Symbiosis - Story Notes · 3:11pm Aug 13th, 2023
annotate | ˈænəˌtʰeɪ̯t̚ | verb
To add a critical or explanatory commentary or analysis.
I guess I never really got rid of that author’s-notes bug after writing The Children of Planet Earth. Curse you, Admiral Biscuit!
Prologue
First, let’s go over the etymologies for each of the names of the OCs here.
Our protagonist, Etaoin Shrdlu (pronounced [ˈeɪ̯tʰwɑn ˈʃɹ̩dluː], for those curious), is so-named because these are the first twelve most common letters in English—at least, as represented on the Linotype machine’s keyboard (see below for more information).
His brother, Lorem Ipsum, has arguably a more famous name in typographic circles, but that’s just because the etymology is a lot older. Lorem ipsum is a typical placeholder text, meant to simulate how a page is supposed to be laid out without getting the actual text. Its source is Ciceró’s Dé fínibus bonórum et málórum:
. . . neque porró quisquam est quí dolórem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet cónsectétur adipíscí[ng] velit, sed quia nón numquam [do] eius modí. . . .
(If you’re wondering, dolórem ipsum means “pain itself.”)
Foolscap Folio is a traditional British paper size, measuring 8½ × 13½ inches for printing, or 8 × 13 inches for writing by hand. The United States uses a slightly-tweaked version, 8½ × 14 inches for both purposes, typically called “legal.” The former name comes from the fool (i.e. jester) cap-and-bells watermark used from the fifteen century onward for this specific size.
Minion Fleuron’s name is in two parts:
- Minion is a traditional name for seven-point type (and has nothing to do with Robert Slimbach’s typeface (and Heaven forbid it have anything to do with those yellow jelly bean characters wine moms post on Facebook)).
- A fleuron is a typographical ornament, by definition a stylized flower or leaves.
Cloud Tree, only mentioned by Roseluck, refers to a Japanese style of topiary where trees are pruned in such a way that groups of branches are formed into round, almost-spherical shapes, with stems left thin and exposed—the resulting effect should be reminiscent of clouds. (You wouldn’t be the first to picture this character as a pegasus.)
Lastly, the names of the changeling OCs all come from a personal headcanon. See, I believe the nonpony species speak different languages, and this has popped up before in other works. Gryphons, for instance, speak German, zebras speak Swahili (though this one is rooted in behind-the-scenes stuff), and changelings speak Georgian (here referred to as Cvalebadi (ცვალებადი) [t͡sʰʷɑˈlɛ.bɑ.di], lit. “Variable”). These names are more-or-less symbolic of their roles in Etaoin’s changeling harem; to wit:
- ვარდი (vardi, “rose”)
- ქნარი (knari, “lyre”)
- რძე (rdze, “milk”)
- ბალიში (bališi, “pillow”)
- კედელი (k’edeli, “wall”)
I’m not sure why I first opted to use dictionary entries at the start of each chapter (and this blogpost, by extension), but I liked them too much not to drop them. It did at least help me come up with the plot point of typesetting a dictionary—a massive project that requires a lot of time and delicate typesetting and editing to make the most of each page of such a large volume.
I have a basic version of one such dictionary sitting on my shelf; I had gotten it as part of my third-grade class in 2005. Once you get past the actual dictionary corpus, it incorporates all sorts of fun little tidbits that any elementary school student in America would want to know, such as facts about the fifty states, biographies of all forty-three Presidents (this was before Obama was elected), weights and measures and how to convert between them, texts of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and right on the very last page is “the longest word in the English language” (which, if you’re wondering, is the chemical name for C1289H2051N343O375S8).
Children these days have the luxury of Internet access to look up this information. I didn’t—I had print books, fact-checked and reliable as they are, morning cable news for weather, and that was about it. Hell, I still think of a world with film cameras, floppy disks, payphones (yep, I’m that old-fashioned), no smartphones, and a much wider variety of social media (none of which were used that often—remember MySpace?).
The Wondertype machine is a really, really obvious analogue to the real-life (if obsolete) Linotype machine. Oft billed the “eighth wonder of the world,” it massively sped up the process of typesetting: no longer did you have to put down each glyph one at a time by hand—now, you can simply type and cast entire lines of text in a few seconds. Add more Linotypes, and you can typeset an entire newspaper in an hour. Before the advent of phototypesetting, this was the fastest way to get something on paper for the masses.
Similar to the Linotype is the Monotype system. It also mechanized typesetting, but worked much differently from the Linotype. On one machine, the keyboard, an operator pressed keys to punch instructions into paper tape, which was then fed into a second machine, the caster, that read it with pressurized air. The tape recorded xy coördinates for a type matrix, telling it indirectly which character it was supposed to be. Any competent print shop would use both of these, because they had different purposes:
- The Monotype system was specifically a system—not a single machine that did it all, like the Linotype. The advantage of this is that you didn’t need the same number of each Monotype machine: multiple keyboard operators could feed tapes into a single caster.
