The Final Game: Behind the Scenes

So, yeah, I published yesterday a new fic:

EThe Final Game

• Equestria Girls
• Drama
• Slice of Life

There is only one game left. One game to remain undefeated, to be remembered as a chess legend in Canterlot High School. However, my opponent is Twilight Sparkle.

• Other
• Sci-Twi

gapty · 2.7k words  ·  37  2 · 385 views

It was actually an idea I had for a long time: Velvet Sky playing against Twilight and let the background character and her inner thoughts get revealed through the game itself.

Why specifically Velvet Sky? She was shown in this short to defeat a Crystal Prep student in a chess game. Well, if we follow the logic of Crystal Prep always winning the Friendship Games and this school wanting to be the best in everything, I concluded a personal headcanon that Velvet is a very strong chess player. There is more to her, like her being in the soccer club and art club, but it's not like anyone else gives EqG background characters deeper characterisations ;P

Anyway, since I had this idea so long, why didn't I write this sooner? Especially when back then I was actively writing fics?

Well, I had no idea how to make it work. Implementing an actual chess game inside a story sucks. Those who have no idea won't understand it, and those who do would rather watch an actual chess game instead of a vague chess game being explained.

I have written multiple attempts with different scenarios: Velvet playing her for the first time, Velvet playing her in an tournament, some story about a secret chess player that Twilight tries to figure out (the secret player was not Velvet, but she would play a role in that story), a story where Twilight enters on the same chess tournament as Velvet and a young girl called Cozy Glow—many possibilites, but none that satisfied me to make something out, so nothing got made.

But now this story is out, and while it's per se sitting there right now under 30 likes with 3 dislikes, it still does well for a chess fic set in Equestria Girls. Not everyone's cup of tea, but at least some seem to like it ;)

So why is writing a chess game working now?

In short: March Comes In Like A Lion.

An anime show about a shogi player. A wonderful show I would recommend to anyone, especially if you liked this fic. Sure, shogi is not chess, but it is similar enough, and human psychology works the same regards board games anyway.

It did such a phenominal job of implementing shogi as a characterisation tool, or how to tell a shogi game. I did have written already in this blog post about it, and after watching season 2, my only addition would be that season 2 does the shogi part even better.

And so, naturally, it served as a inspiration or a "cheat sheet" in how to tell a story through a chess game:

Make the chess game mean something to a character.

Well, per se I knew about this already before, but the imagry and metaphors used were very narrow while the chess game was too detailed. This show however showed me how to portray the feelings inside a game or what imagry to use:

Yeah, Twilight Sparkle, the grim reaper, comes more or less directly from this show—include there also "Such a beautiful young grim reaper. (…) If someone was going to close the curtain, I couldn't ask for anyone better".

Funny enough, I actually wanted to go a different direction, but the fic wrote itself to parallels with the game from episode 9. In short: After 40 years, the old man telling it would get demoted from class C after this loss, hence the grim reaper analogy. Of course, Velvet's motivation and reasoning for this analogy are different, so I count it as inspiration, not copying ;P

However, this show did everything so much better. If you liked my fic and want to see something similar but several amounts better and deeper, give this show a chance. It made me write this fic because I found the portrayel of shogi so inspiring, so take this as proof how I love it ;) (also, to calm anyone down who thinks they need to understand shogi to enjoy it: You don't. I basically know nothing about shogi other that it's similar to chess).

Is this blog post me fanaticly advertising this show? Maybe, maybe not. What I like is that, at least for me, this fic turned out to not be about losing to chess, but about failing own expectations, the fear of being irrelevant and forgotten, and regret of life choices—apparently not for others, but I'm not gonna force my view onto them ;P

So, yeah, funny enough, what turned out to be the missing key to making a chess game fic was to not make it about chess at all (by certain definitions )