Melancholy Days - Dryponies · 6:05pm Jul 26th, 2014
BIG POST WARNING - I'M GOING TO WRITE ABOUT A LOT OF STUFF
Far and away my favorite part of Melancholy Days was the Drypony sequence; that's particularly good news for me since it took up 2/3's of the story. I'm really, really pleased with how it turned out and I thought I'd take a moment and share some of how I created it and what I tried to make it all mean, and so on.
THE JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES...
I mentioned this in a comment for the story itself, but just to recap: I always knew Melancholy Days would have a structure of bookends highlighting James' depression with a larger, seemingly disconnected side story in between them. The original idea for the side story was something completely different than the Drypony encounter (right now I'm looking over those old story notes to see what I could possibly recycle for a third story.) Around the time I was writing chapter 2 and chapter 3 I was also rereading The Lord of the Rings, and while reading through the Lothlórien sequence my thoughts were stirred. The Fellowship gets blindfolded and lead through the woods by the elves, and I imagined the same thing happening to Twilight and company (which is what effectively became the opening events of chapter 13.) This is the genesis of the Drypony sequence; it's all built from answering questions about this little strip of imagination I had.
Who would've captured Twilight and others? Why? Where were they leading them? What were they going to do to them there? The narrative was built from figuring things like this out. I intentionally started by being very general before I refined things out. Initial thoughts were simply things like: captured by other ponies who hate magic (and thus hate Twilight). Taking them back to their hidden village. If they hate magic then they have no unicorns; maybe the pegasi don't use their wings either. Et cetera , et cetera. Piling answers into some notes raised new questions, and the answers to those raised more, and so on. Eventually the basic idea that emerged is that there was a village of pony exiles who despised magic because of some past event involving Princess Celestia, and though modern Equestria had all but forgotten about them, they had built a culture and existence forged around that past event. With that ground material ready, I felt in position to start trying to devise, build, and bind actual, specific story elements together; you know, reasons to get Twilight out there, how to tie it back to James' depression thematically, and so on.
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
This is where Hamestown came into existence and there's not much to say about it. It's a plot device to link Princess Celestia to the forest location that the Dryponies exist in and therefore a means to get Twilight out to there. Being one step removed from the forest itself also let me hide the mystery somewhat; the Princess sends Twilight under the guise of helping Hamestown instead of, "Go solve this dispute with these pony expatriates." I liked this idea immediately because not only does it fit into Princess Celestia's established character (a bit of a tricky teacher who likes to guide others into finding their own way rather than just feeding them answers) but I could also use it to tie back to James' depression; the Princess's reluctance to talk about the situation directly could be a reflection of her depressed feelings on the tragic origin event, and that itself could be something for Twilight to notice and compare to her own situation with James.
The name Hamestown itself is just a pun. I remember there was a comment on one of the sites where somebody guessed it was a corruption of "Human's Town" and it was going to lead into a plotline about a human tribe or something, and I honestly thought that was really clever. But no, that would be a different story. The name is honestly just a pony pun. A hame is part of a horse collar and Jamestown is one of the first American colonies; hame + Jamestown = Hamestown, a village of frontiersponies. Pure bonus about the name connection between Jamestown and James.
Mayor Quillby's specifics came very late in the story development, though he essentially existed as soon as Hamestown did. There's some old note that basically says that if the main characters are going to spend even a small amount of time in the village then there needs to exist some character who represents the villagers, with whom the heroes can interact with. Since I knew when I got to that time I could always be like, "Bluh, here's the mayor," I never really bothered to develop the character. Only when working on chapter 10, the chapter before Quillby's introduction, did I really start to flesh out the specifics of him; and I didn't put a whole lot into him. He's basically a cliché old timey western village mayor: middle aged, genial yet independent, perhaps mildly folksy, the sideburns, the vest he wears... I realized too late, after chapter 11 had already been posted, that I should have had him take out a pocket watch when he talked about how late at night it was. Anyway, I built him from that character stereotype because, after all, that character type had all the qualities I needed for what I knew would be such a short lived character. One thing I did do though, for no other reason than to just be straight up silly, was have him reference birds a lot. Like Gadget, because I knew he wasn't going to be around long enough to have proper character development, giving him a quirk seemed to me to be a way to help him get a bit more uniqueness. Settling arbitrarily on "always references birds" also let me immediately come up with a name for him: Quillby, from both quills (you know, feathers from birds) and Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons. Giving him a 'first name' of Quailbert was just icing for the alliteration/bird-reference cake.
