February Writeoff Thoughts - A Rambling Essay · 11:58pm Mar 6th, 2012
So, at long last the winners were announced! I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the board of judges was full of Equestria Daily pre-readers and Equestria After Dark mods. I could pass some cynical comments about the administration of the assorted pony websites, but I won't, seeing as I'm probably just a little too used to the ad-hoc nature of the tumblr pony community. Anyway, the choices of winners add more weight to something that's been hanging at the back of my mind for a little while now, about where the interests of the fan fiction community here lie. I feel like there's a certain ghetto developing, a la the Sci Fi Ghetto in general literature. To explain the Sci Fi Ghetto without having your day sucked into TV Tropes, it's the way that Sci Fi and Fantasy works get bashed unfairly and labelled as "not real literature", somehow being at the same time juvenile daydreaming and impenetrable rambling.
What I see in the pony community is everything beyond a certain distance from the show getting swept under the rug. Far be it from me to pass judgement on how the write-off was judged, but it seems their top criterion as far as style and theme were concerned was similarity to the show. Of course, this has nothing to do with quality, and there was possibly a bit of politics involved - in retrospect I don't think they'd particularly want to be handing a cheque to someone for a science horror story about ponies - but it still makes me wonder. How afraid are people to stray from the tone of the show? Shipping and Rule 34 aside - frankly, romance has jack shit to do with the show, but that's just the nature of the internet for you - pony fan fic readers seem to like their comfort zone of shiny happy marshamallow equines and the troubles of everyday life. I'll get to my personal thoughts on this in a bit, but as a general observation, stories which rely on things like grand adventure, deep lore, kicking up the maturity rating and complex plots have a harder time getting attention and acceptance than stories which appeal to light comedy, heartwarming, character drama and general literary diabetes. Obviously, this is not a hard and fast rule - things like Fallout Equestria and Paradise are critically acclaimed and hugely popular in the community - but generally speaking, if you write your story in the style of the show, more people will check it out, and people will look more favourably on it.
Of course this is a secondary effect to quality, but it's still present. It still must be said that correlation does not prove causation - it could be just a statistical hiccup, that the quality of stories that stray from the tone of the show is actually generally lower - but with the sample size that is the collected mass of pony fan fictions, that's not incredibly likely. Either way, this effect is reflected in the results of the February Writeoff. In the top ten rated stories in the Writeoff group - which I can only assume were the shortlist - the Comedy and Slice-Of-Life tags come up four and five times respectively, while Adventure only comes up twice, and Romance, Dark, Sad and AU once each.
As for my personal opinion on this, I think the tone of the show is rather... pedestrian. Which suits the show - it is made for kids after all - but why can't the fan fictions be more adventurous? Why can't we take the ponies outside their comfort zones in more extravagant ways than "Applejack loses a rodeo contest" or "Rainbow Dash is bed-bound in hospital"? Why can't we construct 'what-if' scenarios, and see what happens if things went differently on, say, the night of the Summer Sun Celebration? Of course there's nothing written down stopping us from doing this, but this is what the ghetto is about. It's like this unwritten rule that if you're not working from Lauren Faust's show bible, your stand gets shoved off in the corner of the room where most people don't pass it. Unless of course your name is something like KKat or Slywit, but to extend the Sci-Fi Ghetto analogy, FOE and Paradise are like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. They're firmly in the ghetto'd genre, but they're just of such scale and quality (mostly scale for the former, and quality for the latter) that they overcome it. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the tier of work just below them.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not bitter about the contest at all (I'm quite happy with my two thumbs up, thanks. Maybe a little disappointed that it didn't get a few more votes, but oh well) - it just brought something back to the surface that's been gestating for a while. Now, I don't exactly make things easy on myself as a writer. With Harmony's Wrath, it's almost as if I picked the most unacceptable topic to write about (Action adventure? Alternate history? Arcane horror? Anthro ponies?!) and went ahead with it anyway. But I'm used to the uphill struggle - if I wrote what was easy, I'd never improve. My concern is more that, well, this kind of tendency to accept what's in the comfort zone and reject what sits outside it makes readers complacent. They aren't challenged. They get stuck in that kind of rut where they sit on the dashboard spamming F5, waiting for writers to churn out shipfics and friendship lessons for their amusement. And when you remove the challenge from an art, it ceases to be an art.
I think the reason that the topics that stray from the show get less attention is because there are a lot of people who use the show/fan-fictions as an antidote to the depressing realities of life. They want to see/live vicariously through the lives of these ponies where the world is a magical happy place where the concerns of interpersonal relationships and the occasional rampaging out of control god(I.E. Nightmare Moon, Discord) are the only real worries. This is by no means a bad thing in my opinion as I feel that those who do this are just as valid in their viewpoint as those of us who get a certain thrill from seeing things that are different or break away from the norm.
I guess that my point is that while it is certainly true that there are plenty of those who prefer the more lighthearted stuff don't forget that there are still a goodly number of people who appreciate the labors of love that stories like yours clearly are. I can't speak wholeheartedly for other people but I can say that you have at least one fan of your stories not because of some genre or niche that it fulfills or fails to fulfill, but because they are a genuinely good read.