It's Not That Deep

I don’t often speak about my encounter with Laurent Faust.

It was something bizarre… A few close friends know about it, but even they only have the outline. One would think that being in possession of such rare ‘yakety-yakyakistan’ as hers, would have made me a more well-known figure in the extended ponywebs, to say nothing of ponylit… So why, for the sake of my career, hold anything back?

Well. I know what you’re thinking. And it’s not because I am a person of outstanding character, worthy of the monks of Mount Athos. No, no. The truth is, I’m as much of a dweeb as anyone reading this; and, moreover, my love for the fandom and for Friendship is Magic is so prevailing that I couldn’t stand to injure its image in the eyes of its other admirers—all of you—by giving the details of my interview with the show’s enigmatic creator.

But things change, and perhaps it is really true (as Socrates tells us in Ion) that the artist does not understand their own art. And thus, on the grounds of having the wider outlook of middle-age, I may be forgiven if I offer you the facts; only in hopes that it will, like a well-judged causeway, be of a benefit to feet that I will never see, and new life that I will never know—new generations—however much I might be required to suffer for that future in the present.

So let’s say, for the moment—to hell with the devotees of the Here-and-Now, who spend their days tanning in Ponyville’s orange sunset! And up with the blood-red skies of us Longtermists, we marching children of Van Gogh’s Japonaiserie—and damn the torpedoes and whatever else might come our way.

This was all years ago. Ms. Faust (we’ll call her) was part of a promotional event to support Bronycon 2012—which, many readers might recall, was all tumbleweeds and ball pits before Ms. Faust herself eventually papered the convention with members of her nuclear family and old college roommates, in order (as The Times would observe) to gratify her ego on the scale of a Babylonian emperor.

Anyhow, Hasbro became deeply interested in the optics of the con, and sponsored a competition which they called “The Best Night Ever” as their contribution to its success. The premise was this: participants were to organize local meet-ups with their friends and other fans of the show and demonstrate their zeal through a group photo—banners, cosplay, and especially the creative use of merchandise, were all encouraged. This was the “qualifying round”. Two or three of the best shots went past this stage; whereupon, individual members of each group were informed (via a non-CC’d email) that only one person was in fact eligible to receive the grand prize—an all-expense-paid trip to the con and a private dinner with “Ms. Faust” where she would “share the secrets [sic]”. To get this, the participants of each group would have to explain why they, and not their friends, were most deserving of the spot.

(Then-DHX Media president Stephen Denure—a real nail-spitter, I’ve been told—would later, and peculiarly gleefully, describe this move as a “let’s you and him fight” approach to generating public interest).

Truth be told, it wasn’t difficult for me to make it through this stage of the competition. My friends, like good Americans, were willing to pose with their Rainbow Dash plushies for the world to see, but I knew they would never want to go to New Jersey. I had been stranded in Newark once as a little boy, thanks to a careless flight attendant, and angled that as proof of my commitment to travel and buy pins and print-outs, and what-have-you, presumably to bring home to my adoring wife and protectorate. Hasbro bought it, and it was So long! to my rainbow-clad friends and soon a My name is Twilight Sparkle! from the real Twilight Sparkle—actually a person who would never refer to herself as such, but whose flash-animated fever dream, we knew, had fixed her in a prison, much to her own lurching regret.

Somehow, the facilitators in connection with the contest were able to ascertain my travel and lodging information, and slipped a note under my hotel room door on the evening before the first day of the convention. Said note revealed the whereabouts of a liaison who was to guide myself and the winners from the other groups to a secret location where Ms. Faust was to sup at an appointed hour; as a matter of fact, this turned out to be where the fanfiction discussion panel was supposedly taking place, but here again was another ruse—behind the curtain in that conference room was nothing but a brick wall with a narrow metal door, reminiscent of the ruins of a McCarthy-era blast hovel.

The liaison led me and the others down a long flight of stairs that must have dropped some sixty feet; at the foot of it was a kind of bunker, secured behind another steel door, behind which we could hear a gagging sound, like liquid gurgling through a wad that was stuck in the chute of an old-fashioned ceramic toilet. The liaison placated us with a knowing smile as he unlocked and pushed open the door; and there before us was Ms. Faust, flushed in the face, working on a pot roast with one hand (there were no utensils) and swinging around a tin flagon in the other like a sailor in the glow of a red evening.

