Doppler's Log [Deleted]

This is an edited blog that originally explained why the story was put on hiatus, now I edited it to explain why I got rid of the fic altogether.

I don't like it.

I just don't like it anymore after having looked it over. I don't like the characters, I don't like how I introduced them, and I don't like how they got there. The premise for the story is just... bad. Looking back on it makes me realize that there's absolutely nothing I could do to make the situation work. The entire story after a while just felt like I was describing why these arrogant people needed to watch over the mane six and why I constantly needed to find an excuse to justify them being there.

HiE is quite a feat to pull off, and I hadn't respected that sort of notion when I first wrote the story. Not helping matters at all was that it was the first fic I had written and the first... well, actual length story of anything ever. The grammar was bad even in this refined version, the use of italics got annoying after the second character introduction, and my method of describing environments was hindered more so than in my newer fics. As for the characters themselves: they're generic soldier cutouts with unique rifles. That's it. One's angry for no reason while the others are just stereotypes of their nationality, gender, or beliefs.

I think the worst offense overall had to just be the premise. There's a giant ball of radiation in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. When some people went in, mysteriously, they disappeared and so the most logical course of action was to send another six hardened veterans at the thing. To top it off, my arrogant ass teenage mind constantly tried to figure out how they could out do the ponies. Looking back over it and thinking back to the way I created the story the first time; it just looked like I was attempting to show that humans weren't horrible creatures, but ended up just making them armed thugs that disrespected the ponies' society and saw fit to try and handle every and all situations. Like previously mentioned, I wrote it when I thought I knew everything there was to know about the world and its problems, also from the perspective that humans are just terrible creatures.

Sigh* The story has served its purpose. I explained in the unedited version of this post that writing this kept me from going insane as I kept replaying scenarios of this stupid shit in my head. It was a way to give the characters in my head an environment and eventually... off them.

Spoilers I guess: most of them are killed in combat. The whole thing was an elaborate set up from move one where Luna saw the humans as some sort of miasma. I don't know why (Actually, I remembered it being due to a comic someone wrote where they blamed Luna's banishment on humans somehow), but I just embodied her as some immoral bratty teenager with immortal status, so she had planned this out. Celestia went to the crystal fair for the week, Luna decided she wanted to rid the world of changelings permanently after their scrap in Canterlot, and saw the arrival of Onyx as a decent way to do it without dirtying her own hooves. She had simply made an illusion of Celestia and Shining Armor being present in the castle the whole time.

The plan backfires when it turns out that the main character had ordered hits on their civilization in the swamp using 40mm HEDP launchers. Unknowing to them, civilian ponies are kept within the changeling's grasp to help them live in the everfree forest and this explains why they had been kidnapping ponies on the train. The leader had essentially ordered the murder of over twenty innocent people and it devastates the team. It is at this point that Chrysalis explains her situation and through some fucked logic I came up with, joins the team and now Onyx's goal is to immigrate them to pony society.

Luna, being the fig-neuter that she was in the story, was having none of this and essentially shot down the offer, told Chrysalis to go fuck herself, and now considers the humans an enemy. The timing couldn't happen to have been better either, as she awarded the royale guard augment rocks which enhance their magic and could change their form to, surprise, copies of the soldiers just like the changelings had done. Ponyville takes the changelings in, despite the fact that the only people interested in doing this had kidnapped the ponies and murdered them accidentally. Luna sends guards to Ponyville having figured out Onyx's intensions to help them live on, and now intends to imprison Onyx on the moon, showing them the pain she suffered due to their evilness or however the fuck that worked out in the comic. The guards sent to ponyville are overpowered and they proceed to make an assault on Canterlot to deal with Luna (they still perceive her as Celestia due to the illusion) once and for all.

Celestia randomly decides that she'll come home from the crystal fair early because 'I miss you sister'. Upon arrival and when informed about the situation of 'the miasma having returned for her' (Luna is just attempting to weasel her way through this and get Celestia to try and kill off the threat). Celestia sends her off to that... temple, whatever the hell it was called. I haven't seen the first and second episodes of the show in so long, I forgot what that place was called, all the more annoying since it was the premise of an episode in season 3. Anyhow, the team outmatches the augmented ponies working up to the castle and eventually work to the throne room. It is at this point where the assault seems unrealistic since Celestia would just... probably end it somehow before it even began as soon as she was informed of the situation. All that ends up happening though is that she tries sending them all to the mooooooon.

It misses Bellhop and Mercury, two of five remaining soldiers. Mercury draws fire in the room since they're outgunned but is killed immediately as Bellhop proceeds to Celestia. Though it was demonstrated that it had worked ealier in the story, Bellhop somehow grabs her horn and that for whatever reason negates her ability to perform magic... yeah I dunno. The friends are returned, but not in the throne room so he's freaking out and the mane six show up to try and stop him from doing anything rash to Celestia, he has a hallucination that his friends just showed up so he leaves and makes his way to the temple thing from guidance from discord... though he is dead. Yeah.

He makes his way there and it's revealed that Luna was behind it all. After a fucking conversation, he leaves and just... kills himself. The three operatives that returned from the moon just reside in the everfree forest, Kale having discovered Zecora and using her to help find his other friends. That's it really. The story ended there.

All of those events wer pretty much how the rest of it would have played out. Of course there was a shit ton of more irrelevant stuff going on, I mean you had the EPOW, relations with the operatives and the ponies at one on one levels, the interactions with changelings while they were migrating, and all of this other stuff that made the story reaaaallly fucking huge when it didn't need to be. Instead of the fifteen days to explore, it's cut short at six because the mission's over after that. They can't go home because Bellhop having somehow destroyed a god of chaos borked the portal they used to get there.

It just. Again, I don't like it. It's simply not good and there wasn't any feasible way I could patch it up so that it didn't manage to be worse than a self-insert story where everyone just loves the character because s/he's so cooooooooool. It would take a smarter man than myself to make it work. I mentioned before that it served its purpose, and it did. I stopped having troubling thoughts about the characters and whatnot. So why delete it instead of just slapping the 'cancelled' thing on it and leaving up the chapters? I thought at first that it'd make me come off like 'I don't want the story tarnishing my name' or some shit, but now I figured that it's more along the lines of 'I would hate for someone to think this was good and use it as a basis for their writing'.

By comparison, fics like my Drake and Josh one are fine because I posted it on the first of April. Doppler's Log wasn't a satire of HiE or soldier inserts, it was a failed attempt at something serious. And I took it very seriously when I wrote it all in the journals. I'm happy that it didn't get very popular either, because I would've driven myself insane trying to make such a dumb scenario work over the course of a year or two.

For clarification: this isn't a blog on why you can't write in human soldiers going to Equestria, this is why I couldn't write human soldiers going to equestria.

As of now, I just want to write my stupid smut fics. I honestly have more fun doing it and people seem to like them more.

-Farewell for now.

[April 30, 2015]