Twilestia · 1:57pm Aug 20th, 2014
I'm ambivalent to this ship. On one hand, Celestia is thousands of years old, and she's basically Twi's surrogate mother. Which kind of weirds me out.
On the other, it's really easy to write for this ship, and when I read stories pertaining to this ship, they tend to be really amazing.
So anyway, I've been participating in a Twilestia Prompt Collab thing, and I've been writing some fucked up stuff. Evil Twilight. Evil Celestia. Evil both of them. There's a plain romance one that I wrote after realizing that the last one was closing in on cupcakes-level fucked up, but that one's subpar at best.
Man, I really find it easy to write dark stories. I don't enjoy them any more than happy ones, and I don't THINK they reflect my mindset (at least, I fucking hope not), but writing dark stories with death and hopelessness and stuff just seems really EASY.
Maybe I should see a shrink.
To be honest, while I've always shipped Twilestia to a degree, I've never thought that my first published fanfic ever would likely be that Twilestia prompt I picked the other day. I understand your feelings towards the ship! Its one that has a lot of different interpretations.
Plenty or nice people write dark shit and plenty of dark people write happy shit. Its perfectly normal to explore the side of a series that is different from what we normally see. That's why there's a lot of happy supernatural fanfics and why there's a lot of cupcakes clones.
"On one hand, Celestia is thousands of years old, and she's basically Twi's surrogate mother. Which kind of weirds me out."
I don't really have a problem with it. Yes, it is, for the reasons you state, a bit weird, but either Celestia is aromantic or any relationship she has is going to be a bit weird. It's stranger, with this calibration, on Twilight's end, but she's not an ordinary pony, mentally or physically (and I'm speaking of her before her apotheosis), either.
Regarding dark stories, I feel like I really ought to have something to say on this matter, but I can't actually think of anything at the moment. Hm. I will say that that third prompt does seem reminiscent of Cupcakes, in more ways that one. I could see the first two prompts developing into interesting stories much more easily than the third; Cupcakes, in my opinion, isn't really a terribly good story. It seems too dark-and-gory-for-the-sake-of-being-dark-and-gory. I'd expect a story with an evil!Twilight/evil!Celestia romance to be more… subtle. Twilight is an obsessive planner and a highly powerful and well-read mage, and Celestia is generally portrayed as a chessmaster and of course has a great deal of experience. If you're playing up the tyranny angle, as seems to be usual with evil!Celestia… hm. Two broad paths seem to present themselves to me; I'll call them "high propaganda" and "low propaganda". The high propaganda path looks a lot like the show on the surface, because that's the point; everything's supposed to look fine. The problems are under the surface. The low propaganda path… perhaps something more like The Mare in the High Castle but with a more Tyrant Sun twist. One might also look at Sunshine and Fire. Hm… and I seem to be out of ideas again for the moment.
2385884 Well, I've already been considering possible branches for the third one, though they'd have focused on Spike and the world Twilestia built.
Possibly Celestia's lunacy and her murder of Cadance and Luna, too (because no, I wasn't thinking that this was the world of the show), but whenever I think of a sequel to this I think 'Alright, who's Spike gonna recruit?'
*EDIT* Oh, the reason why Twi was like that was because the prompt was 'Agreer'. I'd have gone with genius Twi if I was smart enough, though.
2386744
Ah, I think that I must have missed something due to not reading the full context of the things you linked.
2386835 It was my bad; I didn't post the comment with the context, just the story itself.
2386839
I did wonder why it was in a different format than the others.