Mind Fuschia Garden (twenty points if you get that reference) · 2:33am May 29th, 2013
I just had my mind screwed with beyond any possible help. I realized something so absolutely glaringly obvious that I have no idea how it wasn't noticed by someone before. Why don't stories focus on ponies who can play music?
No really, I'm not joking here. Literally the only music I've ever seen in stories, excluding singing, is an hie fic where the main character turned into a pony and could play the guitar. I've only ever seen music mentioned when it relates to Lyra, Octavia, or Vinyl Scratch. This is unacceptable. I wholeheartedly dislike and despise this now, as music is a large part of my life that really is inseparable from me, as much as somebody else might be an entirely different person without their emotions. This has, as a whole, made me question exactly why we don't see music as a major part of any story, especially when one could quite easily write a story about a travelling bard, or a musician who observed the ponies come and go as they played a piano in a dive. There are so many ways a person could write music into a story, without needing to play the instrument, but we don't see it regardless of how enjoyable a read as it could make.
I've looked at this, and I still have trouble realizing how people could ignore something that is so important and corporeal to me, and while I don't understand it on a personal level, I do on an intellectual one. You see, something that writing is, is in a way, sharing stories. Right? So we like to share the amazing stories we think of, stories of bravery, comedy, humour or simply a look into the life of the commoner that nobody else thought about. But one thing about many of those stories is that many people connect with the characters, but the authors have a sort of "minimum connectivity" if you will, that must be surpassed before the will even consider writing a story.
Now, this might sound like anime psuedo science, but it kind of makes sense, in a mildly messed up way. Think about it, if an author doesn't know something, or at least know enough to guess, they most likely will not think of something. In a similar fashion, what they do know, or what they did guess at is often reflected in the way the world and the individuals in that world work, which is something that should be considered when writing. Much as in making architecture in programs that don't simulate physics properly, such as Minecraft, one must look to real world examples to keep everything fairly realistic. So with that said, an author requires a threshold of experience or understanding on a topic to so much as think about writing on it, right? Well, one may argue and say something along the lines of "I've connected with tons of characters who have a main trait that I don't understand". But that is the thing about writing. A talented writer could allow a blind person to connect with a musician in a story, if they wrote it well enough.
So really, if a person doesn't know anything about something, they won't have the idea for an amazing story that they think is great enough to share with other people. This kind of does make sense though, when you look at other examples of shared media. One such aforementioned noun is shown in video games, when we pass one along a game or two to our friends because we thought they were amazing. People often don't know how amazing music can be for the player, and yet we see no one writing about that. I mean, even earlier today, I just had a jam session with four other people with the school's instruments, and it was only blues, nothing special, but I came up with a really nice bassline, and then my guitar teacher (who was playing the piano, by the way) turned that into a real neat melody, and it was a really powerful experience for me. So because music is a powerful and moving experience for the player, and because people naturally share thing that are amazing, through stories designed to simulate the experience, we must logically conclude that next to nobody knows how to make music.
Who knows, this could change, or maybe it won't. We could suddenly have a bunch of people who make a collab focusing on musical ponies, or we could not. We might even be lucky enough to get a story about an assassin bard. But still, I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're starting a story, and you have no idea of what to write, think about music. It is a moving experience, just sort of throwing something random down and having a bunch of people play along with it. It's an amazingly communal thing, and it makes you feel connected, like your hands aren't your own, like something is possessing them, when you see just how quickly, how efficiently, how neatly, and how impressively you're playing along with the other people around you.
Or maybe I just read too much into this, and I just happened to miss all of the fics centring around music playing protagonists. I'm just a random guy with a cup of tea.
Whoa. Deep stuff there, amigo.
1111722 Meh. I can be philosophical sometimes too. That said, after looking over it in a non-sleep deprived state, I realized that this was disjointed, non-uniform, and makes little connections between past arguments and current ones. I love it.
1111860 And I do agree. It's rare that I find any protaginists in the music biz besides Tavi and Vinyl.