We each took a place at the table, and I seated myself between a man in an Applejack costume and a fairly agreeable-looking fellow who, apparently by sheer luck, had been stranded at the same hotel where I was staying, and had somehow wound up being included in our covert operation. There were three others in total, who, like myself, had come unprepared—that is, without dinner; and so we were obliged to watch Ms. Faust blitz through hers, keeping silent. There were a few emptied wine boxes beside her on the floor and some other container that she kept spitting in.

“That’s a really nice sweater,” said the innocent man, breaking the ice for the rest of us slack-jaws. “I’m a fan of purple and green.”

Something about the mention of a color combination seemed to stick in Ms. Faust’s craw. She hunched over as a contemptuous grin took hold—she put down the roast.

“You know why I got into animation?” she managed to get out.

None of us had an answer. We listened to the ticking of the clock on the blank wall behind us, beating time like a warden’s club trailing the bars of a forgotten prison.

“You enjoyed doing it as a child?” the man eventually replied.

Ms. Faust leaned over and grabbed the spitting container, holding it just above floor level while she finished chewing something and turning over what the bystander had said. She finished both thoughts with the same action, which we heard but didn’t see behind her draping, shoulder-length Viking hair, and felt as a bone fragment from the roast pummeled its hollow destination and made us all jump.

“My mother forced me to,” she explained. “Said it was the best way for me to do good in the world. But here I am—ha! Here I was, rather.”

How bitter, I thought. How Saturnian, this woman. Damned by the churning-mill of the cartoon industry to consume her own children, her innocence crushed, the only way to bear her native impulses to succumb to the mortal devices which unite the living with the dead, and the dead with the living, in a ceaseless grind deafened to all but the remorseful gods.

“Were there any ideas for the show that never made it on the air?” asked the man in the Applejack costume (for we were all men), looking to change the topic.

She frowned to herself, as though she hadn’t made herself perfectly clear. “You really wanna know?”

“I sure as sugar do,” he replied.

There was no way out. She mused over the answer awhile, then let everything go with a breath and the most ruthless chipper smile I had ever seen, showing—I swear I saw it, but was later denied the fact by the others in attendance—a set of cracked teeth.

“Okay, why not. You made it this far, right? It’ll even be a twofer, since it ought to explain why Hasbro and I have… ‘parted on creative terms’, except for gigs like this, because life is hell.”

She took one last spit in the bucket and tipped her chair back, bouncing herself like a giant eight-year-old and scaring all of us that she might really fall backward with a quick-enough lapse of attention; of course, none of us could say anything about the nerves we felt watching her, as she proceeded to give the following account in a loud voice.

***
***

‘Back in the early days (she began) I was living out of my studio apartment in San Jose. This happened to be in a glass skyscraper that I also owned, which I was able to purchase with some of the disposable income I had lying around during my time as a storyboard animator on Powerpuff Girls—after they added ‘screenwriter’ to my list of responsibilities, that is.

‘This move had also lead me through a subsequent career writing and showrunning cartoons—ugh!—something I never wanted to be involved in, as I’ve said. That’s when the boardgame people stepped into my life. God. They wanted a bible for a new animated series based on My Little Pony, blah blah second graders blah blah. Whatever. What’s the worst that could happen, I asked myself.

‘Well, shocker, they accepted my pitch, but it wasn’t a hole-in-one, as we say in the industry, and they wanted to discuss ‘notes and refinements’ to make my ideas more suitable for broadcast television. We would gather on the roof in one of my penthouse suites and go to war over the skyline of San Jose. These ‘talks’ were usually made up of myself, Hasbro exec Charles Bartleman, Jayson Thiessen—who would become my rival director on the show—though they tried to fool me that we didn’t actually have the same role—and a few other goons like Sarah Wall and Ron Renzetti. And last but not least, my cabana girl at the time, Megan McCarthy, who always found a way to be a fly on the wall.

‘One afternoon, I remember, were discussing some final revisions for story ideas whilst relaxing in my dollar-sign-shaped super jacuzzi.

