From everyone's friend to everyone's enemy, Gladmane has always been larger than life.
He started off as a used cart salespony in a backwater desert village, but there was no way he was staying there. For he has dreamed the Equestrian Dream, and why be a small-time businesspony when you can be a king?
In a humble hotel, in Las Pegasus the city of dreams, where even the clouds are within an earth pony's grasp, Gladmane plans to show what a heart of gold he truly has. And to hide his mind of steel.
After all, he's good at making friends. He makes everyone happy. And he knows how mean and ruthless the world can be; it's what he's had to fight against just to get here.
So why does his conscience start to prick him, the closer and closer he gets to his greatest performance ever?
Let's just hope he doesn't end up dead on a toilet, eh?
This is a nice redemption arc. It is redemption, right?
Also, now I want a sequel:
Gladmane is in an old folks home. And a mummy attacks.
Now this was a good story.
Obligatory
I love the image you picked. For some reason I find the shot of a chunky anxious cartoon horse to be adorable.
10520239
Nah, he'll either get abducted by horse aliens or end up working at the local chip shop.
10520466
Honestly, I'd have said "no" myself, but at the same time, I did write the ending in a somewhat ambiguous fashion, so now I'm interested in how people will interpret it. An unorthodox form of self-redemption, or history tragically repeating itself? Or something else entirely? Reader interpretation may yet fascinate me further.
Also, that's a heck of a film reference, buddy.
10520842
Why, thank you. Why, thank you very much.
(Come on, how could I not? You all saw it coming a mile away.)
10520942
Of course.
10522426
Who knew thwarted con artist Elvis impersonators could ever reach the status of "adorable"?
Incredibly surprised this managed to get featured. Between the obscure Gladmane tag and the notorious tragedy one, I didn't predict it'd get more than a smattering of attention. Thank y'all kindly for the pleasant surprise, and I'm glad to see people enjoying my work!
10520466
Only if we get Bruce for a Very Special Episode of My Little Pony.
Whereupon he would immediately become Best Pony, but I may be biased.
10522845
Bruce Campbell in MLP would be so amazing...
10522833
My wants and demands are more like polite suggestions. Do not feel any obligation to address the desires of the insanity machine that is me.
I don’t know why I went there. I think it’s because of the mixture of him turning into Elvis, and the whole changing identities thing. My mind doesn’t make tangents, it is a tangent.
This was a unique one. I thought that the ending was a little bit of a left turn, and it felt like it moved somewhat faster than the rest of the fic, but I just love the way you've characterised Gladmane here. For a relatively unmemorable oneshot antagonist (I seriously couldn't have told you his name until I read it again in the description here), you really did a lot to flesh him out as a character. I never saw much narrative potential in him before, but I'm looking at Gladmane in whole new ways now. Almost reminds me of the kind of fics we used to get around seasons one and two about Trixie or Gilda. Thank you for writing this.
10547098
I won't say that was intended, but I think it was inevitable, given the approach I was taking. The key decision Gladmane makes is when he's returning by train to the place of his birth, reconsidering his life up to that point. That, in a sense, was the "climax" of the fic. All the stuff at the end was mostly the followup and the setting up of a (theoretical) sequel hook, which meant not letting it drag too long.
I concede, though, it's a bit rushed compared with the rest of the fic. There's always the possibility I misjudged it and didn't flesh the ending out enough. That's a risk I was willing to take, though admittedly while thinking I wouldn't actually suffer much from it.
Myself, I really liked him and the episode he rode in on. One of the highlights of Season Six for me, and not just because it had two of my favourite ponies in it. A lot of this fic's details were extrapolations from the potential I saw in him.
Especially since this isn't even the first Elvis-impersonating villain I've come across.
The less apologistic ones, I hope: I did want to make clear that Gladmane's still at least a bit of a scumbag, even though I also wanted to show he had more than one side to him. I don't mind showing the more fascinating or complex aspects of a villain, but I personally don't believe that should come at the expense of, well, being honest that they're a villain (or, in the case of Trixie and Gilda, "antagonist" would be the better word).
My pleasure!
And thank you in turn for giving me such a thoughtful comment. It's always good to receive such feedback.
10559562
If that's what you were going for, then that makes sense. Personally, I think if it were me, I would've cut the story off a little earlier and saved most of those ideas for the sequel. As-is, this feels fairly self-contained, since we already know what happened to Gladmane after his big decision now.
Viva Las Pegasus wasn't bad. I wouldn't say it was one of my favourites of season six, but I'd definitely say it was one of Michael Vogel's better scripts. It's just that Gladmane, for me, previously fell into the general category of "relatively shallow mid-season antagonists who never returned," just like Suri Polomare, Svengallop, Zesty Gourmand, and probably several others I could name. But this fic pushed him up into a higher tier for me. I sort of view on the same level as, say... Wind Rider, now. Mid-season antagonists who never returned, but who I can now see the depth and potential in.
And this is a feeling I understand well, because I felt the exact same way about Tirek when I was writing World of Traitors, and I know that a lot of people (at least at the time) never saw Tirek as a particularly interesting villain either.
Oh, certainly. I just mean that this fic, like several of those, shows a new perspective on events that I had never considered before. Though maybe it's not the best comparison, because Gladmane was a lot more genuinely villainous. I mean, Trixie was just a showmare that the mane six immediately began heckling, so it's actually pretty easy to paint her as the wronged party at least in Boast Busters, but everything that Gladmane did was clearly deliberate, so you'd have a much harder time arguing that he did nothing wrong.
You put in a lot of work to make Gladmane a pitiable character, and a lot of work to make Gladmane a despicable character. Much more work than the show writers who just used that episode as an excuse to set-up future episodes about Flim and Flam in Las Pegasus.
That was a good story.