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Jan
14th
2017

2011: A Lemuriffic Odyssey · 8:17am Jan 14th, 2017

This blargh has a soundtrack.

In 2004, I attended Seminole Community College (now Seminole State College). I was a young man on the fast-track towards discovering his future. Having a blossoming interest in writing and literature, I almost considered writing something original so that I could pursue a legitimate career. Instead, I decided one Spring--on a whim--to start a stupidly long, continuously-written fanfic based on the animated show Teen Titans.

It was a very entertaining cartoon that took lots of ideas from anime. Both comedic and serious, it appealed to me with its tight cast of colorful characters. So--like any other shut-in with no life--I decided to create a Gary Stu to cram into the preexisting roster. His name was Noir... aka "Wildcard"... aka "Jordan Hayes," and he was conceived after one too many play sessions of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

Art by ManiacTHP

Despite being blatantly... well... horrible, the resulting fanfic "These Black Eyes" caught on and was followed happily by a gaggle of Internet denizens. It was relatively easy to follow... since it was being uploaded every 2-3 days and in regular volume too. Somehow, between work, school, and some of the best vidya games to come out, I consistently wrote this superhero story and didn't stop until it climbed to 2.7 million words (I would eventually delete it out of spite and then re-upload it; the original copy doesn't exist and now the current site gives a false impression of its upload state). During this time, I met several long-time acquaintances on Fanfiction.net, including Lord Belgarion the author of Titan's Song which features the character of Bard.

In 2005, I finished what I would call "Acts One and Two" of These Black Eyes. I had a total of Six Acts planned. I began Act Three: Manifest Destiny in the Fall. I would never finish it.

Despite this inevitable failure, These Black Eyes had developed such a following that a message board was built around it. The name "Space Is a Waste" was adopted from my motto at the time. About four dozen people regularly attended this forum to chat and ramble about the fanfic and more.

Art by ManiacTHP

It was a delightful little community, and the sheer outpouring of praise, support, and fan-art utterly mesmerized me. While I transitioned out of Community College and started working more frequently at my regular job, I had the endorphin rush of this forum and the success of Act Two's ending to make me smile. It may seem like nothing now, but at the time I almost felt as though the Internet was circling around me. It was--and still remains today--one of the absolute happiest times of my life.

It wouldn't last long.

In 2006, I found new waves of stress from both work and school. I had transferred to a very snazzy liberal arts college, and while most of the assignments were more than doable... I had lost a great deal of my work ethic. I had grown lazy and lethargic, and I risked lowering grades. I lost a lot of faith in myself, and rightfully so. On top of that, the corporate structure at my job had changed dramatically, and I had at least one co-worker who almost made me want to commit murder. I felt anxious and angsty and paranoid almost every day, and it turned me into a very frowny, unhappy person. Then--to top it all off--my cat of ten years (and the only thing I ever loved) passed away.

I had already lost all enthusiasm for writing These Black Eyes toward the tail-end of 2005, but 2006 drove the nail in the coffin. This was the end of the Silver Age. My fanfictional career had plummeted into an absolute pit of failure. In situations like this, the protagonist of the story would typically turn to booze. However, I've never had any interest whatsoever in alcohol.

So I turned to WoW.

In 2007... I'm not quite sure what I did. Looking back, it's all a blur, predominated by spell cooldowns and teleports to Ironforge. Once upon a time, I sat down to a word processor to write 5000+ words of superheroic Gary Stuery every other evening. In 2007, I was submerged in the stagnant abyss that is MMORPG addiction.

Lord Belgarion was there with me... which was the one silver lining. Since we were both similar, antisocial creatures, we would level up and roll dungeons together. We created a stupid guild of two and named ourselves the "Desperadoes." While neither of us may have been writing much fanfiction anymore, we were still kindred spirits on a regular day-by-day and night-by-night basis.

When the sun was up, I continued with my studies at college and worked at my job. But my true life didn't begin until night had fallen. I barely slept. I didn't stimulate myself creatively. I pined for a time gone by and dreamt of what it would feel like to make things again. It was a dark age--it wouldn't be the first and it wouldn't be the last. Towards the end of the year, I felt the currents shifting. There was rumor of my being transferred to another location within the company. Also, I couldn't help but notice that my co-workers were trying to hook me up with someone...

2008 was interesting. It was marked by three major events: a new working location, a joyous gaming community, and my first, last, and only significant-other.

She was the sister of a co-worker who I met on occasion while going to the movies with fellow employees. One day she e-mailed me. I responded, and we went miniature golfing for our first date. We would be together for two years. She studied in school to be a social worker. She loved films, was obsessed with Rammstein, and had an intellectually stimulating mind. For the first time in years, I felt like I was actually becoming a human being... for I had someone else to think about and care about on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, my job had grown more stressful--but I only had myself to blame. I assumed--quite gullibly--that the company had interests in promoting me. In truth, I was simply relocated for the convenience of other individual(s) within my district. Even if I had a chance of ascending the ladder, I didn't do a very good job at proving it. Also, I felt like a real douchebag everyday on the job... constantly second-guessing myself with a new wave of negative self-consciousness.

So, I craved an escape. I upgraded to a snazzy gaming laptop (for the time), and in so doing I discovered the orgasmic joy that is Team Fortress Two.

One day, I stumbled upon a curious server that was a TF2 spinoff of an Unreal 2004 map. It was called "Convoy" and featured two trucks for two opposing teams driving down an endless canyon. I thought it was nifty, played for half an hour, then signed off.

Days later, I signed on again... and I was surprised when the moderator "welcomed me back," as if I was actually remembered for a brief appearance that one time before. Stricken curiously by this friendly attitude, I decided to hang out on the server more often. I soon found myself signing on everyday. This server would end up morphing into the FUG community, of which I was an avid member.

For me, FUG's TF2 Server was unlike anything I had ever been a part of before. I compared it to showing up at a bar where "everybody knows your name." I made dozens of friends on this server alone, and I looked forward to gaming with them every night... enjoying spontaneous scenarios and lulzing it up about one random thing or another. I discovered video capturing and made a whole bunch of (really, really awful) videos dedicated to preserving my memories of that group.

Generally speaking, things were looking up. I was part of a wonderful online community, and I had someone I really cared for in my life. I may not have been creating much to be proud of, but it wasn't an issue anymore. I had achieved an equilibrium, and it felt like things were going in a good direction.

But all things change.

In 2009, my girlfriend and I broke up. She was a genuine human being aiming for a prospective future. I was the same disenchanted manchild that I am today. If I was smart, I would have ended things sooner, but instead--like a coward--I let it reach a very awkward whimper. We parted ways amicably... or at least amicably enough. She was a wonderful, creative, joyous individual. I told myself if someone as awesome as that "couldn't cut it," then I really didn't deserve to attempt any relationship with anyone else. It's remained true to this day, and it shall remain so until I die. I've been content with my social life ever since.

While the break-up was super depressing, a few things did change for the better that year. I was transferred to a different working location that was far less stressful. I had an awesome boss. I went through a manic cycle where I re-lived the glory days of These Black Eyes in my head. I started an almost-daily regiment where I went to the local park and walked in circles, getting high on Dr. Pepper and listening to music as I attempted to contemplate a way in which I could actually reboot TBE.

This marked a very strange time in my life where--like tiny moments in the past--I was able to live a delicately detailed fantasy world in my head, something worthy of writing. I crafted an insanely elaborate Teen Titans fanfic in my mind called "Jump City Jump" that was both a re-make and a sequel of TBE. I attempted writing it, but the project imploded on itself. It turned out that my imagination was far too big for the stuff to ever be crafted to Word Processor. While this was ultimately a failure on my part, it did stimulate my creative side, and I look back on the time with bittersweet fondness.

The year limped to an end, capped off by yet another unfortunate event. The FUG community collapsed due to a melodramatic coup from deep within the admin structure. What had been a delightful source of joy and camaraderie suddenly found itself ripped apart by infighting and discord. It was like a civil war broke out, and people who were best friends online stopped talking and gaming with each other altogether.

The FUG that I recognized would survive in pieces... but it wouldn't ever be the same size and intensity that it was before. While I would game there occasionally, I knew that a very special age of online community had come to an end. In both my personal life and my digital life, I had been stripped of almost all attachments. Darkness had fallen once again, so where was I to retreat?

Why, WoW, of course.

In 2010, I dove full-force into Wrath of the Lich King. Lord Belgarion and I were the Desperadoes yet again, and we did Dailies and Heroics and other random quest shiet together. It got so bad that I'd have waking dreams of looting the Battered Hilt to form the Quel'delar sword for my warrior.

When we weren't WoWing, LB and I would watch random videos and television shows together online. Lord Belgarion is an awesome guy, and it's very very hard to imagine how I would have kept sane in 2010 if I didn't have him to hang out with. The two of us chatted so regularly that we could almost read each other's thoughts.

But there was also a bittersweetness to it all. We both felt like we were living in the shadow of something awesome and creative. We looked back on 2004-2005 with a rose-colored lens, longing to relive the glory days of the past... but too nervous and reticent to attempt rebooting ourselves. LB, at least, put his heart and soul to writing an actual goddam novel, which you can now find online: Melody's Shadow.

As for me? I flailed and floundered in darkness. 2010 was the year in which I was bored out of my skull. I even drove to Daytona in September to spend a week on the beach doing... nothing. I would put on techno music and walked the sands at night, my mind a horrible blank as I stared at the shadow that the moon made for me on the shore.

There is really no way to accurately express just how nothing my life was and has been. It's a very pathetic thing to be waiting for a spark... instead of knowing that--at any time--you can procure it from the ether yourself. Even as 2010 came to an end, I still didn't know where to go or what to do. The same could be said of myself today, perhaps, but at least these days I have a solid foundation. Then? I floated in darkness with no bottom. And just what is there that's beneath emptiness?

In 2011... ... ...

In early 2011, I was scouring the Internet to pass off the "cold" Florida month of January. I stumbled upon a message board that linked me to something that I had always been curious about for years but never examined closely. On a whim, I went and downloaded a certain program to see what it looked and felt like. Just what program, you ask?

I knew very little about Second Life before 2011. I was vaguely aware that it was infamous for its relatively "saucy" side, but it seemed somewhat pointless to me. After all, why invest yourself in an MMO if there's no killing or blowing-shiet-up in it? I had tried Star Trek Online, and it was about as ghetto as one could imagine. So I couldn't picture something else dominating my attention quite like WoW did.

But Second Life was... something I evidently sorely needed in that time period. I wish I could say that I got into it because of the social aspect. I wish I could say that I was drawn in by the chance to connect with other human beings and form an emotionally stabilizing friendship. I even wish I could say that it gave me the opportunity to express myself creatively and even make money online.

But... let's be honest here... I hopped into Second Life with moist aspirations of digital bacchanalia.

Second Life is legitimately very interesting. I could ramble on about the topic for hours, because I find it amazing on so many levels. It's an online environment that is constantly changing--that can be edited at any time. It's free to join, but to get anywhere you must invest money in the marketplace of items, territory rentals, and services that are pooled together by the community that runs it. It requires a certain degree of Internet savvy to thrive in (something that I lack; but hasn't stopped me from "investigating" anyways).

And yet, for all of the elaborate factors that come together to make the universe that is Second Life... it is a wasteland that has been in a slow and agonizing decay for years and years now. The impression that I've gotten is that Second Life--from the get-go--was a golden land of online opportunities for content creators. Here you had a world where you could make fashion, craft architecture, and run servers at a price. Hypothetically, people would pay you for these services and together you would maintain a continuous community while the program's creators eked an overall profit.

Now... here's how Second Life worked in reality: people would see advertisements for the program. They'd log on. Make a character. Dress him, her, or it up. Maybe buy a house and rent some property. Then... wander around aimlessly in what they ultimately realized was a over-glorified chat room. Then, out of sheer boredom and driven on by wicked curiosity, they'd cut the bullshiet and go check out all of NSFW elements of Second Life. Once they realized that the whole experience was insanely ghetto, they'd log off permanently and never return. Their house, their property, and their belongings would contribute to the digital detritus... like an abandoned house lost in a realm that was incapable of gathering dust.

