From Concept to Completion: The Commission Process · 8:56pm Mar 1st, 2014
It's been a month since I finished up on Human After All, and views / votes seem to be leveling off. I figure now's the best time for me to talk a bit about the project, since it's still (mostly) fresh in my mind.
"Uh, Jesse? Your fly's down."
This is going to be a long post, so I'll continue on after the break. Also, here be spoilers. If you plan on reading Human After All and don't want to have the ending ruined... do not read this blog post.
Meta
I took my first fiction writing commission back in March of 2013, as part of the Las Pegasus Unicon debacle. I don't know how much my $77 charity contributed to anything, and frankly, I don't care. Maybe that makes me an asshole, but at least I'm an honest asshole when I'm saying, "If you couldn't afford to leave the convention, you couldn't afford to go to the convention." Would it suck to have your room suddenly become unavailable? Of course, but it's Las Vegas. They've got motels for like $40 / night, and if your budget was that tight... again, you couldn't afford the entire trip.
I say that now, since with nearly a year of hindsight, I'm hoping even the people who got stuck learned the lesson about "budgeting emergency travel expenses."
Anyway, Las Pegasus Unicon was a logistical fuck-up all around, but it provided me the opportunity to try something new—writing someone else's story. See, I've mostly got my one universe I generally stick to for writing my own stories, and I've never really seen the need to deviate from it in my own works. But when someone gave me a story to write that in no way could organically fit in with my own stories, I got something akin to creative freedom—even if it was a commission, with someone else's idea.
I've already detailed the process for writing that story, and I did indeed learn a few lessons while writing it. I applied those, going forward, to Human After All, and I learned a few new lessons during that whole process. However, I mention everything about Dusk-Lit Waltz because, originally, genuis101 (misspelling intentional) wanted to commission me to just "Finish Summer Days and Evening Flames". And with no disrespect to yamgoth (the person who commissioned Dusk-Lit Waltz, I can only say that it's in hindsight that I appreciate the efforts and outcomes of that story. That's not to say I dislike the story—I really like what I attempted with the elemental imagery—but that, when someone snipes an auction and takes away the "easy" route from you, there's going to be some initial resentment. I didn't act on it (or if I did, I made it work in a story of "Gilda being shipped against her will"), but I was definitely disappointed.
But, getting everything you want all the time makes you fat, lazy, and entitled, three things I try not to be. Dusk-Lit Waltz came with its own challenges, some of them emotional, but I overcame them. Like I said earlier, in hindsight, I appreciate the effort that it took, and it's got its own place on my shelf of "Things I'm Proud Of":
Right between the drug abuse and the gay griffins. My shelf is weird.
genuis101 got in contact with me after Dusk-Lit Waltz went live, this time with a completely new commission idea. I told him a tentative yes, but that I wanted to finish Evening Flames first. We did a little back and forth on the story concept (more on that in a bit), and as soon as Evening Flames chapter 11 went live, I took a little break and started putting together my second ever commission.
It took a grand total of eight months.
Planning and Evolution
Stephen King has a general philosophy when it comes to revising a story. It's a lot like paleontology—there's something beautiful, powerful, and primal, it's just often times buried under several miles and layers of dirt. Revision is about gently brushing away the stuff that's unimportant, letting people see the core idea all the clearer (more on my failures here in the next section).
When genuis101—and you know what, let's give him a name. Kyle. Kyle is this guy's name now. When Kyle first gave me the idea for his story, I looked at it analytically. Some things I liked. Others, I did not. For example,
Lyra:
A unicorn mare obsessed with a creature that saved her life in the everfree that she has never found any information on. She graduated with top honors as an archeologist, and is on a grant to study in the Everfree. Excitable and energetic she does not always think through the consequences of her actions, like lying on her reports to the government to hide that she found both Jason and some of the erased history of the world. She has turned human within the facility that Jason maintains and she has explored many of the differences. Her relationship with Jason is admittedly more physical and exciting than intimate, but she does have sights on bringing Jason out of the woods for good.Jason:
Like many pieces of the Akotash he does not get along with the other pieces and most has been content to reside in a facility deep in the Everfree away from the world of ponies. A rescue years ago however has turned his world on end. Lyra is both interested and excited about the world he is from and has been showing him that the outside world isn’t the pointless sugar bowl as has come to believe it is. He has partially been keeping an eye on the Smooze but it hasn’t done much
That's an excerpt from the original planning document that Kyle gave me. Now, don't get me wrong—at first glance, I fell in love with the general concept of the story. Lyra, spending time with an ancient human, in a futuristic underground city? Awesome. The whole deal with the Akatosh (later renamed "Somniator" because Kyle unintentionally copied The Elder Scrolls) being some sort of man-made god, and being split into fragments? Kind of cliché, but functional. Lyra being in a sexual relationship with a millennia-old guy who's had virtually no contact with the world outside his giant basement where he's become a one-track mind? My creative opinion was "No". Kyle, thankfully, agreed, and the planning phase continued.
