Overly Extensive Author's Notes: Titanium Jack · 1:34pm Oct 29th, 2017
Hey guys. Like I mentioned in a blog not long ago, I mentioned I was considering doing a sort of 'authors notes' on Titanium Jack, since the story went through a lot of iterations and changes during writing, from the initial concept to the actual writing. What I'm going to do (for those who are interested) is look at some of the stuff I thought about and worked through. Who knows! Some of you might find it interesting.
As a few of you have probably gotten from some comments I made (as well as a long PM discussion which helped crystallise my thoughts on the matter), I actually found finishing Titanium Jack to be very stressful and draining, but originally it started out as a bit of a multiverse concept which got thrown away long ago. I brought the idea back when the AppleDash contest was announced but with heavy changes.
Obviously spoilers below, and I am kinda assuming that if you're reading this, you know what happened in Titanium Jack, so some context will probably be required. It's pretty long and dry, so unless you're interested in what I think about when I write stuff, it might not be all that interesting to you. If you are interested, though, please feel free to read on! : )
1) The Multiverse Concept
Before the AppleDash contest was even announced, the idea for playing with alternate universes was something I had been interested in. I don't write a lot of AU, and the AU I have written (a long time ago, which frankly don't hold up as well as I'd like them to these days) were more to accommodate themes than actual changes in events.
When Starlight mucked up the timelines, I thought it'd be very interesting to explore if there were possible universes where, instead of losing to the big bads (and Flim and Flam, I guess), Equestria could have found ways to survive without having the main cast unite through friendship. This was the earliest appearance of Titanium Jack as a concept: Applejack would have become superhuman (equine) and would have acted as a sort of guardian. Thing is, she wasn't the only one: in other alternate universes, each of the main cast would have gotten a similar treatment. Rarity would have crafted magical items of clothing she'd have equipped the guards with, leading to a universe full of magical cloaks and mystery, Fluttershy would have led the ponies to be protected in the Everfree, Twilight would have become an incredibly manipulative (and villainous) plotter to thwart greater threats, Pinkie would have commanded the Party Corps and engineer happiness from behind the scenes, and Rainbow would become a cosmic power after upping her speed and power.
Each of the characters would be given a name very similar to Titanium Jack (mostly to help me organise them): Mystical Rarity, Druid Fluttershy, Ninja Pinkie, Megalomaniac Twilight, and Cosmic Dash. The idea was that each character would have had to go so far beyond what they normally were in order to make up for being on their own. I scrapped the idea because I didn't think it would work, but it did eventually lead to me focusing on Titanium Jack many months later.
2) The Contest
Usually when I get ideas for stories, nothing happens to them and eventually, I forget them and move on. Standard stuff for me: I don't even write them down because I like to use my memory as a sort of filtering tool. If I can remember the idea, then it's a good one.
As it happens, when the AppleDash contest was announced, I did remember the idea of alternate universes, and thought that, maybe, I could find a way to make it work with respect to the prompt: Second Chances. Now, in all honesty, I didn't like the prompt. I like subverting prompts or approaching them from different angles. I also didn't like the idea of writing a standard 'forgiveness story', and wanted there to be something that made the whole thing more readable than just 'character messes up, works towards forgiveness'. I also don't really like the concept of asking forgiveness in and of itself. I personally like to apologise and forgive through actions. If I feel bad about doing something, my perfect apology is to never do it again and try to improve myself from there, and if someone forgives me, I want them to act it, not say it.
I decided from there that I wanted the story to be about giving another character a second chance in a non-forgiveness context: a second chance at life, happiness, or whatever. I thought that angle would work well for a character I perceived as tragic: Titanium Jack.
That was the point I started actually plotting out my beginning, end, and story direction, but I quickly realised it was going to be a bit more complicated than I initially thought.
3) The Alternate Universe Shenanigans
My first hurdle was perspective. I think I quickly realised what kind of struggle I was going to be working with when I realised that I was playing with an alternate universe that needed a lot of explanation, character backstories that had huge leaps in logic (why would Rainbow be in a relationship with Titanium Jack, why would Titanium Jack go along with it) and different characters having easy access to different aspects of information. I had considered using Titanium Jack as my 'main' protagonist, as well as Rainbow Dash, Twilight, and at one point, Rarity.