‘Thiessen, as was typical for him—where does he get off? (Here she began to thrash the table, and only after a quick intervention from a pair of wired security guards did she regain enough composure to resume—all while we waited, still without dinner), all right, so as usual, he was challenging some of my better episode ideas. The hook was this—have Rainbow Dash encounter a gang of deer that live just outside of Pony Town—I mean real deer, that are all brown and reticulated and can’t talk and have those weird side eyes that all the weaker animals have—and boom! Identity crisis.

(She glanced about to gauge our reactions).

“I just don’t see why it’s necessary,” he told me, trying to avoid eye contact while he adjusted his dumb glasses. He must have caught me glaring at him. “I don’t think children are going to be able to relate to that type of dilemma, Lauren.”

Says the guy eating my cheese in my tower in my hot tub. But professionalism was not beyond me. “Well, Jayson,” I said, “I don’t think you can speak on behalf of every child in America, can you? When I was in fifth grade there was this sporty tomboy who used to brag about a stupid trophy she had won and then gab nonstop about the soccer team she was on, and how she had an older sister or something that was on the varsity team in high school. Man I hated her. I would just sit there looking at the back of her head for a solid five hours a day, daydreaming about dropping her and her sister at the doorstep of an Aztecan civilization, where she would see how meaningless these accomplishments were which she hung so much pride on.”

“That’s another thing,” Thiessen returned. “I feel like this ‘Scootaloo’ concept it just… taking your anger out on the audience… I don’t know. Maybe in some kinds of art that’s a good thing, it’s not my cup, but in a kid’s show? Why ‘a speech impediment’? Why ‘a little less quick than the others’? Isn’t her being paraplegic enough?”

“She fell on a railing the wrong way during a skateboard trick or something,” I explained. “This kind of stuff really happens, Jayson. Not everyone can live a fucking bourgeois Gameboy Advance lifestyle with an extra letter in their name like you.”

“And why…” Renzetti chimed in, taking a pot shot with his nose down in the show notes—they would make him a something editor for this kind of malarky, sheesh. “Why do they live in a Breton town? Does that really make sense with the whole ‘tomboy’ thing?”

“Like, goddamn,” I said, starting to lose my cool. “It’s called specificity. Have you ever been to Brittany? It’s fucking beautiful. I mean if you want to move them to Detroit or whatever that’s fine by me. Give ‘em a robot friend for all I care. I’m just doing my best here, what do you people want from me? That’s what making a show bible is, right? I don’t want to sow seeds or leave things undecided—I want a real, raw, in-your-face cartoon, the kind of puppet show that instills the martial spirit of Old Rome. Is that too much? Am I being churlish here?”

“Another smoothie, Mr. Bartleman?” said McCarthy, breaking the silence that followed my statement of the facts. Thank god for that chick.

“Yes, please…” said Bartleman, taking the glass and playing with the straw as though there weren’t a street fight in skinny jeans happening around him. “Ms. Faust, while I personally ‘feel ya’ on this one—as I’m sure many of us do—maybe we could present all of this in a less direct way? You know, make something for the kids, and leave a little something in the bushes for the grownups to find. Like what they did on Fraiser.”

Thiessen stood up and stepped out of the jacuzzi, but didn’t say anything. Meanwhile, I sat there watching Bartleman nurse number two with that indifferent smirk. “Nobody watches Fraiser,” I said.

At that point Thiessen had finished drying himself and finally came out with it. “You know what, Lauren? I’ve been putting up with your negativity for long enough. If you wanna ruin your fucking show with your stubborn attachment to gritty realism, fine. Maybe I’ll just gather up my things and go back to Thiessen Heights…”

At least I thought he was done drying himself. He continued to muss even though there wasn’t a drop on him that I could see. He was making a show, like some ape, expecting us to feel sorry for him and say, no, Jayson, don’t go!, like a hop-out-of-the-jacuzzi-in-a-panic-to-grab-him-by-the-heel-as-he-made-for-the-door sort of thing. But I just sat there as the water roiled around me, so to speak, absorbing his mean glances like Siddhartha under the Bo Tree, transforming the arrows of the Mahajanapada into the flowers of attainment.