The other excerpt from the original planning document that I'm going to share are Kyle's original plans on the ending:
Both Celestia and Jason assume the worst about each other. Celestia, that Jason wants to turn the world back to how it was. Jason, that Celestia seeks to enslave him and take away existence.
I do see a human Lyra and the revelations of the history of the world.
I also see a trial with Celestia, Luna, Lyra, and Jason all being held accountable for what happened.
I like stories where everyone is at fault and there is no one to blame.
That red one, early on, I decided would be better to do away with. Kyle, the final verdict on everything in this story, agreed. The logic was simple: humanity had, for better or worse, run its course. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with Celestia's and Luna's decision to ponywash history, but they dug a hole for themselves by covering things up to make life simpler for the surviving "humans". I also thought it would be a better way to emphasize the last point—everyone is at fault, and no one is to blame—by giving Celestia and Luna some skeletons in their closet.
There were consequences for this, in terms of the story's reception. More on that later.
Once Kyle and I discussed the original, I went through and made an overview for how I thought the story would best go. It can be found here, if you're interested, but I'd like to spend time here discussing a few key changes:
Lyra Heartstrings
An adventurous biologist, she first encountered Jesse in the Everfree Forest when she was a little filly. His strange appearance served as inspiration to study all of the mysterious life forms in the Everfree, and she has made a career as a professional researcher for Canterlot University.Her curiosity often manifests in a naive interest, meaning she’ll care more about how something will turn out rather than what is the “safe” or “responsible” manner in which to do things. This causes headaches for her superiors at CU, but even they have to admit that her passion allows her to investigate things from an eccentric mindset.
Jesse (Element of Endurance)
One of the six fragments of Somniator, Jesse also has the distinction of being the only “human” left alive. Over the course of several millennia, he has worked on researching the changes to humanity so that he may reverse them, thus saving his race. Using Lyra as a test subject, he has perfected a manner in which to transform the beings of Equestria back into humans—he just needs a significant amount of power to do it. Therefore, his goal has recently been reunification with the other six fragments.Jesse, being a reclusive hermit for so long, doesn’t quite bond with Lyra as much as she would like him to. He sees her as a test subject, as a means to an end. Because he also has a cursory understanding of psychology, he systematically does kind things for her in order to gain her favor. Essentially, she’s the closest thing he has to a friend, but he’s blinded by his drive to restore the world and cannot see it.
Basically, I redefined their relationship to focus more on a leader / follower standpoint, and I also changed Jason's name to Jesse. This was actually a fairly significant change, but I'll explain that in detail in the proper section. It was, however, symbolic—as a good deal of almost everything in this story was.
The next excerpt:
Main Story Conflicts
This story (working title: “Human After All”) is going to focus on Lyra’s inner reactions towards being roped into Jesse’s plan. She has her doubts about their friendship and his motivations, but he’s generally kind enough to her where she’s got blinders on to his skewed moral compass.The main conflict arch will therefore be “Lyra versus herself”, where she’s slowly shown to be more and more hesitant to help Jesse. She goes along with him up to a point, but some “sense” is quite literally knocked into her by the Royal Equestrian Guards.
Another point of conflict will be the “I am Legend”-style questioning of ethics of “playing God” and/or trying to impose one’s will on an entire civilization that is generally happy and peaceful. Jesse is, in his mind, doing good: he’s saving his race. But since the means he does this in are questionable, that creates a conflict of him versus Equestria.
As a brief note, this has probably been the easiest-to-name story I've ever worked on. Maybe Heart of Gold, Feathers of Steel came just as easy, but I also did not plan that story out at all. I wrote what I wanted to, for some Godforsaken reason that worked, and the rest is history.
