Post-FotW giga rambles · 7:28am Mar 18th, 2023
You can think of this as a long wrap-up blog for FotW, where I share my final thoughts about it. I meant to post this months ago, but then started waiting for one commission.
While the comm itself is ready, I'm still waiting for the artist to post it. I think I'll just make this post now, then do a separate blog post with the fanart I got, and some of the stuff I've commissioned. Because yes, I'm narcissistic enough to commission art of my own story.
In fact, this big commission was kind of a carrot on a stick for me. It's (part) of what got me to push myself to write every single day.
I've kinda been writing and rewriting this blog since November, so there's bound to be repetition and maybe slight inconsistency. I've given it a once-over, but it's probably not perfect. Buuuut I ain't about to spend an hour proofreading a blog post.
I got a lot of things to say. I'll start off with things like character trivia and other fun/semi-fun facts. Then I'll talk about the things I'd change, and what I've learned (because holy hell did I learn a lot writing this fic.)
Just a small disclaimer: even though it'll seem like I'm harsh on my writing, rest assured that that I do overall like FotW and am very proud of it. Not only am I proud of just getting it finished at all, but I also genuinely think volume 3 is well-written. So this is not me putting myself down for pity points, far from it.
Oh, and obviously, spoilers. If you haven't finished the fic, turn back now. Also, don't take anything I write in here as gospel. It's just meant as a "fun fact" kind of post.
General Character Rambles
I have a lot of things to say about Iron, but I don't know if I'll mention them all.
The spark that created Iron in my mind was from Project Horizons, chapter 2. Scoodle, to be exact. The idea of a filly who's really good with guns just struck a chord with me. Then, there was Cozy Glow, who made me realise how much I liked the concept of an evil filly. Finally, the last piece of the inspiration cocktail: Diamond Tiara (aka best filly)
Iron started off as an NPC for a fallout Equestria campaign I decided to run. Her story was similar to FotW's first chapter, but different. Her father was the mayor of a town, and he tasked my players with "saving his daughter from the bandits that captured her"; however, she'd run away because she was tired of his abuse.
Fast forward to them bringing her back to him, and her deciding to kill him to get her revenge. In the process, she awoke a murderous sadism within her.
I liked her concept so much that I ended up deciding to write an actual story for her. Fast forward almost four years, and here we are.
A character that ended up influencing how I wrote older Iron was Tempest Shadow (huge surprise, you would have never guessed, I know, I know). I didn't start off with Tempest in mind, but the more I wrote, the more similar the two became, and the more inspiration I drew from Tempest.
Something I've mentioned before is that I was planning Iron to become a full-blown raider as she spiralled down and down until Candy pulled her out of that cycle by force. Iron was then going to dedicate herself to the betterment of the wasteland to gain back Candy's love (sound familiar?), and in the process would join up with Star Seeds, who would convince her that he's a good pony willing to do anything to fix the wasteland.
With her skewed moral compass, Iron would then listen to everything he would say and take it as gospel. Eventually, Candy would then find out about the atrocities that Iron committed for Star Seeds and the two would have a confrontation that would end in the death of one or the other.
But as I wrote her and as I refined her, I ended up finding that this stuff wouldn't work for various reasons due to the kind of pony she'd become.
Then, there's the fact that I would have had to kill off Banter, Lockpick and Petal just to have Iron spiral down into raiderhood. In hindsight, just getting kicked from the group would probably have had the same effect, but I didn't really think of it back then. Regardless, I didn't like the idea of using those
three as disposable characters for the sake of hurting Iron.
In the end, I did end up shelving Banter and Petal because I had no reason to keep them around after Banter's betrayal. Or so I thought. In hindsight, I
probably could have made a dramatic reunion of the three with Iron. But then, that would have made the already convoluted ending even more convoluted.
Needless to say, I'm not happy with how I wrote Banter and Petal.
Lock, on the other hand, I very much am. At first, she was going to be a foil for Iron. Similar age, similar backstory, but drastically different result. I was also planning to mostly use her for emotional damage purposes. Essentially, kill her off to hurt Iron.
