Site Post » [Interview] Norsepony’s “The War And What Came After” · 2:03am Dec 7th, 2013
This week’s story wanders far afield from the Equestria we know, painting a dark and compelling picture of an ancient tragedy.
The War And What Came After
[Dark] [Adventure] • 21,487 words
The earth had belonged to the People since time immemorial, until the ponies came to push them out. For centuries, they have hidden in the forest and the hills, slowly losing ground to their enemies.
But now the gods have chosen two young warriors.
FROM THE CURATORS: The majority of our debate over this story centered around its distance from the show — it’s essentially original fiction seasoned with some Equestrian spice. ”For most of the fic, I was listening to a little voice in my head saying “at what point does this tie in to FIM in any way?’” Chris said. However, it won him over: “I never felt like I was wasting my time with it — that’s what I want out of a good story … and the characters are all beautifully grey yet sympathetic.”
Ultimately, that detachment from the source material gave the story room to show off one of its strongest features: its exemplary worldbuilding. “A satisfying story for me on many levels,” Horizon said. ”I especially love his use of language to reinforce his setting.”
Read on for our interview, where Norsepony discusses the magic of writing, the joys of research, and which kinds of elves make the best ponyfic protagonists.
Give us the standard biography.
Howdy, I’m Norse Pony. Originally from San Diego, California, I have somehow found myself living in the middle-north of America, where the weather can’t make up its mind whether it’s going to roast you or freeze you, and the bugs are so plentiful that they’ve got their own seats in the state senate. I fall into the “above average” age bracket in this fandom but otherwise fit neatly into its average demographics, for good or ill. I’ve been part of the fandom since somewhere between season one and two. I’m a nerd about the art of animation, which is a big part of the reason I started watching MLP in the first place. I came for the animation, and stayed for the everything else.
How did you come up with your handle/penname?
In my non-pony internet life, I go by the name of one of the Norse gods. So calling myself Norse Pony seemed both logical and thematic, and also a skosh less pretentious.
Who’s your favorite pony?
In the show, Rarity. I’m a sucker for good voice acting, and Tabitha St. Germain is a great VA. Her skill makes me love nearly every line Rarity delivers. Plus, Rarity is the creative among the cast. As a writer, I feel a sense of kinship to her.
To write about, my favorites would have to be the royal sisters, and particularly Celestia. Worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing, and there aren’t many characters with as much potential for worldbuilding as them.
What’s your favorite episode?
That’s a hard question. I think I’d have to go with Lesson Zero, because it’s so wonderfully over the top. But I’ll always have a soft spot for Suited For Success, because it’s the episode where I learned that Tabitha St. Germain is my favorite VA. In Rarity’s “wallowing” scene, the old movie references and her performance sold me forever on the show and on Rarity as a character.
What do you get from the show?
At first, I got a big community of folks who all came together to squeal over the show, which was a tremendously fun and welcoming environment. Now that the fandom is a few years old and has mostly splintered into a bunch of groups with disparate interests and focuses, that early sense of community is gone. These days, I get creative impetus, some from the show, but mostly from being part of the writing section of the fandom. Ponies is inspiring to a degree that is all out of proportion to what it is, and I’m just one of the uncountable thousands of people who want to make stuff because of it and the fandom which surrounds it.
What do you want from life?
I want to write things that make publishing companies want to pay me. I’m using ponyfic as a way to bootstrap myself up to a publishable level of skill, because I have few other marketable skills and I’d like to be able to pay for the roof over my own head someday.
Why do you write?
To get good enough to make money at it. But I guess a bigger-picture answer would be because I love the written word. I’ve been a voracious reader all my life. There’s a numinous quality to the ability to string together words in a way that lets you transport strangers into the lives of people who only exist in your head. I fell in love with that ability as the transportee, and it wasn’t long before I got the itch to be the magician who gave other people that feeling. Fast-forward past a lot of years of existing in a gray fog of depression, and ponies came into my life and rekindled that spark. I write because I can, and because my life is worse without writing, and because storytelling is a wonderful magic that only works when it’s shared.
What do you feel is the place of stories like this, that put little focus on ponies in favor of other races, in the greater body of fanfiction?
To explore the world. The show focuses on events in the lives of a small cast of characters—as it should, because it’s tuned for young minds. But the creators sprinkle the show with tidbits for older viewers: references to mythology, culture, history, etc. And as much as they intentionally put in, there is always more that can be inferred. The world the show is set in is much bigger than Ponyville, and much more interesting than the show can include. And to me, that’s fascinating. I want to know about dragon culture, especially given that dragons are so long-lived. I want to know what other peoples exist in Zecora’s homeland, and what the politics of Saddle Arabia are like. I find those questions more interesting than questions about the cast we know well, and fanfiction is the only place they can be answered.
(Incidentally, I wanna plug the main-line MLP comics here, because there’s a lovely amount of worldbuilding and question-answering in those books. I’ve been extremely pleased with every issue. If you’re reading this and you’re not reading the comics, you should see about changing that.)
What advice would you give to authors looking to expand on the Equestria presented in the show?
Ask questions and do research. Asking yourself things like “why is X the way it is in the show?” and “if X is that way, then does that mean that Y is also true?” can lead to interesting lines of speculation that could be the genesis of a story. By way of example, when Cerberus made its brief appearance in the show in It’s About Time, I was delighted by the ramifications, because that meant that Greek mythology has a presence in the world of MLP—specifically, it meant that Hades exists, and so by implication, any other parts of Greek myth exist too. I’ve always been fond of Greek myth, so I did research on Hades, both the god and the place, and when I learned that Hades was the son of Titans, it made me wonder if perhaps all immortals are the offspring of Titans, including Celestia and Luna. My musings on that topic never crystallized into a story nub, so nothing came of it, but those ideas live in my head now, and they might come in handy in some future story.
