[Deviant] New Story · 8:06pm Jan 7th, 2021
Deviant is a very weird story. I actually almost submitted it with no genre tags at all. It's too serious for Slice-of-Life, not dark enough for Dark, not sciency enough for Science Fiction, not heavy enough for Drama. And the Romance? Well…
The first draft feedback I got from Gay For Gadot was essentially that the weight of the Romance was undercut by the more meta bits (yes, this used to be even more meta than it is currently!) and how the heartfelt bits in the Cadance section were too scattered to form a consistent tone. This allowed me to realize just what this story actually is. It’s an inversion of one of my themes in Timescales, which is a story that takes really large-scale themes of entropy and the life and death of civilizations and even life itself, and bends them to service the emotional impact of a love story. But Deviant does the opposite: It takes a LyraBon love story as a base and deliberately backgrounds it to zoom out, and place it in the context of a larger meditation on the differences in sexual ethics and norms that a society would have from our own in order to make the canon depiction of Equestria a reasonably accurate description of it. The LyraBon love story is actually easy and uncomplicated, because in this world their kind of love really is easy and uncomplicated. The distant perspective of Princess Cadance emphasizes that it’s not the interesting part. At least until the end, where future complications that could make it interesting are hinted at.
So yes, this is a very strange, hard-to-classify story. This reinforced the obvious reason(s) why this story might get downvotes, so I expected it to be controversial, which it is at 18/6 as of this writing. This is why I was surprised to see enough support to get it into not only the Feature Box, but its open division, at a time when there were two Mature fics on it (one of them being mine, and a VERY different story tonally).
[Adult story embed hidden]
Thanks so much to all of you for taking a chance on this story! It was a series of thoughts that I expected to be too specific to me to be enjoyed by a larger audience, so this really makes me glad.
I like that you’re using pony to explore interesting and complex themes.
You are definitely correct that this was a weird, and more than a little meta, story. But it's a well-written, and obviously very well thought-out one, and the... alien familiarity, maybe? of the pony views was some high-quality worldbuilding from a very unusual and underused angle of attack!
Oh, right, congratulations on having had two stories in the full feature box at once. :)
(Still there, too, at the time I'm typing this.)
"It was a series of thoughts that I expected to be too specific to me to be enjoyed by a larger audience"
...
I mean.
Bearing in mind that I am well aware I'm weird in a number of ways.
They seemed pretty interesting to me? :)
Thanks for writing!