Marked for Evil Inspirations

Hi, everyone,

I'm writing this to go along with chapter two of Marked For Evil, and I thought instead of just saying "Chapter Two's out, read it now," I could talk about why I'm writing this beyond the obvious fact I really like both the film and musical version of Heathers.

I've been wanting to write a story about Sunset Shimmer and Starlight Glimmer for ages. If you read my blog all the way back when I talked about me getting back into fanfic then, the story I was kicking around featured revolutionary Starlight Glimmer and anarchist Sunset Shimmer as the kind of leads. A friend and I were kicking around this version of Equestria that was undergoing the pangs of the industrial revolution and dealing with strong anarchist and revolutionary elements. Sunset wanted to just burn the world down and rebuild, while Starlight would follow a radicalizing arc going from wanting to peaceful reform for demanding the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Also, I'd throw in a lot of references to The Man Who was Thursday, with Sunset being the head of my new Calendar Council.

I wrote about five paragraphs of that story. Conceptually, it was a mess. Equestria isn't our world, it's hard to imagine the social forces that led to the mass unrest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century getting such a strong foothold under Celestia and Twilight's watch. Also, Sunset was a static character whose motivations never changed. She wanted a stick of dynamite to blow up the world, and she never stopped wanting that. Also, her motivations were rooted less in class consciousness and more in that moment where youthful idealism first butts up against the hardness of the world and turns potentially dangerous.

I thought about working around the first problem by focusing on the human versions of Starlight and Sunset (that is to say, the ones from the human side of the portal who we haven't seen yet), and I really liked that idea, but it still didn't solve the second problem, so I moved on to thinking about other possible fanfic ideas (I also wanted to write a crossover, but didn't know what to adapt. The same friend pitched D&D, I tinkered with the French Revolution a little bit (same problems as initial idea, though), and a few other things, but nothing really grabbed me.

Also, during this time, I discovered Heathers: The Musical and fell completely in love with it. I've watched a recording of the musical at least ten times, listened to the songs who knows how many times, and seen the movie about three times now. Then, one night, I was watching a PMV of the musical and reflected on what a great J.D. pre-reform Sunset made, and the main ideas of the story started coming together. I could have my little story focusing on human Sunset and Starlight, they could both be angst ridden messes, and I got to write a crossover adaptation featuring something I was passionate about.

Not to say I'm just copying the whole plot. While we haven't had any major divergences yet, astute readers will notice I uncoupled the party and Sunset and JD's Snack Shack meeting so they didn't occur on the same day. Why? Stay tuned next chapter where I introduce a scene that wasn't in either the musical or the movie, introduce my own major plot point, and continue the trend of completely rewriting what happens at the party.