SPEAKING OF REPRESENTATIVE CHARACTERS
There needed to be similarly representative characters for the forest ponies. Twilight and the others couldn't interact much with a formless mass (which you'll notice is basically how the Drypony crowd acts in the story.) I quickly decided I wanted three such characters. Only having one felt like it would be inviting the idea of villainous antagonism; there would be some enemy to overcome. Having three is a nice number where you have the range to demonstrate that they're still an antagonistic force but they're not dark or evil; just characters that the heroes have to convince to walk a new path. Also, with three, I could make them all very different. Some differences were simple and direct, perhaps not always meaningful to the story: one was old, one was young, one was adult aged; one earth pony, one pegasus, and Willow Wise was what would have been a unicorn if the Dryponies hadn't bred them out; etc. However, I wanted there to be a key difference between them; they each had to be something for the story.
The approach I went for, at least from the perspective of writing, was that the three named Drypony characters where essentially three aspects of a single character. They were THE Drypony, the essence of who the forest ponies were, divided into three individuals. They were the mind, body, and soul of the Dryponies. Each one of them represented one of those aspects. Again, that was only my approach for developing the story; that concept wasn't necessarily supposed to come across when reading it (which is part of the reason I elected to use the three above bolded terms in their respective chapters.) Each character displays traits associated with their aspect, or their interaction in the story is based on their aspect.
Poppy is the soul and as such is a character who connects very easily to others. She feels things spiritually, and earthly matters tend to be more easily disregarded for her. Appropriately enough then, she is the young child character, driven more by a youthful idealism than by the hardened pragmatism we take on as we get older. When James first starts talking to her she spits out Drypony rhymes gleefully but only because that's simply what she knows and she hasn't been exposed to other things yet. She instantly connects emotionally to James and takes his profession of the "Sunponies" being his true friends earnestly and faithfully because James gives it as a true appeal. True emotion; true soul; is what affects her. She never loses her belief in the spiritually fulfilling aspects of Drypony culture (she always stays loving and devoted to Broken Oak; she always believes in Prideheart virtues) but she learns to empathize with James and the others, which lets her question the rightness or wrongness of the things she's always known. Befitting her aspect of soul, she is won over with emotional appeals.
Willow Wise is the mind and as such is a character of thought and story. Given that, she was the elder character; old, experienced, and wise. Her struggle is one of knowledge. She understands the stories of her culture very well but has allowed her wisdom to mix too freely with them, so when she begins to be confronted with new things, things that don't mesh with her long entrenched wisdom, she doesn't know immediately how to handle it. It's sort of the idea of knowledge as neither good nor evil but how you use it, again. Because there's something she truly wants out of what is happening, she lets her knowledge hold her back from the truth until she's finally confronted with something she cannot possibly deny: Twilight's magical power. Once wrested free of the dark side of her knowledge, she's able to understand the facts of the situation even if she doesn't like them and that's what allows her to act for the betterment of the Dryponies. Befitting her aspect of mind, she is won over with logical appeals.
Broken Oak is the body and as such is a character completely dominated by his own physicality. MLP creates a world where the pony characters have some core essence to their being, usually tied to their cutie mark and special talent, and I wanted to get across the idea that physical exertion is Broken Oak's core essence. That's who he truly is; pushing himself physically is what makes his life worth living to him. To this end he seems to be the character most stuck on the Drypony cause and also the most violent, but that's not necessarily a reflection of his true character. He's not maliciously exploiting the situation to get what he wants. He's not falsely claiming to believe in Prideheart's legacy for his own ends. But... he isn't as devoted to it as it would otherwise appear. There is a part inside of him that simply understands that this is the only means he has to be who he truly is, and that's why he sticks so strongly to the fight. I tried to emphasize his physicality coming off in other ways too. For example, he often gives orders through whistles and stamps because it wouldn't be enough for him to just tell his guards to do something; it has to be expressed through his body. Befitting his aspect of body, there is no way for the heroes to win Broken Oak over except through overcoming him physically. I was very excited once I realized that a physical confrontation must be the case, from a storytelling standpoint anyway, because that would mean that he was a kind of soldier like James and it would put him immediately at odds with the man. And because one of the thematic elements of the story was friends coming together and working together to deal with difficult things, it also meant that James could absolutely not be the one to beat him. So that gave me a chance to complete the arc of trust with Rainbow Dash that started in What Separates but I had to drop there eventually for time.
