TMy Little Minecraft: At the End
MLP: FiM
Dark
Adventure
I hold the power of creation in the palm of my hand, yet these creatures still frighten me.
Gore
Crossover
Human
Celestia
Luna
OC
Other
Main 6
Journeyman · 250k words · 1,653 70 · 30k views

At the End Commentary: Chapter 15 · 6:58pm Dec 10th, 2012

This entry contains spoilers for its corresponding chapter of At the End. Be warned...

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
<--Previous Chapter Commentary *-* Next Chapter Commentary -->
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

I don’t like this chapter that much. Not due to content, mind you, it’s because I messed up my writing. This will require a little explanation.

When I had first planned this chapter, I was very unsure about a very specific event. The Crafter enters the town, barely escaping detection, grabs his target, but is unlucky enough to get caught. At the end of the fight, being outmanned, outgunned, and outclassed, he surrenders.

That event was the surrender itself. I’m going to be honest: I have no idea what I am doing. You people seem to like that, so I’m just doing what I do again and again. I was never sure if I made his surrender believable, so I had scripted an event just before the Crafter meets Barricade: the Crafter meets “The Emperor.” I had intended for the Emperor to nudge the Crafter to make the decision he did and drop a small hint on why his powers work the way they do, but that left two holes I wasn’t sure if I could fill. Did this adequately explain why the Crafter surrenders? How will this event impact the Crafter in the future? I’m a procrastinating bastard, so the second one didn’t bother me that much; I’d get to it eventually. Still unsure, and with the deadline approaching, I asked my editors their opinions. I followed their advice: his surrender was believable as it is.

That still left a problem: I removed about 2-3 pages of dialog because of that. I don’t like this chapter because A.) It’s short and B.) it ends in nearly the exact place as the last chapter. I really don’t like that, but I simply could not escape that it needed to be done. My usual length of a chapter is between 5-8 thousand words, and, after taking in that scene’s removal, left chapter 14 at about 3k. My original plan was to have chapter 14 split into two chapters and have chapters 15 & 16 be a single chapter. That deletion left chapter 14 critically short, so I combined it with its other half, and split what would be chapter 16 into chapters 15 and 16. For those of you that understood what I just said, raise your hand and explain it to the person next to you.

Now I suppose I should talk about something I failed to mention in the last commentary. When the Crafter enters Lyra’s house, I had planned for him to play the piano from the start. The only difference was I had a “pony” piano in mind. I had schematics in my head how a pony with its hooves could play it, how it would factor in the Una corda, damper, and Sostenuto pedals, rearranging the keys and their size so they can actually be played by ponies (sitting up, of course. That was why Lyra sits the way she does; she needs to to play her piano. That would have been the explanation, anyway). I really wanted to put it in, but after taking an objective look at what I had planned, I deemed it too ambitious to write, especially in character. Sadly, I took it out and had a normal piano entered, with the excuse that unicorns use magic to hit the keys.

Okay, now the actual chapter... really, not much happens other than the fight. The fight itself wasn’t hard, especially because I had it scripted in the last chapter.

Major Stormcloud’s entrance will be the branching point for Celestia’s return to Canterlot, where we will soon learn about the creeper’s aftermath. The Endermen subplot will begin to move as well, as will the Emperor and Abaddon’s. It’s about time I start delivering some answers.

And a fan brought up an interesting point. The way I constructed my story - through the eyes of the Crafter and the ponies - I’m essentially writing two different stories, simply running side-by-side. It’s the same series of events, but told through a radically different lens. If you want to introduce someone to my story, have them read the Crafter chapters independently of the Pony chapters. I want to see how that turns out.

And before you spam: “lol, fag. leet steve wont ragequit like a noob and giv up,” wait ‘til you hear his take on events.

Report Journeyman · 653 views · Story: My Little Minecraft: At the End · #Minecraft #Commentary #At the End

Comments ( 9 )