New Nightmare Night Story! It's Complicated... · 5:29pm Oct 30th, 2023
Hey gang!
It sure has been a while, amirite?
Nightmare Night is a busy time of year around here! While I had initially canceled my plan to write something spooky, fate had other plans - a little gift exchange between friends ended up helping me produce some seasonal scares :3c There’s only one problem, though: it is almost impossible to post.
The story I’d like to share with you all is written as a screenplay. Therefore, by Fimfic’s content policy, it cannot be posted here (stories “written in chat or script format” are not allowed - I do feel that my fic would constitute a good-faith exception to this rule, but I don’t want to get into it with site staff over something like this). Even if it could, I wouldn’t be able to reflect all of the formatting necessary to tell the story. Ao3 unfortunately has the same issue. So, by necessity, the fic resides in a view-only Google Doc.
I have duplicated the text and some of the formatting into an ao3 work. The work also links to the Google Doc in an author’s note. This is mostly to give people a designated space to comment and leave kudos (likes). You can find a link to this work at the bottom of the blog post.
I really, really want to share this work with you all. I enjoyed writing it, and I think the audience who joined me after last year’s The Head will have a lot of fun with it. As such, I would really appreciate it if you could follow me into this new space and give this experimental fic a try.
Symptoms Include:
Tags: MLP: FiM, Suicide / Self Harm, Death, Dark, Horror, Mystery, Rumble, Thunderlane
After the death of his mother leaves him an orphan, Rumble starts to dig up his family's long-buried secrets.
This fic was written as a gift for my dear friend, Seer. Seer constantly inspires me to push myself and the boundaries of my work - this story would not exist without his support and friendship.
This fic is an intense horror fiction that explores a variety of difficult topics, primarily the complexities of mental health. More detailed content warnings under the spoiler: mental illness, unreality, psychosis, schizophrenia, dysphoria, transphobia, self harm, and suicide. Tread carefully.
If you would like to read the fic, please follow this link to the ao3 posting. I'm very glad that I get to share this with you all :)
Peace out,
Mushroom
I always felt that the script format restriction is too dated, representing an older era of fanfiction, and limiting creativity and ingenuity for being able to write an entertaining story.
Being able to write a script is a skill, more so if its formatting furthers the narrative. Pushing this format away limits the potential talent writers can take into the film and theater industries. One of my literature professors felt this way, requiring an essay to be submitted in this format. Even the stories on here that enter a grey area of the rule have the potential to impress. Pray, Hope, and Wander, told almost entirely as a transcript, is one of my top picks. Crusaders of Three Minds, using dialogue only, was one of the most viewed fics of August. A story I plan to write also has sections left intentionally dialogue only, to contrast with other sections that are dialogue-free.
I recognize how the script limitation exists in part to deter low-effort snippet stories, but the outright ban seems unnecessary, since script writing has the potential for just as much literary merit as prose. Second-person stories are similarly also typically associated with poor quality, and yet also have the potential for greatness. But those are allowed, and script format stories aren't.
My point being: it feels like a waste that something a respected writer like you is so proud of, something that is fully within the spirit of MLP fanfiction, can't even appear on the site dedicated to such. I wish they'd just abolish the rule and recognize that there's not enough active users on the site anymore for any potential issues of script format to become a problem.
Thank you for writing it for us anyway.
Wooo I always love new Mushroompone spookiness
IT'S HERE
5752918
You said it, my friend! Definitely an outdated rule from the time when every single submitted fic had to be approved individually. With the auto-queue - and the generally declining participation on the site - I can't imagine that allowing script format stories would suddenly flood the site to the point of being unusable. Unfortunately, I don't really foresee this changing, since the site is well past regular updates at this point. Honestly, I just feel very lucky that even a handful of people are willing to follow me to another site to try something new. That's pretty amazing if you ask me!
Damn, you've done it again. There's so many layers to this, it's astounding. Fate Dysphoria as a concept is uncanny in that it mashes various concepts together and plays them off of eachother. An allegory for real mental health issues, commentary on how we structure society, grappling with free will and higher powers... And all of it is enhanced by the later-subverted screenplay format. Which is hard to pull off for people used to narrative writing, as I myself know firsthand.
My only real issues are with Gale and Rumble's violent endings. I feel like it would make more sense, while also adding even more depth, if they'd simply ran away to live with other races instead. Because only ponies get cutie marks, after all. I imagine essentially any dragon would be equally anxious over the possibility that they weren't truly free and independent, for instance. Maybe Spike, raised among ponies, feels similarly stifled. Meanwhile, a changeling might also be subservient to the will of the queen in the same manner as Rumble was to the script.
5753106
Thanks so much!! I'm glad it worked for you :) I hope to do some more with the fate dysphoria concept sometimes, perhaps for a lighter fic than this one lol.
My choice to end the fic the way I did honestly just comes down to the mental health aspect. I actually got similar comments on The Head last year. The reality is that people who are experiencing symptoms like these without a genuine support system are often well past the point of logic. Without getting too personal, I have seen many people through these sorts of mental health issues, and I have experienced some of them myself; logic-driven solutions are meaningless. It's really something that has to be felt to be understood.
Part of my motivation in writing these sorts of stories is to capture, at least partly, how it feels to be that helpless, and/or how people in that state of mind might perceive even the most well-meaning offers of help or support. It's terrifying. My horror stories are, more often than not, an exercise in exploring that terror.
HEY YEAH MUSHROOM THIS IS
SO
FUCKING
GOOD
ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS STORYTELLING
I CAN'T EVEN—
IT'S AN ACTUAL CRIME THAT THIS DOESN'T HAVE A THOUSAND MILLION EYES ON IT
leaving a longer comment on the ao3 link in the morning but i just got done reading it and WOW like WOW oh my god