But! This was definitely a transition for the goals of the story. It was no longer about Jesse. This is important because, frankly, I knew what I was working with. He's a human, who's essentially as powerful as Celestia, and he's "friends" with Lyra. He's also lived underground for a few thousand years, leaving him with what one of my pre-readers called "the social skills of a potato". (Not the 4chan slur against the mentally disabled, but just... the brown tuber that isn't known for its social skills) If I did the story from Jesse's point of view, it would have been extremely difficult to engage readers with. He's a know-it-all, a one-track mind, arrogant, and virtually omnipotent.
Telling the story from his point of view, or making it about him, would have quite easily made him a Gary Stu. Telling the story from Lyra's perspective, about Lyra, and where Jesse is a source of conflict... that actually works. And heck, it worked. People have their share of opinions on why this story wasn't what they wanted it to be, but none of them were, "God, Jesse was too OP and therefore boring".
I think this planning phase portion has gone on for long enough, so what I'll do instead is give some final links for the interested, just to see a quick visualization of my writing process. The general idea I had for this was "Write everything, sit on it a while, and revise everything." So after Chapter 11 of this story got written, I took a quick break to take care of some other business in my life, and then I went back and revised the thing starting at Chapter 1.
Basic Story Outline
Quick note: You'll notice that the entire second half of Chapter 9, in which Jesse and Celestia actually had a showdown, was originally handled off-screen. This was a terrible oversight, and I rectified that in the first draft.
Chapter 1 (Original) Chapter 1 (Revised)
Chapter 9 (Original) Chapter 9 (Revised)
Final Product and Reception
This story is, unequivocally, my most-hated story on Fimfiction. Granted, that's a story with 16,000 total views and "only" an 89% approval rating, so I'll find some way to survive this slight. But there was an extremely vocal group of readers who disliked the story, and even looking back at it through hindsight, the only thing I can see "wrong" with what I did was to deliver this story as I wrote it.
They wanted something different, which would have been a different story than what I set out to tell.
See, the title of the story is Human After All. That's not just because I love Daft Punk (if that were the case, why would I name a story after what many fans consider to be their worst album?); that's because... that's what this story is about. It poses the very basic question of, "What does it mean to be a human?" This was the main conflict, the raisin detter of the story. All the stuff about Jesse's plan, slowly building to fruition... that was to set the stage for the question.
I'll be blunt. If Jesse's plan hadn't completely and utterly failed, the story would be utter and complete tripe in my eyes. Yes, it would have been interesting to explore the world, but I could have achieved that in a different setting with a different conflict. If the story were about the amazing, god-powered man blowing up Equestria and forcing everyone to be his version of humanity, that would have been an extremely macabre answer to the question. "We used to be human, then some guy came and stole that from us."
The story posed an implicit question to those who read closely: Who is the human, Lyra or Jesse? The answer is clearly Lyra (and I don't generally like to answer rhetorical questions in my own story). But Lyra is curious, empathetic, and passionate. She loves, she explores, and she lives. Jesse, on the other hand, is a machine. He has one purpose, and he's dulled his emotions to the point where they're nonexistent. I'd even be hesitant to call him "passionate", since that implies a much more balanced existence that even Lyra calls him out on:
I swallowed my fear. “[Your plan] is priority,” I agreed. “But ‘priority’ implies there’s other stuff that you’ve got to put off—that doesn’t mean you should just completely ignore it.”
“Elaborate.”
I pointed a hoof up at him. “That. Th… maybe that’s how humans talked to each other, and that’s your cultural prerogative, but your culture’s…” I stopped short of saying something we’d both regret. “Different, than the one you’re trying to save.”
“Our cultures’ differences are irrelevant; once I am finished, there will be a substantial merging that will redefine one culture.”
It's an interesting question, because I raised it behind a lot of veils and smokescreens. At first glance, the human is the human, and the pony is a pony. But part of Jesse's character dynamic is that he's exceptionally good at appearances and deception—even deceiving himself at certain points. I truly enjoyed writing this concept, and of course, I went with the fun route:
I wrote him as the Antichrist.
Now, there's a whole bunch of things from religion school that I've forgotten, so I didn't make the whole story play out like the Book of Revelations. I just borrowed one of its more interesting character archetypes that fit the story—a deceptive, evil entity that promises salvation but brings damnation.
