The Spike Has Been Berried – Author’s Notes · 6:20pm Dec 27th, 2022
With a pairing of these two for my Jinglemas story this year, it took quite the restraint to avoid making the obvious pun in the story*: a pun so obvious, the show put it in a Season 1 episode written before Berry Punch had even been designed as a background pony. Light spoilers below for the story, of course; read at your own discretion.
* The story title isn’t just subverting the obvious pun: being berried means something is bearing berries, or is like one, so it’s a punny way to show the effect she has on him over the course of the story.
Three times makes a tradition as they say. Not Jinglemas itself, even though this is my third time, consecutive and altogether. Nope, this was also the third time I got a character pairing that left me quite stumped at the outset.
Not for Spike; being my second-favourite personal FiM character, tackling him was something I was quite reciprocal to. Neither was it necessarily for Berry Punch; she’s a background character whose fandom personality largely consists of “town drunk”, but that didn’t ostensibly have to be how I used her. After all, last year I wrote for Vinyl Scratch and Octavia without using their usual fandom incarnations (as fillies, with Vinyl being the one who needed to mellow out more than Octavia, and also with the offbeat storytelling device of a mute Vinyl as the perspective character without it being being a focal point or an obstacle to the storytelling; this remains my proudest achievement with the story).
Largely, the difficulty stemmed from the two being put together, for there’s no connecting tissue in the show to base it off. Also ostensibly fine, fanfiction makes wonders with this. But I strained for several weeks to concoct a story idea that felt fresh and didn’t feel derivative, but was also something I could actually write.
For, you see, the biggest obstacle here was, I cannot write drunk characters. Tried it in the past, and the results were terrible. Either for being a joke character, or in a more serious light. Yet that felt like what Winter_Solstice wanted (in their request, they cited the story It Spills Over as one of their favourites), making me reluctant to go in the direction of a comedy I’d have picked if left to my own devices. So, I banged my head against something in this direction for several weeks, before I had to admit to myself it wasn’t going to work, and I needed to just follow my gut on the characters. At that point, I started to make progress.
Anyone who knows me knows I prefer the first half of Friendship Is Magic to its second half, and even more specifically, the first three seasons, when Twilight was still a unicorn (friendly reminder that I only discovered the show via the 2017 movie five years ago, so this isn’t nostalgia talking). Might not be instantly obvious if you were to look at my written Ponyfic, given two of my prior stories break this: my first Jinglemas story, Shouldering a Holiday Burden, was a Season 8 Silverstream/Gallus story, while my second, The Endeavor Within, is a Gen 5 story. However, even there, there is a trend: I often gravitate towards an earlier stage in a series or at least a character’s ongoing story, when they’re still discovering themselves, still don’t quite know the other primary character super well, still fall back on their old natural instincts they haven’t quite move out of. And the story pivots on these factors, for the longer a story or character goes on, generally, the harder it is to have them surprise while remaining consistent. This is, after all, a problem the show ran into more with each season. My other stories rely on this too: New Wave of the Frozen Variety is about Vinyl and Octavia’s first meeting as fillies, while even my entry for the Thousand Words Contest, Madame Pinkie Pie's Project, basically a plot skeleton for several gags I’d been sitting on for ages, pivots on this being the first Ponyville Science Fair Twilight bears witness to.
That’s a roundabout way of saying I was keen on depicting, if not the first interaction between Spike and Berry Punch, at least the buildup of some kind of rapport. As one of my writing goals is to branch beyond relaxed-pace stories depicted more-or-less in real time across a scene or two, my first outline centered around jumping between several interactions between the pair at the margins of canon episodes, and a few invented wholesale; it would have started with Spike meeting her after the Running of the Leaves in Fall Weather Friends, being impressed at how she went right from running to manning her drinks cart for everypony. She’d have noted he made a good commentator, they would have had some pleasant chat. Similar situations would have occurred after the Sisterhooves Social, and a few other The story’s back half would have concerned a single scene of the two crossing paths on Hearth’s Warming Eve (likely in the aftermath of the play in the titular episode), building off their prior impressions of one another, leading to some fluffy but deep takeaways about both each other and the holiday.
