Behind the scenes of Warverse · 7:47pm Sep 25th, 2012
When I was writing chapter 6 for Innocence Once Lost, I suddenly had an idea and pretty much rewrote the whole chapter. Then I stopped and realized how much my original vision had changed.
Let's start from the begin. The idea behind the Warverse, as I shall call it for now. Idea was to have humans and ponies go into war, but keep humans as sympathetic, yet ruthless people. They didn't do bad things because they enjoyed them, they did bad things because they were desperate.
Original draft of the Warverse was to have Twilight being captured and her horn cut off, alongside other unicorns who would be captured. As you can see, this got changed into losing her family. Furthermore, i realized that having Twilight in a prison camp didn't play well for the story.
Another major change was that in current Warverse ... both species live in peace. Original draft called for either extinction of humans or Equestria being conquered. Anti-Magic field, which in current verse is made by Luna, was in original draft a human made tower that robbed magic completely, pegasis became unable to fly, earth ponies lost their fortitude, unicorns their magic, and so forth.
Perhaps the biggest change was humanity's origins. In original draft, humans came from underground, living in a massive moving city (ALA UEF Fatboy) and they would appear in Ponyville, that would be held by humans. I got pretty far with the idea before I realised the problem with it: How would humans had survived this far? At first I planned to just have them dig deeper than ever before, until they simply couldn't and were forced to return to surface and claim the world. I even had a scene where humans first time walk outside without their suits, celebrating the first time they see the sky and feel the grass beneath them.
However, more I thought this, more I realized how badly it worked. So I scrapped the idea and decided to be tormented by the idea forever.
Then I saw a little movie called Iron Sky.
Warverse came back, but this time humans were from the moon.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Interesting... Gives a bit of insight into the workings of the writer's mind, which helps a reader understand the story just a little bit better.
The underground part you mentioned reminded me of the game 'Gears of War' where the enemy come and attack from underground.
383087 it reminds me of resistence when the chimera raises the towers :P
Funny thing is, I never played Gears of War. So I had no idea of this, apart from what I read from view reviews.