Noodleverse thoughts and plans, plus a small Playing House note! · 11:50pm Dec 1st, 2022
So Playing House got a review by PaulAsaran! Check it out! Also note that Call of the Mountain is finished. On that note, the rest of this blog will be about Noodleverse, so jump ship now if ye not be noodly.
So now that Call of the Mountain is done, I thought I'd get a bit nostalgic with you all. I know that there aren't a ton of followers of the Noodleverse. It's maybe weird that I want to dedicate so much time and effort to a series that's not that successful when I have Who We Become right there. Of course, personal interests rarely link up with little things like success, and I'm personally invested in Noodleverse these days. On that note, I'm working on the next entry, but more on that later.
First, I want to talk about my own feelings on the series, and not just on my writings in it, but the series as a whole. Because it exists in a very special place in my heart. See, back in 2016 I met Pasu, who became one of my closest and most treasured friends. I also met a few other folks around this time, all Tumblr artists like Adgerelli and CarouselUnique. We formed a little friend group, and then in 2017, Pasu started a Discord server. Others soon joined, like Hoofclid and Rawreinstien. These became my first pony friend group, and largely my first ever online friend group (as opposed to having a lot of different individual one on one online friends).
Around this time, I habitually went through Pasu's blog to see more of her old art, and I dug up the Noodle AU (calling it the Noodleverse was a later thing and revolved around the term "verse" being more popular than "AU" on Fimfiction). It was, IIRC, only four posts at that time and had been abandoned. I pestered Pasu about it, she restarted it, and it became a mutual obsession of ours. Importantly, it was an interest shared with our friends.
The thing with this friend group is it was full of amazing artists, with a few fanfic authors (namely me and Deathscar) thrown in for good measure. That led to a lot of collaborative works, and drawing each other's AUs was common. When I look through the Noodleverse, I see tons of amazing art by a wealth of my old friend group.
But as often happens, we drifted apart. It's not dramatic, most of us still know and talk to each other. But life moves people places. Even so, that friend group and the memories of the time with them are extremely deer to me. Because aside from that? I was spiraling into worse and worse depression all the time. At the end of 2016, I had a major mental breakdown. It came to a head in 2019 when I tried to kill myself. So when I look back on what I did at that time – Looking Glass, Playing House, etc. – I see a lot of baggage. I remember what headspace I was in when I wrote that stuff. But when I look at Noodleverse art, it's so pure to me. It doesn't have any of that, it's a way to relive what the good times in that important part of my life was like.
None of which matters to any of you! But I had thoughts and I wanted to share them lol. If it was just a nostalgia kick for me, I'd've dropped it by now. But I have an idea for a six-part story (recently dubbed the Harmony's Chosen story arc) which I think will be very very good. I've written parts one and two now (Call of the Mountain and Heart of the Forest) and I've got a prologue and a good chunk of chapter one done for the next story, Way of the Road. That one will be a Pinkie Pie focused story, and I'm extremely happy with the plans for it. It was workshopped with bats, because in addition to her being an amazing writer and storyteller, when you live with someone it's easy to workshop with them haha.
In other Noodly news, Pasu is drawing a 19 Noodleverse page comic! I'll let y'all know when that's out, but for now, remember you can see the Noodleverse on her blog as well as on Manebooru.
So if you haven't read Call of the Mountain yet, go check that out! It's a good intro point to the Noodleverse and I'm pleased with it myself 
Neat! I just finished reading the two stories that are out and loved them.
I'm enthused to hear there are plans for more!
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Awesome! I'm always extremely happy when folks read those stories, as you can see in this blog post they hold a special place for me. For the past year I've been bouncing around a ton on what I'm writing, but I'll be coming back to Noodleverse and the in process fic Way of the Road sometime soon I hope!