People talk about ways to simulate the apocalypse of western civilization. If you ask me, they wouldn't have to look any further than Second Life. It is a digital apocalypse, a depressingly saucy wasteland of hedonism and over-saturated marketing. If you make a character and just... fly over a random in-game continent, you'll discover rows upon rows of completely abandoned buildings: shops, garages, hotels, community centers, bordellos, strip clubs. You can go for several kilometers in-game without finding anyone. If you have audio streaming turned on, you'll phase in and out of Internet Radio shows--all sounding off the echoes of digital ghosts that once roamed these plastic sepulchers, music playing for nothing and no one because everything is so insanely desolate.

It utterly fascinates me. I even tried channeling the sensation into the Cider Space arc of Appledashery, as a means of paying tribute to the overall experience. Sometimes I dream of making a blargh where I do digital urban exploration complete with screenshots of abandoned places built for a population that no longer exists, forever frozen in limbo and neglect.

Alas, when I dove into Second Life, it was for purely caveman reasons. And while you might think that this is the start of a very shameful, self-deprecating memoir, understand that I am... quite glad for having gone through with it. For all of my young life, I've had several... let's say... itches that were needing to be scratched. Second Life provided just the right kind of artificial arena for me to have those bulbous bubbles finally popped, and without such a catharsis I shudder to think how tense and sociopathic I might be today. And it's kind of silly to say this, considering that the extent to which Second Life provides a "sensual" experience involves standing around in the body of a muppet-like homunculus while engaging in an awkwardly silent staring contest with a dozen other socially-inept avatars with their digital organs hanging out. Try to imagine Rated XXX Dance Clubs floating like sporadic islands in the midst of deep space, full of disproportionate bipedal specimens clinging to the hope of erotic comfort, with everyone standing dead-still while the server's radio pumps out unfittingly hype club music, with each hairy and lonely soul waiting for the first shot to be fired.

Somehow... I enjoyed this culture, and it occupied my time and attention for nearly seven months. And don't get me wrong: not everyone on Second Life is a two-dimensional horndog (like I was). In truth, I've met some really fantastic, creative, kind-hearted souls in the community... people for whom I'm eternally grateful for knowing.

But, for me, Second Life had mostly been an experiment in exploring my own computerized Sodom and Gomorrah. And having been a part of it almost nightly for half of 2011... well... let's say it expanded my mind while at the same time turning it into mush. I spent so much time, money, and hormones on something with no definable goal. It was the kind of existence that dwelt on a Hellish plane even lower than World of Warcraft addiction. I grew distant from Lord Belgarion because of it... grew distant from reality in general.

And yet, I also felt as though I had burnt away the last inhibitions I had remaining in my psyche concerning kinks and fantasies and lifestyles. You haven't truly lived until you've walked through a forest of dicks... or accidentally stumbled into a room where the walls were caked in scatological photographs. I've seen a lot of awful things on the Internet; most of them I've absorbed unwittingly through osmosis. 4chan is a good example of where this sort of thing happens, and yet I feel as though Second Life--and my experience with it--sort of superseded all of that.

So, long story short, the first half of 2011 disassembled my mind and numbed me to a lot of things that I might previously have found awkward, embarrassing, or even offensive. I grew calmer, more mellow, more accepting of stuff in general. So... it wouldn't have been any real stretch of the imagination that I might have embraced something that any other adult male my age might have found reprehensible. Hell, if I wanted to, I could even have sat down to watch a television cartoon show made for little girls without blinking an eye.

Wait, wat.

In 2011, memes were annoying things... but innocent. They lived and died in a blink. No one thought much of them. Most certainly, nobody expected that memes would elect a U.S. president five years later. If you frequented 4chan casually--like I did--you'd find threads flanderized into common subjects: Kim Possible and Shego shipping, Nevada-tan circle-jerking, cock-mongler photoshops, cats for days. It was an era before Baneposting, a time before nightmares lurked the forests all around us.

Seen here: the good 'ol days

About six and a half years ago, I started noticing an... exceptionally bright-colored meme appearing frequently on the Chans. It featured--of all things--anorexically thin horses with adorably flouncing manes. Knowing that the characters were females that undoubtedly belonged to a show aimed at little (aka "underaged") girls, I suspected that the 4chan threads were only pretentiously farting around before the deluge of sopping-wet Rule 34 art roared in like a turgid comet. And yet... as the months went by... it almost seemed as though the levee was holding. These pony threads were actually maintaining their cool... curiously chock-full of legitimately detailed conversations that were unironically appreciative of the show and its content.

What show? My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. So it's a reboot of the old franchise. Okay. So it features the voice of Tara Strong from The Power Puff Girls. Okay. So it was also created and produced by Lauren Faust, one of the creative forces behind The Power Puff Girls. Okay... so what? It occurred to me that--perhaps--the show was indeed good. I was simply not in a place to care. Also, the seemingly obsessive attention that 4channers were paying the program was borderline psychotic. Surely they were just being ironic for irony's sake. The charisma would die out in a matter of weeks... just like all memes.

And yet... the pony phenomenon kept going. And it kept going strong. There was simply no way to avoid it. Even if I tried... I would find pony pics popping up in the most random of places. There would be forums for everything imaginable that would generate a "Pony Thread" just to satiate the mania of the masses.

As it so happened... one such thread was made at my old haunt. Fugworld. It was created by Mr. Bear and frequented by the likes of Fenrir and Raefire (rest in peace). I couldn't even avoid this meme at a place that I more or less considered home. While I have a hard time gauging my initial reaction while lurking, my first post on the thread (equipped with a link to an annoying YTP) might give a hint as to my initial impression:

Now, to be clear, I never had a problem with the *content* of the meme. I was more or less turned off by how effing popular it was. I've often had a less-than-appreciative perspective on the nature of popularism--or what I see as people doing stuff because "everyone else is doing it." And, to me, the MLP craze was happening too quickly and too enthusiastically to be... well... sane. So, like most individuals within the "anti-brony" wave, my way to contend with the tsunami was to exercise a knee-jerk reaction. But I wanted to be more facetious about it than douchebaggy. In Fugworld chat--I believe--I went about posting pictures of horses kissing as a way to tease the otherwise one-sided craze (by the way, a word of advice, never go on Google to search for "lesbian horses" with the safe search off).

And, as several other brony "converts" can likely testify, attempting to resist the content is usually a catalyst for indulging oneself with the material in the end. I feel like Tourette's Syndrome makes for a good analogy. When attempting to reject something, you have to contemplate that which you are rejecting to begin with. However, at some point, a specific gland in the brain might fail and you'll find yourself stopping at just the contemplation and never falling through with the rejection.

And yet, I fought it tooth and nail... for a short time. I would watch Youtube Poops featuring ponies... and maybe the occasional PMV. But nothing actually made me want to watch the actual show.

Until I saw this:

It's a proven fact that you can add classic Nintendo music to anything and make it instantly awesome. For some reason, I just couldn't... stop watching this video. I'd view it every evening, putting myself in a happy place that I could not logically explain or put into words. Perhaps this was what opened the door for me... that fed my curiosity and made something that seemed so detestable suddenly delicious and... endorphin-inducing. Sometimes all it takes is the right mood with the right amount of caffeinated Dr. Pepper high while watching something to... fall in lurve with the substance laying right in front of you. I'm not sure if the Fugworld forum was to blame for me stumbling upon this video, but I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought hadn't I lurked ever so spitefully on that one particular thread.

And what became one beloved video would slowly trickle into a whole playlist of horse-flavored multimedia that I had available at the hairy tentacle-tips.

And gradually, fave'd video by fave'd video, I started approaching the source (aka "sauce") of the forbidden material in question... until finally I decided to squat down in front of Youtube and watch a single episode straight from beginning to end... if only to finally answer all of my questions about "that lesbian one with the rainbow mane" that I kept seeing prominently on pony threads.

I watched "Sonic Rainboom," the first full episode of horsery I was ever exposed to...

...and I wasn't very impressed.

The characters seemed two-dimensional. The plot was very generic. The conflict felt bland, diluted, and predictable. All things that were indicative of... y'know... a cartoon show aimed for young people. In other words, I didn't see what was so special about it... at least to legitimize the maniacal craze it was garnering from the Internet alumni. In a way, I was sorta let down.

But the Internet is a very venomous place, and over time I would allow a strange sense of hope to weasel its way into my mind. Surely there was something magic about... the Magic of Friendship, f'na? So, against my better judgment, I sat down and decided to marathon the dayum thing and get it over with.

I watched the pilot, and--ironically--I found it even less impressive than the Rainbow Dash story that I saw. Here I was witnessing everyone worshiping Lauren Faust up and down in threads and on the Chans, and yet the bare-bones plot of the show was basically an overglorified reinterpretation of Magical Girl smex... like Sailor Moon but with quadrupeds. Each main character had a destiny to fulfill that was both literally and metaphorically represented by an "Element of Harmony." What was so unique about that? Granted, it was nifty that the Maleficent ripoff antagonist, Nightmare Moon, was redeemed in the end... showing a curious amount of depth and optimistic spirit of good-will... but I feared that I was simply about to re-tread stuffy, generic ground. Hooves or no hooves.

Nevertheless, I pressed on.

And as much as I wish to say that I was getting "hooked" on the show, I couldn't. It wasn't very mentally stimulating... or emotionally, I felt. It just felt like really cute, simple, and--in many ways--relaxing eye candy.

I could agree that it didn't feel like it was pandering to little girls (remember, there was a time when that was the intended audience and people watching the show for irony's sake had to take that into account while processing it). But I didn't think it was revolutionary.

Perhaps what helped me most in ultimately enjoying S1 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was deciding to stop looking for reasons to be impressed by it. There was a certain... zone that you had to get your mind into for enjoying something of that nature. No, you didn't have to dumb yourself down or whatcrap, but you did sort of have to reach a meditative zen-like state. If you accepted the show for its innocence and cast your troubles and cynicism away, then there was something positively joyful and affirmative to glean from its relatively minimalist approach. Seriously, take a trip back and re-watch episodes of Season 1. There are less things that happen in the entire run than in a single episode of Star Trek Enterprise. Conflicts are almost all over before they start, and there's almost no overarching danger that threatens the characters throughout the extent of the season. If something crazy does happen, you can expect an awkward and almost anticlimactic deus ex machina to play its hand... or hoof.

And when you stop stressing over the need for a complicated narrative... you realize that the show has nothing to do with a narrative. It's all about the characters--each of which are adorably different, joyously memorable, and deliciously portrayed by their respective voice actors. The show might have the pace and excitement of a melting iceberg on Valium, but it was put together by a good team with good charisma and good skills and overall produced by a great content creator.

And the moment... the instant when I finally knew that the show had grabbed me by the balls was during my first time watching "The Show Stoppers." It was the first time I recall feeling a bit miffed about an episode's plot. More specifically, I kept thinking in my head: "What's with these annoying three pipsqueaks? Give us the six main characters back already."

Oh shit...

Suddenly... I kept finding reasons for why I was looking forward to watching (and eventually re-watching) the episodes. Just... small subtle things. Things that could be easily captured in .gifs or in youtube snippets. Tiny little differences between the characters. Signatures that made each stage player unique. The raspy squeak in Rainbow Dash's voice. Twilight rubbing her cheek after a frog jumped off her face. Fluttershy sliding bashfully across the floor of Sugarcube Corner. Even Spike delivering a curiously hilarious line out of nowhere.

These little things became everything. Remember... once upon a time, there was only one Season... and obsessing over it was an art. A rapturous art. And, all things considered, that single season alone gave us plenty of reason to adore these character. From the very beginning, we are introduced to their dreams and aspirations. At the same time, they are extremely flawed characters. Twilight Sparkle--whom I first thought was going to be a Jean-Gray-esque Mary Sue with a dull destiny story arc--turned out to be one of the most flawed characters of all, and it made perfect sense that she would be aggressively pursuing story lessons in each episode. Thus, the method of the storytelling made-sense, and the overall attitude towards life and all of its surprises that is represented in the S1 finale is truly humbling and hilarious.

