Another Story · 7:23pm May 13th, 2012
Below lies the revision of a drabble I wrote a few weeks ago. Writing-wise, its main purpose was to exercise some "Tell, Don't Show" because I'm a loose canon author who doesn't play by the rules.
Forced Evolution
On a grey winter's day, Dr Genome Map put the finishing touches on a spell that would forever shatter the public's image of the alicorn. For thousands of years, an alicorn's birth had been a rare event of great significance. The few alicorns born in Equestria's history went on to become pivotal players in shaping the nation, two of them – Celestia and Luna – defeating a great evil and becoming Equestria's supreme, immortal rulers.
So it was with great scepticism that the public received Dr Map's news of a spell that could force an act of fate. All that was needed to birth an alicorn, he claimed in a press release printed on the front of every paper in the country, was a pegasus and a unicorn to conceive while enchanted with his amazing new spell.
For eleven months, the nation waited with a bated breath. Meanwhile, the burgeoning cinema industry tapped a nerve with a slew of exciting, idealised romance movies starring unicorn and pegasus leads, and hit gold with immense popularity of on- and off-screen lovers Lightning Strike and Cosmos Quill.
Nearly a year after Dr Map's announcement, during a warmer winter, he was proven right by the births of ten new alicorns. By this time, the Princesses had wisely revoked the age-old policy of inducting alicorns into the nobility, much to the disappointment of many interracial parents. However, even without that incentive to go with it, parenting an alicorn swiftly became a popular aspiration.
After the heat of Lightning and Cosmos's affair cooled down, savvy executives captured the interest of the growing teenage alicorn market with inspiring films about the difficulty of growing up as a subspecies still in the minority – the teasing, the stares, and the immense pressure of having to succeed at flying and weather-control for Dad and magic for Mom. Between a Cloud and a Leyline kickstarted the acting career of Lightning and Cosmos's daughter, Clouded Moon, who went on to achieve even greater heights of stardom than her parents.
Alicorn foals grew to be taller than other ponies on average, and many often outshone their pegasi or unicorns peers at flying and magic-usage. Studies conducted indicated that the strongest and most enduring ponies in the country were still all earth ponies, but the greater size of the alicorns meant that they were catching up fast.
Dr Genome Map retired to a mansion in Haywaai, and his eager successors soon found a way to cast the alicorn-birth spell across the whole of Equestria, permanently. They succeeded, and from then on, every foal born to a pegasus and a unicorn had both wings and a horn.
In an interesting trend, the number of children per pegasus–unicorn couple actually decreased. Behavioural scientists hypothesised that it was because both parents could now relate and teach what was dearest to them to a single child. A few unsubstantiated studies and morning television programs – most famously The Star Shower Hour – claimed that this made the families of pegasus–unicorn couples "closer" and "more accepting" on average than any other kind.
Within a few generations, it became abnormal and backward for a unicorn or pegasus to date among their own subspecies, and fewer and fewer did.
Quasar Nova, the last unicorn, died three hundred years after Dr Map's announcement, surrounded by her loving children, alicorns every one of them.
Flash fiction was my first love, and I'd like to spend some more time applying it to ponies once I'm done with my long stories (which I'm still working on amidst IRL obligations and a small bout of writer's block).
Thanks to Eustatian Wings for some insightful critique and helping to tighten this into more of a story and less of a splurge of science fiction based on headcanon I made after watching the finale.
Showing - control the imagination
Telling - control the curiosity
That was chilling. I wish I could say more, but anything beyond a straight-up compliment or diss and my Critique-O-Matic starts to wheeze.
Also "loose canon author" made me laugh.
Intriguing. Sad. Compelling.
It's a peculiar scenario, where a reproductive fad might become widespread enough to produce total evolutionary change. While it's far-fetched for humanity (though not to a great extent) it's entirely plausible in the FiM universe, as one of the many horrors in that fridge. There is so much hurt, awkwardness, shock and gasping for air that you could inflict with this story, considering the advent of unicorns going extinct and racial diversity in decline. I don't know if the demographic of FiMFiction at large could be mature enough to stomach it.
113470 Yeah, there we go, what he said.
I'm just the worst commenter =3
This was good!
It'd be interesting to hear more about how the pure unicorns and pegasi react to the effective death of their species, as well as how the earth ponies react to having to live with this new super-race of ponies. Major upsets to the status quo like this have all kinds of potential for great acts of both villainy and heroism. But... I understand this is flash fiction and therefore deep exploration wasn't really the point. (Though, given how nearly every OC alicorn story in the fandom ends up being a Mary Sue story, it'd actually be pretty cool to read something where that very much was not the case, eh.) In any case, this flash fiction does accomplish what I think you meant it to do: It got the readers thinking.
One tiny quibble: The first sentence is somewhat awkward. I had to re-read it four times before I understood what was being said. (Also, a weather report? If that's how you're going to start, can you tie it into the imagery later on?)
The cool (frightening?) thing with telling is how compressed it is vs showing. With something like this, a 100:1 expansion ratio is entirely possible. Instant novel, just add characters and scenery.
Dem's right, though, a lot of folks would hate it.
113446
Don't sweat it. Critiquing is hard (why do you think I do so much line-editing? =P).
113517
Thanks for this. Such are the dangers of cobbling together revisions from old drafts. I've cut that sentence down to size. RE: weather reports – in my hubris, I'd like to think mine closer to "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" than "It was a beautiful Spring day in Ponyville and the birds were singing in the trees". I did have a thought about tying the imagery into later events, but it seems to have gotten lost in the writing process. I'll see what I can do about fixing it later.
113470
113646
113517
Writing a decent story with (an) OC alicorn(s) is something I'd very much like to do at some point, but with all my other ideas, I'm not sure I'd get around to it. I think this idea certainly does have a lot of potential for expansion, and in a perfect world that's something I might see to, but if there's one thing I know it's that I shan't have time to really do justice to every one of the story ideas that pops into my head (there are a lot... expect more of these blogs).
114752
Hey, neither will I for my ideas most likely. But that doesn't stop me from writing them down, and it never hurts to simply put them in simple words to see how the idea comes out, does it?
114752
>beginning line
Aah, much better now!
>story ideas and lack of time
I can absolutely empathize with this. Blog posts like this seem like a good medium to give them some voice without consuming all your time, eh.