It's Called Boxing Day Because It Makes You Want To Hit Something · 3:50pm Dec 26th, 2022
Turns out going through the holidays when you're out of a job is a hard hit financially. Who knew.
I'm going to keep this part short and sweet, because I don't want my blog to turn into spilling a million details of my life out onto a screen for all to see (let's save that for stories, where you all can speculate to your hearts' content who is the thinly veiled self-insert in a given tale), but my original goal on my Ko-Fi has been changed to "recovery from the holidays" instead, and while I don't have my hopes up high, since I know all of you are in the same boat... if you can spare anything, it's appreciated. I'll also be putting up a blog either later today, or early tomorrow, with rules for commissions, because it's clearly time to bite that bullet, so if you've looked at my catalog and there's something you want to see me tackle, here's your chance.
As for the original goal... my Kindle Unlimited has officially been cancelled, to keep my monthly money obligations lower, but I have come into ownership of some gift cards over the course of the month, so I should hopefully be able to buy a couple of comic volumes relevant to The Long Eventide. And for those who've read the latest chapter and are familiar with the comics, you might be able to guess which ones...
A shame that the nyx don't have a species tag, really, though I suppose for comics-related characters there isn't as much demand. It would normally be as easy as simply searching stories for the word, but unfortunately "Nyx" has a very different meaning to most people in the fandom, so trying that just reminded me how few of the "classic" MLP fanfics of the early days I'm all that familiar with. I wouldn't have even known that the likes of Rainbow Factory or Cupcakes existed if not for the fanworks that sprung up around them, honestly.
Oh well. It'd be nice to know if I'm the first to use them, but I'll be forging my own path regardless of whether previous portrayals exist, and it seems that Hypnos's appearance led to an appropriate level of "oh shit," judging by the comments. Silly ponies, summoning and consorting with outsiders mortal minds can barely comprehend...
Every once a while, you accidentally do something that, if it'd been intentional, would be a brilliant little Easter Egg.
It's safe to say that zebras are under-utilized in My Little Pony, to put it mildly. The season 10 comics eventually gave us a glimpse of their homeland, but otherwise we just had Zecora, and she didn't even have many appearances. Fans have done a lot of filling in the blanks, as we're wont to do, since even with the glimpse of Farasi, there's a lot of blanks left that need filling.
But while Zecora was the first, and nearly only, zebra in Gen 4, she wasn't the first in the franchise as a whole. Like many, I wasn't really a fan before FIM happened and only knew MLP by the occasional glimpse of the ponies themselves in toy aisles of stores or a rare DVD of the specials being at eye level at those same stores. Still, I'm aware that FIM was mining the older generations for material (hi Tirek) and some fanfic writers do the same, so in the process of building background notes for my budding 'verse, I've done a little digging of my own.
I was vaguely aware of the character of Zeb, from the My Little Pony 'n Friends era. What I was not aware of, until recently, was a toyline-only gem.
Meet Zig Zag, from G1
She's even pink.
This wasn't intentional. If it were, my Zigzag would have had mint green stripes instead of pastel blue, to be closer to the source, for starters. But apparently my decision that it would make a good name for a zony was correct, since the source material itself beat me to it.
Does it count as a Mythology Gag if you had no idea you were making it? Either way, it gave me a much-needed laugh.
That depends on the "why". If it's to control the outsiders, it's gonna go pear-shaped. If it's just to make friends, it has a pretty good chance of turning out just fine.