The Monotypes emphasized quality, while still making typesetting faster than the old-fashioned way. One could typeset mathematics, sheet music, and other complex documents in this way. The Linotype, meanwhile, emphasized speed above all else: it had just enough characters to typeset upper- and lowercase letters, spaces, punctuation, and that was it. Needed italics? Small caps? Superscripts and/or subscripts? You had to change the type magazine first.
- A third machine, the Intertype, was produced as a Linotype derivative when the relevant patents expired, but had its own improvements—chief among them was the ability to load four type magazines at once and switch between them at will.
The Wondertype combines the best of both: like the Linotype and Intertype, it’s a single machine that one operates with a keyboard, but combined with the mechanisms and type matrices of the Monotype, granting it speed in operation and intricacy in output.
How does it work? It’s a wonder!
Images and typographic decorations like dingbats and fleurons would still be typeset manually, but when these machines take the pressure off having to do body text, it becomes a trivial task.
Tying into my earlier point of nonponies speaking different languages, “Yakut” is, as you might have surmised, the language of the yaks. It also just so happens to be a real Turkic language spoken in eastern Russia, deep in the Siberian tundra, to match the far-north homeland of the yaks.
A previous draft called the language “Kipyak”—a pun on “Kipchak,” a group of Turkic languages spoken across a wide swath of Central Asia, which looked to be the general feeling the yak character designs were going for. Ultimately I substituted in the former, as it made for a better pun.
Books aren’t (usually) printed in individual sheets; they’re split up into little booklets called signatures. Signatures are printed in such a way that they’re then folded in halves, then quarters, and so on until you get to whatever page size you need. The edges are then trimmed away (except for the side that will become part of the book’s spine), and all the signatures gathered and sewn together. Slap on a cover, and boom, you’ve got a book.
Signatures can have varying numbers of pages, but by and large they’ll all be powers of two: 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. (Thus, a single sheet of paper can be thought of as a 2-page signature.) 64-page signatures become unwieldy due to the required number of folds, and past that is practically impossible. In general, the larger the page size, the shorter the signatures tend to be.
Theoretically, a printer can add any size of signature to a book, even mixing signature sizes as needed. In practice, most publishers try to optimize for 16-page signatures only, to reduce costs and printing complexity. The print-on-demand (POD) companies—Ingram, Lulu, and Amazon*—all use 4-page signatures, since they don’t print from sheet webs.
*Yes, just these three, because they actually own their print facilities. Other POD companies simply subcontract one of them.
The walk between the print shop and the Spa was one of the trickiest scenes for me to nail down—in particular, trying to nail down the details Etaoin would pay attention to as he noticed the other mares. I didn’t want him to come off as a complete pervert, mind you, but one should still infer his preferences.
In an earlier draft, Marble also made an appearance here, specifically leaving Sugarcube Corner with Maud and Limestone, but I eventually cut that bit out as there was just too much going on at once.
The bathhouse scene was actually the first thing I’ve written for this story, and in fact I wrote it sometime in September of last year, before the drive crash. (It managed to survive because I kept it on a separate external drive, along with most everything else pony-related.)
But I couldn’t just plop it straight into the current draft: I also had to convert it from third- to first-person, insert Etaoin’s and Vardi’s names, expand a few parts (in more ways than one), and do a few minor touchups here and there. By the end of it, most of that snippet had been incorporated in this chapter.
The rest of it, with similar modifications, was incorporated later into Chapters 2 and 3.
“Skies above” seems like an appropriate epithet for ponies to say—while it acknowledges a non-Christian background (Igneous Rock Pie’s “Providence” remark notwithstanding), it also neatly sidesteps the idea that Celestia and Luna are themselves deities, as I find that common headcanon to be cringeworthy.
I also totally didn’t steal it from Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, nope, no way, not at all.
Chapter 1
Alright, look: I like to listen to music while I write. And it’s sort of an open secret that the music I listen to may influence the way I write. But seldom do I actually incorporate the music directly into my writing—ironic, considering how many songs have appeared in the show.
But I digress.
Several authors on this site like to add hyperlinks to whatever music they intended for a particular passage. Usually it’s a YouTube video (though Soundcloud links are not unheard of). Often they’re inline, but some amateurs give the reader explicit instructions like they’re supposed to be following along. Both ways I consider to be bad form—after all, you wouldn’t expect to click on a hyperlink in a print book, would you?