Broken Oak and Willow Wise were both named immediately; I came up with their names instantly and they seemed to perfectly fit. Both names reference trees, reflecting the forest theme of the Dryponies (the forest theme itself tied slightly to the idea of them being "natural" and magic-free.) Oak trees are famed for their size and strength, matching Broken Oak well, and the Broken aspect of his name also has reflections of harsher strength; it invited the image of a shattered tree trunk as a cutie mark. The broke side of it also hints at his being the most difficult of the Dryponies to contend with; something is not well or right with him. The rhyming of the two halves ("oke" - "oak") is really what sealed the deal. Willow trees reflect age and sadness, and I knew melancholy would be an aspect of Willow Wise's character once she could push past the limits of her knowledge and recognize the tragedy that their culture was inextricably moving towards if left unchanged. And alliteration? Always a plus.
Poppy is something different. The first name I came up with for her I knew without question I would not use. It was Bark-a-Lark. (Note the simple reflection of the tree theme again as well as pointing to the nimble aspect of her character. That nimbleness became important to me and was recurring with my potential names for her.) Terrible name, I know. Again, it was just the first thing that popped into my head and while that had worked for the other two characters I knew it wasn't going to fly here. I used it in the notes I was writing because I had to refer to her by some name, but I knew I needed another one. I immediately though to calling her Barky or Larky, since those names sound slightly better on their own; then I would have a joke too, where I could reveal that she goes by either of those as a childish nickname to hide her super terrible real name. However, I dropped the nickname concept swiftly to try for an actual name for the character. There was a long list of different names that I came up with, some referencing birds to fit in that agile, tree-jumping side of her character, but I wasn't liking anything of what I came up with. Eventually I went back to the drawing board: Broken Oak and Willow Wise were unified by their specific tree connection, so this character needed a tree name as well. I gathered a list of tree species and "poplar" immediately stood out to me. It has the word "pop" in it, reflecting the jumping aspect of her character, and the buds some of them produce have this long, droopy form that I could use for her mane; almost like a child's pigtails. That's how I came up with Hoppin Poplar as a name... but I still didn't like it completely enough to use it. There's an oddness to it; sounds like a breakfast cereal mascot, you know? That's when I remembered the nickname concept and brought it back; Poppy was a good name; it has a levity to it that befits a child, it still achieved reference to her nimbleness, and it gave me the nickname joke back (though I turned it instead to a character moment between her and James; a moment that I absolutely love, by the way.)
So... what of the two nameless Dryponies that Pinkie Pie befriends? Well... they are nameless specifically. I wanted to emphasize only Broken Oak, Poppy, and Willow Wise having names, so I intentionally never named them. While the three named characters are supposed to represent all of Dryponydom, there's a way in which these two unnamed guards represent the more common Drypony, and how friendship between Drypony and Sunpony is innately possible. That's really half the reason why they exist. However, the other half of the reason is... just to give Pinkie Pie and Rarity something to do, honestly. Twilight's, Fluttershy's, Rainbow Dash's, Applejack's, and even Spike's roles in the larger story were all secured, but Pinkie Pie and Rarity didn't do anything except for their parts in chapters 5 and 6. Winning over the guards gave the two more neglected ponies just a little more relevance to the story again; and really it was a perfect use of Pinkie Pie's innate talents.
