Taking A Step Back From Fall of Equestria - pt. 1: Announcement · 10:48am Jul 6th, 2020
This decision has been a long time coming, but due to recent events, I have an announcement to make. I am taking a step back from my involvement in Fall of Equestria for an unknown period of time. I’m still in the process of determining what exactly that means, and whether it will be permanent or just temporary, and I already have the help of some of my good friends in the fandom in figuring it out, but as I said, it was a decision that had been in the making for a long while.
First of all, let me spell out what this doesn’t mean. Most importantly, I am not going to remove myself from the community in any way. I’m not going to leave any groups or Discord servers I’m in, and I’m not going to shut down communication channels. I’m not ghosting FoE, like <name redacted> did. I have many very good friends in the fandom that I’ve developed connections and shared interests and in some cases even strong emotional bonds with far beyond the scope of Fall of Equestria - and honestly, the majority of conversations in the FoE Skype and Discord groups aren’t even about FoE anymore anyway. I’m also still perfectly fine with talking about or discussing Fall of Equestria with anyone who is interested, and any contributor who wants me to do things like proofreading or editing is free to ask. If I have the time to do so, I likely will. Secondly, I’m also not going to abandon my work on my collab story with Moonshade44, Hope In Bleak Times. The future of that story is yet to be determined, it hasn’t been updated for a long time, but if Moonshade44 wants to continue working on it, I’ll be there for her. She and I have grown beyond the point of mere friends by now, and I’m not going to leave her hanging. Likewise, I still have a FoE parody in the making that I’ll try to finish and then try to publish, since Celesticorn specifically requested for it. It might not comply with fimfiction’s rules though, since it has very little pony in it, and is also pretty derivative of the one chapter Cardinal left us with - in roughly the same sense in which Spaceballs is derivative of Star Wars, or even more aptly in which Men in Tights is derivative of Prince of Thieves. In a similar vein, I’m certainly also going to continue riffing on bad FoE stories with Rylasasin - that’s just too much fun to give up.
Now as to what it does mean. I am going to take a step back from working on any of my FoE-related projects, though to what extent is still to be determined. That means that Freeville Chronicles will be set to On Hiatus for the time being, and it might end up being set to Canceled depending on how exactly I proceed from here. The same applies to my other FoE stories. I also probably won’t RP much in the near future either (with the exception of Moonshade44, to whom I relate on a far deeper level than mere RPing by now). I’m not stepping away from RPing completely, I’m just cutting down on it, particularly with regards to FoE scenarios - but I wasn’t overly active in the last two years or so anyway.
There are various reasons for this. The primary reason is that I don’t really feel like I care for the FoE setting anymore, and in fact, I barely care for MLP anymore either, at least by far not as much as I used to - i.e. by now, I don’t care more about it than about any other cartoon show I like or liked to watch, and there are shows I care far more about. This has been the case for a while now, and these rising feelings of indifference have built up over time. It also coincides with increasing time constraints as my academic career proceeds onwards, and will very likely only be amplified once I’m able to get a full-time job.
This ties into the second reason: As much as I hate it, I have to face the fact that it is very unlikely for Freeville Chronicles to ever get finished. In the last year, I’ve published two chapters for it, with nine months between them. With ten to twelve chapters more to go, I just can’t see it getting done any time soon. In addition to that, I have had trouble writing the romance between Monolith and Fluttershy. I had looked forward to writing it, but once I actually got to it, I started to realize that I seem to have trouble writing clop scenes that involve a canon character. It is pretty much the first time I’m really doing that, and thus, I’ve come to this realization only this late - over six years after I got into FoE. Since it is a pretty important part of the story and I essentially can’t proceed without it, I’m not sure anymore if this is a hurdle I can take. It’s why my last chapter ended where you would expect a clop scene to begin, and then promised one for the next chapter.
I’m still extremely torn on how I feel about Freeville Chronicles. On the one hand, the main story is something I really want to tell, as are (to a somewhat lesser extent) the Monolith-Fluttershy romance and the planned sequel, which would have been about Eadgil taking a gender-switched Vestri under his wing in the aftermath of Dainn’s death. (Freya, Dvalinn’s girlfriend mentioned in Schorl Tourmaline’s story Legacy of Dainn, is actually the daughter of Eadgil and Vestra, and I really hope Schorl is going to keep this element even after my departure if she ever continues Legacy of Dainn.) I still think these are stories worth telling. On the other hand, as I said, I really don’t like or care for the overall FoE setting anymore, and I also feel like the way I’ve told the story so far is an incoherent mess. In the early chapters, the characterization is weak, there are large periods of nothing interesting happening, and a lot of conversations that feel forced and unnatural, because they’re either exposition or feel like metacommentary. I still think the ideas laid out in these chapters and the general concepts of the characters’ development are valid, but the execution is clunky and at times downright awful. The story gets a bit better once things actually start happening around its current middle point, but by that point, too many issues have piled up, and it feels like I’m keeping a story alive that started as a stillbirth: Even if it gets better over time, it never truly manages to grow past its weak beginnings.
That does not mean I’ll give up on writing. I’ll likely never fully do that again. If not, I’ll focus on different avenues. I kind of have an idea for a story in the Lord of the Rings universe in my mind that came to me during a brief conversation I had with BrightDawn and Alue yesterday, and while I’m not sure if I’ll pursue that, it has already started to grow. Similarly, I’ve had a fantasy story in an original setting in the back of my head for a while now, about a nun discovering inconvenient truths about her religion. I’m not sure if anything will come from these, and particularly the second one only grows veeery slowly - so I really can’t say yet. As I said, I do also still want to tell a story similar to Freeville Chronicles (including the sequel), I just can’t see me finishing it in the specific form and context it has right now. So if I do take it up again, I have to thoroughly reconceptualize it and my engagement with it (again, *sigh*). Of course, it also means I likely won’t publish any of my new works on fimfiction, due to them not being related to MLP. I want to provide a possibility to my readers to continue following me, but I’m not quite sure if I’ll go about that.
Anyway, it has been quite a ride. I’m happy that I went for it for all these years, I don’t regret a moment of it, and thankful for all of you who rode along with me. I am not lost to you, I’m not leaving the community, I’ll continue to be there for all of you, and I’ll always have an open ear. But I have to rethink my specific mode of engagement - and I will be glad for any kind of help or advice any of you wish to provide for this task.
I will likely update you guys on the exact specifics of my decision in the upcoming weeks as I figure them out - hopefully with the help of all of you.
Wow, it seems my announcement has created quite a spark. The internal Redux Discord server is positively on fire right now. Quite a few people coming back from the shadows to talk about FoE and exchange their views, and new connections being made. Don't get your hopes up for Cardinal or Contral though, I don't think they'll ever be coming back - but quite a few other old and familiar faces, in somewhat new constellations. I've chatted and talked more about FoE in the last 24 hours than all of 2020 before that so far. I did not see that coming.