That would have been dumb. What I ended up doing, instead, was way better. Iron first helped make Lock a better pony by encouraging her to mature. Then, Lock noticed that Iron is quite a bad pony, and yet still saw her as admirable. This started her downward spiral into vice and selfishness, and I genuinely liked her arc. I was tempted to give her a bad end, but she's a selfish pony willing to screw over others to maintain her position. There's no way someone like that gets a bad end unless you're trying to go for karmic justice.
Candy Cane
I've said this before, but Candy was originally supposed to be disliked.
No, no, you can stop laughing now. I swear that wasn't a joke. She was originally going to be a shitty, cynical subversion of the caring hero trope. Yeeeeaaah, just admitting that makes me want to hide. I don't know why I thought a subversion of any kind would ever make for good writing.
She was going to be an obnoxious mix of Velvet Remedy and BJ's personalities, which makes her cutie mark's inspiration pretty obvious. She was gonna be a heroic semi-pacifist with a bleeding heart who lacked any perspective and believes her morals are the (only) correct ones.
It wasn't until I typed this sentence that I realised just how much in common this early version of Candy has with the fic's actual villain. Which is fitting, given that Candy was originally meant to end up as a minor villain.
And Iron was originally going to kill her off either very early on, or at the end of volume 1. Then, I got invested in her relationship with Iron, and decided it would be very shitty writing to have Iron kill her off.
However, Candy still needed to be killed off. Iron's character arc demanded it. At the very least, she needed to be separated from Candy. In hindsight, I probably didn't need the convoluted plot to split them up. I could have just had Candy believe Iron's dead, while Iron actively wants to get away from Candy in a childish show of rebellion. Would have led to a very different fic, though.
Character SPECIALS
A fun little thing worth mentioning is characters' specials. When I started writing this, I used a New Vegas character creator to assign points, but eventually switched to having a vague idea of their stats, and deciding that the totals didn't really matter. Hell, I don't even have the original stat distributions I had at first, but out-of-stable Iron had the gifted trait.
Young Iron's SPECIAL:
S - 2
P - 9
E - 2
C - 7
I - 10
A - 6
L - 8
Not really much to comment on, except maybe the Int score given her rash decisions, but I like to think that high int characters don't need to be wise if they have other reasons. I realised I already posted those a while ago, but they can stay here as a refresher. They're probably slightly different than what I posted before, but they're kinda just an estimate anyway.
Starting with the second arc, they became:
S - 3
P - 9
E - 5
C - 4
I - 7
A - 6
L - 8
Perception stayed the same, because even though her hearing deteriorated, her eyesight compensated.
Charisma dropped because she lost the whole "cute filly" vibe she had at first, but also because of her raider-like attitude.
Intelligence dropped because it turns out that being an alcoholic at the age of 12 really does hamper your brain's development. Who woulda thunk.
If you're wondering why Iron's luck stat is so high despite her having a really shitty life, it's due to my little headcanon that luck is more about a character's fate. A character with a high luck stat has a strong destiny, whether or not they want it. More often than not, though it's fairly benign.
Candy's stats are similarly lopsided
S - 9
P - 3
E - 9
C - 7
I - 5
A - 9
L - 1
The low luck stat is a lot less weird than Iron's high one, but I do wanna talk about it a bit. Candy was completely unbound from destiny, with only her actions determining how likely an event was. She didn't have a destiny, and was truly free to do whatever she wanted (but also meant that she was likely to get unlucky when facing someone with high luck). I know it's not really a super fleshed out idea, but hey, shit's meant to be vague.
Things I learned, things I would do differently, and more rambles
A huge issue with the fic is the first part. The big thing that makes it sub-par is the lack of any real narrative structure or character development.
That's partly because I frankly didn't really know what I was doing back then (you get better at something as you do it, who would have guessed). The character development issue came from the fact I wanted Iron to be a huge schizo from the get-go, when instead I should have gone for something like manic episodes that get worse over time.
There's also the issue that I didn't have a super good outline for the story for the entire first part. Yeah, oops. I started off with a simple outline, but as I went, details and new ideas were accumulating so quickly that, by the fourth chapter, I'd already completely derailed that plan (as mentioned in the section about Candy). And good, because my original outline was shit. Think PH volume 9 levels of shit (as in, the fic's tags would have become [Anime][Cool][Edge][Misery Porn]).