I knew that I had been won over by the characters around the time I saw Suited by Success--more specifically the scene where Rarity has her melodramatic emotional breakdown:

Aside from an exercise in glorious voice acting, this showed how much the show had established the characters so that they could each have believable and amusing one-liners to address the situation. I giggle like a school girl every time I see it, even to this day and writing this egotistical overly-long blargh. And my adoration of the characters persisted in episodes like "Feeling Pinkie Keen" and "Green Is Not Your Color" and--yes--even the "Sonic Rainboom" episode that I had previously thought was boring.

But, despite all of the things that the show itself had done to win me over, it was ultimately something else that kept me interested in ponies. Namely... it was the thing that brought me to watch the show to begin with: the fans.

Art by RizCifra

Art by Moe

Art by MisterAibo

Art by... somebody... f'naaaaa

I thought I was impressed by Teen Titans fanart. Once upon a time, I used to believe that the Legend of Zelda fandom gave us the best fanart. That all changed with what I started witnessing in 2011. The art of My Little Pony blows everything else out of the water. It's incomprehensibly good. And it's not just works of irony for irony's sake. Fans don't throw so many hours and creative juices into the pot just to be trolls. This was a sign of legitimate passion... of a competitive spirit for showing off one's abilities in placing this show on a pedestal. Whether or not it deserved to be on that pedestal wasn't the issue. People loved it because they chose to love it.

After all, the love of all things poni poni poni was born from the cesspool that is 4chan, a site that has otherwise given us rape threads, pissing fetish .gifs, suicide encouragement, antisemitism, sexism, and every despicable meme known to man.

Somehow... from this navel of digital defecation... something bereft of iniquity came into being. Yes, it would be polluted horribly in due time, but at the start... back in the ecstatically liberating days of 2010 and 2011... the brony movement was something fresh in its innocence. It was like willfully and purposefully creating a clean slate for the internetter's comprehension. You could clear the mind of impurities and start over again, and every silly joke or double entendre or innuendo suddenly had a cosmic rippling effect... because you could literally attach ANYTHING to ponies and--through both irony and gleeful enthusiasm--it would be instantly hilarious in every shade of the spectrum.







The fandom was a living race--a race to see who could prove themselves to be more knowledgeable and more obsessed with the content than others. It was like the Star Trek fandom was born overnight and condensed into a single fat cable that channeled nothing but poni poni poni memes at a thousand muffins per second. As I finished Season One, I found myself reading more and more into the fandom side of things... and I learned about the evolution of Derpy Hooves, the strange overpopulation of background pony doppelgangers, the silly unicorn who sits funny and obsesses with humans, the Dr. Who crossover that nobody asked for, and so many other things that must have looked positively ridiculous on the outside.

But it didn't matter. Once you were inside, you felt a whole new joy. You felt a camaraderie that was fresh and explosive and growing nonstop by the minute. You knew you were in communication with another fan of the show if you could say "the tree nearly turned to stone after babysitting a dictionary and a chicken," and that person would clearly understand what you meant. You'd show up in streams where they'd be replaying "Sonic Rainboom" and during the introductory cheer scene, everyone in chat would be plugging their ears and screaming at Fluttershy to "Not be so loud! Quiet down! Sheesh, Fluttershy! Our ears!" It was a collective consciousness unlike any other I have had the pleasure of being a part of. All that was needed was something to fill the void between my head, to make the bones in my ears vibrate and the eyes in my sockets sparkle:

Videos like these... and countless more like them... became all I listened to or watched in between... well... doing ANYTHING, really. Just sit back after a day at work, grab a bottle of Dr. Pepper, and let the endorphins roll.

But it wasn't until one evening when I was sitting down to a masterpiece by Alex S that I had... something of an epiphany.

About two-thirds of the way through the video, contemplating on what I had seen in Season One, digesting all of the art and talent that I had seen exemplified by the community, and amazed by the sheer amount of time and effort that must have gone into creating the AMV playing before me... I realized that I was in love with this show. It not only meant something to me... but to everyone else. The one thing that has always gotten me into a fandom is the sheer amount of output that it pulls from a group of enthused individuals. Even if the show sucks (and let's face it; there are better things out there than MLP:FiM), what wins it for me is what can be made of it. I've almost always seen canon material as the foundation... but the fanworks to be the branches that bloom in open sight. It's a matter of a single focus having infinite potentialities, and it's something I lurve with a passion.

And here I was in 2011, lurving poni poni poni with a passion. It was final. It had pulled me in. I was a brony.

So... what was I to do?

What was the only thing I was ever good at? Or at least decent at?

The neverending pain of being a fanboy is always wanting more from a given material. Even if the creators of the canon give you everything, you'll only ever experience the sensation of living out that beautiful artificial scenario once. As is the way of all creatures, you'll inevitably crave more. And if the original content creators can't provide more... or won't... then you'll eventually be inclined to produce an addendum yourself... if only to recreate that sensation of being there again.

This is something we've all felt, for sure. At the end of a television show binge. After the closure of a web series. Walking out of a theatre after watching a dayum good film. I first felt this way at the age of fourteen when I was desperately waiting for more episodes of Space Ghost Coast to Coast to come out. I felt it when I got into superhero cartoons and felt the incessantly venomous need to write-in Gary Stu self-inserts. I felt it at the end of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Resident Evil. Oftentimes, it's not enough to simply contain things within the nebulous boundaries of your imagination. You have to make something concrete. You have to expose your thoughts and fantasies to the rest of the world so that they too may live out your ideas in the exact same way that you did. It's the innately human need for spreading viral abstract progeny. It started at the dawn of recorded time with word-of-mouth religion, and in the course of two hundred thousand years it's evolved into furry dickgirl vore smut on Reddit. We simply have to infect others with ideas.

"Art" by moonbrony

Lo and behold, here I was at the end of Season One of MLP: FiM, having arrived at the party a bit late, and I... didn't exactly know what to do.

Surely I couldn't actually write My Little Pony fanfiction(!). That was out of the question. It was silly and juvenile and cringe-inducing. Nah... the endorphins pumping in my veins was simply a sign of enthusiasm. All I needed to do was ride that inspiration and take it wherever.

So I did. Out of nowhere with almost nothing else to prompt me, I decided... to write a Teen Titans fanfic (wat). It's kind of cute, in a way. I was like a dumb little puppy... or a Mars Rover that didn't know what to do beyond the boundaries of a single computational action. It was my first serious attempt at actual writing that I had done in over a year.

All I got to produce in the end was two chapters. I haven't looked at the work in several years, and only now have I glanced at it while making this blargh and... I have no unearthly clue what in the blue fuck I was writing. It looks like a highly-experimental action story with a Mary Sue character and weird fourth-wall breaking moments, comparable in some ways to .out.of.character.. But looking at the "notes"--I feel my own spinal cord splattering the walls all around me. It's almost as if something had uncorked the creative bottle in my brain bone, and I was spilling out a schizophrenic deluge of words and ideas and crossover fluff... with sporadically-placed references to MLP as a tongue-and-cheek way of going "hey guyyyyth! Guetth what I'm watchiiiiiiing!" Like a humpback whale screaming from deep inside a three-by-twelve foot closet.

I vaguely recall telling Lord Belgarion--quite prematurely--that I was "attempting to write again." But I literally had nothing to show for it. And even if I somehow did, it still didn't satiate the growing fire deep within this lemur's chest vacuole. I was living in the past; I simply had to stop kidding myself. The Teen Titans were dead; I had to bury their shadow. There's more to life than being a one trick pony. First off, you gotta connect with that pony... acknowledge it in the corner of the room and tell it to take the floppy ears and trunk off because it's not fooling anybody.

I was a Brony. And true Bronies do Brony things. And if I wanted to express my Brony self in any artistic way within the Brony community, the only avenue my "talents" gave me to pursue was literature... the one genre that--ironically--fell into the least popular category of this Goddess-forsaken fandom. F'naaaaaaaaa.

And--don't get me wrong--I had started to become somewhat acquainted with the realm of horse-wordery at the time. I was vaguely aware of the huge 'Fallout' crossover that everyone was obsessed with. There was a sad!fic called 'Bubbles' that was making the rounds. Everyone who possessed genitalia on the Internet was (sadly) aware of 'Cupcakes.' The one story I actually recall reading was "Of Mares and Magic" written by GanonFLCL, because back in the day I apparently had a huge thing for Twixie shipping.

So, in short, there were works of literature to skim through... but it was all slim-pickings. It's not like today where there's a glorious oversaturation of poni poni poni lit to feast your brainballs on. From what I recall, Fimfic didn't really start breaking the ice until later that year. There was Fanfiction.net, but Fanfiction.net sucks. It's always sucked. What's more, I could already tell that--for as big as the Brony movement was--it was still a very niche thing. People had already gotten a lot of attention by expressing their talents to others, but it was all a matter of choosing the right audience. And pursuing something on Fanfiction.net like I had with all of my previous works wouldn't quite cut it--the waters were just too thinly diluted and stagnant.

No, ma'am, back in 2011 there was only one place where anyone bothered to be noticed for their fan-works... and that was Equestria Daily... a place that was virtually inescapable to the wandering Brony eye. For a lot of marsupials out there, it may be hard to imagine a world without Fimfic... or to conceive of an Internet where the only way to get noticed at all was to ferry your horse fic across the River Styxx that was the Equestria Daily literary review board, where the dark waters were teaming with pallid razor-sharped banshees itching to ejaculate your amateur accomplishment in one direction and in one direction only.

But to even contemplate all of this was a stretch. I already had to come to terms with one mind-numbing thought:

Was I ready... was I actually ready and prepared to write stories about girlish cartoon ponies? Had I sunken that far? Was I becoming a borderline furry? After so many years and gray hairs, had the Internet finally broken me? Goatse didn't do it. Tubgirl tried, but didn't do it. But of all the things 4chan threw at me... ponies???

Context

Self-doubt and hesitation were quite abundant... but my manic enthusiasm was simply too dayum great. I was bursting from the insides with ponies. I had to get them out... or else die trying.

And, indeed, by Summer of 2011, my mind had already started to contemplate stories that could feasibly take place in that universe. It began as simple fantasies that one could go to sleep to with a smile on their face. Remember, this was before Season Two, and things were deliciously fresh and minimalist. It was--arguably speaking--the absolute best time to write fanfics for the show, and considering that some of my biggest works transpire between the events of S1 and S2, it still serves as a jumping-off-point of inspiration.

The very first MLP:FiM idea that I ever naturally had was--you guessed it--a self-insert story. It was called "Just Scars," and I've rambled about it before in a far older blargh. While watching (and re-watching) Season One, I naturally had the contemplation: if these main characters didn't have hooves, which of the females would I find most attractive? The answer was a loud and resounding "APPLEJACK." Yes, even back then, I knew who best pony was... even if she wasn't my favorite at the time (in 2011, it was #1 Rainbow Dash followed by #2 Twilight Sparkle and then maybe #3 Trixie... different times, f'naaaaaaaaa). But I've always admired Applejack's honesty, maturity, loyalty, strength, and work ethic. She's just... the perfect, squeaky-clean character... and adorable to boot.

But I've never liked having a personal "ponysona," and that was even more the case back then. So... I immediately distanced myself from matching Applejack up with a self-insert, and instead crafted a completely different male protagonist from scratch. I came up with the idea for a stallion who was a fatigued soldier... limping out of some nondescript pony war that took place behind the scenes of MLP:FiM. He and several other fellow veterans make a home in Ponyville--part of some state-funded reintegration program aimed at helping shellshocked heroes of combat recuperate from what they've gone through.

It would have been a bittersweet, melancholic story--the picture of an imperfect relationship fraught with numerous psychological issues that both Applejack and the stallion would have to overcome if they were to love and respect each other like their instincts desired. It would have challenged the innocent notions of the show and question the ethics of military action being a necessity in a setting that originated in a child's cartoon program: How would ponies cope with war in a universe ruled over by almighty alicorns? Is Celestia truly god-like, and--if so--can she sanction the existence of such horrors?

I dropped the idea for many reasons. 1) I detested the idea of writing a Gary Stu fic out of the get-go. 2) I've never been in combat and I have no unearthly clue what PTSD is like, so it wasn't my place to attempt to pretentiously comment on it. 3) Romance... ewwwwww. 4) I couldn't create answers to all of the philosophical quandaries, and it ended up becoming too much hard work, even in contemplation.