It’s probably not a surprise I struggled to flesh out this story skeleton, for the obvious problem that I was trying to force character moments out of a plot rather than the other way around. Didn’t help that it also felt like the old fanfiction fallback of scenes at the margins of episodes that try to make an importance out of something we never see onscreen, tricky to pull off at the best of times. I knew it could work, but on my tight schedule, it looked unlikely.
It was at this point that, while shooting the breeze with hawthornbunny, that we took to an old writing exercise to see what other directions I could take it in. Basically just firing off whatever ideas came to mind. Given our personalities, most of these were comic vignettes, suited maybe for a gag here or there, but not really for an actual story. However, it did its intended goal, getting the creative juices flowing, and got me to take a fresh look at these characters, and see what I could do with them. Moreso, three of the ideas here did make it into the story. Two – “Berry is inventing a new drink for Hearth's Warming and dragonfire is a key component” and “Berry introduces Spike to Ogres and Oubliettes” – ended up more as side plot details or gags, but important ones. But one of them – “Spike is doing some work for Berry Punch as an apology for the damage caused during his greed-induced rampage” – ended up as the plot’s inciting incident, after a fashion.
At this point, my intention for the characterisation of Berry Punch was something akin to that of her in GapJaxie’s fantastic The Perfect Drink, an omnipresent, all-knowing wise bartender type. But apart from having severe doubts at being able to pull this off, it was pushing the story towards one where all the character development and growth was on Spike’s end. Which was probably one reason I was having trouble cracking my prior outline. Plus, I was keen on avoiding a lot of the common pitfalls of Spike’s fandom characterisation, which tend to either lean too hard on him being treated like a kid and wanting respect/equal treatment to the Mane 6, or make him akin to the age and EQ of other Ponyville foals like the Cutie Mark Crusaders. This proved hard when the development/arc/growth was all on his end.
One reason I had wanted to try and avoid using Spike’s rampage in Secret of My Excess as the setup was because it felt way too easy a connecting tissue between the two (and also, in my eyes, I was still too much in awe of The Enemy Within by Jake The Army Guy). It also presented the dilemma of why Spike would be getting advice on this from Berry Punch over any of his other friends. But then I thought, who says it has to be the immediate aftermath? Who’s to say I can’t have this sometime after that, where Spike is mostly over it and okay about it, but there’s still some lingering doubts? And show through implication what’s happened since then and now? This also appealed to me because, as Spike is more outgoing than Twilight, it let me run a thread through the story of him having a desire to get to know the whole town, something he hadn’t fully done before this.
The one nut left to crack was Berry Punch; I eventually decided to stick with her as an energetic drinks vendor, one who was capable of dispelling wise knowledge when called on, but was by no means perfect, and a pony who sometimes used her energy and flow as a barrier against those she didn’t quite know how to interact with. This gave me some connecting tissue beyond just “she gets Spike’s addiction-caused rampage”, plus I liked simply implying without confirming that Berry may have had addiction troubles of her own in the past, or simply witnessed them due to her profession. I have my answer, of course, but it’s ultimately left up to the reader. Also, the contrast of Berry Punch sporting reading glasses and trying to do her accounts felt like it had to be told.
There was also the matter of Hearth’s Warming; I liked using it as a catalyst for Spike wanting to volunteer to everypony and get it all done before the holiday was over, so he could fully move on from it all (well, almost fully, I sought to retain an implication that one doesn’t fully move on from such things). Not only did it give an urgency and drive to a story who’s onpage events were rather relaxed, it added a slight bittersweet tinge to it, while still keeping the story a suitably light read for the holidays.