As disappointing as I make it sound, the actual best way to do it is to leave it vague, and leave it up to the readers to fill in the gap for themselves. It necessarily limits the writer in expression, but it’s a necessary limitation. The beauty of reading is that you can assemble the scenes in your head; vulgar descriptions like that rob you of that power.
That said, I will point out that the “tune [Etaoin] often heard on the radio” that he whistles on the way home is intended to be Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, III. Forlane. It was first composed for solo piano, but I recommend you listen to the orchestral rendition as well.
The Forlane is naturally my favorite movement, but the entire Tombeau is a masterpiece in its own right. Ravel composed it in six movements, each dedicated to the memory of a friend of his who was killed in World War I; the Forlane was dedicated to the memory of First Lieutenant Gabriel Deluc, a Basque painter attached to a reconnaissance unit during the War.
“That which is hoarded soon is lost” is paraphrased from an actual Georgian proverb, derived from the epic poëm The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.
As a bonus, the full proverb usually runs “That which you give away is yours; that which you don’t is lost.” That first part, however, would have revealed a significant plot hole, which is why I omitted it.
If the word “telephile” looked familiar to you, it means I did my job correctly. This word is derived from Ancient Greek τῆλε- (têle-, “faraway”) and φιλία (philía, “love, friendship”), which should succinctly sum up the amulet’s purpose. (Yes, I’m aware Ancient Greek has several different words for love.)
Some of my readers might recognize this isn’t the first time I’ve derived the name for a spell or charm from Ancient Greek: Twilight Sparkle uses a “ballantine” spell, essentially improvising a magical “pocket” to store things within, in When Stars Come Out to Play.
On the surface, having Vardi be the fly Etaoin absentmindedly swats out of his face is an exercise in subtlety. It also does show, however, the true danger of changelings, one that I haven’t seen get brought up very often, if at all.
The show has shown that changelings can change into other nonpony species, such as King Thorax throwing on a bear disguise in S7E15 “Triple Threat,” or even otherwise inanimate objects, such as Ocellus turning into a rock in S9E03 “Uprooted.” This gave me the idea of other things to transform into in order to infiltrate someplace. After all, who would suspect a bird? A fly? A plant leaf? Maybe something else altogether!
A changeling can quickly assume whichever form is most convenient for any given situation, and that’s what makes them particularly dangerous. In fact, there could be one in this very room. It could be you! It could be me! It could even be
Changelings are subtle—necessarily so, to aid in their camouflage abilities; a parasitic species cannot easily survive if found out. Consequently, their reconnaissance needs to be subtle too—it’s not like they can walk up to a pony and play a quick round of Twenty Questions; observation is key.
Here, Vardi was following Etaoin on his way to the Spa, (mostly) without calling attention to herself. She observed where his gaze was directed, making various mental notes about potential disguises she could use on him, and eventually deciding on Roseluck.
Preparing Etaoin’s dinner also allowed him to study his character, especially at home instead of in public. A lot of people behave differently in either setting; this allows her to account for this. Plus, it’s often said that the best test of character is to sit them down in a restaurant and see how they treat the waitstaff.
Knari volunteered herself to bathe Etaoin at the end of the day. This had two purposes: besides putting him better at ease (i.e. making him feel more confident naked in front of somepony else), it also allowed her to take stock of his body: size, proportions, scars or wounds, anything she feels is noteworthy. True, they could have done that in the bathhouse at the Spa, but bear in mind they were interrupted partway through; this one was more-or-less picking up where they left off.
As for communicating this information to the others—well, they’re part of a hive, aren’t they? Wouldn’t they have a hivemind?
An ungulicure is basically what I call a “hooficure” without mixing English and Latin roots, which I consider to be bad form. When you’re borrowing words from other languages, typically you want to stick with the same language, at least for the whole word; otherwise it becomes a hodgepodge of etymological nonsense.
(This coming from the guy who coined “biosegregation,” so take that as you may.)
Chapter 2
As I’ve said before, Vardi had decided on disguising as Roseluck, but with Lyra, Octavia, and Vinyl as Plans B through D, with an impromptu Marble Pie as Plan E (none necessarily in that order). The reasons for these choices, from my own perspective, are rather complex; bear with me here.
Seven years ago, if you had asked me which was my favorite character in the show, I would’ve answered “Applejack!” without any hesitation. Today? Not so much. During a writing hiatus I took from 2016 to 2020, I started focusing on other pressing matters, not all of which had to do with the show or the fandom. It also meant some measure of maturing (which is more debatable, given what I’ve just written and published): in short, while Applejack is a good mare, honest and true to her fellow ponies, I had grown somewhat distant from her—both from watching the show and reading fanfiction (just because I had fallen by the wayside doesn’t excuse me from keeping up with the former, doncha know).