And, besides...

This is friggin' ponies, maaaaaaan. It had no business getting that serious. Or... at least... that was my prevailing attitude at the time. I looked at stories such as Fallout Equestria and Cupcakes and I scoffed at them: "Just because we're dark and cynical people doesn't mean that we have to make everything horrific, edgy, and depressing." I came into the fandom out of joy, mania, and lulz. Everything about My Little Pony was about silliness, adorableness, and innocent irony. I was of the impression that making it all so needlessly dark in art and literature was antithetical... detrimental... and a sheer waste of the positive energies that triumphantly dredged the fandom out of the inescapable cesspool that was 4chan to begin with.

Besides, more than anything else, I was bursting on the inside with happiness. It would be better to proliferate that in a literary work... and--most importantly--to not take it all so dayum seriously.

And, with that concept in mind, I just... naturally fed into my own manic energies. I dove back into the regular nightly habit of watching episodes, perusing clips, pouring through fanart and memes, listening to music, and just... letting my brain bone wander. Second Life had become a boring dusty arena by then. Lord Belgarion had made it abundantly clear that he didn't want anything to do with the fandom (I recall his actual reaction to my brony confession being something to the extent of: "Dammit, Krillin"). All in all, I knew that I had to go into this whole thing alone.

But I did not feel alone. Between the fan music blaring in my ears, the fan art clinging to my eyeballs, and the pastel horses curving my lips skyward... I identified as being part of a far greater movement than anything I had partaken of in years. Out of the bottomless abyss of darkness that was my descent into Second Life and the Internet in general, sparks of color had formed, and I rode them to the surface of a brand new beach... washing ashore onto a land of opportunity and promises.

I was energized... passionate. I looked forward to things everyday. The last time I felt that way about anything was back in 2004 and 2005 when I was... y'know... writing. And suddenly I felt certain that--after years and years of kicking rocks in the dark--I was soon to be writing again.

And--like the egotistical bastard that I was--I couldn't settle for making a tiny ripple in the pond. I wanted whatever I ended up writing to be epic... to be larger than life... to establish myself as a legendary contributor so that--one day--I would have fantastic fanart and fan songs and brony essays written about me and my creations within the fandom. Equestria Daily was getting millions of hits everyday, and somehow I knew--I knew--that making it big on that site would be an instant ticket to acclaim and recognition among an incalculably huge audience of brony peers.

Yes, it was an extremely shallow and opportunistic attitude... and yet there was a sincere joy beneath it all... a lurve for the show and what it meant to me and what it meant to others. If I could write something horse-epic and be successful with it, then I might enjoy both the sensation of being recognized as well as the chance to have other individuals live out my poni-poni-poni brain fantasies tenfold.

This intense mania fueled me for weeks... months. In the dark, humid nights of Summer 2011, I would shove an MP3 player into my ears and just... pace in circles inside the dusty confines of my garage and the office containing Sedna therein. I'd make companions with the crumpled corpses of spiders dangling from the ceiling, my toes treading over grease-stained concrete and wrinkled sheets of carpet while my mind did a tango with the music and dreamt up ideas, episodes, and scenarios in my head. I'd stare blankly at the closed garage door and fantasize the front page of Equestria Daily, months from then, touting works of literature by "shortskirtsandexplosions."

If this all sounds horribly arrogant and pompous--that's because it was exactly that. There's no proper way to scale the degree to which my head inflated over nothing.

I have a great deal of music that's indicative of this extremely-specific time in my life... tunes that are insanely important to me, regardless of how objectively good or bad they may be. A lot of them were groups and albums that I was introduced to thanks to pony amvs:

Other samples were things that I just happened to be listening at the time... just because:

Listening to a playlist of these songs and more instantly takes me back to that period of knife-point obsessive contemplation. I only wish there was some way to convey the mesmerizing emotions that are in orbit of this sort of a collection. The best I can possibly do is wax nostalgic in a stupidly large blargh six years after the fact.

Nevertheless, something eventually came from the nothingness of my nightly musical meanderings. Tempered by music and fueled by endorphins, my thoughts coalesced, and they found themselves revolving around a single character: Rainbow Dash.

My favorite episode of MLP:FiM is--by and large--The Cutie Mark Chronicles. It's true now and it was true then. What made it so much more special in 2011 was that I was already warming up to Rainbow Dash, Scootaloo, and the adorably implied relationship they had as a mentor and peer by the time that I saw the episode. Thus, when the events unfolded before my eyes as they did, it was as though the show was confirming all of my heartfelt interests. Yes, Scootaloo looked up to Rainbow Dash. Yes, Rainbow Dash was the epitome of awesome. And... as it turns out--not to mention further backed up by the climax of Season Five--Rainbow Dash is the very real and canonical reason for why the events unfolded the way they did so as to allow the Mane 6 to meet in the first place. It's as though the show and its creators were telling us: "YES... Rainbow Dash IS horse!Jesus with wings. Bow down and accept it, plebeians. F'naaaaa. (Paraphrased.)

One of my most favorite plot situations to work with is the fragile existence of memory and/or timelines. I lurve to toy with the hypothetical, to imagine situations as changing dramatically due to the inclusion or the exclusion of one minor event. Years before MLP:FiM did it proper in "The Cutie Remark," I contemplated what would happen if Rainbow Dash were to have the events of her first Sonic Rainboom gradually undone, one friend at a time. In other words, how would her life as she knew it be changed if Applejack and then Rarity and then Pinkie Pie and then Twilight Sparkle and then Fluttershy were--one by one--removed from the equation? How would this change the world she lived in? Furthermore... why would this get unraveled in the first place and how would Rainbow Dash fix it before it was too late?

I would later explore this same concept in Refraction, and to some extent the themes of causality would be thoroughly explored in Background Pony. And, as a matter of fact, I would eventually uploaded all that I had written of the original concept on Short Scraps and Explosions.

The name of the story was "I Remember Rainbow Dash," a line that would have been quoted during a moment of climactic epiphany by Scootaloo towards the unwritten end of the fic. I've rambled about this story before in many a blargh, but it remains unfinished for various legitimate reasons. Needless to say--at the time--I thought I was conjuring up the end-all-be-all of poni poni poni fiction. All of my mania and enthusiasm and self-centered egotism was channeled super hard into this concept of an epic quest Rainbow Dash goes on to save her friends and--in the end--fix her own personal failings as an (ironically) arrogant, pompous braggart. It's hard to list all of the things that were going to happen in this story. It would have featured multiple glimpses into alternate universes where--one by one--Rainbow Dash becomes estranged from her friends while maintaining memories of a preexisting continuum. Trixie would have become her unwitting wizard ally, helping her coil together the untethered strings of causality. We would have seen a reality where Princess Luna laid in a coma deep within the halls of the Royal Palace, because Princess Celestia--without the aid of the Magic of Friendship--was forced into pacifying Nightmare Moon upon her return with an irreversible sleep spell. There would have been a heist to uncover the Elements from within the Royal Vault, a scene where Rainbow Dash poses as a Wonderbolt during an airshow to avoid security, and even a crazy scene on the moon. One of the penultimate sequences would have had Rainbow Dash outracing Gulltoppr, the patron alicorn of life, death, and rainbows.

It was a crazy, ambitious, frenetically-charged story and it came from a crazy, ambitious, frenetically-charged headspace. All of my silly thoughts and contemplations about the Brony fandom were stuffed into the project. I filled the lines with in-jokes, memes, references to things about the Brony fandom at large. I allowed my charisma to take control of my tentacles and craft style over form. Pizazz over restraint. Exclamation marks over commas.

It's been said before--quite accurately, I must say--that the ponies who star in SS&E stories are more akin to "caricatures" than genuine representations of their canonical counterparts. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing stands to be debated, but one thing is for certain: the Rainbow Dash of I Remember Rainbow Dash was as "caricaturesque" as they come. The same can be said of all of the other supporting characters... of the events... ... of the background noise and tone and presentation of everything... ... ...

We're barely into the first chapter of the story and we see Rainbow Dash having a long and dragged out Jackie Chan-esque fight scene with the bullies from Sonic Rainboom in Cloudsdale. Then there are inexplicable OC characters introduced for one-time gags. Weird and out-of-nowhere one-liners from the Mane 6. Horrific abuse of the Fourth Wall. Bronyism references. Flutterdashery. Scootaloo flying a friggin' gyrocopter. Just... a whole toilet-load of crazy, twitch-grinning nonsense.

If there's any saving grace, it's that the story consciously embraced the kaizo mania. It was reflected in its tone; the narrative didn't take the environment and the medium very seriously. There were one-line paragraphs, sentence fragments, and a ritualistic abuse of ellipses (even by today's Skirtsian standards). It was all just a few diarrhean degrees away from >italicized greentext. It was almost insulting how off-beat the written form was... and yet I was convinced that somehow I could utilize it in pulling off an obtusely epic dramedy featuring Rainbow Dash as best horseplosion. As if it wasn't obvious, it was the one fic set to live up to my burgeoning author name, an omega-level weapon of text-splooge aimed directly at Equestria Daily's oily foreheads.

And yet, as I huddled in the darkness of my garage, hammering away at Sedna, brief visits to the digital surface made me realize something. Even if I didn't take pony literature too seriously, others did. From what I glimpsed at various site--most especially the editorial section of Equestria Daily--getting your story featured wasn't exactly a walk in the park. It wasn't like the assembly line processing of fanfiction.net that would accept just about anything. If you wanted to get your story seen on the most horsecentric blargh on the Internet, it had to pass a test... the test. And this meant more than uploading a clean family fic that didn't do something grotesque like make fun of genocide or rape or Sethisto. This meant writing a story of a specific quality that would earn the seal of approval from those who were entrusted to safeguard Equestria Daily and its literary reputation.

While some writers may have found this whole process pretentious and time-consuming, I thought it was a spectacular challenge. If the review board was strict (and indeed it was in many cases), then that meant that actually getting a story to be featured on the blargh was a stellar accomplishment in and of itself. It meant--in a way--that my story was worth looking at. If the strict editors gave my fic the time of day, then "so should you."

Somehow... I actually thought that the manic abomination that was "I Remember Rainbow Dash" would be worthy of tattooing Equestria Daily's shiny digital folds. However--in a brief flash of clarity, perhaps--I decided not to send the fic straight to EqD directly. A part of me... a very realistically pessimistic part of me stopped to consider that maybe... just maybe... the story should go through a pre-reading process first... to survive a minefield of scrutiny before an Upper Echelon of Horseword Inquisitors got their hairy palms on it. After all, the site had a maximum amount of allowable submissions before one's story was rejected forever. And then where would my dreams of being a horse fame god be?

I got the idea of seeking pre-readers from one of the most glorious sites to ever exist: ponychan. It doesn't exist in quite the same faculty that it used to, but--once upon a time--ponies were so fucking huge that they were banned on 4chan... a fact that I couldn't be more proud of at the time. As a result, would-be-horse-cuddlers flocked to random satellites of the internet's cesspool, where they fashioned islands of hope and retribution. There, under a spirit of mutual camaraderie, they allowed for the exchange of ideas, fanworks, and--you guessed it--horsewords.

An amazing, epic workshop of poni poni poni literature existed at this site. I vaguely recall (and old fogies may correct me if I'm wrong) it being the spawning pool for various early epics: Antipodes, It Takes a Village, The Ballad of Echo the Diamond Dog. In truth, I had extremely narrow-sight at the time... in that I was selfishly looking for help more than offering any. I spotted multiple "Pre-Reader" threads where editors and readers and overall fantastic bronies offered their literary services for free... so that fellow authors might work on harnessing their talents and creating competent storylines. And yet, while there was a smorgasbord of potential editors to choose from, I knew that I had to choose carefully. As egotistical as I was, I didn't want anyone to "go easy" on my literature. After all, my intentions were to upload my fic to EqD... so I needed someone who was efficient, who was merciless, who was honest, who was intelligent. I needed someone who could give me a trial by fire so that the final act of uploading to Sethisto's site would be even less painful in the end.