NOMENCLATURE
I wanted to establish the Dryponies as a whole separate culture. There was one comment in the story that talked about them as religious fanatics, which I thought was interesting because I never had perceived that angle before. There's a whole potential discussion that could be had about the nature of religion and culture; where they're the same, where they're different, etc., but that's a talk for another day. The idea with the Dryponies was that they should be a culture built around a single tragic event and that gave them an identity separate from the rest of Equestria. That was the point of having some unique names and terminology, as well as imbuing them with their sense of ceremony; to create an idea of culture and tradition.
They also therefore needed a name. They couldn't just be ponies or forest ponies. Giving them a name that tied back to Prideheart's tragedy was one option but I didn't want to go that route; I culturally bound them to that instead through the Prideheart mark that each of them has around their right eye; the idea of cultural symbols at play. (Again one could point to religious things here; symbols like crosses; rosaries around the neck, and so on. But that wasn't what I was thinking. Cultural symbols are real things beyond just religious elements. Try to think of things like flags; every household on a street flying an American flag for instance.) As "no magic" was another key component of who they were, that's what I choose to build the name out of. It's pretty simple really: utilize a metaphor for magic and the rest names itself. Obviously, water was the metaphor I went with. If magic is wet then things without magic are dry. It's no accident that three times Twilight describes the nature of magic out by Hamestown and all three times she describes it in terms of water. Hence, Dryponies. I named the forest Dryearth Forest in order to better bind them to it; it still uses the water metaphor and you get the sense that maybe the ponies named themselves after the forest.
There's a few other naming niggles here and there.
* Because Dryponies eschew the traditional earth/pegasi/unicorn setup due to their hatred of magic, they bind the wings on the pegasi and call them Branch Dancers, a nod to how instead of flying they bounce between tree limbs. Branch Dancer was actually on of the potential names for Poppy first; I liked the term itself but I didn't feel it was a good name so I recycled it for this instead. It never came up in the story itself but earth ponies would have been called Root Runners.
* They call James the Walking Desert; complete dryness capable of its own locomotion. I always knew the Dryponies would attach themselves to his lack of magic; it would be a good way to split the story and get dueling narratives going; but I didn't hit upon the idea of them using a specific name for him until I was actually writing chapter 13, when they name him. Again, that thought of building a culture struck; James had to have a special name as part of their cultural identity.
* Heartwood as the name of the village is just a reference to heartwood, the central column of wood in a tree; as a bonus it uses the word heart just like Prideheart's name, creating a link between them. In the notes it was always just called things like the Drypony village and the forest village; I came up with that name fairly late, at the same time as Prideheart, as I'll explain just below.
THE FOURTH DRYPONY
Speaking of Prideheart, he somewhat blindsided me. After I had decided on there being some past tragedy, I never dwelt too much on what specifically it was. I was more concerned with creating my three Drypony characters. Eventually I did fixate the tragedy on the fall of a hero (since this would maintain the tragic element plus let me make it tragic on Princess Celestia's side as well; she lost someone she truly cared about,) however even after deciding that, I had left the specific details sparse. I knew enough that for chapter 9 I was able to create the statue that James comes across. A unicorn of the Royal Guard who gets grievously injured defending Canterlot was almost literally all I had for the origin event at that point in time (I gave the dragon the spiral horn cause I wanted to imply some form of dark magical power; he was more than just an ordinary dragon.) Honestly, I absolutely believed that the finer details of the tragedy were inconsequential and that I wouldn't need them.
It was in writing chapter 13, when the Dryponies are leading their fresh captures along, that I realized that this fallen pony had to have a name. He had to be someone. Because the Dryponies, to stand proudly against Princess Celestia, aren't going to build their culture around the tragedy directly... they're going to build it around the fallen hero. Who he was is absolutely essential to their story. So he needed a name and his tale needed to be a full story. Just like Broken Oak and Willow Wise, he was fast to name; Prideheart was the first thing that came to my head and it encapsulated who I want to him to be perfectly. The name can be interpreted ambiguously: is the heart of his character that negative pride, the kind that comes before the fall? Or is it that glorious, honorable pride of a stalwart hero, indomitable against the wrath of a dragon? In reading the story, at first, you don't know fully if he's a good influence on the Dryponies or a bad influence; if what happened to him to start all this was his comeuppance or his tragic fate. In fleshing him out, the core of his story stayed the same - falling to a dragon while defending Canterlot - but more details emerged; the Princess's specific involvement and failure, the creation of his decision to leave being one of momentary anger, one that he would come to regret; his eventual shameful departure from Heartwood... His story actually became more tragic than it originally was...