“I have an idea that can maybe help us to come to an agreement,” said Wall, who was a little less equipped to handle the kind of tension that can arise during a production meeting with Hasbro. “Why don’t you two have a casket match to determine whose vision of Scootaloo will go through to the writing floor?”

Renzetti again. “What’s a casket match?”

“It’s basically like boxing. Except, at one side of the ring we set a large casket, a hinged black box like you would see in the old American West, and the idea is that Lauren and Jayson would fight bare-fisted to try to knock each other into it.”

Renzetti nodded. “Are they limited to the ring?” he asked.

“Oh! No, no,” said Wall, trying to smooth it over. “They’re free to roam around and find whatever weapons they can bludgeon each other with. The person that winds up in the coffin would be beaten to near-unconsciousness so that they can’t defend themselves enough to prevent the lid from being shut on them.”

I was starting to like the sound of this. “So the winner is the one who closes the lid on their opponent?”

“Exactly!”

A stream of ahs! let forth, the build-up of all the frustration of the proceeding minutes finding a way out.

“Oh, yeah, my sister and I used to have those all the time,” said McCarthy, returning to check to see if everyone was good on napkins. She was lying—she doesn’t have a sister.

I cracked my jaw as the others began to chatter. All the while our good friend Mr. Bartleman had been mulling over his smoothie, taking it in. “I’m liking this idea! Can we televise? We could air live portions of it between episodes in a Strawberry Shortcake marathon. It would probably boost ratings.”

Now the onus was on Wall. She looked at me and Thiessen, beseeching us with a desperate smile.

Thiessen was still drying himself, and finally set the damned towel down. “Of course,” he said. “It would be my pleasure.”

Guess I had to fight for the future of girls’ cartoons.

“I’m in. …Throw me a towel, will you? I gotta hit the gym.”

That’s how it happened. Bartleman was able to procure an arena without much difficulty; there was a spare one close to Hasbro headquarters in Pawtucket that was cleared and set up for the fight. It also turned out that Renzetti had a cousin in New Mexico who built coffins for a living.

Everything was going according to plan, but much as I hated Thiessen, I knew he would be a motherfucker in the ring. I pushed aside any thoughts about the show and spent the next two weeks preparing for the bout. As part of my routine, I would run parkour drills on the rooftops of San Jose, just for, like, agility. McCarthy started joining me on these outings, in order to make sure I didn’t need water or some such thing, I figured.

“You know,” she was panting one day as we landed a jump from a high-rise office building onto the casement of an old courthouse window, “I really hope you take Thiessen out. Your victory will do so much for the place of women in the animation industry.”

“Appreciate that, kid,” I said. I made another jump from the window and caught a flagpole, using the momentum to propel myself up a story, onto to the roof of a merchant suite that formed the start of a nice row of platforms looking down Japantown. McCarthy landed next to me a few seconds later and we started running, the sunrise in front of us warming our brows with the pink promises of a new day.

“I feel like you’re paving the way for people like me, who have gotten their ideas shot down for so many years, just because they’re high school-oriented and ‘nihilistic’.”

Couldn’t resist this one. “Heh. Maybe if you’d been in this business as long as I have, you wouldn’t be as eager to be a part of it.”

“Maybe if you’d been kept out of it for so long, you’d appreciate what a platform you have—well, maybe I should just let you train.”

I was happy for the pool girl’s quos ego on the whole ‘pun intended’ thing, but her knowing smirk communicated victory in a more cutting way than words as we leapt from roof to roof. “Just looking out for the innocent,” I said. “I don’t want you to wind up like one of those bozos from Hasbro. You’ve got too much love for life.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Ms. Faust. I know that, thanks to you, one day, Saturday morning cartoons will be treated with the seriousness they deserve.”

Coming up to a ledge at the end of the street, we somersaulted into the air, making a rapid descent toward the pavement. We landed on the awning of a pizza shop and sprang back safely onto the sidewalk.

“I hope you’re right, kid,” I told her.

So, as had become the norm in my professional life, a staff meeting was about to culminate in a bloodied-knuckle struggle for creative control. Bartleman was able to fill half of Hasbro Arena with children, the other half with their uninterested parents—though he assured me the dads would like it, too. Though trim and unassuming in his demeanor, Bartleman was always pushing the envelope of children’s broadcasting concepts, and had managed to orchestrate a twenty-foot dirt mound by the side of the entrance ramp of the competitors, to give a more authentic impression of a grave site. I thought it was a nice touch.

