Intro

Greetings,

Figured the beginning would be the best place to start. Until I became a Brony in 2012, I had never read a fan fiction. Now, a little over a year later, I’ve started posting my own. My writing experience is mostly through school: writing essays, research papers, and the like.

I have written on my own as well, mostly poetry and a few short stories of varying quality. I did make a few feeble attempts (scraped and restarted the same thing a few times) at a story set in the Star Wars universe.

It had... flaws:

The main character was a self-insert. It started as a short bio for the Star Wars RP that a friend tried to get going (it never did). From there it evolved into… well, I really don’t know. I never finished it.

Most Star Wars stories that I know about focus on the Rebels, and when they do decide to focus on an Imperial it is usually a high ranking officer about to be force choked by Vader (an exception being Thrawn on account of Vader being dead and all), or someone who will eventually join the Rebels (Han Solo, Fell, etc…) . The idea behind it was to write a story about an Imperial bomber pilot flying with a secret elite squadron. There are not many stories about Imperial Tie Pilots, so I figured I would try my hand at one.

Having never read any of the X-Wing novels and very few EU stories in general, I realized I had no idea how to depict a dogfight. Keep in mind that this was also a Tie Bomber dogfighting Headhunters (the Rebel’s fighter before the X-Wing).

~~~

Back to the Ponies…

How did I become a Brony?

January 1, 2012: The ball had dropped and we were flipping through channels. After watching a bit of an alpine ski race, we switched to the HUB to watch the classic Adam West Batman series (we had actually got my dad an ornament of the classic bat-mobile that played the theme from the series that year). During the commercial-breaks, there were advertisements for a marathon of the classic G1 J.I. Joe and Transformers series. Needless to say, I went through the cable box's guide to double check the airing time so I knew what time I would have to get up to enjoy all the awesomeness.

I noticed that before the marathon there were a couple other shows: two episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (they ended up being the Discord episodes), followed by some other shows that I do not remember. Being about 2-3 in the morning, I immediately set my alarm so that I could get up early enough to catch MLP.

Why?

I thought it would be funny to watch a show for little girls. (I had not heard about the show, or its fan-base at the time). I got up, turned on the TV at the appointed time, double-checked the guide, and noticed that the show was labeled as being "science fiction". That seemed odd to me, but I shrugged it away as being silly nonsense. Although, the Sci-Fi geek in me did add that as an excuse as to why what I was about to do was okay.

As soon as the show started, I began laughing... at myself for how ridiculous this was:

"A 22 year old watching MLP: I must be insane!"

Within minutes, however, I realized that I was laughing at the show, and I that I was enjoying it. The characters, the story itself, the references to past episodes and allusions to a vast world.

I was immediately hooked, though I did not know it at the time.

Being what could be considered a Lunar worshiper, the mentioning of a character called Nightmare Moon piqued my interest. The next day (Jan 2, 2012), when no one was home, I tracked down every episode that had aired up to that point and promptly watched them all, in order, over the course of two days (day1-S1; day2-S2).

While watching the first two episodes, I vividly remember face-palming as the pink pony was about to sing:

"O dang...is she really going to sing?!"

At the same time, the other characters were having the same reaction. I had to pause and rewind the video to double check that they had in fact noticed that the pink pony was about to sing, and that it was not normal. I loved it! (Pinkie Pie is now nearly tied with Fluttershy as my favorite of the M6)

During those first episodes, I rewound and re-watched several scenes. One, was when I began to realize that I really was going to watch every single episode of this little girls tv show. The episode: “Winter Wrap Up”; the reason: the song. I must have rewound the player a few dozen times to continue listening to that song before finishing the episode.

Within a few days, I had found the fandom and was rocking out to the fan-made music. The first songs being “At the Winter Gala” by Saltlakrits and “Sunshine and Celery Stalks” by PinkiePieSwear.

I must admit that I did not really learn about Derpy until the airing of The Last Roundup.

Sometime around early February or late January, I began reading fan-fiction. Won’t go into too much detail about the first two or three, but I will say that if it were not for “My Little Dashie” I would not have read anymore. Sure, it has issues, and is in no way close to being the best; but, being the first “good” fan-fic that I read, and being the one that brought me into this part of the fandom, I will always hold it dear to me and rate it as being one of my favorites.

Also, a quick note on one of those first three:
If I ever refer to Pinkie as Pinkamina, it is because it is her name and not a split-personality’s, not an altered psychotic state, and Not. That. Demon’s.

also, I think it's cute…

~~~
Thunderhalk89