Soothe Them explained... kinda?

(Spoiler)

Boo! Did I scare you? That wasn't my intention, I just wanted to get you in the mood to read my blog post about Sooth Them. I have to immediately put out there that I'm a one Doodl3r army and the editing isn't that good. A pattern, as seen in my many stories. Speaking of loneliness, that was the main theme in Soothe Them.

So, I wanted to use the undead as a metaphor. A metaphor? Yes, a metaphor of being surrounded by many people but not being in the crowd. I started accidentally making Autumn sound like me near the end of the fic because of this. Lucky for Autumn, she achieved what I couldn't. Originally I wanted to make the ending ambiguous but I rushed it and threw that neat concept out of the window. In fact, the fic would've been ten thousand words but I mentioned how I didn't want to make it that huge. It's why the other Them stories felt so impactful to me... they were... Bite sized? Unlike the other stories, Soothe lacks the emotional weight the others had.

I wanted to make it span within the time frame of a week, detailing Autumn finding the ingredients to make the tea, having a little trial and error as insanity slowly took over. And that's what I wanted to go with but I like to write a lot, unfortunately. Another scrapped concept that only a part made it inside of the final publish is her shadow being a physical manifestation of the last bit of sanity/morality. Instead, things became a little messy. I failed to convince myself— and by extension, the reader— of how big of a toll the loneliness is taking on her. But what I give myself a little hair flip over is not even outright mentioning the isolation. That's as far as the compliments go.

Hopefully this is considered canon although I do have to explain why the niriK form doesn't look appetizing for the undead. I believe my original explanation was that niriKs are mostly fire, taking away any fleshy scent? I dunno, I guess it just made sense to me at the time, that her dead friends wouldn't want something that is mostly fire. Speaking of which— the dark magic parry.

In Origin of Them and Entertain Them, it's revealed that using magic isn't a great idea. Why does turning into a niriK deflect the effects of the undead virus? I forgot my huge explanation. Again, it just made sense to my that niriKs, as a source of similar dark magic, wouldn't be phased by the virus. But this needed to have a trade off, don't you agree? And that's also mentioned in Soothe Them. Autumn used the form so much, she wasn't angry anymore. niriks are said to be entirely emotional based and this silly gal was desensitized to her friends being gone.

Now for an explanation about that ending. She simply wanted to end her loneliness. Earlier in the story I made this scene seem important with her staring at the mysterious figure walking in the distance. I mentioned why Autumn couldn't cry but let me elaborate... it gave her hope of another pony being out there but once the figure left, her hope died. And that's when the shadow came into the picture. Am I making any sense? Anyway, if this were canon, I'd like to think it takes place a little bit before Guide Them (a few months in) but when the airship arrived AFTER the outbreak is an unspecified amount of time. To be totally honest, I haven't thought about the timeline at all.

Moving on to conclude this, I was inspired by Feed Them and Understand Them mostly. Hex, I even commented on Sleepless’ story admitting how similar my piece is. And for Feed Them, I drew from the the idea of caring for an deceased friend.

Now, I can finally work on my contest story. This was interesting to write because I wanted to focus on the mental health of somepony going through the post apocalypse.