Thiessen, the moron, insisted that we should both arrive via helicopter from our respective cities of residence, and begin the fight without delay. This actually required three extra days of travel, with more than half a dozen stops and just as much psychology. I’m convinced it was his attempt to win the match before it began. Looking out over the mountains in the solitude of ariel and terrestrial expanse, I nearly regretted the truculence with which I had treated that nerd boy over the prior six weeks, and there was even a night where I found myself awake and shouting something incomprehensible at the ceiling. But I thought of that kid, McCarthy, rooting me on, and though I hadn’t realized it while I was making my cheap defenses, it was her I was fighting for, I mean crazy gals like us, and that drive cast out the maddening whir of the chopper propellers.

All of my misgivings disappeared the moment Thiessen and I made eye contact in the squared circle. I saw the hatred flicker across his eyes, and before I could think, my own rage flared up—at him and at my mother and at everything that seemed to conspire to put me in the cell of children’s animation. I lumbered at him in a shrieking blitz, and we grappled like Transformers in Hasbro Arena, over the fate of a secondary character in My Little Pony. I was informed later that the first part of the bout was “mat oriented”, and probably boring for most of the children in attendance. But after a few hold reversals Thiessen must have realized that he would not be able to take me down so easily. He pulled out a pair of brass knuckles he had concealed in his glasses case, which, in my reeling mind, counted as a weapon that had been brought in from the outside.

I was blasted in the jaw with that little metal equalizer, and I fell.’

(Here she broke off her narrative and showed the banged-up teeth that I thought I had noticed earlier, or at least, I remember her doing this.)

‘I called for the ref as blood trickled down my chin, but it seemed to no avail. He kept looking back toward the crowd as I lay there in agony like he had posted something in the wrong thread, which happened to be about me and my dinged up face and the slimy side of kids’ animation. I was screaming at him whether it was a good time to step in when OP sent down a suit to deliver a message to the ringside officials.

“Ladies and gentlemen… the sponsor of this event, Mr. Charles Bartleman, has ruled this contest to be no disqualification!”

I was dizzy. I looked up at the window box and could see Bartleman there with his arms folded, laughing at me like some kind of Taoist hero observing the quintessential comedy of the struggle for Earthly existence, Pollock’s painterly vision given veritable life in blows and blood dancing across the mat. Is this even legal? I thought. I, like, wasn’t even actually mad. This was too heavy for that. It was life and death staring me in the face; I was paying for the sufferings of the ancestors, and as Thiessen pulled me up by the hair, I saw that deep down there was a part of me that had wanted to trust him and his Hasbro cronies. I thought that maybe, family-oriented cartoons meant something, especially if they could be enjoyed by more than just elementary schoolers. Guess I was wrong.

Thiessen hoisted me up, and whispered, “Ready to go for a ride on the magical mystery express?” before throwing me over the ropes down into the pit. The velvet interior of the casket felt nice to tumble into; for everything that was happening, Renzetti’s cousin had done a nice job.

I could have almost gone to sleep, lying there, bleeding, exhausted, and worn out by my battles in kids’ entertainment.

I saw his hand go for the coffin lid.

He said with a wicked grin, “We can discuss the changes at the next meeting.”

I’m not sure where the energy came from. Perhaps I had a few extra imaginary friends helping me that night. Maybe I wanted to show the universe that Lauren Faust had not been beaten after all. Whatever it was, I would be damned if I was going to let nerd boy close that lid.

My left hand shot up and caught the door. I held on for dear life and the contest ensued between the two of us, one step between me and a metaphorical grave. I don’t think either of us even understood what was happening anymore, or what we were fighting for.

“Take the fall, Lauren!” he shouted, the spittle of his frustration flecking me under the flattening lights of Bartleman’s arena. That gave me an idea.

I was propping myself up as the kids rallied behind me. Soon we were shoulder to shoulder, butting heads like two Flash-animated ibexes, ready to take the world come hell or highwater. But I spit in his face so that that world would be mine, sending him jutting back away from the ropes. With his glasses knocked away, I decided I would do a little cheating of my own—and gave him a solid punt where Celestia’s sun doesn’t shine (not in my imagining of it, anyway).