The thing with alternate universes is that I wanted it to highlight aspects of the characters that exist in canon. Titanium Jack reflects Applejack's motherly nature taken to an absurd extreme, as well as what I perceive to be a need for family and being close to other ponies. Taking family away from Titanium Jack would, I hoped, highlight how much vanilla Applejack needs them. Similarly, Rainbow Dash in the AU would reflect Rainbow's complex need for attention. Even in vanilla MLP, losing a pet was a crippling obsession: here, she would feel she wasn't good enough for TJ, which I thought would make for a strong motivation as well as be a strong message about her character.
Basically, I wanted for nothing in the AU to be random: it was supposed to be a commentary on the canon universe by contrast and hyperbole.
I wanted to make it clear that this was an alien alternate timeline, and I felt that the best way to deal with that was to use Twilight: her struggle was getting home, and I thought that would work well. On the other hand, the story was also about TJ and RD's relationship, and Twilight wasn't the best character I could think of to explore those.
I used diary segments to try and bridge that gap, so I could explain where Rainbow came from whilst also use Twilight to explain what was going on with the alternate universe. Anything else I snuck in through conversations and cheeky head-hopping.
That wasn't the only problem I had, though.
4) The Likeability Equation
My next problem was one I was already worried about when confronting the idea of a Second Chances prompt. I felt that, in most forgiveness stories, both parties act like douchebagsat some point or another, which I always think dents their likeability if you're not careful. Here, it was going to be worse, because I knew that in the end, RD would succeed, give Titanium Jack her second chance by returning the universe to vanilla MLP. This meant one big thing: she wouldn't back down. I also knew that Titanium Jack wouldn't come around to her way of thinking (otherwise there would be no conflict).
So basically, RD was going to betray Titanium Jack and Titanium Jack was never going to listen to dialogue from RD. I thought that was going to be pesky.
I ended up feeling like I was balancing an equation: making Titanium Jack likeable on one side and understandable and making RD likeable and understandable on the other side. I tried to get around this by changing Titanium Jack's motivation. Initially, she was primarily motivated with defending Equestria: that was her one purpose. I didn't feel this worked because it made Titanium Jack an unfeeling machine (which was part of the point, but I still didn't like it that much).
Instead I changed Titanium Jack's motivation to wanting to keep Rainbow Dash out of love. I thought this made it better because that way, each character was doing what they were doing for kind reasons. I hoped that Rainbow would appear less selfish if she was giving up her Titanium Jack for one that was happy, and Titanium Jack would still be cold and implacable, but still driven to have a family. I like to think I sidestepped the likeability equation in that manner.
5) There was no happy ending
Originally, the idea was that when the timeline was reset, that would be it: the end. The story would begin and end as the timeline itself came into existence: with Twilight entering it and with Twilight leaving. Applejack being happy or Rainbow finding a way to keep her relationship going through alternate universes would be left completely up to the canon show as well as reader interpretation. It was actually a tragedy, initially, and quite a classic one. Rainbow would lose Applejack because her feelings meant that she could never not try to make TJ happy, and TJ would drive Rainbow away as she tried to protect her. The only place for their relationship to work would be a doomed timeline that needed to be fixed.
Of course, that would mean I'd forfeit the chance of winning any place in a contest with a max $500 prize, because there was a rule in the contest that stated that the characters had to end in a relationship. In a way, I'm very glad for that: I'm a sucker for happy endings, and I was more than happy to slide a bit in at the end. I also thought it worked well for Rainbow's character: she could never completely give Applejack up.
6) The cut characters
There were, initially, a lot of changes to the story itself. The location was different, for starters: the earliest version had the story take place in Manehattan. There would be a crime boss named Sodium (he'd sell salt) who was the one to send assassins after TJ. There would be villains other than Captain Cobalt. Trick Pony was going to be the AU's version of Trixie, Yellow Death was (as many in the comments figured out) Fluttershy gone mad, and there was going to be more superheroics from TJ's part.
Rainbow would largely sit those out, because she would be fully confident that TJ would win each time.
The problem was that I was running into another equation, and one I felt was harder to get around: content versus distraction. I wanted the story to be about Titanium Jack and RD, and describing battles and fights didn't ever advance the plot in any meaningful way. It was just another fight. The only one that worked (I felt) was Captain Cobalt, because he represented TJ's past and how she was unnatural and broken. He also represented how broken the universe itself was: the doctor who saved Applejack would become hellbent on killing her. In the end, he was the only one to stay.
