I've made a huge mistake · 12:31am May 5th, 2013
So, I was here, browsing poni when I should be doing more important things with my life and dancing to Godflesh in my most ill-fitting one piece dress when I made a turn and hit a wall.
There is this one story about a new team of elements I was writing and noticed that:
1. They take down a new bad guy almost each chapter I planned.
Not of the caliber of NMM or Discord but still pretty bad ass, dangerous and peculiar. Like the G1 villains.
Now, they may be pretty cool and stuff but I really don't want to risk making them better than the mane 6.
At best equal and that's it; but if they keep on beating a witch, warlord, timelord, living goo, alien empire, rubber chicken, jumper, etc. daily it's going to look like they are inherently better and more effective than the mane 6.
And no, I don't want to scrap any of them.
2. I don't really have a good reason for Luna being their "Celestia".
The MC and new element of magic is under Luna's wing but she isn't her protege or anything like that; just a pony that just graduated from magic school.
I really like the idea of Luna taking this random pony and forcing her to recruit a team of fillies with attitude behind her sister's back but I don't have any good reason to make her so childish and bull-headed other than well, make her into one of those quirky badass bosses that often appear on media.
3. Where in the world is Twilight Sparkle?
This is one of the big ones.
If I write a story about another set of Elements, then what do I do with the current ones?
However, I came up with 3 ways to fix this and they are:
1. Alternate Universe.
With this I kill two birds with one stone since I had another fic in mind about the mane 6 if the sonic rainboom never happened and it gives me a shot at attempting to write Solar Flare(I'm more partial toward Empress Corona myself but, eh.).
2. Going to the future.
This is a good one, giving me plenty of space to cameo the mane 6 and not venturing that much into Team DESU territory but Season 4 is going to hit me in the head if the rest are turned into alicorns too.
Farfetched but still a possible.
3. Going to the past.
No Luna, so Celestia is left with a sassy, unwilling trainee with Equestria's fate on her hooves.
I'm actually warming up to this one but the only problem with this is some of the characters would become pretty much a paradox to exist in a world with less technology.
Anyways, yeah, any suggestion or help is more than welcome.
It's important to me and stuff but I don't want to bother anyone on the forums with my silly first world problems.
Well, for the first issue, if you're going for a sort of show style presentation with your fic you could, conceivably, intersperse each 'antagonist adventure' chapter with 'character building slice of life' chapters. Which would allow you to keep the baddies, but not make it look like your new team of protagonists is whooping evil butt all the time.
Second issue, sibling rivalry. Luna and Celestia may be the leaders of Equestria, but that doesn't mean they aren't above a little petty sibling rivalry on occasion. Besides, Celestia's team can't be there to handle EVERY problem, let Luna handle some of it.
As for the third issue, eh, I'd go with the few years into the future plan. Maybe the current elements are having trouble dealing with all the stuff that's getting kicked around as of late, so your group is formed to help them out. That way you can have appearances from the mane six, like you originally wanted.
Not to be a cranky grumpy critic pants, but I'm upset that you are forcing the elements of harmony on these characters in your story. I mean, what are the elements but a weak glue meant to hold your characters together, and a majorly overpowered Deus Ex Machina. Really, you could eliminate most of the problems listed above by removing them from the plotline. That would open up so many possibilities as well. You'd no longer have to worry about tailoring your characters to embody the elements, for one thing.
You say your big mistake is that you have them beat a villain every other chapter and don't want them to exceed the canon main six. That's not the main problem as I see it (though it is something to be worked on). The real problem is that your insisting on comparing them to the main six at all.
Try thinking of how your story would be different if you removed the elemental shackles on your characters. Now what would they do? Where would they go? You've got a whole world to work with.
I'll be paying attention.
BeauZoe
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Noted.
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I never thought of tailoring them to fit each element though, but I did struggled a bit to know which element would suit each one the best.
For example, Plumsweet was eligible for honesty, kindness, loyalty, generosity AND magic, but I settled for kindness and then I had to nerf her character to be less perfect; Twinklestar didn't qualified for anything except for Laughter but she is a sophisticated pony and trying to come up with ways to make her funny is going to be a pain in the ass; or Lily who could be honesty but I gave her generosity in the end for being the most selfless pony in the group.
I have to add, though, that people will point out an overpowered character as a mary sue faster than an actual mary sue like my first version of Plumsweet was, and that shaping a generous character into any form other than "oh, you want my house? No problem, it's yours. I'll get you the property papers tomorrow morning" is hard.