Octavia's Reprise - Chapter Ten - Author's Note

STOP. FULL SPOILERS FOR Octavia's Reprise - Chapter Ten BELOW!

The idea of Octavia being in a guild comes from TriteBristle’s comic Heartstrings.

I got the ideas for the other stage names Vinyl considered from the discussions on what to call her not long after her first on-screen appearance. Personally, I like the one(s) that stuck.

I hated doing that to Vinyl. There isn’t a thesaurus with the words I need to describe how much I hated it. I love her as a character, in my story and in other works, and the end of this chapter deviates a LOT from wanting to keep the story as family-friendly as possible. It could have been worse, but here I felt subtlety is good. The fact of the matter is, I think it helps to really drive Vinyl’s frustration with Octavia. It’s what makes her stay so angry for so many years, and what makes her so inclined to easily return to such a state, even if she’s not completely aware that’s the reason. Her first night in a club greatly reflects Octavia’s, and in a way Octavia’s moment early in the story foreshadowed just how bad a night in one could go for a mare. Some may ask then why on earth Vinyl would return to such places, but I think the fact that she did speaks volumes about where she’s at at the moment. Maybe she feels they’re the only places she can go, maybe she just wants to really spite Octavia’s memory, and maybe it’s for reasons even I don’t fully understand. Like many things in stories, it can be up to the interpretation of the reader.