In 2011, ol' Candle-Stickhead was an editor, a writer, and a frequent hater of all things Rarity. Little did I know that he was about to become one of the most important individuals in my life. From lurking, I noticed that Vimbert was deliciously hardcore with his reviews... throwing in a little bit of dramatic flare every now and then in order to liven things up. He applied a sort of sardonic twist to the way in which he read and critiqued horsewordery, which--to me--was a form of sincerity indicative to the Internet. On top of all of that, he was an actual functioning member of the Equestria Daily Review Board. This meant that his opinion conceivably encompassed the standards of "quality" that was normally accepted of EqD submissions. In short, I was smitten... and I knew that he would be the one and only person to accurately review my fic. To send it to anyone else would be settling for second, third, or fourth best.

So... with very little grace... I stuffed all five schizophrenic chapters of I Remember Rainbow Dash into a single post on his thread and shoved them his way. For days, I fiddled my thumbs, waiting... hoping... anticipating his response. I had waking dreams of him reacting positively, exclaiming his praises for the epic narrative, and incorporating countless exclamation points in his approving commendation.

Lo and behold, when the moment had finally come, I signed online to Ponychan and discovered exactly what the term "Vindictive Review" meant:

Before my eyes, his avatar morphed into a crimson-eyed monstrosity. I was... briefly confused as to what exactly was going on. As my brain started limping down the paragraphs and paragraphs full of shock and outrage, the reality dawned on me, solidifying in my chest like a jagged chunk of prehistoric ice filled with mastodon farts: "My fic... is bad???"

Ohhhhhhhhhhh boy, was it, and Vimbert held no punches in delivering the truth to my brain bone, one bloodied knuckle at a time. From the story's utter butchering of grammar to the tumorous uses of ellipses to the violent OoC shenanigans of Rainbow Dash to the improper use of present tense narrative to the mind-boggling attempt at a flashback prelude to the glacial plot to... well... everything. With gentlemanly exuberance, Vimbert punched orifices in me that I never knew I even had. It was like taking a shameful trip to the principal's office... while drenched in mucus... and on fire... with leeches and hot coals wedged between my toes... while listening to Coldplay. Klingon Hell knows more grace than what I Remember Rainbow Dash was dealt.

And the entire time, there was an underlying sense of purpose to Candle-Stickhead's passionate crucifixion. I could tell that--beneath the caustically comedic veneer--there was the ultimate goal of fixing my writing style into something that was... yanno... less abysmal.

I feel as though most amateur writers in this situation would have taken the beat-down a bit too closely to heart and given up on the whole matter altogether. Nietzsche knows, with my ego and mental self-glorifcation and vanglorious fantasies of become big in horse-fame, I certainly set myself up for an intense fall. And yet... after reading the deeply passionate (although highly dis-favorable) review of my lemur drivel... I don't recall feeling angry... or slighted... or unjustly berated. I certainly did feel embarrassed, shameful, and more than a little bit foolish--foolish to think that my uncouth style of so-called "literature" could actually fly in this environment. If nothing else, Vimbert had saved me the humiliation of uploading this to Equestria Daily. After all, if I remember correctly, I was actually crazy enough to think I could write the whole work and submit it to EqD in one go... all 200,000+ words that it would very likely have been. It was merely a last-second decision to try and run it by a pre-reader, thus resulting in the kick to my bloated head that was sorely needed at the time.

Was I crushed? Yes. Absolutely, I was. And yet... the spirit of brony enthusiasm that got me to produce the manic work that was I Remember Rainbow Dash was still alive and kicking in my chest vacuole. It was strong. Undeniable. The only real loss I suffered from that whole fiasco was the dream of finishing the Rainbow Dash story to begin with. It was never a matter of rewriting it to fit the parameters that Vimbert so dynamically set forth. The story existed as one with the goofy narrative style that conjured it into being.

No... I had to do away with it. I had to start over again. I had to produce something else... something that I could believe in... something that would be sustained by its own separate spirit of storytelling and purpose.

And while I didn't hate Vimbert for forcing me to tread a new path, a certain... cynical part of me came to life, forged by the bitter aftertaste of I Remember Rainbow Dash's ashes. I realized that my manic enthusiasm at becoming a Brony had to take a back-seat. Like a tiger, I had to cage it and keep it tame in one hemisphere while the other lobe did the literary legwork. It was clear to me--I realized--that the brony community wanted "serious," even if I didn't necessarily wanted to produce it. So, I resolved myself--almost out of spite--to meet that challenge.

They wanted serious writing? I was about to give them serious writing.

It is my firm belief that writing is an innately lonesome act. To create anything of quality, you gotta sequester yourself somewhere isolated so that the mind can be unfettered by distraction--and that includes social elements. This wasn't that big of a problem for me in 2011. My only friend at the time was Lord Belgarion, and yet--by that summer--my excursions into Second Life and other ventures had driven us further and further apart. When it was time for met to get "seriously" writing, I made it clear to him that I was vanishing for a while.

And vanish I did... into the deep darkness of those humid nights, walking circles in the garage, listening to all sorts of musical inspiration and attempting to bleed story from a black, black stone. There was no Noble Jury at the time... no Spanish Announce Table of fellow friends and writers. I hadn't made any companions in the brony community. There was no Pilate, no Props, no Swan Song or Razgriz or Zaponator or Warden or Spotlight or Floydien or Fourths or anybody. And--to my unknown dismay--there certainly was no Ponky.

It was just me, tracing circles in the shadows, accompanied by cute pony faces that lingered along the traces of my mind. Sometimes I paced about and thought for hours on end. I'd take it outside, cradling my .mp3 player as I shuffled awkward circles barefoot along the sidewalk to my home. This would occasionally happen at one or two o'clock in the morning, which is kind of a scary thing to think about in hindsight. After all, the Trayvon Martin killing took place barely a dozen miles from where I lived, and I remember more than once catching the attention of the Neighborhood Watch vehicle on patrol in the dead thick of night. They must have thought I was crazy. I must have thought I was crazy... walking circles under the cadance of pony-conjuring. After I was spent, I'd shuffle inside, my feet blistered and armpits sweaty, and my nostrils would fill with the stuffy alien smell of the house once again. Such a queer feeling, like coming to the surface for air, but not satisfied with the dive. Never satisfied with the dive.

There was something... strangely relaxing about the ritualistic experience: deep dives into darkness with music as my only relaxation. It was something I started to fixate on, and rather than dream up pony stories I was instead imagining a situation that ran parallel to me... of a lonely outcast... a pariah who ventured into the depths... eventually forced to rise back to the surface to recharge before once again taking the plunge. I imagined a character who was capable of so much joy... but instead was forced to immerse him or herself in darkness... to be serious for seriousness' sake, because there was no other alternative.

Of all the music that I listened to in 2011--especially during those passionate midnight meanderings--one particular group's work stuck out to me. After exposing myself to their work on the Internet, it quickly became my most favorite album of my adult life. It would be none other than The Arcade Fire's Suburbs.

As if this blargh hasn't already made it obvious, I super dig nostalgia.

The Suburbs is a bittersweet anthem to the concept of nostalgia... and how one's perspective of the past--especially concerning our youth--changes and morphs over time. There is joy there... but a lot of it is blind. Sorrow can also be blind, along with regret. I suppose it depends on what defines us... what we're willing to focus on... and knowing to divide lessons from burdens.

The album speaks to me heavily, perhaps because I allow it to. Life--as we're all likely to discover--is a constantly changing thing, surprising and predictable at the same time. Anticipation often leads to a fall, but that's something we can learn to get used to as well, and whether by becoming jaded or by becoming mellow we find the sting of disappointment to be less venomous, and in the end fate is something we'll ultimately have to accept. That's my own philosophy, at least, and it's likely to evolve in due time.

The Arcade Fire made something beautiful, like an echo in the darkness, mourning the loss of innocence and yet laughing it off at the same time. Life is decay, but what can be done of it? Enjoy the sweet half of "bittersweet" and learn to move on... because we're going to have to one way or another, even if we're not conscious of it.

Somewhere in contemplating my own interpretation of this album... in focusing on the concepts of agency vs destiny... on obsessing over ideas of lost childhood, lost friends, lost glories of the past... I came upon a theme that appealed most... most sexily to me. Perhaps without consciously meaning to, I applied it to the sensation I was feeling from my nocturnal pace-sessions. What was this indefinable character searching for? What had they lost? Could they learn to live with that loss? What if--even after coming terms with the loss--they were to somehow be exposed yet again to the glories of the past?

And... furthermore... how could you apply ponies to it all?

When coming up with story ideas, I think it's best to go with what feels good.

In 2011, what felt best to me was the Scootaloo/Rainbow Dash dynamic. I found Scootaloo's idolization of Rainbow Dash to be adorable. On top of that, Scootaloo was a very sympathetic character. The blatant lack of parental figures in the filly's life and her apparent inability to fly have driven bronies' and pegasisters' imaginations wild since day one. After all, she's a very affirmative character who doesn't ask to be pitied... so naturally fans tend to pity the ever-lurving shit out of her. There's also a sort of easy connection that one can make... seeing as most human beings desire to be loved and cherished, so it's not hard to relate to Scootaloo's obsession with meeting Rainbow Dash's awesome approval.

By the time I finished Season One, Scootaloo was becoming a fast favorite of mine. But I didn't consider the deeper implications of her potential backstory until exposing myself to some awesome bits of fanart:

Art by Gavalanche

As I considered more serious takes on ponifiction, I learned some brand new terms. One was "grimdark," which had its obvious infamy. The other was "scootabuse," which was an off-kilter meme that was apparently born as a polar extreme to the waves of Scootaloo-sympathy that one found abundant in the fandom. Most bronies, it would seem, found both genres almost bereft of any quality or purpose.

But as I allowed my mind to traverse the darker shades of pony lore, it became evident to me that there was a great deal of potential to be had in exploiting the melancholic side of MLP:FiM. I obviously wasn't the first person to discover this, as evidenced by some of the art I've shared previously in this blargh. In the world of innocence that's crafted in My Little Pony, the stage is set for some amazing feats of emotional commentary... from the alicorns' presumed immortality to the fate of Spike's mother to the painful legacy of Nightmare Moon. The show simply won't explore these facets because--for the most part--it can't. The canon material is held back by the restraints of its producers and the demographic it pretends to market to. That's not to say that the show hasn't approached somber subjects, but back in 2011... it was a deliciously clean slate... which is part of what made fanfiction so ripe for exploring the universe.

I started wondering how one might explore melancholic or even "dark" themes... but dealing with some of the same emotions that I got from listening to The Suburbs... and yet ultimately fixated on the relationship between Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. It was around this time that I got major inspiration from a smexxy piece of art done by none other than good ol' John Joseco himself:

Art by johnjoseco

(Notice the author's comment under the description: "You can also make up your own story folks." Thank you, Mr. Joseco. I most certainly did.

What kind of a horrible future situation would render Scootaloo so... angsty looking... and also inspire her to wear a fake Rainbow Dash cutie mark over her own flank?

Around the same time, I was trying to answer the question: "What kind of a 'serious' story would bronies like to read?" Well, there was ONE serious story out at the time that every fucking person on the Internet (but me, lulz) was reading. I had played lots of Fallout 3 by that time. In fact, I would later re-purchase Fallout New Vegas and play it often during Fall of 2011. But I didn't personally see how Fallout 3 could conceivably gel with the My Little Pony universe without taking exceptional liberties with the exposition. Also... I was too lazy and self-centered to try and find out for myself by reading... lulz. But it didn't stop me from thinking: "Hell... maybe I should just write an apocalypse story." But if I did that, then it had to be an apocalyptic scenario that could fit in the world that Lauren Faust had crafted... which was a challenging world of minimalist, almost Luddite technological crafting. So, in other words, I felt the personal-challenge to conceive of a magical excuse for an apocalypse... presuming I wanted to pursue such a thing.

And, as I've been obviously hinting, I had no intention of ripping off Fallout Equestria. So I chose to rip off Hollywood instead:

Earlier that year, I had watched 12 Monkies for the first time. Hot damn, if that isn't a good movie. A daringly bleak one, and yet surreal through and through. The story is self-contained by a closed loop of tragedy from the very beginning, and everyone knows it. Despite this fact, the movie still manages to be fascinating, provocative, and surprising at every turn.