Research is incredibly useful, in my opinion. The stories and myths of human cultures are varied and fascinating, and they can add interesting new angles to a story idea or plot. And more than that, even when we’re writing about Technicolor ponies, or aliens, or snails who sing and dance, we’re always really writing about people. Research can illuminate things about culture or the human condition that add the stamp of verisimilitude to a story.
Or it can just teach you about a cool thing that would be cool in a story. Not everything needs to be cosmically important. It’s OK for a story just to be fun, or cool, or both. It’s all parts of the same storytelling magic.
What influences, if any, did you draw on for the People, their society and beliefs?
The reason I chose deer instead of any other kind of creature was as an homage to Jetfire’s “It’s a Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door,” which is one of my two all-time favorite stories in the fandom and one of the stories which directly inspired me to begin writing again after almost two decades without. When I began thinking about the story, I was thinking of writing my deer as Tolkien-flavored elves, as Jetfire did. But I quickly discarded that, because Tolkien’s elves aren’t particularly interesting to me in and of themselves. Their essential fatalism makes them poor main characters, as well.
Instead, I decided to base them on Elfquest’s elves, who are a dramatically different take on elves: a warrior culture, vital, passionate, lusty and lustful. And, importantly to my story, Elfquest’s Wolfriders are a people at war, fighting to hold their home against the spread of the fast-breeding humans. Elfquest also had a powerful influence on me early in my teens, so it was a way to pay homage to another one of the building blocks of my creative aesthetic.
As the pieces of the story nub came together in my mind over a week or so, I realized that the animistic aspect to the People’s world, and their relationship to their gods, hewed closer to some Native American beliefs than to the Wolfriders of Elfquest, and so I folded that influence into their portrayal. The shaman’s tale which opens the story was consciously written in a style patterned after the style of translated Native American creation myths, for example.
The day-to-day mechanics of the People’s way of life was my own creation. Or, to put it more accurately, I don’t know what the influences were for those aspects of the story. Some low fantasy settings, some Jean Auel… the usual sort of creative pastiche.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
My favorite quote about writing and creativity in general:
“You have to get back on the horse. Somehow, and I don’t know how this kind of thing starts, we have started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on: these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror. Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.” —Jerry Holkins
You have stories that only you can tell, and there are strangers out there who don’t know that they’re waiting to read them. Don’t give up. Add your magic to the world, because the world is always, always in need of more magic.
(You can check out The War And What Came After here. You can follow the Royal Canterlot Library's interviews at our site, or join the fimfiction group to get notified of new selections and suggest your own favorites.)
This story is a cool story and Norsepony is a cool pone. Folks should go check out the rest of his works, because they're all pretty awesome.
I think you are missing "/story" in the hyperlink at the bottom for the fimfiction link.
1579603
Thanks! Fixed.
God I
this story.
Norse Pony is a winner.
So basically, the better the story is the more you are allowed to break the rules?
Okay, I just wrote down that Jerry Holkins quote. It wouldn't hurt if a few more of us did the same.
I plan to read Norsepony's works as soon as I'm done with my reading list. Pinkie Pie Promise
1584309
A better way to think of it is that, if you put your story together well enough, you will be able to incorporate challenging elements (removal from canon "feel," lack of a sympathetic protagonist, etc.) into your work without alienating readers. It's about knowing how to use those things to your benefit, or at least about preventing them from becoming a detriment
To give a non-fic example: in choral theory, one of the first things aspiring composers are taught is that parallel fifths are bad (this video shows what parallel fifths are, and why they don't work). And yet, parallel fifths are used by plenty of great composers--not because the "rule" is bad, but because they are skillful/knowledgeable/(let's be honest, sometimes simply lucky) enough to utilize them in a way which doesn't weaken their song.
1600142 Your example made less sense than your explanation (at least for those with little to no understanding of music theory). Of course if I felt like reading too much into that, I might speculate it was deliberate and in fact you were making a very subtle point.
1604865
Not deliberate, I assure you. Let me toss out a couple more examples, and see if one works better.
In boxing, one of the very first maxims taught is "always keep your hands up," because the head is the most vulnerable part of the body, and exposing it to big hits is a bad idea. One doesn't need to watch much boxing to observe professionals flagrantly ignoring this rule, but this isn't because it's a bad rule--it's because they (theoretically) know when they can afford to drop their hands for a second or two to get inside their opponent's guard, protect their torsos, or whatever, without unnecessarily exposing their heads.
In professional speaking, beginning elocutionists learn early on to keep their hands at their sides or behind their backs when they aren't using them. This is (among other reasons) because many people will unconsciously cup their hands in front of them when addressing a group--a gesture that's colloquially known as "peeing into a cup." Yet you don't have to search hard to find a famous speaker or politician who keeps his hands in front of him while speaking, and who's able to do so without projecting weakness.
The reason "rules" like these exist is because they usually work; following the rules will produce a better end result than not following the rules in the vast majority of situations. Likewise in MLP fanfiction, we have rules like "avoid Lavender Unicorn Syndrome," "don't use passive voice," and "make sure your story has a strong thematic connection to FiM." Following these rules will almost always result in a better fanfic than not following them, and so they become "rules." But they can still be twisted or even ignored--if the author has enough skill, ability, or luck to avoid the attendant perils which ignoring these rules invites.
Did that make more sense? If not, I'll bump one of the other RCL guys and see if they can phrase things more clearly than I have--I don't want you to feel like you're being talked past, after all.