characters move the plot as they go. I almost always have the resolution of the story in my head when I start to write, however – I just don’t know how to get there till the characters do it by themselves.
But that’s why I have that word diarrhea that makes it hard for me to write stories that are less than 12k words long. So here, I did what I never do. I wrote down a list of all the jokes and scenes I had in mind, and then changed some, deleted some, and reordered, till I ended up with this incredibly professional timeline:
And then I said “neato-peato-beato mamapapa” and just started writing. Once I got a hand of the first scene, the rest came alone without me really thinking about it. However, there was a thing that I didn’t plan and happened on its own – Celestia’s asides were written on the go, when they just came to my mind, and by God her second apparition is, in my subjective opinion, the best joke I’ve written in a year or two.
There’s an art to brick jokes, and the only ability of mine I’m confident about is that of writing them. Not all of them land, of course – I’m not a machine – but, dammit, when they do they make me laugh.
Would Bang was insanely fun to write. Hard to plan, but easy to write once it was all laid out – it really felt as if the story was inevitable, because of course that would happen. Oh, and random trivia: Dusty Book is a self-reference, the way Curly Winds ended up with Wiz Kid is a self-homage, and I’m sweetly camelopardin’ for you, babe. Oh, oh, feel my black tongue of love, babe. There’s a heart-shaped spot that’s been saved up for ya.
Y’know, one day I’ll put my money where my mouth is and I’ll write an actual love story. It’ll suck, but, you know. Shut up. Shut up I said. Christ. You come to my own page, and insult me so. The nerve.
That’s all one can say about the story, really. I hope y’all liked it. I don’t know if I’ll ever write about them bros again, but it’s a possibility. Maybe they’ll have a cameo somewhere? I don’t know, they were fun to write, and I’m known for milking those cows like a madman.
Neat
And A Hell of a Time recently reached 3,000 upvotes. It’s ranked #1 on the website again, too. Wonder how much that'll last. Record's about a week, if memory serves.
Nnnnnnnnneat
And that’s about it! As per what I’m doing right now, I think “stuff” is the way to put it. I’m working on a story that’s not a comedy, that I’ll probably never post, as it sucks. I’m also going to write a story where Octavia and Vinyl have to hug for eight hours, or the building explodes. And the building is full of babies. It’s called “Pressed for Time” (again, thanks Numbers for that one.)
‘Cause one can write actual literary works, that count as high art, or one can write shitty but awesome stories.
HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL YEAH HELL
Oh, oh. Camelopardin'. Camelopardin'. My antennae can't detect your feelin's, babe. You gotta tell me. Oh, oh. Camelopardin'.
My buttcheeks are great, by the way. I know some of you will ask.
There's an art to saying "I didn't watch or read it, but I'll gladly take in the making of."
I did this for Lord of the Rings.
Bro? No. Bro! That's better.
a single “bro/bruh/breh/brah/brother/brotha/whatever iteration of the thing” comment
Still evil.
I was one of the sheep, sorry about that.
But I did love both Would Bang and Fly Hard, thanks again.
C'mon, Aragon, don't 'Boo like that!
Am I the only one who can't see the images?
I feel for you sister!!!
3756415 Try a full refresh (Ctrl+F5).
3756456 Thank you!
3756484
Yeah, sorry for that. There was a problem with the hosting and I had to reupload'em all.
3756485 Ain't no big thing, bro.
The fact that I made you laugh is an accomplishment that I will place on my imaginary 'Greatest Successes' Shelf, right next to "Accidently Wrote the Top Rated Equestria Girls Clopfic on Fimfiction."
3756657
But no one out of you, Selbi, Themaskedferret, or MrNumbers lives in the US? Does the saying still make sense? The saying doesn't even apply to me, because I'm too high up north.
Wait a second, that wasn't a joke? Wait, is this happening while Lyra's trying to stop a train?
The entire concept was brilliant. You made a dumb jock fic in which the alleged dumb jocks were people. There was stereotype but it was all good natured ribbing. Like the guys were trying to live up to it in the most positive way.
It was a perfect 80's film, where half the drama is caused by things that are going to resolve themselves anyways, the morals aren't exactly moral, love conquered all, and the mean ol principle gets her just desserts but turns out to be okay in the end too.
It's insane, it's silly, and it's fun.
3757612 Ideas can be revisited.
i honestly should have expected something like this after you wrote multiple blogs talking about how bad you were at writing romance
that said, there was car-punching, and i would not have it any other way.
The dance off is in the sequel. Big Mac takes Cheerliee home to officially !set the family and AJ challenges her to a dance off to prove she is worthy. Cheerliee just can't out dance AJ and is almost driven off, but then Granny Smith takes her aside and teaches her the real way to be cool with the old secret Apple family dance moves that she was master of when she was Cheerliee's age. Of course Granny is old and busts herself up since one part of her body can no longer handle that much funk. So Cheerliee has to win not only to earn Big Mac's love, but to honor Granny's sacrifice.
The title, obviously, is: Granny's Hip.