For example, he named himself Jesse:
[Luna] looked up at me with a piercing curiosity. “I remember your name, from when you spoke to us in the dream. But I know not now who you are.”
“I am no one,” I admitted. “And I am humanity’s last voice in the cosmos.”
Some math is required, but the inside of his helmet displays three different versions of six (Degrees Celsius, degrees of an angle, and the number triangles in the nuclear symbol):
My eyes were granted vision of the world, overlaid with information about the climate around me. It was negative six degrees Celsius outside, my bearing was point-one-oh-five radians south of west, and a circle of alternating yellow and black triangles told me that, if all else failed, I had an arsenal of backup contingencies.
His stated purpose:
I knelt down, gripped her horn with my left fist, and began absorbing the fourth fragment of myself. As I did, I whispered to her horrified eyes: “I am salvation.”
And, of course, the machine from chapter five, which is essentially a high-tech crucifixion, which Jesse enters on a Friday afternoon:
A tall steel apparatus stood in the back of the room. It was wider at the top, and the black tube connected to its base on the side. A large, Y-shaped groove was set into the machine’s face, and straps dangled near each of the three ends. I puzzled over what it was for, or why the top arms of the Y were so much thinner than…
Arms.
I let out a small, muted cry of horror: It was the right size and shape to fit a human body. My horror only grew when I realized it’d been built for that specific purpose—like all human tools. But why would anyone need to be fastened to a machine like that?
There's some other things I left out here (like his lab coat), but basically, I went through a lot of subverted Christ symbolism. It fit in the story, and I had a lot of fun weaving it in. Clearly, the Antichrist character is something akin to the villain of the piece, so I don't necessarily think I was being intentionally edgy / offensive to Christianity, but seeing as how almost no one's picked up on that part of this story, I don't think I've got too much to worry about on that front.
So, despite the reception and the fact that a lot of people missed the point of the story, I have to say that I like this story. I'm not that much of a philosopher, so the philosophical portions of this story were a bit out of my comfort zone and area of expertise, but in the end, I can't really look at this story and say I wish I'd taken it in a different direction.
And heck, I took a story about "Lyra and Humans", and the only complaints were about the ending. Not the premise being handled poorly, or it being cliché, or boring. Three years into this fandom, I say that's got to count for some measure of success.
Lessons and Failures
Of course, this story is far from perfect. Just because I can accept its imperfections doesn't mean I'm not going to strive to do better.
For example, a significant portion of people disliked the ending. I don't think that, necessarily, that was because the ending was bad for what I had in mind, but that I didn't do a significant job of setting it up. The story does take an abrupt turn from Chapter 8 to Chapter 9, one from "This is my benevolent plan" to "I'm going to murder everybody in my path". I hinted, not so subtly, that Jesse was an untrustworthy character. Heck, he even went Darth Vader mode on Lyra (complete with Sombra-powered crystal lightsaber). But I think I could have done more to show that he was amoral, false, and violent.
I think a large portion of the blowback against the ending comes from how people were expecting a different story. So, I think I may have missed a few catches while juggling the "distraction story" (i.e., Jesse and his plan) and the "core question" (What is humanity?). I honestly toyed with the idea of Jesse dying in either Chapter 9 or 10, and then Luna discovering she can't enter his facility, which would have essentially doomed humanity to oblivion not through a judicial system, but because of the false savior's single-mindedness. I weighed that between his and Lyra's final scene together, and in the end, I liked the latter more.
A weird mixture of relief and sadness made my stomach churn, but I raised a hoof and waved. “Goodbye, Jesse.”
“Goodbye, Lyra.”
I... I'm emotionally invested in that exchange. There's something to be said about creators getting attached to their work, here. For eight months, Jesse and this story were swimming around in my mind. So this little bit of dialogue, where Lyra and he part ways... I feel that exact same mix of relief and sadness. The romantic part of me wishes things could have worked out for them, despite how that would be a practically easy and vapid story. But the relief...
The relief comes from how I wrapped up a project, it didn't completely suck, and I can move on to exploring bigger and brighter things. Like stories where Applejack is a detective.
If you've made it all the way through this blog, you have my sincere thanks. I hope this was an insightful look into my writing and commission process.