Dwelling back on the film, I started obsessing with the idea of fixed, "immutable" time. Imagine if a story danced straight past all joyful precepts of a good ending and told you--straight up--that there was "nothing that could be done to prevent a cataclysmic apocalypse." Imagine a premise that promised no catharsis other than the emotional ones that the characters themselves could contrive. Once you had that solidified, you had something very dismal--yet interesting--to work with: grounds for philosophy and supreme emotion. It'd be a story that would make no promises, and whether or not it would eventually break its own rules, it would spend the majority of its time in helping the characters--and the readers--come to terms with a bleak inescapable reality. An analogy to life itself, in a way.

So then I started pondering more and more about Scootaloo as a character--and more specifically on her obsession with Rainbow Dash juxtaposed over her own personal aspirations for the future. As a Cutie Mark Crusader, she's focused on achieving her own destiny. But what if the future she ultimately received was an unhappy one in which she had no agency? And, furthermore, what if she had no other pony to share her pain of regret with... because there was no other pony? What if all she had was herself... in the darkness... in a realm devoid of color, life, and all the whimsy that she was originally born into? Would she be mad? Mad at the ghost of Rainbow Dash for giving her hope? Mad at herself that she squandered her youth in idolizing something that she ultimately emulated... only to be handed the world in an ash tray once she got it?

And then... once she thought she was finally coming to a place of contentment with her fate...

...what if she had a chance to revisit her youth? To re-experience the joy and comfort of foalhood? To see her idol once again and feel what it was like to not have a care in the world?

Would tasting that joy be worth it? Or should she just reject it all for the sake of the numbing agent that is ennui? Why would she even bother to go back in time if there was no chance of changing anything? Would her own personal closure be worth the pain of ripping that old wound open one last time?

All of a sudden, I had the inkling of a story idea that was everything I was looking for.

It was serious.

It dealt with themes related to Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash, which I adored.

It reflected my personal interpretations from listening to The Suburbs, chiefly concerning the stark contrast between our youth and our rose-colored perspective of that very same past.

It was a concept drenched in isolation, which I felt every night as I searched for a story idea in the dark, serenaded by music.

And, although I hadn't read "Fallout Equestria," I felt that this had suddenly become an "original" enough concept to go on (even though it was ripping off 12 Monkies), namely because it wasn't concerned with pulp adventure as much as it was focused on dealing with the philosophies and emotions of childhood, innocence lost, and personal reconciliation. The Wasteland served its purpose as being an apocalyptic setting, but it served an even greater purpose of metaphorically representing the state of Scootaloo's heart... and her being.

What the story needed now was substance. But what I had formulating in my head was very lopsided. On one hand, I wanted a dark, depressing apocalyptic fic that transpired in the future. But, on the other, it needed to explore the past through magical time-traveling bullshiet. What I ultimately decided on was a heavy-handed exposition that would force the readers to digest an extremely grimdark tone... before plunging them repeatedly into the paradise of the past. The irony is that the "happy" visits to a warm and lively Equestria serve more venomous and painful than any exploration of the horrible future. That... is a pretty nifty thing.

So, at last, I had something to work on. I named the fic "The Last Pony," made Scootaloo the main character and began brain-crunching a rational rule book by which this future could function. I couldn't get too technological with the material; instead I needed to keep everything magic-based. The Last Pony needed something to get around in? Give her a steampunk zeppelin for flight and scavenging. The wasteland needed a malevolent population to contrast with Equestrian society? Fill it with sentient diamond dogs, monkeys, squirrels, and goblins. Scootaloo needed weapons, despite the fact that Equestrians never built firearms? Have her utilize once-taboo "lunar runes" that were employed by Nightmare Moon's army during the Lunar Civil War. How did she learn this runescaping? She scavenged the diaries of Luna and Celestia, just like she's scavenged everything else in a desperate, half-hearted attempt to salvage the permadead past.

I wanted Scootaloo to have a silver lining to experience. Like me, I figured she would have music as her escape. Assuming she had a functioning record player, what in Equestrian history could withstand the decay of time? How about recorded performances by Octavia Melody? To inspire myself, I scoured the Internet for classic and modern cello instrumentals. In so doing, I discovered Apocalyptica, and their cover of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" became THE anthem/soundtrack to the story that I was slowly molding together.

Soon enough, I had at my tentacles a story that was intensely sad... and yet the forward motion of its purpose didn't leave any time for grieving, or obsessing, or wallowing. Energized by this new vision, I produced one of the best expositions I've written for anything ever, painting a story where a pony has to saw off the horns of unicorn skeletons so she could have "ammo" for her magical instruments. In the darkest corner of her hellscape, she retreats to a lonely sanctum just to fire a rainbow beacon into the air--all in the futile hope that somepony--anypony--is out there who can respond to her. And by the time she realizes there's no hope to be had, she has to make one truly perilous journey into the past, confronting the same disaster that rendered her to this state for the sole purpose of dissolving the mystery once and for all, and restoring truth to the legacy of ponydom.

I knew that in writing the story that it too--much like I Remember Rainbow Dash--had faults. I chose to interpret them as "risks," for I felt then--and I still believe--that it had a dayum good premise behind it... even if it is far from original. It's hard to remember exactly how long the first two arcs took me to write, but I believe I had something prepared for pre-reading within the span of two weeks. The passion and speed at which I produced material back in those days is something sorely missed today. I wasn't about to make the same mistake of assuming that the entire thing would be a masterpiece. I was prepared to submit the dayum thing in pieces as I wrote it, so then I would at least know that I was headed along the right track.

So... who, then... should I have given the rough draft to? Surely I wouldn't have tossed it at the same unimpressive individual who burned me so horrifically before?

Surely, I did.

With steely determination and undying confidence in both my work as well as his opinion, I marched back to Ponychan and thrusted the first few chapters of "The Last Pony" once again before Candle-Stickhead's eyes. It took a while for him to review it, but he eventually did so... and without the crimson-eyed demon that so haunted me beforehand:

What you have here is essentially six chapters of build-up, exposition, and world-building. We're just barely getting to your main conflict after almost 80,000 words. You know what, though? I don't care. This is fucking beautiful. This is what I was expecting to see from your last story. You took an interesting concept and executed it brilliantly, building the world and introducing us to basic story elements while managing to not slow the pacing to a crawl. Almost everything feels necessary here. On the whole, this is a damn fine fic.

You can make it better.
~Vimbert, Ponychan, 2011

At last... I was going somewhere.

But it wasn't a success quite yet. It was obvious to me that I had a stupidly-large epic on my hands. I had to prove it could stand on its own plot by breaching the initial wall of rising actions. Thus, I got started on the first major story arc: Scootaloo's visit back to Applejack's farm. It took me maybe a week and a half of intense writing to finish. All in all, I stuck to my original vision. And then I sent the material to Vimbert...

...and Candle-Stickhead's Crimson eyes returned. Turns out, I had lost my grasp of the fic's grimdark tone, and a resolution to an early conflict was executed in the most laughably anticlimactic way imaginable. Vimbert made sure to let me have it, and I felt twice-burned for my silly, brony reticence.

So, returning once again to the gung-ho spirit of "YOU WANT BLOOD, I WILL GIVE YOU BLOOD," I set upon the most intense re-edit of my life. I combed through the existing Applejack arc. I re-read it and re-re-read it. Then, taking notes along the way, I changed entire sweeping swaths of dialogue, inserting necessary bits of thematic foreshadowing until--at last--I had realistically sculpted a brand new and more cathartic climax to the first branch of the story.

To say the least, I had apparently wow'd the ever-loving fluff out of Candle-Stickhead... mostly due to the fact that I had provided him intense notes localizing all of the edits I made so that he wouldn't have to re-read the whole dayum arc and find out on his lonesome. I faintly recall him stating how he wished that certain other stories that he edited would employ the same degree of alterations based on pre-reading critique. If there was any other proof I needed to know that I had impressed the unimpressive, he swiftly provided it to me on Ponychan:

Something I'm eternally proud of; Nietzsche knows he's probably not

At last, I was filled with the confidence I needed to submit my story to the Golden Gates of Equestria Daily. I decided at the very last second to change the title, for I felt that it was far too similar to Peter S Beagle's The Last Unicorn, and I wanted to differentiate myself while also avoiding notions of plagiarism. I went with a slightly more provocative name: "The End of Ponies," and it's hard to imagine it being called anything else.

So, with a skip to my step, I filled out the application and submitted the first two arcs of the story to Equestria Daily's editorial board.

...and I got a response within twelve hours.

... ... ... ... ... ...huh ...

Well, about those music links... I had done a super amateur thing by providing youtube clips at the top of each chapter to help "set the mood" as t'were. It was something that--as the pre-reader advised--would not last long, and I was more than happy to remove them. But, that being said... I couldn't tell from the response whether or not the fic had been approved. I kinda assumed that it was rejected... but I wasn't explicitly told to work on an edit and then to expect a chance at being posted on the site. I was just... left to ponder on my own. And I was left this way for several days.

After two and a half grueling months of soul-searching and hard-ass keyboard-plonking, I found myself floating in a stagnant limbo.

I tried to be patient, but... unfortunately... I was me. Ultimately, after six anxious days, I sent a follow-up question simply asking for clarification as to whether or not the fic had been rejected, since it wasn't very clear in the response.

Thankfully, I wouldn't have to wait long for a reply. Remember... this was 2011:

Well then.

Talk about an instantaneous flip-flop from despair to pure joy. If you saw the elaborately long and overtly polite e-mails I sent to EqD in inquiry of the matter, it would make for a hilarious contrast to such casual one-line responses.

Needless to say, the moment of rapture was at hand. Sure enough... not very long later:

The fruits of my labor were graciously presented to the Internet. For the first time since 2005, I had uploaded a piece of literature to the Internet that I could actually be proud of. What was even better--I was still in the process of writing it... and I was super jazzed about the whole thing as well.

I remember celebrating on the day of release. Contrary to popular belief, drinking loads of Dr. Pepper isn't always a source of writer's fuel. I had--in fact--been fasting my favorite beverage for months. I wrote most of I Remember Rainbow Dash and The End of Ponies while chugging cold bottles of Grape-Flavored Powerade. But on the day that EoP got uploaded to EqD, I went and bought an entire pack to reward myself. I popped the thing open and walked the same park I used to frequent back in 2009 and 2010, drumming up ideas for a story I would never write... only I had finally written one. Autumn had arrived, bringing a blissfully crisp coolness to Florida. Tons of people were out and about. Meanwhile, I sat on a ledge and started brainstorming for the Pinkie Pie arc. I spontaneously came up with the title "For the Moon Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Pie" based on an old Star Trek TOS episode. I laughed hilariously. People looked at me like someone crazy had fallen in their midst.

I was happy.

Naturally, I looked forward to oodles and oodles of commentary and reviews on the site.

I barely got any. I would soon discover that Equestria Daily--while fantastic for exposing you to the brony masses--was notoriously terrible as a forum for discussing fan literature. Assuming anyone casual person who glanced at the site was interested enough to comment on your fic, they would first have to navigate a fairly cumbersome browser format in order to do so. And--on top of that--many of the archives of past messages are now missing, lost forever to the digital ether. It was nothing at all like Fimfic... which was something I would discover much, much later.

And yet still, there was no slowing down. I had the Fluttershy arc to finish. Nothing was going to stop me at that point... surely not an inexplicable computer crash of my laptop.

Whoops.

Days later, on an ill-fated whim, I figured I would log onto Second Life for the first time in months. As if stricken by a bolt of karma, on that very same evening, something inside my laptop went le-dead. It shut off and I could no longer bring up... well... anything. I had a brick in my lap... and not the smexxy type.