Now that I had an actual character story to work with, the details linking them finally started coming together. Using Berry Punch struggling with her accounts and Spike helping… Well, after I derailed my first Jinglemas story into a 1K+ exercise using cross-cancelling equations to solve a friendship problem, I guess it’s fitting for me! But it also acted as a do-over on that, being plot relevant, making sense, a good catalyst, providing some amusing lines and imagery. It was also important for me to not push too far towards Spike knowing it all offhand – he isn’t an adult, even if many of us wish he would be – so making it so that it was just his ease at parsing the helpbook that got them through it, rather than him knowing it offhand, was key. Also, it’s probably just my growing distaste at G5 (and most kids’ media) feeling the need for modern social media and technology, but having ponies crunch numbers using an abacus was such a satisfying little detail.
I still got to use Berry Punch winning the Sisterhooves Social as a jumping-off point for the conversation towards the end, even if it was no longer a key plot point. And doesn’t Berry feel like exactly the kind of pony who’d make a big deal out of a 3rd place Ludo ribbon?
Getting back to Spike, I wanted to lean into the implication that his personality and somewhat subservient ways were a byproduct of how he grew up, without making that the point. It was also out of this that the final scene, which didn’t exist in the outline, came about: originally the story ended with Berry Punch giving Spike the O&O set as a gift. But given what the duo ended up talking about as regards Spike, how he’s coped with this, and his relationship with his friends, it felt right to have a coda with him and Twilight. To reinforce how wonderful a friendship they have, show how the events of Secret of My Excess has let her to acknowledge and appreciate Spike more directly than she once did, more directly refer to what they might have talked about prior to Spike starting to volunteer around town. And it also let me use the upcoming play they’re putting on as a light anecdote to splice in some more character moments, in Spike pretending it’s Twilight and not him who needs more line practice, and her rolling with it in her snarky way.
Berry Punch using Pinot Noir as her work drink is a nod to that being the wine of choice Lauren Faust had while working late nights during the development of Friendship is Magic, and that it was also her personal name for the character, who later got different names in both the fandom and the merchandise (Berryshine for the latter, though Berry Punch has been used on occasion).
After all that, how do I feel about the story? Moderately happy, though there are for sure aspects I wish had been better. I had aimed to write a story around the 4K mark, to do something that was denser and faster-paced. Yet it ended up at 6.1K. It is still dense and fast enough, what with being split into five scenes, especially out of the gate, so I don’t feel it drags, but there’s some level on which having the last scene between Spike and Berry take up 2.1K isn’t right. I seriously considered scrapping the 500-odd words of Spike asking Berry why she acted the way she did earlier, but as it was pivotal to a setup from earlier and its absence left the character development and insight too lopsided in Spike’s favour, I didn’t pull the trigger on this. Still up for debate whether I should have done this, but it is a Jinglemas gift; more is sometimes more.
More prominently, I’m not altogether sure the prose style and perspective voice worked as well as I’d have liked. It suits Spike, and after some late edits I felt I achieved a balance of hinting at his dilemma without outright addressing it until Berry made him talk about it. But perhaps the prose is still largely functional. Similarly, I think the dialogue for the two mostly fits their personalities and gets their characterisation across well, but might still be merely functional for stretches. Possibly if I’d been able to crack the story earlier, maybe loop in an editor to advise on this aspect, this might have been stronger. Certainly, I’m not altogether sure whether the varying subtexts and implications throughout really land as strongly as I’d sought.
Oh, and I still struggle to find/assemble suitable fanart cover images, evidently, if my falling back on a screenshot pairing here is any indication. Least it captures their personalities as I wanted to come across in the fic, and Berry holding a fruit/fruit juice barrel feels especially appropriate.
But, I do feel the characterisation of both characters is solid, and there’s enough flair to the dialogue along the way to make it skate on by. Considering this is my most dialogue-dense story thus far (a 180 to the Vinyl/Octavia story last year that didn’t even have 400 spoken words across its 5.1K, which will happen when your perspective character doesn’t speak and and the other character is only onpage for just over half of it), that’s no mean feat. So, it works well enough. Hopefully Winter_Solstice likes it, even if it’s certainly no It Spills Over.
Over 2,600 words on this one? Well, it did have quite the back-and-forth to settle on the depictions of the characters and the story…