Well I will say that I enjoyed it, and that the ending was interesting, and made sense, to me at least. This look into how it got written is appreciated!
Is that intentional or do you mean raison d'être?
Always interesting to hear an author's thought on his story, especially ones like these, that go more-or-less in depth!^^
Well I for one really really liked this story, and even though the evil part of my me wanted Jesse to win despite how obviously amoral he was, the ending that the story has now makes it ultimately a better story. I would never have known reading it that the whole philosophy thing was outside your comfort zone. Philosophy is something I really enjoy both in the things that I write and read and you pulled off philosophical musings quite well.
I also got a kick out of reading your chapter outlines/notes. It was a learning experience, considering my notes are just walls of text with no rhyme or reason to what I put where. One thing I noticed that wasn't in the notes (or it was and I totally missed it) that also really stuck out as odd for me in the actual story was Lyra's brief fling with Berry Punch.
I'm not entirely sure why you threw that in, it kinda came outta nowhere and didn't really fit in with the rest of the story. I'm guessing that was just your way of showing Lyra doing something "human" (love is undeniably a fundamental quality of humanity) in contrast to Jesse's inhuman nature of being like you said. Still, I could've done to either see that particular relationship more properly set up earlier in the story or done away with entirely.
That's only one very small gripe and your story has made its way near the top of my favourite Lyra and humans stories. I hope you don't feel like the fact that it's your least popular story is attributed to any fault on your part as a writer. I think that those of us who actually understood what you were going for with it loved it!
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Thank you.
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And thank you.
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I was honestly curious if anyone was still reading at that point.
1886111
But how could it be a Human x Lyra story without lesbians?
In all seriousness, that scene was Lyra's chance to "go down to the Winchester for a pint and wait for this whole thing to blow over". She rejects that notion (which she had been considering) and realizes she's got to face her problem head-on.
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I read the entire thing.
Huh, I can see all the Antichrist stuff now, so clearly: very nicely hidden in there.
I, for one, found the ending enjoyable and Jesse's sudden turn not all that sudden. I know that mindset all too well, and know where it leads without checks.
First off I haven't read most of this post. I haven't read this post because I haven't read Human After All, and therefore I didn't really understand what was going on here. I probably could've grasped this post without reading the story, but I'd rather save it for after I read the story. Oh, this post has convinced me to read Human After All (I'm pretty sure that's the title of the story). Normally I wouldn't because I see Human in Equestria and I just kind of say no.
I unfairly associate HIE with self-insert fanfic, and I hate self-insert fanfics, with one exception for a Mass Effect fanfic that I don't remember the title of and might not of been a self-insert anyway. I'm also okay when it's a little more subtle, like when the author introduces a original character who also sometimes serves the role of author avatar. Even if it's like the previous example, when the author avatar is too overt or the character starts to have author filibusters I am quickly turned off. It's obvious to me now that Human After All is (probably) none of these things.
Anyway, I have an actual question. The only reason that fan works are allowed to exist is because the fan doesn't make a profit. It's technically copyright infringement but it would be really petty, and probably cause some public backlash, if a creator/company were to directly intervene or even sue if the fan weren't making a profit. But when you start accepting commissions you are making a profit for a story set in someone else's world. I don't have a problem with that, but why hasn't Hasbro sued the pants off you?
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It's not worth their time. If they want to sue any member of the fandom, for any reason, they could. With legal costs and time being what they are, Hasbro could probably win a court battle of attrition suing anyone without a lawyer on retainer, for any reason. But they're a business, and businesses operate with their best interests at heart. To go after artists who sell commissions, they'd have to launch an investigation, assemble a case, find the artists... and to what gain? To shut down one person who writes stories that generally don't fit in the themes or settings of their show, to the point where he or she isn't a competitor?
It's not worth their time. The plushie commissioners are more of a threat to Hasbro's bottom line, and they don't go around shutting them down anymore, either.
An interesting point you've made:
By wordcount, a vast majority of my stories take place in original locations: Farrington, Griffalia, the SRF, Stalliongrad (I only took the name). The only three stories I've written where show-Ponyville is a main setting are Heart of Gold, Happily Ever After, and Taking Care of Animals. Human After All uses it in name only, unless Hasbro wants to include a scene where the main characters go to a classy lesbian bar.