So, literally within a few days of having uploaded End of Ponies to Equestria Daily, I was robbed of the means to properly upload future chapters to the site. This would continue to vex me over the course of a month. Somehow, I managed to survive the inexplicable intermission in Internet use. I was already focused on writing, so I spent of my time writing on Sedna--which wasn't connected to any network anyway. I channeled through the Fluttershy arc, and when it came time to submit for pre-reading, I used a laptop donated by my folks--although only in brief bursts. The bulk of End of Ponies survived much like Austraeoh has, bouncing back and forth on a flash drive between computers. Those were interesting, awkward days... hunched over a (frankly) ghetto portable computer, attempting to limp my way onto Ponychan to see what my editors thought of the latest draft. This was around the time Season Two started, and the Brony movement was reaching a fever pitch.

One autumn day, my father my neighbor and I worked together in felling a tree in the backyard. During the brief breaks that were afforded me, I snuck myself back on Ponychan--only to discover that fanart had been made:

The lattermost pic featured above was offered for free as the new cover art to my story. To say the least, I was infinitely grateful. At last, some of my dreams were starting to fully come true. My contribution to the brony narrative was garnering fan art. Soon, it would corral more attention: theworstwriter and Warden joined Vimbert in editing the later arcs of End of Ponies. I would see people posting physical prints they had made online of my material:

Eventually, there would be live reads of the story...

And even a goddayum rock song:

And while all of these concrete manifestations of the ideas I proliferated are truly fantastic, they don't quite hold a candle to the sheer volume of stuff I would later witness coming about from future works. Still, it was the beginning of something glorious... something I had dreamt of during lonesome nights of pacing through my own mindscape, serenaded by smexxy tunes as I sought to make words out of nothing.

Eventually, I would purchase a new computer. I suppose I could have pursued a repair of my laptop... but that risked someone successfully booting up my dashboard... thereby discovering a wallpapered screenshot that put Rainbow Dash and Applejack in a somewhat compromising position. I gladly shelled out over $800... ... ... ...lulz

Winter came, and as the year came to a close, I spent a long, cold, hard month working on the most difficult piece of literature in my life--up until that time: the Dredgemane Arc. And yet, as awesome as I felt that work of fiction was (at the time), I felt most confident in the support I had from my editors and a slowly-growing group of warm-hearted individuals on Ponychan, Equestria Daily, and beyond. I was still quite the antisocialite in that time period. I kept individuals like Vimbert at a distance, attempting to treat the whole drafting/editing process as "professionally" as possible. I didn't even do any blarghing to connect with my readers, because I hadn't grasped the true nature of the young, nubile site known as "Fimfiction" yet. In the commentary I did provide on Ponychan, I started referring to all readers as "marsupials," employing a coy tongue-in-cheek approach to those who actually paid attention to my story.

And there was only one story... and until I hit my first snag, I considered it the one and only story I would ever write. A fateful trip to the beach one day helped me conjure up an idea called "Ponymonium," which I told myself would be the "next work" I did after End of Ponies was over. All things considered, I thought that I would follow EoP all the way to the end... even though the last few weeks of December didn't quite give me the motivation to do it. For all of the work and time and labor I spent on the Dredgemane arc, it was becoming clear to me that I wasn't nearly going to receive the sheer quantity of comments and reviews and reactions that I so deeply desired. I felt bad about that... and I felt even worse for wanting more. I recall walking around my old haunts on Christmas night, dwelling on the future, amazed that I had come so far and yet there was still so much uncertain beyond the next turn of the page.

And yet, despite my wavering security in the fate of End of Ponies, I couldn't help but acknowledge...

...that 2011 was one of the best years in my existence. It may have started uninspiringly. It may have been marked by unrest and turmoil across the rest of the known world. But for me--much like 2004, in spite of its tsunamis and horror--the year proved to be the most productive I had felt in over half-a-decade. Years and months of limbo, wasted away in nothingness... suddenly transformed into purpose. Sure, it may just be poni poni poni fiction, but it means a lot to me, and the stuff that I did, the people that I was introduced to, and the exposure that I got ultimately laid the foundation for who I became later on.

Because later on...?

...much like in 2005...

... ... ...I would experience one of the happiest times in my entire life.

-SS&E

Report shortskirtsandexplosions · 4,905 views · Story: The End of Ponies ·
Comments ( 82 )

When the sun was up, I continued with my studies at college and worked at my job. But my true life didn't begin until night had fallen. I barely slept. I didn't stimulate myself creatively. I pined for a time gone by and dreamt of what it would feel like to make things again.

I feel like I'm on the receiving end of Disney's The Kid right now.

And still going strong, very well written. Ponies (and many other amazing shows) have changed so many of our lives for the better. Inspiring and entertaining us. Hopefully they will continue to do so in the future.

Skirts I got through maybe half of this.
Its three am and im going to bed.
But wow, just wow. The sheer size of this blarg is intense.
And I love your wirting and everything you put into it.

edit: oh and the sheer visual content nearly locked up my computer. It took a few minutes to actually load this thing.

Wow skirts this was...wow. Thank you for writing this.

Now this is what a blog is all about.

It would be nice if others would follow suit.

It's nearly 9am, and I haven't slept in over a day. And yet I read this whole thing through. Kinda felt compelled to.

It's strange. I'm not an author, so a lot of what you say regarding writing being a lonely task, or wanting to earn respect for work I've created, or anything like that. Yet...

A lot of this blog resonates with me, both good and bad. Everything from hanging around the early days of the fandom, the GDocs/Deviantart/EqD age of fanfiction, moving on, online communities, melancholic nights spent remembering friends... Hell, even the drama in tf2 servers hits uncomfortably close to home.

And that god damn Moonbase pony video. God, I watched that so many times on loop way back when. And Apocalyptica! I remember discovering that exact damn song when reading End of Ponies. I can't remember if it was from a link in your story, or just sheer happenstance, but the two are linked forever in my mind.

Thanks, skirts. For this blog, EoP, the overwatch times we've had, that damn podcast from a while ago, everything.

So, by directly addressing the ever present elephant in the room that is EoP, does that mean you're going to start writing it again? :derpytongue2:

Its such a long blaargh it made Fimfic change the background behind the text 4 times on my phone. Obviously this is where all the time slots set aside for writing the daily fics have gone instead.

But jocularity aside: in seriousness, this blog worried me at the start, cause it felt to me like it was building up to a retirement announcement. Glad to see that wasn't the case.

I think it would do an injustice to the post to try and even begin to write a response without taking a period of time to let it sink in and churn about my head. A reactionary post feels like I wouldn't be able to reply to this without sounding trite or insincere.

May the westerlies be ever at your back, and may all your Apples be Dashed.

That was very nicely written, Skirts. A great autobiography, as it were. And here I am, staying up until 4:30 to read all of it. I've never really read your 'big' SS&E works (End of Ponies, Background Pony, etc.) but I love the hell out of the Austraeoh series. It is, bar none, my favorite thing I've ever read. Ever. In any capacity, professional or fanfiction. The worldbuilding is amazing, and you've created something special on this ridiculously amazing journey. I got caught up on Austraeoh 150 and I've followed the series' daily updates since then. I love it so much I've even ripped off the story into a D&D campaign that I put my friends through at college. Even though they don't watch the show or interact with the fandom at all, they love the story, as twisted as I've made it to fit the campaign, and I let them know that I'm borrowing the story ideas from my favorite work of fiction ever. They just got started on the Rohbredden arc after going through the shitshow at the Quade...

You are an awesome writer, Skirts, no matter how much you may think otherwise at times. Just keep writing and keep on keeping on. Nobody can take that from you but yourself. You'll always have fans here, no matter what you do or write. I happily count myself among their number.

Cheers, mate, and keep on flying toward that morning sun.
24

Good god, this was moving. Talk about nostalgia. I needed a good cry. Thanks, Skirts. I will love you until my dying day.

Wow. This hit me hard with nostalgia. Thank you for writing... and sharing everything with us.

For those interested, a little bit of my half of a tiny bit of this story:

In summerish 2011, I found myself for various reasons doing almost nothing but poni. Seriously, there were some days when I reviewed ponyfic for more than 12 hours straight.
i.ytimg.com/vi/upM86GHy4Cg/maxresdefault.jpg
What's a social life I still don't know

One fine day, this unknown fella staggers in with a giant deluge of words (upwards of 100K? Maybe?) with a brief yet uniquely written note requesting assistance. Fine, I think. It has Rainbow Dash. I like Rainbow Dash.

And when I finally get to it, it's a goddamned disaster. I considered myself well-read with the arrogance that only a kid who'd spent pretty much his entire life reading and writing fiction could, and I was having to stop to look up words every other paragraph and generally get annoyed at the brutal raping of general sentence structure, most conventions of the English language, and other such flaws as Skirts and I have since reminisced about. Yet, it had a tone. It had a voice. I've been out of the game for a while, but back in my day plenty of ponyfics were blander than white rice with milk when it came to narrative voice.

I recall little specifically from that hazy summer, but I remember reading and rereading my imminent review of this opus story I probably didn't read all of (I was and am a bastard like that) and fretting. I was going all out and tearing into this guy, but was this the right thing to do? More than perhaps any other author with delusions of pon-grandeur, I wanted this "short skirts and explosions" guy to come back. Eventually, I decided, screw it. I'll roll with my usual style. I'll give the story what it deserves.

As I recall, I got a short reply acknowledging the review and radio silence for several weeks. From time to time, I'd Remember Rainbow Dash and worry in full neurotic fashion if I'd discouraged the guy by how seriously I took fanfiction about brightly colored ponies. I saw on the board a few rumblings about this new challenger from the Internet wilds, with folks speculating he was some big-shot fanfic author about some cartoon I hadn't heard of at the time.

Imagine my mixed horror and delight when the wanderer returned, hauling a new, in-progress story that looked to quadruple and then some the length of his last effort. By this time, I put my game face on, determined that this guy was a glutton for punishment emboldened by too much success and fame in whatever this Teen Titans thing was. He called space a waste? I'd show him again what a waste of space his story was, go harder on this story than I'd ever gone before, and holy shit he listened. :heart: :heart: :heart: Sure, there was still Future Spike explaining to Scootaloo for like 40,000 words "YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PAST, THIS IS THE THEME OF THE STORY DO YOU WANT TO SUFFER ANYWAY HEY YOU MIGHT FIND SOMETHING LOL I'M A DRAGON WHO GIVES A SHIT," but I had to resist fanboying all over the screen.

And the rest, as the say, is incredibly minor Internet history.

Now this is what I call a blog. Thank you for writing this.

4382419 I've got a beast of a gaming computer and it was struggling for a while.

Man... It was really interesting to hear you describe that time from the other side. I remember on /fic/ just being another dude who would anticipate your new chapters, then binge through them, looking for grammar mistakes, misspelled words, and sentences that were hard to understand so I could post my compilation of corrections in the thread. I loved the story, and I loved helping with it. Your own commentary on it was always fun to read as well.

It was really an honor to have been a part of it. To be at least one fan that made you feel that sense of "There are people who like what I've created. They like me and what I do." Glad I could contribute. And apologies if I made things harder, or awkward or whatever. I'm still mightily embarrassed about having made this piece of music, only to be chastised for using someone else's edited artwork and simultaneously chastised for making music about a chapter that, sadly, ended up in the scraps pile.

But you know, I'm still proud of it, because, well... duh, I made it, even if I think it's insanely amateurish and a mistake. I'm a prideful bro, as much as I fight it.

Anyway, yeah.

Now that that nostalgia trip has been properly addressed (Feels like I just watched someone take a huge built up, but ultimately satisfying pee.) I think some relaxing and sleep is in order. I think I may have just spent an hour reading this.

You knew you were in communication with another fan of the show if you could say "the tree nearly turned to stone after babysitting a dictionary and a chicken," and that person would clearly understand what you meant.

...boy do I miss those glorious days of pony overexcitement.



Well, I'm off to bed. Hugs and cuddles!
-That dude who annoyed you a lot on steam some years ago.

Oh man, those old pony videos bring back good memories.

It's really neat reading your story (separate from your stories). I would have liked to seen more of the fandom back in 2011 - I didn't really start looking around until late December of that year. I do remember first hearing of you in April 2012 though, when the first chapter of Background Pony was posted on Google Docs. It's actually crazy how quickly it ballooned in popularity; I remember it wasn't long before people started proclaiming it as one of the Big Four stories at the time.

