Feb
11th
2014
New Story: The Terrifying Prospect of Swans in Love · 4:25am Feb 11th, 2014
So you guys know how I keep threatening to finish writing that Twilestia fic that isn't The Lessons of Eternity? Well...
Yes! The Terrifying Prospect of Swans in Love is live! It contains Twilight, and Celestia, and booze, and swans (disclaimer: swans may be entirely metaphorical), and may also include jokes. Go check it out!
Seriously this story is... I think the second piece of pony fanfic I ever started writing, almost 2 years ago. Before even "In Search of Lost Friends," I think. It feels really good to finally be putting it to bed.
There's... more stuff to say about the writing of this fic and why it took almost 2 years but I will save it for another time I think.
Report
Fedora Mask · 994 views
·
Can that time be right now, in answer to this comment?
Good for you, man, getting out something that you've been working on for so long. I look forward to reading it, though it may take me a couple of days with school going on.
1821819 Well, see, I can answer you right now, or I can take the time to tell you the story. Heh.
It's not a -tremendously- interesting story but it makes up for it with length, and it goes something like this:
Back in April of 2012, like 1am some night, Twilight's obvious crush on Celestia would not get out of my head, so I gave up on sleep and pounded out something approximating the first scene of this fic (the only one from Twi's perspective). Eventually this expanded into Celestia's response and Luna showing up and telling Celestia to get her act together as she does--though the original tone of that conversation was... much sillier. Some bits of it may sneak into future fics (there were a lot of relatively silly references to Nightmare Moon that felt a little out of place as the tone of the fic changed).
However, I was never really sure how or if I was going to finish it when I started out. See what happened was, I spent a long time just sort of dwelling on the Twilight/Celestia relationship because it appealed to me (again, mostly that Twilight had this desperate girl-crush). But you know, I don't write shipfic, and I definitely don't ship ponies. So I figured I wouldn't finish it.
And I was sort of uncomfortable writing Twilestia to begin with. I mean, part of the appeal is the taboo--I might regard Twi's behavior toward Celestia to be suggestive of a crush, but to actually engage in that relationship would seem to be kind of unhealthy. Even from Celestia's perspective, would she ever be able to separate Twi as an adult from Twi as a filly? Anyway, I decided if I was going to write it, I wanted to address a bunch of these issues (having not really read any Twilestia and thus not knowing that many fics already do). So the fic was going to start with Twilight confessing and Celestia rejecting her for all the reasons the relationship shouldn't work, and the story would be about finding the way that it did work anyway.
I almost didn't bother even starting the fic, except for one line: "Dear Princess Celestia," said in a drunken slur by a spurned and pissed off Twilight. Basically it wasn't until I happened on the idea of a scene where Celestia tries to apologize for hurting Twi's feelings after rejecting her confession that the story had any weight to me.
Which is all sort of a way of saying... I wasn't really comfortable writing romance, and I was doubly not comfortable writing a romance fic about cartoon ponies. So my initial efforts really REQUIRED the comedic elements... sort of hiding behind comedy, even while I attempted to convey serious feelings. To say "I may be writing ponies in love, but I'm not taking this seriously." Bear in mind, I hadn't published anything (or at least, had only published Lost Friends, and didn't really have any clout whatsoever, as opposed to the small amount I have now). Well, that, and in the span of about 3 or so months I'd gone from being pretty sarcastic about my friends' interest in a My Little Pony cartoon to being a really big fan and writing fanfic, so I was uh... a little embarrassed to be into shipping ponies, especially a questionable ship.
But anyway, my hangups notwithstanding, the real obstacle to the fic was that when I hit that hilarious scene where Twi is really drunk and mad at Celestia, while Celestia tries to apologize to her?
Yeah, it didn't come out funny. It came out really freaking sad and desperate.
And for the longest time... I didn't know what to do with that. I'd written myself a pretty neat trap. It turns out that focusing on all the reasons why the relationship shouldn't work makes finding the way it DOES work (without just bullshitting it) kind of hard. I didn't know whether the fic was a comedy or a drama anymore... should I rewrite the dramatic scene when it felt so powerful and raw to make it more in line with the comedy? Or should I rewrite the early stuff to be more in line with the drama? You know, they say you figure out what you're trying to write about while writing and should revise with that in mind... but what about things like having an original vision?
So I grappled with that for a long time. Basically what it all came down to in the end was an agonizing search for whether Celestia's objections to the relationship were correct or not. And if they were wrong, why was she wrong? And it couldn't be contrived just because I wanted it to fit. And that took a super long time to figure it out.
And, of course, The Lessons of Eternity was the result of me thinking so much about why the relationship might not work. Lessons is still... a potential future of this fic, though I think the Celestia of Lessons would come into her relationship with Twilight from a VERY different places than is shown here.
Anyway, basically I tabled the fic for ages. Occasionally things would remind me of it--the Escaflowne opening, for instance (the title translates to "I don't need promises" and basically it just reminds me of how I wrote Twi's crush on Celestia). But you know, nothing really made me sit down and finish the stupid thing.
Until the other week, when Three's A Crowd aired. I uh... still haven't seen it, but shortly after it aired people hastened to tell me that there was someone I'd be... interested to see in it.
You guessed it:
FLASH F**KING SENTRY.
So I guess the moral of the story is it's easy to get yourself stuck, and sometimes things just click months or years later.
Alternatively, nothing will put me into a rage-fueled vindictive effort to solve story problems like shipping my favorite character with someone who ISN'T ACTUALLY A CHARACTER.
(Seriously, okay, I don't -expect- the show to make Twilestia canon, that would be weird. And I don't like the phrase "she deserves better" but Twilight does at least deserve to have a crush who HAS A PERSONALITY. I mean the show is probably not really intending to ship them, it just... frustrates me okay?)
Anyway, that was probably more information than you necessarily wanted, and not as organized/prettily presented as I meant it to be (I'm a bit sleepy), but since you asked I felt I should go ahead and just relate the story.
Any other questions, class?
(I say that jokingly, but seriously I'm usually game to talk about myself or things I wrote ad infinitum)
>Twilestia
I love you.
1822127
You hit the perfect balance.
Comedy has more meaning when there's weight attached and drama feels more real when humour is allowed to normalize it.
And with that I left what has got to be one of the longest comments I've left on a story... though surprisingly not by much.
1826539
... Wait...
Did it... did you get the comment? Did it send? On the story I mean, not on the blog post.
1828086 Er, the long quotey one I am still attempting to respond to?
1828172
Ah! So you did get it! Fantastic.
It wasn't showing up on this computer and I thought it lost to the ether.
... perhaps that may have been better.