Writer's Recap: A Stranger in the House · 10:11pm Mar 23rd, 2020
First chapter started, last chapter finished.
For best results, be sure to read the chapter first.
The main struggle with this one, it turned out, was how to start the actual conflict, which is probably why it underwent the most changes, originally starting with Lyra arriving on a midnight train to find our four antagonists making a spectacle with a public interrogation in the town square. As time went on, I decided I didn’t like this because I couldn’t make it work narratively, and eventually scaled it back to where we are now. Part of this was necessity, because as soon as I changed any one aspect of that opening, the rest of it fell apart.
Button Mash originally wasn’t in here at all, and it was Mayor Mare who came galloping back with Twilight and company, but again, that didn’t work without the public spectacle, because without someone to publicly challenge her authority, her running off to meet them and explain didn’t work so well.
And then I gave Lieutenant Rye Mash his name, and after maybe another year before I finally looked at it again, the connection immediately stood out. It made sense for Button to be awake despite the late hour; he was waiting for his dad to get home. It made sense that he would run off to go meet them when things were going south; he’s been taught to report any crime you see to an authority figure, so of course he’d run to tell his dad, who is also a Lieutenant in the Royal Guard (lacking a dedicated police force, the cohort responds to crimes in progress in Ponyville, and then turns suspects and evidence over to the a sheriff’s deputy once they arrive), and would be with Princess Twilight.
The only things that didn’t change much were Bon Bon and Lyra. When I started writing this, it was still a bit in vogue to make Bon Bon a changeling, so I knew immediately that I wanted to invert that since it was something I hadn’t seen written before. This was also a couple years after Slice of Life aired, so it was canon that Bon Bon was a secret agent. From there, it became a matter of how to have Bon Bon/Agent Sweetie Drops handle the situation. The first run had her subduing all four of them by herself after Lyra got blasted, but that was the public spectacle era, and she was chained up; looking back, I didn’t like how I’d written that, but at the time, I decided against it because I couldn’t work out the choreography. That turned into her only subduing two of the four, still with chains on, but I still couldn’t work out the choreography in a way I liked. Finally, when I ditched the public spectacle, I had to actually show how Bon Bon ended up in chains, and realized putting her in chains in the first place was a problem because it would take too much time; this is supposed to be something that happens quickly and violently, and adding chains, appropriately, slowed things down and restrained them too much. That just left how she’d get out from being pinned down, and the fact that she was a Crown agent and the fact that magic in the Strangerverse doesn’t work the way we see in the show made it easy enough; if an eel can produce a high current electric charge without the need for magic, then why couldn’t a specially trained earth pony learn to produce a high voltage one with magic?