He fell to the ground, paralyzed. My aching body was desperate for a chance to recover, but I knew I couldn’t wait for long—I had to act, had to find a way to finish the job while I still had the chance. I staggered outside of the ring in search of a weapon. Not his knuckles—something that would make the kids happy, because that’s how I do. Luckily, I discovered that the set-up crew had found nowhere else to store several folding tables except under the wrestling ring. I knew what I had to do.

If one table was painful, I reasoned, then three of them stacked on top of each other ought to be enough to put the nerd out for good. I got them set up, and boy, it was a harrowing climb, being totally drained and dragging that guy up the turnbuckle by the shirt. We even traded a few blows as he made a last ditch effort to escape what was coming. But once we made it to the top, I only needed one more fit of energy.

I picked Thiessen up over my shoulders and power-bombed him through three tables, snapping them in half like burnt bread and leaving both of us writhing on the mat. I think the kids liked it, I couldn’t tell. For a moment I couldn’t feel anything but my pounding skull and the ring of tinnitus. All I knew was that I was in better shape than he was, and all that remained was to drag his bruised body and broken spirit over to the coffin with my own.

As I pulled him up, I noticed a figure jolting down the entrance ramp. A referee coming to call the victory—no!—it was McCarthy! My trusty cabana girl, surely come with pina coladas to make sure I was ready for my post-match celebration. As she approached, I gave her what must have been a glazed look of appreciation as I motioned for her to set down whatever she had brought and to grab an arm. I took the other and hooked it around my shoulder, and gave her a cue to lift.

There was a crack, and a whirl of lights, and I found myself down on the mat once more. Turns out her pina coladas were a steel chair. She had gone to strike Thiessen and deliver her own brand of justice, only she had missed, and hit me. Or had she?

This was my thought as I slowly brought myself to my feet, staggering against the ropes. You might have guessed that I tend to be optimistic. Almost audacious. Like the world could be a better place if we just wished it to be so, and left it all in the ring. I could see it in my head, even then, against the glaring lights and the roar of an army of seven-year-olds, come to give me my licks: friends gathered together in a world where the sun rose on time and people wore their inner children on the outside; where everyone had a place, and the place had everyone, everything knitted together in a land where people, things, and animals merge into a love-collective.

But there was no love lost here. I spun around and gave her the old et tu.

She smiled. “Every little girl wants to be a princess.”

Jeez, what did I ever do to her?

What that, she delivered the final blow across the side of my head, and everything went blank. I was later told by a well-wisher that I went sprawling over the top rope and landed with a deafening thud back inside the coffin.

Also something about enjoying a party of one, blah blah.’

***
***
“So out of Scootaloo, we got Derpy,” said the man in the Applejack costume. “It’s always cool to know that little details.”

“Oh, but does that mean Scootaloo is handicapped for realsies?” asked another attendant to the gathering.

“I fuckin’ hope so,” said Ms. Faust, letting her chair tip back down to the floor. “I couldn’t stay for much longer after that. I made up some bullshit about a professional opportunity, but… since you insist, the real reason I left the project was because my colleagues betrayed me in a wrestling match in Rhode Island. I mean, would you have stayed?”

The question came down like a charge to a lightning rod and struck me between the eyes.

“Probably not,” I answered.

“Let that be a lesson to you. Beneath the charming veneer of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic rages the soulless libido of corporate greed and corruption, a shit shoot where good friends are willing to turn their backs on each other at the chance to have their own skyscraper. But, I don’t want to say too much. I’m sure McCarthy will do great things with the show.”

Before we could ask any more questions we here stopped by the jingle of a hidden bell, which sounded just big enough to go on a cat’s collar. Ms. Faust stood up, and with that, our meeting had come to a conclusion, as she spread her arms in a t-shape, and spun out of the room like Zangief, onto the next panel.

Comments

[Hoofprintz]

How was this not made into a fic?

[Forcalor]

I hope that Faust will return to us from the raging wars on the frontier in the Orion constellation and grace with more insight into gritty realism of the biz. You gotta love when famous creators are just regular people like us, it is very relatable