With his name complete he could also be wedged into their culture in more ways. They have ceremony and songs about him, they use his name to describe the highest held virtues of their society (i.e. being strong is good, but true strength is "Prideheart strong",) etc. This made creating the songs for chapter 14 significantly easier. The Dryponies started as a thought spurred by The Lord of the Rings, but the songs are probably the only thing of the entire sequence that were really directly influenced by Tolkien's story; I knew I wanted them to sing and perform in order to demonstrate their culture. Having an actual hero with a story simplified the process greatly. You get to see them tell their hero's tale from their perspective, and what's so great about that is that later you get to compare it to the same tale told from Princess Celestia's perspective in chapter 21. It really drives home the idea, as said by James in one of the middle chapters, that Prideheart's story was a tragedy on both ends. Lastly, note that the Dryponies ceremony is divided into three parts and, again, mind, body, and soul: one part is introduced by Willow Wise and is about who they are conceptually; one part involved Broken Oak and has intensity, conflict, and battle; the last part is sung solely by Poppy and is about hopes and dreams.
As a happy accident of Prideheart's expansion, it created a secondary link to the plotline of James' depression. While the Dryponies themselves were James in a symbolic sort of way due to their thematically similar struggles, Prideheart became a reflection of what James could be; what could happen if he never found a way to move on from the tragedy of his separation from his old life. I liked that I could now take what happened between Princess Celestia and Prideheart and use that as a comparative point of thought for Twilight and James.
IT ALL COMES BACK AROUND
I've mentioned this a few times but never really expanded on it, so here we go: the Dryponies are James. That's the point that binds the Drypony encounter back to the central story of James' depression. They both are struggling with something that is innately tragic, but they both refuse to see the tragic elements of it and try to heedlessly carry themselves forward. Forward into oblivion if they don't accept help, that is. Even more specifically is the fact that James immediately, IMMEDIATELY recognizes the Dryponies' troubles and fights against the dark side of their fate; the idea is something Applejack exactly points out at the end of the story: James has the power to recognize his own difficulty but he refuses to see that problem inside himself. Such can be the nature of depression.
There are other things that try to draw the similarities as well. What Twilight does to Willow Wise with her magical breakout, forcing her to confront something she cannot deny, is the same thing Applejack does to James later only with force of personality instead of force of magic; James cannot retreat from Applejack like he does from Twilight because he cannot deny the farm pony's quintessential honesty. The heroes have nothing they can give to the Dryponies but promises that things will all work out if they step into the light and abandon their dark destiny; likewise there's nothing but promises that can be given to James in dealing with his depression; no magical solutions. Both have to walk in blind trust. Going back to why I write these stories: for my own personal philosophical musings. Twilight's letter to Princess Celestia covers a lot of combined thoughts, but I think my most central thought through all this is still there: depression, crippling sadness, deep pain... those are instances where it is so essential to hope even though you have no reason to hope; that is critical in carrying through them. It's just a thought on the human spirit.
BLURGHGHAGHHH...
I think that's all I really have to say. I mean, I know there's more; I could keep these thoughts going forever and ever, but this covers pretty much where the Dryponies came from, who they are, and so on. If when you read Melancholy Days there were things about them that didn't make sense to you, or things that you naturally questioned, or so on... well, I hope knowing where I was coming from might help you along. Never be afraid to share though; it's in that sharing that we generate knew knowledge.
Thanks for reading! Let me get back to these old notes because even just going over all this has given me new ideas for another story.
- Zurock
When you talked about the magic/wet, no magic/dry imagery, for some reason my mind went to the temperance movement in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alcohol (wet) was deemed "bad" or promoted "bad" behavior. Towns and states had the authority to pass laws to go "dry", where alcohol was made illegal and was not allowed to be created, imported or sold. Of course that didn't stop people drinking on the sly or simply (if they were able) to ride to the nearest 'wet' town or state for a drink.