As an aside, the name Captain Cobalt was actually designed to reflect a drastic change in mentality. Doctors heal, whereas Captain is a more military title, representing him turning to violence. Cobalt is also used in cobalt-chrome implants, which sounds nice except that there is currently heated debate as to whether cobalt-chrome is actually really bad in implants. A surgeon I met even refuses to use them, and I visited a university that's full of recalled implants that studies its effects. It's still in a lot of hip and knee replacements today, and it's unclear how harmful the effects are. This is in contrast to a different metal used in implants that's quite biocompatible: titanium.
But basically, I felt like very time I added something that I thought would give the universe more depth, or clarify events in Titanium Jack's past, it was a detraction from the story. I wasn't able to find a creative way around that, which was the major reason why I found writing Titanium Jack so very draining.
7) The other characters
So I've already mentioned that Fluttershy was hinted at going mad and becoming a supervillain, but I did also spare some thought to the other characters too. Pinkie stayed at home on the farm, effectively taking a similar turn as Applejack. Where Applejack was all about family, Titanium Jack had none. Where Pinkie was all about friends, here she had none.
I liked the idea that Rarity was almost exactly the same, but I also liked her being the only pony who was able to read the other characters motivations. I thought that was a nice switch to her being all about appearances, although I think Rarity is a very good pony at reading other characters even in canon. There was actually a version where she had a crush on TJ, which explained why she always gave TJ her capes and outfits despite them always being torn and ruined, but I ended up cutting that.
8) Trick Pony stole the magic scroll
Originally, it wasn't Angel that stole Twilight's spell. Instead, Trick Pony (Trixie) would have recognised its power and nicked it, leading to a confrontation and eventual surrender. Eventually I decided Angel worked better, as it let me talk a bit about Ponyville without Fluttershy and contrast the universes in a more subtle and meaningful way than 'this character is hella different now, fight'. Still, I do think the scroll recovery could have had a bit more of a challenge attached to it.
9) Titanium Jack was overpowered
Initially, Titanium Jack was going to be hella strong. Like, smashing through buildings strong and leaping into the clouds strong. Whilst here we never see the upper limits of her strength, she does take damage when fighting against Captain Cobalt and Rainbow Dash, which initially would never have happened: TJ would have steamrolled over them.
I changed this because I liked it better when there was an actual struggle between Cobalt and TJ, although the fight with Rainbow was going to reveal Rainbow to be of comparable strength to Titanium Jack, which was a hangover from the earlier Cosmic Dash idea. She would eventually lose, much like how it went down in the final edit, but the fight would have been far more destructive.
10) There was going to be more season finale
At one point, Twilight was going to go through some of the actual timelines that we saw in the season finale, such as the Chrysalis timeline, the Tirek timeline, the Flim Flam timeline, as well as at least one I made up to introduce people to the concept that there were more than the ones we saw in the finale. There were actually going to be hints that Twilight's fight with Starlight lasted weeks or even months, leading to Twilight being almost broken by the end of it.
I scrapped that because it felt like I was just repeating stuff people already knew, which came back to the content versus distraction equation I mentioned: every time I talked about Twilight fight with Starlight, I wasn't bringing any new information, just repeating stuff from the season five finale. That's why I got rid of them: I wanted to avoid repeating info if I could help it.
And, uh, that's basically a summary of some of the changes the story went through. Do let me know if you found this interesting, as I'll try and remember to do it for some other stories in the future or some that have already gotten written. I hope that, if you did read through all this, you didn't find it too dry and boring.
I worked very hard to make Titanium Jack as good as I could manage, but there were a lot of cuts that I felt I had to make that prevented me from making some of the elements as effective as they could be. It was like trying to find the best-worst way to make the story work, and I'm still trying to figure out ways I could have made it better to this day. However, what came out is what came out, and although I found it tiring, I'm pretty happy with what came out.
Cheerio,
Hap
Unfortunately I haven't read the story (yet). I still really appreciated reading about your writing process, and how much the story changed as you worked on it. I've spent a couple weeks revising my first story, so it's encouraging to see how much your story has changed since its initial conception.
4712239 I'm glad you enjoyed the post. I really rather like rambling about the processes I go through to finish stories, and I hope it gives some transparency regarding how I write what I write (for better or worse).
Such a titanic endeavour.
Get it ?
Kiddadles aside, that was an interesting read and ride.
4712905 *snickersnickersnort*
I geddit