If you ask me that same question today, “Who is best pony?”, well. . . I don’t know if I could answer that question still! I like several of them, for one reason or another—either their character, their appearance, something they did in an episode or a fanfiction, or simply because a friend also liked them. But eventually I had to pick one. If nothing else, I felt compelled. And now I must confess I feel guilty in saying that my friend Wand3r3r3 had contributed to swinging me over to Roseluck’s side. (Though of course he alone is not to blame. Another colleague, the aforementioned Admiral Biscuit, was a much stronger force in this regard, being the author of the Sam and Rose series.)
. . . actually, you know what? I retract the beginning of the preceding paragraph. Roseluck is best pony. Change my mind.
A huge problem I had with this chapter, although it might not seem major at first glance, is how I would refer to these changelings in their disguises—namely, by putting their disguise names in quotes each time (e.g. Vardi as ‘Roseluck’)
On the one hand, this would be more consistent, especially if the real Roseluck became involved in some way. But on the other, it would quickly become annoying otherwise; plus, the style would interfere with apostrophe placement (e.g. ‘Roseluck’’s necklace, or ‘Roseluck’s’ necklace—I still have no idea which is the correct form).
Eventually, midway through this chapter, I did away with most of the disguise quotes—I figured the reader would interpret it as Etaoin still acknowledging at some level that none of them are the real thing, but deciding to play along and get immersed anyway.
If you thought this chapter had a rather jarring start, you’re not alone.
I have a few policies when it comes to writing stories; one of them is “Chapters do not exceed ten thousand words in length.” I know plenty of authors who don’t abide by this rule, however. Quite often it’s for good reason, and even then the length stays manageable. But some just keep writing and writing and writing, not even knowing where to cut the scene off; I remember, for instance, Flammenwerfer finishing off his seven-year endeavor My Best Friend, Stella with a twenty-six-thousand-word monstrosity, with about 90% of it between two scene breaks. That was unwieldy.
My policy’s been long-standing (though until recently I seldom approached, never mind hit, that limit), but this digression illustrates the hidden quality of brevity. Describe what’s happening in just the right amount of words, not too few (I also maintain not going under a thousand words in length), and certainly not too many.
So when it came to writing this chapter, after Octavia’s bit I realized I was approaching that limit uncomfortably quickly. If I didn’t do something about that, I’d have the chapter go over and risk losing readers. (A silly thought, I now realize, given the subject matter of the story.) One solution came to me over lunch: to be honest, I hadn’t really thought of doing anything with Marble Pie in this scene, so I decided to play with that by transplanting her scene into the following chapter. It was simple, elegant, exactly the sort of solution I strive to look for.
But later, owing to a busy schedule one particular week, I put the story on the backburner while letting the general idea stew in the back of my mind. Then right before I went to bed one night, I got an idea: why cram everything into one chapter?This one scene was already stretching longer than all the rest—so split it off! Once I made that decision, I found myself a lot less constrained; probably the hardest part was coming up with a fitting title (and definition) for it.
(Which is not to say that that part was by any measure easy—indeed, I had gone through at least five or six candidate words before settling upon communion.)
And yes, I realize that, doing the math, Chapters 1 and 2 still add up to under 10k words, but by then the division had stuck with me, title and all. Besides, I doubt the reader would appreciate being slammed with such an oversized chapter (ironic, considering the subject matter).
But in any case, now that I sidestepped that self-imposed constraint, I was able to put down everything else I wanted on it. Mainly it was a more vivid description of the scene and its events (though I did have to introduce Marble here, given that I had cut her previous experience, per the Prologue notes). In fact, Marble was the only character I wasn’t able to expand upon (har har), mostly because I had already written her part in the following chapter and I was too lazy to take it back.
And speaking of. . . .
Chapter 3
Damc’q’ebi (დამწყები [ˈdɑm.t͡sʼqʼɛ.bi]) is the Georgian word for “novice,” also used in the same sense as “rookie” or “greenhorn” (which may have been a subtle pun, now that I think about it). The -o (-ო [ɔ]) suffix is Georgian’s vocative case, used for addressing another.
Different authors will have different caste systems for the Changeling Hive, some simple, some bizarrely complex. Mine is split into eight castes—in no particular order:
- Worker
- Nurse
- Honeypot
- Guard
- Queensguard
- Infiltrator
- Soldier
- Drone
Furthermore, males and females are sorted into different castes. Nurses, Honeypots, and Queensguards are female only; Soldiers and Drones are male only; Workers, Guards, and Infiltrators are unisex. Every caste is sterile, apart from Drones, whose sole purpose is to reproduce.
For obvious reasons, the Queen is not listed here.
Part of the reason why we often cringe at our own recorded voices is because a microphone doesn’t pick up every part of our voice—or rather, we hear other parts of our voice that noöne else can. It’s not that we’re listening to our voices bounce off the walls of our surrounding: our speaking also vibrates our jaws and teeth—very slightly—just enough to stimulate the eardrums that way.
However, because bone is denser than air, it also lowers the pitch of our voice, so that we think our voices sound deeper than they actually are.
It was while writing this chapter that I realized something: while I suck at writing smut, I particularly excel with writing lore. I took a break from one section and wrote about the changelings introducing themselves, briefly discussing castes, them using their amulets, and just like that, I covered over a thousand words in two hours—a welcome change to the snail-slow pace of the past three or four days.
Another open secret I have is that I typically don’t describe my characters’ appearances. This isn’t a problem with canon characters, of course, but it will rear its ugly head the moment I introduce an OC. I wanted to change that here, moreso because this is (to my memory) the first time I’ve written something from the first-person perspective, so I had to make Etaoin more grounded in the world, if that makes sense.
Of course, I couldn’t just plop down a physical description just like that, à la “Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way. . .”; I had to be more subtle than that—show versus tell, after all. The bathroom mirror proved to be an effective trick.
As for the colors I picked. . . well, I was going completely at random. I’m not an artist, so I have literally no clue how to make an OC appear right—just how to act right.
The shower scene was surprisingly difficult for me to write, and this time around I can’t blame it squarely on just my own inexperience. In fact, I’ll go so far as to confess that it forced me to pause it in the middle of May while I thought more about it—which was just as well, because between then and the start of August life just threw a ton of work at me. Safe to say this wasn’t finalized until literally the week before it was published. It’s a lot more polished than before, but even so, I’m still not entirely proud of it.
If you could believe it, this scene didn’t even originally exist; as you might recall, it’s only here because I had a brainfart with reckoning chapter length and gave K’edeli the cold shoulder. Originally (at least according to my outline) Etaoin was meant to spend most of the day outside gardening with Vardi, obviously with her making the most of her Roseluck disguise.
A pica is a unit of measurement used in typography, synonymous with “twelve-point type”; in fact, it’s a traditional name for that point size. In reality, however, there are a few different picas. For instance:
- The French pica, used throughout Europe, is based on the Didot point system, where 1 pt. = .376 mm (.148"). Therefore, 1pc = 4.512 mm (.1776").
- The American pica is defined in 1886 as ⁴⁰⁰∕₂₄₀₉ of an inch, or roughly .16604" (4.217 mm).
The PostScript pica, used for digital typesetting, is equal to exactly ⅙ of an inch (4.233mm). This is what you’ll find in Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, and Affinity Publisher.
- TeX, meanwhile, uses the American pica. (However, it is possible to make it output in any of the other picas.)
More music! We all have a particular song or piece we listen to when we just want to get up and get shit done—this one is mine.
Here, I was picturing Lyra/Knari humming “Noune’s Dance,” from Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane ballet suite (which is better known for its Saber Dance and, to a lesser extent, its Adagio, due to its appearance in 2001: A Space Odyssey). There are several renditions, but I contend that the superior one is by Yevgeny Svetlanov and the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra.
It certainly helps that its Armenian heritage complements the Georgian flair I’ve added to these changelings (not to mention that knari is ultimately a loanword from Armenian k’nar (քնար)).
Technology in Equestria is all over the place: a fantasy setting with modern amenities, at first glance, seems an impossible reality. Admiral Biscuit’s general rule-of-thumb is that, if it wasn’t done in pre-WWI England, it wouldn’t be done in Equestria.
Even there, we see some weird exceptions. Relevant here is that there was a washing machine at the Spa in S6E10 “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off,” with a motor and timer—something that wouldn’t appear until 1957. And don’t get me started on Vinyl Scratch’s equipment.
There was also the radio I mentioned in Chapter 1—the one bit of modern tech with no basis in canon, but given everything else, I think it excusable.
Chapter 4
Yep, even more music, over the aforementioned radio this time. This one’s also by Khachaturian—but here, I turned to another of his suites, one that you probably haven’t heard of: Masquerade. More specifically, the first “Waltz” movement, the most famous of the five: a merry tune that slowly builds into a storm of activity, much like the print shop during their final push. As for how it sounds, I leave you in the capable hands of Stanley Black and the London Symphony Orchestra.
I had also considered another piece from Gayane: “Embroidering the Carpet.” Neither Svetlanov nor Black conducted it in their respective recordings, so for that I turn to Jansugh Kakhidze and the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra. Ultimately I cut it because it just didn’t inspire the same whirlwind as Masquerade’s Waltz, though you’d be forgiven for using it for the walk home from the print shop.
One day, out of boredom, I started hopping around Wikipedia. I don’t quite remember the exact route I took, but I eventually chanced upon the article for the Order of the Occult Hand: a group of journalists who have all sneaked the same purple-prose phrase “occult hand” into their story without editors catching and removing it.
They were exposed in 2004, so they’ve since adopted a new, more subtle (and very much secret) phrase and carried on. Still, now that I knew about it, I just had to find a place for it—even if it was a lot more blatant than what the Order would allow.
It seems only yesterday that the word thicc (specifically (mis)spelt that way) was considered fringe slang, but nowadays it’s part of more commonplace parlance. Of course, the older spelling thick still exists, and the cc spelling also crops up in other words.
But where did it even come from?
Several different theories abound, but I, speaking from experience with the California court system, believe it originated with the Crips gang alliance centered in Los Angeles. At some point in their history, they developed their own spelling rule: the traditional Germanic ck (I say “Germanic” as it also crops up in German, Dutch, and Swedish) was changed to cc, as ck to them stands for “Crip killer” regardless of context.
Speaking of spelling rules, I’ll bet you were wondering about those last two slugs Etaoin cast. Princeſs? Friendſhip? Equeſtria? Ah, but now, let me formally introduce you to the lost art of the long S.
The long S (ſ, not to be confused with a lowercase f) originated from Roman handwriting during the eighth century AD, as a medial form of the letter S; it also served as the initial form of the letter, when not capitalized, and the round S we all know and love was merely the final form. And all throughout the Dark Ages and well into the Renaissance, the long S was a mainstay with all who were learned in Latin letters, and all the rules associated with it. Some languages, particularly the Slavics, actually drew a distinction between the long and short S, assigning each different phonetic values.
The long S started to die out, first abandoned by printers almost simultaneously in 1800, though lingering in handwriting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century; but by 1900 you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who knew the rules of the long S.
What’s that? You want to learn how to write with the long S? Not to worry, I’ll spell it out for you in plain, simple English. First of all, there were two different sets of rules, one for handwriting and one for printing.
The handwritten rules were perfectly straightforward: only use the long S before a round S (baſsoon). The printed rules, however, were far more complex than that. (Please note that these rules are specific to English; other languages of course had their own rules, even if most of them were universal among them.)
Use ſ at the start and in the middle of words, except:
- When capitalized;
- After another long S;
- Before a lowercase B, J, and K (Lisbon, misjudge, skin);
- Before or after a lowercase F (misfit, offshoot);
- Before any punctuation (us’d);
- In compound words, wherever a round S would normally appear (misſhapen);
- When a word spans across lines (maſ-querade); or
- As an abbreviation (Geneſ. for Geneſis); and
- Use s everywhere else.
Another note: these rules have never been set in stone. For instance, the no-long-S-before-lowercase-B-and-K rule existed only from the seventeenth century up until around 1750; after that, these words would be spelled Liſbon and ſkin.
In French, the round S was also used before a lowercase H (déshonnête); this was also done in Spanish (deshoneſto). In Spanish as well, a long S followed by a round S was used before a lowercase I (illuſtriſsimo), but two long Ss were used elsewhere (neceſſaria). In Italian, the round S was also used before any letter with a diacritic (ricusò). In German, the long S is also used at the end of a root in a compound word (Drechſler) (particularly if a following E has been dropped) or in the prefix tranſ- before K, P, and Z.
In fact, technically it still exists in German: the scharfes S or Eszett (ß), derived from ſʒ (the latter glyph being the tailed Z), is a ligature of ss when following a diphthong or long vowel (except aus and words with final devoicing (e.g. Haus)) and when a word stem takes an inflectional ending (e.g. größte). In fact, the Council for German Orthography has prescribed an uppercase scharfes S (ẞ), though this does not have historical precedence, and is usually spelled SS or SZ anyway. Switzerland, meanwhile, does not use the scharfes S at all.
While other languages written in Latin also used the long S, by and large they followed the rules of either English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian. Dutch, for instance, went by German rules.
And that’s the long and short of it!
Etaoin’s meeting with Twilight was not planned in the original outline, and for a while I kept going back and forth with using her and Princess Cadance. Ultimately I stuck with the former; she’s a local of Ponyville (even if she was born and raised in Canterlot), and she actually knows Etaoin, unlike Cadance.
The deal Twilight mentions is very much plot convenience, and only really works with Sunset Shimmer. On the upside, it did provide a path of little resistance (though I’m sure better ones are out there).
Although I didn’t make it perfectly clear, this story is set somewhere between seasons five and seven (inclusive). Twilight’s ascended into alicornhood, but she’s not the ruler of Equestria yet—nor, for that matter, is she running her school out of her literal backyard. Consequently I tried to keep the troupe of characters in Etaoin’s collection limited to just that span of time—older than that, certainly, but not newer.
Tempest Shadow was an exception to that, and I had to write my way around that limitation. Changelings, it seemed, were too perfect for it, but it does presuppose the Storm King was willing to take on more ponies than just Tempest.
Readers of mine might know my obsession with über-precise wordcounts with my chapters and stories—everything has to be a nice, round number. Hassenfeld Pony Anthology is exactly ten thousand words long. When Stars Come Out to Play is exactly fifty thousand, with one chapter being exactly ten thousand. Fallen-Song takes this to its logical conclusion: not only is the whole work a hundred thousand words long, each canto is either five thousand or twenty-five hundred words. This obsession also shows up in The Children of Planet Earth, but it’s a lot more subtle. You’ll know it if you know what to look for.
And Symbiosis? Originally it was meant to be twenty-five thousand words, but I found myself somewhat constrained by this tight wordcount, no matter what I tried to do—so eventually I relented and allowed it to balloon by another five thousand.
But the last part of it was really hard to write, and I lost a ton of time for various reasons. This chapter had only been completely written, edited, uploaded, and scheduled (not even in that order!) within less than twenty-four hours before publication. That’s how down to the wire it got.
Closure
Closure, conclusion. . . confession?
To be honest, while I’ve always planned to end this set of notes with an essay—which you’re reading right now—I always stop just short of what to write in it. Ideas, execution, you know the old song and dance by now.
Then when it came time to publish it, after it’s completely written, edited, whole nine yards, I felt nervous. I always feel nervous when publishing a new story—I know I’m not supposed to care that much about what other people think about me, but those thoughts still lurk the hidden corners of my mind. But this time, it came full force, stronger than at any time, stronger than with Fallen-Song, stronger than with The Children of Planet Earth. That’s when I knew I was way out of my comfort zone.
To be clear, this is not my first time writing porn. This is—but clearly, it’s little more than a shitpost, following a bandwagon by The Abyss, and nothing more. I gained no experience from writing it, and now am regretting writing that too. But I won’t delete it. Goes against my honor code. Nor will I delete Symbiosis, now that it’s out.
So now you might be asking me, “Ted, why did you even bother writing and publishing it if you’re going to be so embarrassed about it?” I have a few reasons.
“Here’s to You...”
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
—Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, vol. 1
I’m not the first author to tackle written porn with these fetishes (and I doubt I’ll be the last). Plenty of other authors have done the same—and no doubt many of them, if not most of them, do it far better than I. In time they’ve come and gone, but their stories (or the memories thereof if they’ve went scorched-earth) remain.
But there’s one author that stood out to me, at least in the earlier days on this site. I’m talking, of course, about Megapone. (Er, Megapone—the old account’s been nuked.) His style was very unashamed (though that could be said of every other clop author here), emphasizing certain wordsin italics, just to hammer the point home. At some point in (I think it was) 2016, for whatever reason he nuked his entire portfolio and all but disappeared from Fimfiction. (However, you can still find his works on Fimfetch.net.)
I have my favorites; you probably have yours; but in his full bibliography surely there was something missing. Not any missing stories, of course—the site admin went to great lengths to archive the lot. No, I’m talking about stories he could have written, but didn’t for one reason or another. And then I hit upon it: of all the things he had written about, seldom did he touch Queen Chrysalis or the changelings—as in, I can count them on one hand—and even there, he hadn’t considered straight, gimmickless love harvesting. Perhaps the concept was too vanilla for him?
In any case, the further I looked, the more I saw that other authors have also steered clear of the very thing I had in mind. Either that, or I was not well-versed in searching for relevant content. That meant I had a viable story idea on my hands. Viable? Maybe, maybe not. But considering I hadn’t seen anything like it out in the real world, I might as well take it and run with it. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.
In the end, it became something of a tribute to one of my favorite authors. He didn’t write to stimulate the mind; he didn’t write to become famous. He merely wrote to get rocks off, and in that regard, he had greatly succeeded.
. . . dammit, I miss him.
“...That Agony Is Your Triumph”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
—Fredrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Every time I publish a new story, I’m always struck with nerves. Namely: how would readers react to it? Even for content that by all means should be low-effort, I still put a great deal of effort into everything I write. Hell, the fact that you’re reading an essay is all the proof you need of that fact! It’s also why I disclaimed “This is not up to my usual standards, so take that as you may.” While I still take some measure of pride in what I’ve written, vis-à-vis the fact that I wrote this, I realize that far, far better works exist on this site, even within the same genre.
However, what usually happens, I find, is that nobody notices or cares. They click either the red or the green thumb and go about their business. And, barring a handful of exceptions, this is limited to a handful of users here: it would be some time before I manage to gain ten votes total, up or down. To put it in perspective: it took more than 24 hours to get to that point with Symbiosis. Even then, I didn’t expect it to succeed by any stretch of the definition: it naturally started off poorly, getting four downvotes to one upvote just on the first day, but that didn’t dissuade me (partly because the other chapters had been uploaded and scheduled (or were still being written and/or annotated)). At last count, just a few minutes before this essay was published, it was nine up, eight down.
One of those downvotes belongs to me. That’s how little confidence I had.
The other facet of the problem is what I call Shrödinger’s Comment: it’s either positive or negative until you actually read it. So when I got a notification that Exuno had left a comment on it, I didn’t touch it for several hours—not entirely out of nerves, either: a contractor just so happened to be at my house that day, rewiring the kitchen for a new electric oven. I was sure it said something along the lines of “This was just as much cringe as I thought when I saw the description. Downvoted and reported”—as per my usual assumption.
But what I got instead was:
“This is excellent and indulgent. I haven’t read enough of your usual work to tell how much of the downplaying of quality is universal, or tied to Eta’s [sic] sex-shame response, but either way, this is more fun than you’re giving it credit for, and other people will like it too.”
. . . okay? Certainly better than I expected, but now I feel robbed of the necessary experience.
What do I mean by that? I distinctly remember publishing Hassenfeld Pony Anthology on 7 June 2020, with the same butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling, only to be shocked at how easily I made the feature box. (But then, that can be partly blamed on the shrunken fanbase compared to 2016.) And each story after—When Stars Come Out to Play, Fallen-Song, and especially The Children of Planet Earth—I felt that same old feeling. In the first two cases, those stories got hardly any attention—which was a shame for Fallen-Song, because it sorely deserves it. The Children of Planet Earth would have suffered the same fate, had Admiral Biscuit not signalboosted it.
One thing’s for sure, though: I won’t ever be trying this again. (And before you ask, no, I don’t take commissions.)
So while I have two good reasons to put this out, personal as they may be, they didn’t quite send me over the edge and compel me to push “Submit.”
“Impulsivity” or “It All Comes Tumbling Down”
“The toughest iron, tempered strong in the white-hot fire, you’ll see it crack and shatter first of all.”
—Creon, Antigone
This did.
It’s easy for a fish to ignore a hook in the water if it’s just floating there—after all, it’s just a piece of metal. But if you put a little bit of bait on it, suddenly it’ll start biting. Similarly, it’s easy for a person to keep their deepest secrets bottled up forever—after all, it would be embarrassing if they brought it up. But if given the temptation for an outlet, chances are they’ll take it.
And that was exactly what happened here.
While it’s easy to go through a folder full of porn on your hard drive, oftentimes it’s more satisfying to seek out newer works, something you hadn’t seen before. And one fine day almost a year ago, I found what I thought was the perfect picture, just ticking all the right boxes for me. Now Fimfiction site rules prevent me from embedding or even linking to the artwork, so please don’t go look at it on Derpibooru dot org slash two nine three seven seven zero seven.
But that wasn’t the only image to fuel my writing. I won’t name any other numbers (mostly because there are too many to juggle around for me); all I’ll say is you’ll know it when you see it.
I suppose this is the hardest part of writing this essay, even if, by the same token, it’s the most important. “But Ted!” you might object. “Everyone has their odd moment of weakness! How are you any different?” In truth. . . perhaps I’m not, in the most relevant aspects. The only one I have is shame: while other authors might put out a stupid shitpost out of the blue with zero prior announcement, then be surprised whenever it does well (which, granted, doesn’t always happen). I? I still have some measure of shame for having put this out. But I guess it’s far too late to take it back, especially with the inordinate amount of effort I’ve invested into it.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is, in so many words, Etaoin Shrdlu is actually a self-insert. His shame is my shame; his reservation is my reservation; but more than that, his fantasies are my fantasies.
Is it blatant wish fulfillment, especially since I published it on my birthday? Yes, and I’ll be the first to tell you that. Is that a good thing? I think I’ll let you make that call. On the flipside, going back to the first section of this essay, it’s also a story I’ve always wanted to read, but noöne seemed to want to write. Very well—I’ve done it myself. Happy now?
Good night, and good luck.
I must guiltily confess I've not read the attached story, though I'm confident it's excellent quality.
This was still a fascinating essay to read and see more insight into things.
Megapone moved into an industry that requires a lot of discretion with regards to personal history, which is why he nuked everything and vanished.
More specifically, 1880s American or British tech, with allowances for things that ponies care more for than humans did, and for certain magitech. It's not an exact cutoff, though; I do tend to go more for a vibe than ignore some bit of old tech I really like 'cause it was invented three years outside of my normal window or what have you.