What did Twilight Sparkle wonder, gazing at the throne that would be hers? · 8:07pm Jul 17th, 2022
What's this? A blog post? Couldn't be, not from me.
Anyway, to justify this out-of-character move a little more, I had a few words to say on Alicorn Ascentionism (and the Plotholes therein), and a few comments I wanted to respond to in a more substantial way, so hey, here we are! Let's get to it.
1. Gold Medal, yay!
If you'll allow me just a moment to celebrate... Alicorn Ascentionism won the experimental gold! Wooo! Yay! It was up against some very stiff competition, some of which was wildly, gloriously experimental (shoutout to SparklingTwilight's It Ur Flt Trixie), but I'm still glad it won! I'm much obliged to all the judges, and special thanks to anyone who read this fic and got its very specific vibe!
If you enjoyed the sort of raw experimentalism of it, then firstly I recommend you go immediately read Bicyclette's Timescales, which is an utterly brilliant story (and directly inspired one of the sections in Alicorn Acsentionism). I imagine the venn diagram of readership of this blog post and Bicyclette's work is about the shape of one braincell (labelled "tragi-gay existential romance", probably), but if you haven't read Timescales specifically – do. Secondly...well, we'll get back to secondly later.
3. Broken Images (and itch.io)
So Alicorn Ascentionism contains nine image links. As FanofMostEverything observed in their comment, the first of these is broken. This is fully intentional! Part of the experimental format, and all that. To my horror, however, I discovered a few weeks after publishing that Come on! Join us here in Equestria!: was not the story's only broken link – all nine, in fact, had stopped working. Which was a little bit of an issue, given that the story's whole ending revolves around them. I went to fix it, and what do you know! These images refused to work. They just kept. Fucking. Breaking. Because, well, they come originally from this facebook page, and it turns out facebook image links expire. Who knew!
I don't much like editing stories once they've been published, and I especially don't like fixing the same eight links time and again, so after much faffing about, I have set up now what I hope to be a more permanent solution. The images link now to an itch.io page: if these links expire, or break, or whatever, you can hop on over to that page, at https://botched-lobotomy.itch.io/alicorn-ascentionism, where you'll see a full copy of the story again. In case even these images break, I've included a download link, for a pdf copy of the story formatted pretty closely to fimfic's style. If that still doesn't work, future pony, just DM me, I'll send you it myself.
Alicorn Ascentionism is fundementally, intrinsically connected to fandom, and specifically fimfiction.net – but at least these other formats will probably remain more readable.
4. 
An interesting sidenote about that one image that was actually meant to be broken:
As Bicyclette pointed out to me, following the source of this broken link takes you to https://derpicdn.net/img/view/2022/5/29/287570.png, and derpibooru's 404 Not Found page. All as planned! However, following 287570 to its source nets you...
Discussion: How do you think humanity would respond if MLP ponies popped out of a portal in real life?
Discussion: How would Earth react if a portal to Equestria really did open?
Discussion: How do you think humanity would handle it if we opened a portal and suddenly lived with ponies?
Come on! Join us here in Equestria!:
Recognition something yearning lost but never found. Why is it that one thin line does all the separation.
This was not supposed to happen. Luckily for me, however, it ended up fitting the story shockingly well! The mundane/fantastic dichotomy; the different language – broadly unintelligible (to this english-speaking author, anyway) yet still understandable; even the framing of it – the idea of this meeting taking place inside a photo, filmed on a camera, framed as a response to a tumblr post, all in a picture on derpibooru... Could it be any more perfectly suited to the themes of the story? In any case, it's now officially Canon and Intentional, and I am of course a genius.
For the record, the original image linked, before I broke the link and accidentally ended up with the image above, is available at 1644215. (Content Warning for suicidal ideation, bad taste) I'd embed it here, but fimfic's spoiler code does a frankly terrible job at handling the transparency.
This is an image I saw years and years ago, laughed at briefly, and moved on from. Only, it didn't want to be left behind: its specific, pointless cruelty stuck in the back of my mind, and when I reached for something desperate and just a little dark, here it popped up. I do think it works – it draws the image into an interesting conversation with the text, its pain masquerading as intelligence. There's the idea of framing, the play with fandom, the mundane/fantastic, etc etc. But...well, it's more bitter. Less pleasant. It taps into all the entropy and desperation of Alicorn Ascentionism, and exactly none of the joy of fandom creation. And, well, I prefer the joy – an unexpected bolt of innocence, raw creation, in all its (always, ever) slightly cringeworthy glory.
Now, if you wanna get real pretentious about things...here are two images, both connected but neither actually linked. What separates them? There's something about a thin line in there...
(P.S. All those "Discussion:" lines are actual posts on Equestria Daily! Good thing we're all for rejecting originality round these parts, eh?)
5. Chapter 5
One thing that a couple of comments picked up on was the title of the chapter. Why 5? At the risk of revealing too many of the story's secrets, here's why: as I'm sure you're aware, the Thousand Words Contest had five categories. This story was imagined, originally, as the fifth in a loosely connected cycle. They were, in no particular order:
- 10 Things I Hate About You – Trixie writes her therapy-mandated list of all the things she hates about Twilight Sparkle. The whole thing is, of course, a love letter.
- The Crime of Trixie Lulamoon – Elusive and his boyfriend Discord, rulers of the Great Equestrian Empire, are falling out of love. The sacrifice of Twilight Sparkle by her lover Trixie Lulamoon is briefly alluded to as a historical event.
- Army of a Thousand Dead – in the distant future, the ancient remains of an undead army still march, long stripped of their original purpose. Written as what amounts to a song sung to the sole survivor of one of their countless victories. It is implied that this army is somehow, in some way, the remnants of Twilight Sparkle.
- Untitled Sombra Fic – a workplace comedy starring Sombra, whose tyrrany is now constrained to petty office bickering. And yet, he dreams of being king...
So why keep Chapter 5? Basically, I wanted to. It fit the fic. I enjoy putting in references that only I will get (including references to my other fics). And, of course, there's the thing about denial... Something's missing. This Is Not The Way Your Life Should Be. You'll probably never get it back.
I'll likely never write any of these, but hey, you never know!
2. What's next?
Here's where the secondly comes in: Watch This Space. There's a story I'm working on at the moment that I'm pretty excited about – probably not my next story, no, but hopefully the one after that – that follows a similarly experimental thread. I'll make another post about it nearer to the time (I'm really quite excited about it), but for now I'll just leave you with the working title...
Genderfuck.
Coming soon.
let's store this fic in some sort of cryogenic vault for future generations!
honestly i never thought about this until you wrote it and now i 1000% agree? like, wow, there are a lot of layers here!
what's funny is that before poking at that link, i actually expected that very image to be what you were referencing! so it was clear what you were leading up to, at least to this brain
aww i love this way of talking about it
all of these ideas are amazing, and honestly, i am enjoying just reading them in this pitch format even if they never become stories. in a way that is Content of its own, you know? the raw idea material, like eating cookie dough raw
super excite
5673259
So many layers! I hadn't realised it either tbh until I started writing about it. Destiny!
love that image! & honestly, some of them are probably better left as ideas lmao
You have me intrigued with the tease of the coming attraction. And I much prefer the accidentally canon image to the intended one. Don't you love a good bit of serendipity?