Story Notes: Little Sparrow, March Up Hill · 8:50am Jul 1st, 2018
I've never really done this story-note business that Admiral Biscuit specializes in, but Little Sparrow feels like it needs it, a bit.
To start with, the story genesis itself. I was driving down to Florida, with a limited supply of CDs to while away the high-velocity hours. And I ended up listening to a lot of Dolly Parton's late-career bluegrass album, Little Sparrow. People who only know her from Nine to Five and Best Little Whorehouse in Texas might not be familiar with this version of Parton, but it's a great record. She's got a voice trained for, and perfectly suited to old-school bluegrass, and there's a pitch-perfect version of "Seven Bridges Road" that I had on repeat for like a half-hour through southern Pennsylvania and Maryland heading south.
But the parts which actually inspired the story. The record is full of tragic little songs about innocent mountain girls done wrong by 'handsome wicked strangers'. The song that kicks off the record, "Little Sparrow", sets the mood:
I am not a little sparrow
I am just the broken dream
Of a cold false-hearted lover
And his evil cunning scheme
And about half the rest of the songs on the album follow in that train. "Mountain Angel", "Down From Dover", "The Beautiful Lie" - song after song about seduction, betrayal, miscarriage and madness.
If I'd written just that, I think even I would have been bored, but my restless driving mind married that sense of urgency and terror with my usual obsessions, moral ambiguity, warfare and ponies. And I started thinking about El Cid, and the nationalistic tradition of beautiful failure and the victorious defeat. The idea of a pony, victorious in arms, whose challenge was something more important than war...
This chapter in particular is yet another gloss on Xenophon's old western-arrogance classic of orientalism, the Anabasis, or March Up Country. If you've somehow managed to get this far in military fiction without finding a previous pastiche of this famous story, it's about a large group of Greek hoplites sold out as mercenaries, who joined up with a Persian pretender to the throne, and fought a mostly successful campaign up to the point where their employer and sponsor was killed in battle. When Cyrus died, they suddenly discovered that they were a gang of foreigners deep, deep inside Persian territory, surrounded by millions of hostile locals, over a thousand miles from the nearest Hellenistic territory. They formed up on themselves, organized a temporary polis in motion, and fought that thousand miles overcountry, defeating every tribe and local force that tried to stop them.
The Anabasis has been the inspiration for a hundred different writers working in fantasy, military fiction, SF, and even 1979's juvenile-gang fantasia, The Warriors.
As I said, orientalist ethnocentric arrogance, in classic Athenian Greek. Xenophon translates roughly to 'Strange Voice', which my protagonist talks about at some length. My version is heavily ponified, of course, and features the more heavily-Egyptianized Anugypt rather than Persia, but it's the same basic idea.
Diamond dogs have appeared exactly twice in MLP canon, once in a season one episode, and once again in an EqG short. For all we know, Celestia had them exterminated after they kidnapped and enslaved Rarity for mining purposes in that first episode. But probably not. What's their deal, in the showrunners' minds? Who knows? They probably have forgotten that they exist. So, they make for useful 'uncivilized back-country tribals' without getting into too much detail.
The narrator and protagonist of the story should be recognizable from the featureless bust on the cover-art Shrink Laureate contributed to this project. He starts off the narrative lying to his beau ideal, and I kind of think that establishes the tone of the story. I'm far, far too fond of unreliable narrators, but that comes with writing about villains.
And make no mistake, if any pony is a born villain, it's the canonical Sombra, who according to the comics was born bad, scion of some orklike sub-race that only seems to exist in the comics, the umbrum. I'm not really married to comics canon, but they can make for useful kicking-off purposes, and I tend to regard the comics as a place to start from, a treasury ripe for plunder.
The comics may not be canon, but they're sure as hell full of good ideas to steal.