Plot problems are something that still happens even with my current skill. Volume 3 had that issue as well. Originally, Cherry was not planned to be a major character, and certainly not the main love interest. He was introduced because I liked the idea of Iron having her own slave that she would normally treat decently, but when things got rough, she'd turn abusive.
Fuck, originally, Iron was going to offer him freedom before going into the stable (as is still the case), but was going to deeply hurt him when she found out just how bad her mother's schemes were (in essence, that hasn't changed either, though I did add the revelation that Candy is alive; as an extra layer of salt into the wound).
However, the way she was gonna hurt him became very different than the original idea. At first, I was just going to have her rape him. Threaten to not set him free if he didn't do as told.
Then, I realised that this wouldn't be enough of a major character moment, so I needed to have the two grow at least a little bit closer.
Then, I realised that this really wouldn't be in caracter for her. Kind of obvious in hindsight. Yeah, it would play into the whole "abuse is a cycle" thing I was going for, but until then I really hadn't given Iron any real sexual urges, so it would have been a bit outta nowhere. Of course, I might have been able to get away with it if I made it clear that it was a breaking point for Iron; as in, yet another extremely unhealthy coping mechanism. Buuuuut I was closing in on the ending, and wouldn't have had the time to explore that new aspect of hers.
I also had the idea that maybe she might not realise what she's doing is wrong. But that was quickly scrapped because it's fucking stupid.
So, I switched to the next best thing: she beats him up when he tries to get her to calm down. That scene could have been written from Iron's perspective; I would have been able to convey that frenzy much better. But also explain her thought process, and what drove her to do it.
In the end, Cherry's perspective was chosen because it better conveyed just how fucked up this was. He was just trying to help her, and get beaten up because of it. It was just a matter of picking the more emotionally charged option.
Pacing
Something I need to improve as a writer is my "setup phases". You might have noticed that there are slower sections and faster ones in FotW. Volume 1, for instance, has that whole "surviving the wasteland with Candy" thing going at first, but then everything falls into place. Well, maybe it's a bad example because the emotional climax of volume 1 was so poorly executed.
As a sidenote, I recently re-read an old favourite of mine that has the same issue. It's an AU fic that spends 3/4 of its wordcount building up to the actual plot. While that buildup can be interesting when you don't know what the AU is about, it falls flat the moment you do. Same thing can be said about my fic's first volume. FotW meanders a bit too much, and I'm 99% sure it's lost me some readers.
A similar thing can be said about volumes 2 and 3, just to much lesser extents. Volume 2 was relatively short, and the mystery of "who did Iron become" can keep readers intrigued. Actually, you know what? I think volume 2 might not have that issue at all.
Volume 3 on the other hand has pretty big timeskips happen between its chapters. This leads the fic to feel a bit exposition-y. Thankfully, the real meat of Iron's POV starts with chapter 21, so the wordcount wasted is not too big.
The way to improve all that is to set up the universe and characters as the plot progresses. The point isn't to cut any and all setup, because that would be stupid and might lead to aforementioned [Anime][Edge][Cool] fics. My next fic's already been restructured once, with another one on the way, just to improve the pacing (without losing any exposition).
Funnily enough, I've also realised there are parts where the pacing is way too fast. The biggest offender in that regard is chapter 15, and I think it's just due to my own impatience. I wanted to get to volume 3 as fast as possible. I wanted to reveal Plat's deceitful nature, and the fact that Candy had survived.
So yeah, I should have split that particular chapter up and added a bit of context.
Close calls/fakeout deaths
You know what's funny? I'm very much not fond of fakeout deaths. Moments where a story convinces you a character is dead, only to reveal that "jk, he lived".
The funny part is that I have a lot of those in FotW. Most of them semi-accidental. Lemme explain.
Stuff like Cherry's injury in the metro. Or Iron's Gloam-induced neck wound. None of these were meant to give the idea that the character actually died, and it's my failure as an author if they did. Those many moments come across as "oooh, did she die? find out on the next episode!", and that's not really the intent.