I dunno, just some pointless meandering since I missed the End of Ponies hype for a long time. I hope you find that inspiration once again, skirts.

So... is this the story of how you met ponky?

It was pretty epic. this was honestly the most interesting and exciting blog I have ever read

To be serious though, I can say with sincerity This blog was one hell of a trip, I am glad I took the time to read it because I feel like I know a little bit more about you as a persona now and honestly? That's kind of a cool feeling. I hope that you never stop being you skirts whether it's here with ponies or a million miles away with something else.

Skirts, I was trying to watch AGDQ! Not spend hours reading a massive...

Actually, this was really cool. Thanks for spending the time to make this.

And, as several other brony "converts" can likely testify, attempting to resist the content is usually a catalyst for indulging oneself with the material in the end.

I know, right? You see a bunch of colorful animals that are really omnipresent and annoying, and you're like, "Know your enemy!" And then before you know it, you're hooked.

...For me, that was Pokemon. Pony was infinitely more painless.

This was the best nostalgia fuel ever. I love you, dear sir.

4382446 Also, hey, mofo. How's tricks? I miss editing stuff with you.

4382437 Also also, holy crap, it's a family reunion in here. Hey, bro! Miss ya, shoot me a message.

I've always wanted to know a little more about proto-Skirts. It's amazing how easy it is to relate to that super-disassociated series of events that conditioned us into being ready to accept the horse into our lives. It's also a little melancholic thinking about how many amazing things you had done in the past, and how transient they've become in the history of your life.

But then again, you did have that entire paragraph on nostalgia. Mwap.

Also, hot damn. You too accurately described so many things I've been struggling to put into words for years. That fearlessness, that drive, that collective spirit that was infused into the heart of every brony in 2011. The true nature of the show's beauty, despite its minimal and simplistic approach to storytelling. The Wild West that was the lack of canon in S1, and the possibilities hinted at beyond what we knew.

I wonder if we'll get a sequel to this blogpost.

Also my phone browser crashed repeatedly while trying to load it. Thanks for that .-.

I read this, as I often read Cynewulf's blogs (because he's a neat fellow), and I'm overcome with the sensation that I've lived all too little in shockingly many years.

Oh man, that was so worth the read. I must admit I let out a small squee when you mentioned Ponychan, and Vimbert. I feel like such an oldfag in the pony writing community, because I've been around longer than most of the people who ask for my opinion these days, but man, I feel like a child compared to the old names of the /fic/ community. I actually showed up there pretty much the day Vimbert stopped showing up there, in the spring of 2012. April 23, if memory serves which it will have to because even the now archived board only goes as far back as the 2013 /fic/ sticky that !!DaringDo mod (Seattle Lite) put up.

But I remember End of Ponies making the rounds while I was reviewing there, and I remember you in the writeoffs, and I remember the day someone pointed me toward Background Pony, and it was made clear to me that writing stuff someone who is actually decent wrote has a tremendous impact on your writing. And I remember the day I finished Background Pony, cried for a bit, and then tried to write my own epic story which gained a lot of popularity really fast, inspired by a bit of drivel I coughed up while stuck on writer's block, and then realized I needed more reading material, and I was hooked on Pony. It was there that I finally looked at that floating mountain of pony literature wafting through the caverns of /fic/ and said "I'm going to read that.

I was shocked to realize that the full Dredgemane arc was longer than the entire rest of the story (it is. I counted.) But somehow, I had reached the end. There was no more story. out.of.character. was out by that point, and it looked like you would never finish it. After reading some of your blogs, I think I've given up hope that you ever will.

I'm trying to write my own book now, and finish that other epic thing I wrote, and finish that stupid thing I never wrote that Seattle wanted me to finish because it looked like it could be something. And well, I need stuff that hooks me and doesn't let me put it down until I've consumed all of it. And you're the only author that's ever done that. Be proud of that.

So I figure I should wade through out.of.character. or Austraeoh, heck, even Appledashery. I tried trudging through The Things Tavi Says at one point, if only out of the same curiosity that drove you to discover ponies. It kept showing up and I couldn't avoid it. I think I got as far as Fuzzy Things before my life got busy and I entered a really bad depression. Oh yeah, turns out I have this not so uncommon condition where my brain just randomly decides it's depressed for no reason. Who knew? I've fallen so far from the glory days of /fic/ where I could review three fan fictions a day, I scoffed at the prospect of consuming less than 20,000 words in one sitting, and I could churn out 1000 words a night, consistently. I've slowed down now, I'm a bit bitter, and I know more about writing than I probably should. I'm actually about to sign up for this program that lets me skip two years of a master's degree if I can prove I know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is "Thank you". Thank you for all the content you created, inspired, generated, and continue to dream up. You're by far my favorite pony author, as I'm sure most of the site will agree, and among my list of things I would die of excitement if it happened is for you to happen upon one of my own stories and actually like it. Keep being awesome, and I'm glad you're feeling better. My heart would ache for you each time you posted a depressing blog.

Right now I feel a bit like Agate standing before Blue and Yellow Diamond.

I read this the whole way through. It was a fascinating glimpse behind those short skirts and explosions.

I'm glad you found joy again after nothingness.

4382470
Played some video games. Made some money. Got older. The whole usual bit. Not so much on the writing any more, at least not beyond the technical writing done at work.

But digging up my old /fic/ pics for skirts led me to my old unfinished story drafts and... hey, who can say?

Y tu?

4382446
I had heard tales of the fearsome creature that once lived in your cave. I've yet to meet this creature, of course, and that's probably a good thing. Though tales of your ferocity are part of what inspired my own standard for fiction, which has earned me my own reputation on Fimfiction for being a hard to please reader, and has inspired a few authors to greatness through sheer fear of my disappointment. I long for the old days in college when I could spend hours jumping between threads on the only internet community I've ever felt at home in, losing sleep trying to produce something that would impress the hissing and snarling vagabonds who dwelt in it's musty caverns. Heck, I think I became one at some point. However, they are indeed gone, and I must fight for the small moments when I may be happy to create once again, and I want to thank you and everyone else who contributed to that beautifully dank cavern I once called home, for it taught me everything I know about writing today, and I would be nothing without it. Follow that link if you dare. It leads to the very first fan fiction I ever wrote, in its original, unedited form

Dang. That was one heck of an autobiography. Thank you for sharing that annus mirabilis with us, Skirts. Brought back very fond memories of my own.

4382482 Gaming, making Star Wars armor, and teaching kids to be better at English than I am, hah. I'm getting married sometime this year, and things are generally pretty decent. On, I'm an uncle, now, too, which is pretty much the best job ever.

Thank you for this post, it was fascinating to read.

Wow.

A whirlwind from start to finish. I do hope you still keep in contact with LB, he seems awesome.

But, like, all of this? Feels like a person in someway could relate heavily to this. Thank you for sharing this with us.

...I really wish I had something better to say.

~Skeeter The Lurker

This was quite the surprise to see. Thanks!

This blog hit my system harder than a Second Life Dance Party.

Ink must flow. :pinkiecrazy:

As for The Noble Jury.

In every Missing Man formation, there must be a Missing Man.

Something confusing? How many Gary Stus have the paperwork to actually back them up? And what happens when they do?

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

It's funny, that same Moonbase Alpha video is what I credit for getting me into the fandom, too. :D

4382446
You know, I don't know if I knew you at the time, but I do remember the speculation of "some big-shot fanfic writer" on ponychan at the time. Ah, ponychan, you served your purpose well.

Also holy shit, you motherfucker, you are here :D

Hell of a story, my dude. You've lived a way more interesting life than I ever could.

How's LB doing these days? Have you talked to him much? I miss the guy. Good times.

Yep, this has inspired me to quit wasting time on MMOs and spend more time on my art instead.

Who would have thought that 6 years later we'd be looking back on the internet as something naive and innocent. I never thought I'd feel nostalgic for something like rage face spam.

I loved the blog post even if it about killed the poor hamster on the wheel powering my archaic internet service. Having no imagination to speak of (one of the reasons that I supplement that void with yours), I always enjoy seeing the creative process that drives an artist to create. Getting a peek at the editing process behind the scenes was pretty cool as well. There are times that I like to think that with some practice I could end up being a decent editor, but then I see instances like this one involving somebody that's actually experienced and much more knowledgeable and realize just how out of my depth I'd be.

Thank you for taking the time to tell us a little bit more about yourself. I think that after a period of time there's an odd sort of relationship that builds up between a writer and reader, after reading 10 million+ Skirtsian horsewords over the course of a few years I feel like I kind of know you without actually knowing anything about you. It's nice to learn more about the lemur behind the curtains whose works have taken up so much of my time the last few years.

Thank you ShortSkirtsandExplosions,
Your stories inspired me to greater heights than I would have ever imagined for myself.
This little marsupial will be forever grateful.

This was worth the read, every single word. Wow, skirts, just wow.

Hap

That was a hell of a thing. It took me two and a half hours to read it.

It feels like... the first chapter of a blog.

And it's interesting to hear the stories, and even see the people who are spoken of so reverentially.

It's weird to think how long I've been reading your stuff. Weirder still to fling back to 2010 / early 2011, back when ponies was in that ur-space and everything was just so, so...something.

Thanks for this

Well, that was an adventure.

Wanderer D
Moderator

This was a great, nostalgic read... so many memories man, I remember when EoP came out and I fell in love with it... as well as the budding friendship we've had since then. It's been always great to be your acquaintance, and I will always be a good thing to keep in mind who you are and what you've meant to the community, your close friends and me, personally. Keep being you, Skirts.

As someone who joined the fandom relatively late (November 2012, after the last chapter of Background Pony was published), this was a fascinating read, not only because I missed all of that "blank slate" 2011 had, but most of the continued fanon and such from 2012. It's inspired me to work more on my writing and spend less time farting around online randomly, I'll say that much. As always, thanks for the great read, and I look forward to your next blargh (BP? Ponky?)

Reading about your life and history always have a beautiful tinge of fairy tale to it, and this was no exception. I'm amused because I fell into the EQD side of things more than I ever did ponychan so while you were discovering Vimmy and co I was more occupied wading through the terrible comment section.

Nice life story. I I have nothing further to comment about this.

Wow, I read through the whole thing now. I never thought we would get such a deep insight in what made you the writer you are and what inspired you to write "The End of Ponies". Thank you for that.
I will later screenshot this entire blog entry and keep it safe. It's a piece of history worth of preserving what you wrote here.

Other than that..... I guess this is a nostalgic blog entry caused by your feelings after you announced to stop writing "The End of Ponies", one, so I hope, will bring back the joy you felt when you started writing it and leading you to continue it.
It's a story important to you and one worth getting continued..... maybe more worth than any other, unfinished story on this site. I really hope you will find the spark for it again and continue it one day. Be assured I will wait for that day and that many, many others will as well.

Wow, it's really interesting to read this. This has convinced me to finally read EoP(Well, this and the rest of the Jury)

Also, Skirts, if you read this, I just want to say,
Thank you. The stuff you write is so amazing; I've read a few of your short ones, but what I'm mainly talking about is Background Pony, Appledashery, and the Austraeoh saga. It took me 4 months to get through to the current stuff on Utaan, and it was the only thing I was reading for those four months. The Austraeoh saga was the only story that has ever caused me to, over winter break, read for about 16 hours a day. And it was amazing. I also loved the sheer feeling you put into Background Pony, you made Lyra a favourite character of mine. With Appledashery, I never got bored at any point in the story. So, once again,
Thanks.

As a very casual reader of any kind of literature and/or/what consumer of poni-art and stuff whatsoever, it's really nice to get glimpses to the lives' of the very few pony-related people I still follow after years of disinterest towards the fandom in general. It's awesome to see the "behind-the-scenes" to some things I value greatly. Weirdly enough, I feel compelled to leave a comment here, though it's probably pretty selfish.

Thank you for sharing this. It is very pretty.

Funny how moved I feel by a complete stranger's life-events. I guess that's a good thing :twilightblush:

I laughed really hard at the "Go to Hell" post. It's great having more of the Skirts lore filled in, but I'm going to have to finish the rest of this after work, lest I be late.

Cheers, Skirts!

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