Behind the Story: All The Small Things (Plus: A Special Announcement) · 4:36pm Feb 1st, 2023
I feel like I’m getting back into the groove of writing. This story was very fun to write, and while it could’ve used a little more editing (I released this 2 hours from February beginning under a time crunch), I’m proud of it.
The Special Announcement will be at the end of this post.
I endeavored to set out on this story with a simple idea, now, in the show, we see that the Badlands aren’t really what you’d call… “hospitable”. I expect them to be fairly similar to a desert of some kind. Also, add in the whole mad queen and hive mind idea and you’re stuck with a place that’s probably miserable to live in.
So, I set upon writing this story with a simple idea, what would be Thorax’s first reaction to seeing snow?
I live in the United States, and not only that, the Midwest at that, so I first came upon this idea during the massive December winter storm. Namely, the one that hit most of the US and caused some places to lose power and hitting incredibly low wind chill temperatures clocking in at -40° F (in my area), cold enough to be dangerous.
The winter storms were miserable, but it did result in a nice white Christmas, so on my way to my grandparents’ I suddenly realized that there are people who’ve never seen snow before, how would they react to it?
Thorax was the first character who came to mind when thinking about this. This was likely due to a few factors. The first one is that I love this boy and I want to see more of him (and Constantly Changing was fresh in my mind), the second was that he was under whatever mindscrew Chrysalis put him under, at least in my mind, and probably wouldn’t be able to experience snow truly even during infiltrations, and thirdly, my Thorax would absolutely find snow adorable.
For someone who experiences snow on a normal basis, like me, I don’t think too much about snow, but harkening back to my whole idea regarding beauty in the mundane, people who haven’t experienced snow much would find it unusual and have some reaction to it. In a way, this story is very much a 2019-era Dashie04 fanfic, it’s just there’s a femboy in this one.
While the original idea did revolve around Thorax experiencing snow, that idea went on to the backburner as I started writing it. Regarding the whole “Pyramid of Needs” idea in psychology, Thorax wouldn’t be looking to experience snow, he’d be looking for food first and foremost.
Now, the Pyramid of Needs was not in my mind when I wrote this, but I just cross-refrenced the thing and it’s actually very close to the story beats. Maybe that’s a subconscious influence.
So, I had this big long opening where Thorax mulls about being the new changeling king for 600 words, but that dragged on so long, so I was about to figure something out, then HapHazred mentioned in a QnS chat that if your beginnings seem too long, to just axe them.
So I did, and that was actually pretty good advice. You don’t need to know Thorax’s exhaustion and hopelessness, the story’ll do that for you, you don’t need to know he needs food, because that’s just going to be stated when the story kicks off anyways.
So, the story started with Thorax already in Ponyville.
I decided that Thorax would know who ponies are, so he immediately heads to Applejack to ask for food, but it’s winter and a snowstorm is scheduled, so he’s directed to Sugarcube Corner, where afterwards, Mrs. Cake says that you should have clothes for a snowstorm, so he goes to Carousel Boutique to get the clothes, then he heads home with the food. That was not laid out at the start, but I felt each step just naturally flowed into the next.
The characters, even though I don’t write pretty much any of them often, and don’t even have large bullet point lists on any of them except for Thorax, I’m actually quite happy with.
Applejack I wrote as a family-oriented country girl, and I had to include at least one ‘countryism’ in there. Other than that, there wasn’t really much else.
My fellow Midwestern representation, Mrs. Cake, I wrote… well, like a good-natured Midwestern gal. I didn’t include an ope, but that’s something for next time.
And finally, Rarity, who shows up the least, and the one I’m the least confident in my portrayal of. She’s somewhat posh, into fashion, and generous, pretty much my bullet point list of her, she’s not among my favorite characters so it’s probably a little rough.
The entire idea of Thorax wanting to feel comfortable in his skin is partially related to the changeling part pf him, but he’s also not genderfluid or anything, just a femboy, and I tried to make that clear by mentioning he felt uncomfortable infiltrating as a girl.
In fact, the entire story being about how he became a femboy was sort of decided on during the process. I knew my Thorax liked cute things, but this thing is being written directly after Season 6 ends, so the entire story became him coming to terms with liking cute things because he was never able to enjoy cute things, or his life, really, under Chrysalis. So, I figured the story would be about him enjoying life.
The snow actually didn’t come into play until the last section, where Thorax starts to see snow as something unusual and normal about life he can finally appreciate.
That’s pretty much all I can think of worth mentioning. It is possible to see the Pyramid of Needs stuff here: food -> safety (protection from the weather) -> love and belonging. That wasn’t a prominent influence, but maybe a subconscious one. My biggest influences are probably the usual ones (Tangled up in Blues, A Day in the Life of Average Statistic, FabulousDivaRarity), and The Little Things (which coincidentally shares a similar name with my story even though the Blink-182 song was the main refrence).
And I now headcanon changelings as being slightly bigger than ponies, don’t @ me.
Right, you can’t do that on here. However, you might be able to now…
I have a special announcement to make. I’d like to officially announce the official Dashie04 Discord server! I now have over 100 followers, and I figure I might be able to make something out of it. It’s not incredibly detailed, but it’s got some community. You can join if you want, though many people probably won’t.
You can just follow the link, and it should bring you there. If you want to be involved at all, you can be.
And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie
