[NEW FIC] Back to writing ponies! (...sorta) · 8:03pm Oct 16th, 2023
tl;dr - I put ponies in another fic, but only for a few chapters
So, real quick, minor confession...this fic is actually one of my oldest, and it's not on this site.
Hey, easy, easy, let me explain.
So way back in 2005, I had a flash of inspiration. See, back in the 90s and carrying into the 00s, we didn't really go on forums or (even older) newsgroups if we wanted to avoid spam in our all the everything, we got on mailing lists. The Big One for fanfiction was the good ol' FFML, or "Fan Fiction Mailing List." What fanfiction? Yes. Which fandom? Yes. There was no division of franchises here. You were just as likely to encounter Trek as Xena, everything from Ah, Megami-sama! to Zoids. There was also no curation. The crap was flowing, and caught in the stream would be the occasional diamond, and it was up to YOU to determine which was which. And we called our porn "lemons." If the fic was leaning toward spicy we had a citrus scale. Orange was a little eechi, Lime was "there's plot, but expect to need some 'private time' later on." And so VERY much of it was anime-centric. (Sidebar: The late, lamented MythrilMoth and I first encountered each other while active on FFML)
One of the biggest fandoms in the FFML was Ranma 1/2, with Sailor Moon being a solid second place, though still trailing by quite a margin. It's not a stretch to say that, at the time, Ranma 1/2 was the largest single fandom active in the US-centric portions of the Internet (which, thanks to the heavy hand the USA had in creating the Internet, was a pretty sizeable portion of it). This was objectively provable, too. Not only was there the Penultimate Ranma 1/2 Fanfic Index, something none of the other fandoms needed, let alone had, you could go to fanfiction.net and show a list of ALL the fandoms sorted by number of fics, and the one having more works than any other by a LOOOOONG margin was Ranma 1/2.
So the fandom started curation, which is necessary when you have that many fics. (and the War of the Churches, which is one of the earliest online shipping wars, which is like talking about the Punic Wars when the subject of world wars comes up...and The Bet, which the less said about that, the better) There were so many fics that we had to split them into multiple meta-categories, some of which you'll easily recognize:
- Continuation
- Divergence
- Crossover
- Fusion
- Lemon
- Spamfic
There was obviously some mixing between them, but relevant to this is the Crossover and the Fusion.
Crossovers are kinda obvious, and introduced one of the most enjoyable, if WAY overdone, tropes of the FFML: The Fukufic. Take some Ranma 1/2, add some Sailor Moon, and viola, one fukufic. The catch was, they were all crossovers (except for one notable exception...which I really should dig up again sometime, it's a fun one), simply because direct fusions would dilute too much of either Ranma 1/2 or Sailor Moon.
Now, not that anyone saw this as a problem, mind, we just kinda shrugged if the subject came up and moved on.
Until one day, I was pondering this. (I mean, c'mon, you know me by now) "Fusion is where you take two properties and 'fuse' them together in new but recognizable ways," ponders I, "...so what would fission look like in this context?"
Naturally, my mind locked onto the fukufic, and the fanfic Fission was born.
Fission
Ranma is having A Day. The usual wacky relationship hijinks wind up with him tripping while running from his self-declared love interests (it has to do with martial arts, several foreign laws, and an okonomiyaki cart...long story) and falling off a roof (...again, long story) to pass through a stream of water from a broken pipe, triggering the magic that cursed him to turn into a girl with a splash of cold water. But today the wacky cranked right up into the weird when he DIDN'T collide with the other person who also happens to be standing in the spray of water.
Usagi is having a pleasant day, actually. She's spending time with her boyfriend, taking in parts of Tokyo she doesn't normally get to, and in all enjoying herself when she gets a call about a monster attack. She ducks into an alley and starts to transform into Sailor Moon when a pipe bursts and sprays her with water right as someone...doesn't collide with her falling from the roof above.
The destiny of both Ranma and Usagi has been altered by a random accident that nobody could have planned for or anticipated.
Nobody around them is even remotely prepared.
The principal conceit is this: In the most unlikely of unlikely events, both Ranma and Usagi's respective magics to turn them into their other half are active at the same time when they collide. This "splits" their respective destinies, spinning off events and introducing characters that would completely rewrite their lives going forward. Ranma would get a Senshi team and their own "silver crystal" artifact and royal destiny, and Usagi would get a gender-swapping curse and a whole slew of romantic entanglements. Making this happen has been an incredibly fun challenge.
Plans and Schemes
I did not, I promise, intend for there to be a hiatus of any sort for Fission. I had, in fact, encountered a MASSIVE PILE of inspiration and jotted down a HUGE amount of notes for nine books worth of material about this new world in which there would be time travel shenanigans, a Xenomorph on an abandoned Mercury research base, and a look at the world of the Silver Millenium 1,000 years into the future.
But, as happens so often with me and in a recognizable pattern I wouldn't know about at the time because this was the first time it happened, I burned myself out. A move was involved, my marriage was experiencing challenges, and we were trying for a baby. This doesn't even factor in my career obligations, church activity, or social interactions which...yeah, most of it I wouldn't have chosen and only did because...okay, stopping there, this isn't a rant about my failed marriage.
I tried over the years, up to and including putting out a new chapter here and there, but I kept running into various forms of burnout.
Then the divorce happened.
Needing some sort of outlet, I started writing Double Trixie Trouble, and while it was just silly fluff, it was relatively easy to squirt out a chapter or three and just toss 'em up, but then the whole thing started getting complicated, and I started burning out again. By that time, though, I'd started writing Lost Little Wolf as a catharsis piece, and that wound up even more popular than DTT. And suddenly I couldn't not write LLW, it was metaphorically draining the ugly, puss-filled blisters that were my severely maladapted responses to the divorce.
On the plus side (and yeah, there's lots of plus sides), I did land on my soon-to-be-legally-changed new name of Chrystal Amber from the writing of it.
Then I went through my homeless period, and I've written about that quite a bit during the author's notes for My Empire of Dirt, as well as the severe injury I sustained during that time and the long road to recovery.
And during that period of time, I began to get nearly itchy to write more for Fission.
Outlines and Brainstorming
Fission has always, from day one, looked like this:
- Pluto takes a vacation, this is widely considered to be a mistake
- Ranma and Usagi 'collide' in a freak accident that could only happen to them. Owing to their already crazy lives, they don't realize how big a deal it is and promptly forget about it
- Ranma and Usagi both start experiencing some "bleedover" from the other person, but since it's very minor and still within the realms of "crazy shit I have to deal with," they still don't think much of it.
- Ranma turns into a new, not quite mirror version of Sailor Moon and gets her first senshi, Mercury, who winds up being Konatsu, the "Genius Kunoichi" as a not-quite-mirror to Ami's "Genius." Meanwhile Usagi gets her first suitor
- Mars appears, additional bleed happens between the two "sides," Usagi experiences her first gender swap
- Venus appears, more bleed, Usagi encounters another rival
- Jupiter appears, Usagi can't hide her changes from the rest anymore, plans are made to meet
- Ranma's "Inners" unite as a team, Usagi gains a new suitor
- The two groups of Inners meet, the meeting is sabotaged by the BBEG but they wind up fighting along side each other and start to compare notes
- Shampoo encounters Hotaru, offers to train her, coincidentally becomes the new Saturn
- Ryoga receives a package promising to cure him of his curse. It changes his cursed form to a girl and becomes the new Uranus
- Ranma receives a package with a key and a cryptic note saying he/she will know who it goes to
- Akari initially rejects Ryoga's new cursed form, prompting Ryoga to go on a suicide mission. Trying to rescue new-Uranus, new-Moon realizes that only Akari can save Ryoga and the key is for Akari. They rescue Ryoga and Akari admits she still loves Ryoga, no matter the form
- Ami advises the BBEG that's been after both teams is The Doom Star, named Nemesis by some consipiracy theorists in the 70s
- They split into teams, do a three pronged assault, find Nemesis has a senshi, crack the Dark Planet, big space battle scene, huge martial arts, much wow
- The day is saved, the teams start interacting, epilogue
This has been, from day one of writing the first words on the screen of the job I was holding at the time, the way things were going to go. I knew even then pretty much exactly what I wanted to do with this story.
Let's drill down a bit (I'm going somewhere with this, I promise):
Jupiter appears, Usagi can't hide her changes from the rest anymore, plans are made to meet
As with everything else, waaaay back in 2005 when I first started this monster, I had a specific idea how Ukyo would be introduced as Sailor Jupiter:
- Ranma's team gets an invite to a concert in Jubaan
- Three youma disguised as human pop stars reveal they've been siphoning energy for the entire concert tour, they get the upper hand on the senshi
- Three members of the audience step up to do a counter-song to the youma
- Ukyo turns into Jupiter, tipping the scales
- Senshi win, headlines next day are about the Senshi openly appearing on video, but they aren't the usual senshi
Like I said, this has always been the plan, all the way back in 2005-2006.
Another Fandom Enters the Chat
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic entered the scene in 2010, and you all will know that part of the story.
But sometime around the time I started coming out of my trauma haze from being homeless and injured, I started re-reading my old fics and starting to figure out next-steps to continue the stories.
And I'm looking at the three monsters that are set to appear as energy draining singers at a concert...
...waaaaait a minute!
(Art by Racoonsan)
It was...PERFECT! I just needed three kids to step up, and heeeey...
Of course, if you know me at all then research will be involved. Thanks to pony names being, for the most part, based on nouns, this wound up being cake. I will say the names for the Sirens were more of a challenge, simply because the modern Japanese music scene uses a LOT of loan words from English and so I had to really dig to find the actual Japanese words for "Adagio," "Aria," and "Sonata," but I did find them.
And Scootaloo...well, I'll let the reader treasure-hunt that particular translation. 
Oh yeah? Fine! *conforms your gender*
2005 was...a different time for the queer community. It legitimately felt like we were on the verge of fracturing off the gender presentation parts of the community from the sexual attraction parts, and asexuality wasn't a thing most of us even heard about. (I wouldn't for another 2-ish years after that) Compounding that is the fact that my fanfic is built on a foundation from the 1980s, and yes, everything you've heard about how bad it was worldwide for queer folk is true. We barely made it out of that decade. Ranma 1/2 is a product of its time, but even for that it's VERY subversive. The whole thing is practically a study of teenage gender issues and nonconformity, by the end of the anime Ranma basically declares they're NB using the language available at the time, and Konatsu is known to be AMAB, but is treated as a woman. Any time the NWC tries to make Ko-chan 'act like a man,' it's shown just how very bad at it she is.
When I was writing Fission back in the mid-2000s, it wasn't a big deal to have Ranma be a guy who turns into a girl and back and that was that. There was no "they/them" we could use without looking like absolute weirdos. Konatsu was a pre-op transexual at best, so when writing for the ninja, you used he/him, end of story. If you review the chapters I wrote prior to my unplanned hiatus, you'll note that while Konatsu is in "civilian" guise, I use he/him. When a senshi, I had to do freakin vocabulary and grammar acrobatics to not use a pronoun at all. I wanted it to be clear that being a senshi in this universe is pretty much the ultimate form of femininity. Yes, they can crack a planet on accident and one of 'em can sneeze at the wrong time and alter history, but they're girls who are feminine and can kick your ass.
On this side of a transition, being where Konatsu would want to go if she could do so and afford it in the 1980s, I just couldn't bring myself to continue with the joke. It's ultimately kinda mean and I didn't feel comfortable with it. This "chapter" (consisting of chapters 10-12 on AO3) was me taking steps to address this in a plot-conforming, in-universe way and not break the flow of what I'd already written.