They're kind of just meant to be close calls. Wounds that were barely treated in time. Of course those scenes were meant to be tense, but I don't like that they came across as fakeout deaths.
Now, onto the elephant in the room. Candy's fakeout death. That one was (obviously) entirely on purpose, and it was kind of born of my obsession with bad tropes, and what makes them bad. In the case of this trope, the main issue is that characters kinda just accept it, and it's treated like no big deal. For instance, in jojo, a main character gets killed on screen, only to come back a few episodes later, and it's completely underwhelming.
This kind of stuff especially undermines when you plan to actually kill off a character. Yet, I'm kinda fine with that in Iron's case. She's seen so many close calls, it really was just a matter of time before one of them was too
close.
Things I should have cut
Sonata. She was inspired by an anime villain of the jojo variety, and I regretted putting her in just a few chapters after doing so. The original idea was to have Iron be the main personality and kind of cage Sonata, all while doing awful raider shit. Super boring (at least past the initial exciting phase).
So when I changed the plot, Sonata became an artefact of the past. I couldn't just forget her and hope the audience did too, but I also didn't want to deal with yet another protagonist (especially one as bland as Sonata). So, the next best thing was to make her into a villain. I'll admit it wasn't the most graceful of transitions, but it got the job done.
If I could easily do so, I'd still remove her. She's not necessary to the emotional plot of the story (in fact, she detracts from it). All she is is an anime-esque plotpoint. However, her existence helped simplify one thing: the Goddess' leniency towards Iron. Even then, it was mid explanation at best.
Rating
Oh, one more thing I regret is making this fic M-rated. I'm pretty sure that, without the heavy gore, I could have gotten away with a T-rating. (The scene at the end of chapter 4 might have needed to be slightly toned down, but not much else apart from that.) For one, it would have made forced the fic's edge to be less in-your-face, which could have helped de-suckify volume 1.
Second, it would have gotten me a much bigger audience, since some people skip M-rated fics by principle.
Yeah, it's a bit silly to focus about how popular your work gets, but c'mon, I'm allowed to enjoy knowing that someone else is enjoying the fic (in fact, I absolutely adore reading someone's comments as they progress through the fic, especially when they pick up on foreshadowing).
Things I'm proud of
Yeah this section is just gonna be me stroking my own ego. Feel free to skip.
The villain
One of my big personal points of obsession is moral relativism. I know, I know "I'm 14 and this is deep" and whatnot, but hey, I like it. So having the villain be a "good guy" with "righteous" reasons to be awful was one of my favourite decisions of the entire fic. And it was frankly the most logical choice, given my protagonist is a violent, sadistic murderer, and yet most readers root for her. Well, maybe not during volume 1, but volume 1 is volume 1.
I was originally worried it would immediately be obvious he was the main antagonist when I introduced him. After all, he showed up, suddenly Iron's life takes a massive turn for the worst (somehow), and it's revealed he lied to Iron in the past. Yet, many people were suprised to see his misdeeds. So I guess I did it right.
Sparing the villain
Same thing as the fakeout death thing. This was something that stemmed from a bad trope that I decided to make not-bad. While I dislike the fakeout death trope, I downright despise the "sparing the villain" trope. It's always so fucking pretentious. "Oh noes, killing is wrong! If I kill him I'll be just as bad!!!". Can't think of a single instance where that wasn't obnoxious.
Originally, the plot called for Iron murdering Plat in a fit of fury, and it was going to include a graphic torture scene. In the end, it still kinda did, but not nearly as intense as originally planned.
Frankly, it was the logical thing for her character to do, as seen from the outside. She's a raider whose default solution to any problem is violence. She's prone to fits of anger and enjoys killing. So that's why it was so important to have this be a turning point for her. She didn't spare him out of a pretentious need to be better than him. She spared him because she genuinely wanted to change.
This trope is usually born out of laziness, in my opinion. Authors don't want to think about the moral implications of corrupting the "pure" protagonist, or they need the villain to come back later. In both cases, it's obnoxious. For those protags, refusing to kill the villain is the easy choice, whereas accepting responsibility and killing the villain is hard.
In Iron's case, it's the opposite. She spared him as an attempt to escape her destiny. To escape who she'd become. To her, killing him would have been easy, while letting him live required so much more self-control and determination.
I realise I'm sounding pretty pretentious here, but I genuinely am proud of Iron's character arc. I just hope it didn't come across as pretentious in the fic itself, heheh
Easter eggs and "missable" content.
Most of it is stuff that's been hinted at, but never made obvious. I'm kinda sad no one picked up on this stuff, so here I am spoiling the magic. Since it's not in obvious text, don't take any of this as canon.
To reiterate: Please ignore this if you want. I don't want to impose a specific interpretation on anyone.
I'm sure many of you picked up that Clockwork (one of the alicorns in the epilogue; originally she was called Sprocket) is actually a "reincarnated" Iron, but that's the least obscure of them. (In case you're wondering about "how", I figured it's something along the lines of her mind being destroyed, but her soul went to Unity instead of the afterlife.) Glitter's obviously Sonata.
I've also gone back to make those implications clearer, because I think they're essential to understand the point of the epilogue. The epilogue doesn't exist to show Moonwing's life, or what's become of the wasteland. The epilogue exists to reveal that Iron and Sonata's souls have survived. I just had to camouflage that reveal a little, and maybe I did too good of a job at first.
The other instances aren't quite as obvious. And by that I mean they are pretty damn obscure. I spoilered them because they should be seen more like "author's headcanon" rather than what really happened. These details aren't explicit, and shouldn't be treated as canon.
For instance, there's Bluestar's (birth) mother's name; Cascade.
After her freedom was bought by Iron, the latter helped her find a way to survive, because Cascade was pregnant and had a bum leg. Overall this is the most obscure one, simply because there's no reason to believe the two are connected. It just so happens there's a Cascade-shaped piece and a Cascade-shaped hole.
Then, there's Iron's own pregnancy. It's pretty obscure, too, but less so. The idea was that, given how often she... saw Crow, there's no way she wouldn't be pregnant, and I needed to answer that question without making it a theme.
I probably could have gone with a shitty excuse like "she's sterile" or "there wasn't enough light in Fillydelphia for a mare to be receptive", but the former feels like a shitty copout while the latter doesn't really make sense. They have indoor artificial lighting. Worse, both of those explanations would have needed to be explicit, and I kind of didn't want to tackle that topic directly.
Instead, I made her lose the foal without ever realising she had it. So yeah, Sonata's idea of sending Iron into the Detrot crater to recover an airship cut that short (which is why I mentioned it in Iron's letter to Lock).
As for why I didn't wanna deal with the topic directly… I feel like it didn't have a real place in the fic. The issue is that it's a very delicate topic, and it definitely would have hit Iron hard. On the one hand, she does yearn for a normal life, and does yearn for motherhood. On the other… It would have been the foal of someone absolutely despicable.
It would have been a very heavy theme that would have very strongly taken over the fic. It would have been… too much; too tryhard. In fact, it would have been a bit cliché. I feel like the whole "do I keep my rapist's child?" thing has been done to death, and I would have needed a unique spin to make it interesting.
Finally, a pattern. Every single character with a metal in their name is shady at best. Silver Tongue, Iron, Platinum. Pyrite (the zebra spy/sympathiser). Even Golden Aurora/Golden Chip was quite morally deficient. I'll admit I cut a lot of content about her.
Come to think of it, I can't even remember if I put in any extra hints that Stable 4's second overpony was Arcane's kid. If I didn't, pretend I didn't say anything.
Clockwork
I recently drew Clockwork/Ironcorn, because I felt like putting a face to the name. She's a bit pudgy, and while that mostly stems from my horrible understanding of anatomy, it does fit the character.
Well, overall I thought it was a pretty good story. Any plans for the future?
5718631
Thanks!
And yes, I've been working on a much shorter fic since November, and it's about 80% done. It was originally gonna be set in the same continuity, but I scrapped that idea back in 2021, so it'll be a completely original, medieval-ish AU setting (very mildly inspired by Elden Ring).
It's called Where only Silver Shines, and it's about a stallion training to become a guard for an influential family, only for him to get wrapped up in a political scheme way beyond him.