The Blanket of Wholesomeness: Thoughts on The Descendant · 1:45am Aug 27th, 2014
I've been a member of The Ravens, the local Descendant fan club, for quite some time now. Although I've never thought about leaving the group, I see myself as a conflicted Raven. Maybe I'm more of a crow, or a jackdaw. (Reddit drama incoming...)
In other words, I have a love-hate relationship with The Descendant's work.
He's a peculiar writer, with a very clear style of his own. If I had to sum up his defining traits as an author in one word, it would be: wholesome. (Hang on to that word, because I'm going to use it a lot.) Whether the tale is a happy or a sad one, his characters are always very moral: they care about each other and stick to their values, and usually get very passionate on both counts. Well, okay, sometimes they're lecherous monsters instead – the colts at the auction in Every Little Bit, the pegasus seductress in Father of My Children, the gossiping mares and cat-calling stallions Spike imagines in The Talk – but those only show up to threaten and harass the main characters, and get little development beyond that.
From what I've read, I think I can divide his non-comical stories into three broad categories: wholesome characters (especially Spike, TD's go-to paragon of virtue) try to protect each other from the decidedly un-wholesome hoots and jeers of the outside world (Father of My Children, The Talk, Every Little Bit); wholesome character struggles with their own demons (Highball, Tangled Up in Blues, A Cup of Joe, As a Mother); or some combination of the two (Variables). I didn't get very far in Zenith, but from what I did read of it, it seems to be in the third category.
The first category is an interesting one. Some of these stories can be read almost as religious allegories about resisting sin. TD often pushes the contrast between the brave, caring main characters and the leering outsiders too far, creating black-and-white morality – and yet in some cases he still manages to tell meaningful, engaging stories against such a backdrop.
If Estee is the cynic of Fimfiction, TD is the idealist. (Interestingly enough, Estee, though coming from the opposite direction, often runs into the same problem: she emphasises the evil of the out-group where TD emphasises the virtue of the in-group, but the resulting black-and-white contrast is much the same, as I've told her before. In her case, the implications, as I see them, are quite disturbing.)
When I first noticed this pattern in TD's work, and tried to describe what I was seeing, the first thing that came to mind was that his stories feel warm – like he's covered everything with a thick blanket of morals and feels and wholesomeness.
TD himself has blogged about his real-life work with children influencing his writing; maybe this blanket of wholesomeness, especially the "protecting innocence from evil" variety, comes entirely from there. At any rate, my opinion on the blanket varies.
Sometimes the blanket feels pleasant and comfortable (Tangled Up, As a Mother, Highball).
Sometimes the blanket feels suffocating and oppressive (Cup of Joe, Father of My Children, Every Little Bit).
Sometimes the blanket is there but I really can't figure out whether I like it or not, like on one of those hot nights where you toss and turn about, trying to get comfortable, and eventually fall asleep with one leg under the blanket and one on top of it (Variables, The Talk).
Sometimes the blanket is relatively thin and only covers one corner of the story, and while I think the story would have been better without the blanket, I still like the story enough not to mind (Children of a Lesser something something, Certain Advantages).
But whether I like the story or not, my short-term reaction to the blanket is always the same. After reading one of TD's stories, I want to immerse myself in booze, heavy metal, junk food, emotionless sex, shoot-everything-that-moves video games, and Samuel L. Jackson levels of profanity. I want everything that isn't wholesome in this world, and I want to revel in it.
And in that moment I am no better than the hordes of insecure manchildren who give this fandom a bad name. (Fortunately I tend to snap out of it pretty quickly.) Such cravings are those of a teenage boy desperate to be "edgy", not those of a well-adjusted adult. Maybe I have more of a teenage boy left in me than I'm consciously aware of, and TD's stories just bring these remnants to the surface.
The point stands, though: the wholesomeness of TD's work always draws a powerful, aggressively negative reaction from me. It's like I'm shouting at my screen: "No! I can get out from under that blanket, and there's a whole world out there! There are politicians to laugh at, songs to rock out to, pretty girls to flirt with, and at the end of the day I can just take a step back from it all, have a beer and smile! Not everything has to be so damn full of deep emotions and heavy-handed moral principles all the time!" I Want To Break Free, indeed.
But maybe I'm fighting a losing battle. Maybe I'm wrong and TD is right, and the world really does belong to Bibles and Boy Scouts. Maybe ten years from now, when I have a job, hopefully a wife, possibly children, I'll have become just as wholesome as any of TD's characters.
Until then, though, I'm going to pretend there's more to this world.
Love and tolerance,
Rambler
This is why I follow people I find interesting. Because you said something interesting, and I like that.
It's interesting in this contrast you show, between the wholesomeness and virtuosity. I try to... I suppose be grey.
Thank you for the blog post, Rambler. I enjoyed reading it.
Sometimes, that's how people write stories. I assume it is less that he finds things wholesome in the world and more that he wants to find something wholesome in the world. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are two very different sides of the spectrum that both show the brightest light and the darkest dark of the world. There's the Bible, that generally tries to preach about the wholesome qualities humans do or should contain, and then there's Breaking Bad, that shows the scum of the earth, the logical devolution into madness and corruptness.
Which is a valid depiction of human life? I'd say neither. The thing about good and evil is that they must learn to get along. And that means we have a whirlpool of mixing ideas that all define humanity.
And it's as simple as that.
The only aspect of this blog that I feel the need to address is your understanding that reading my work somehow is in opposition to flirting with pretty girls. I disagree. In fact, I approve of flirting with pretty girls, and before I became a old man I did it quite a bit. I tried to do it after I became an old man but the police got tired of coming around and asked me to stop.
2405673 Ah, I'll keep that in mind for when I become an old man.
Want a beer?
2405685
No thank you. Alcohol and I haven't been on speaking terms since I was in college some dozen years ago.
He is a talented writer.
I wouldn't want to read nothing but his stuff, but reading some of his stuff as a part of a well-balanced diet is good, I think.
It is nice to see a different point of view, though I also see his Spike as being off - Spike in the show has an edge to him, and in many ways he is the most cynical of the main characters on the show.
2405697 Ah, that's fine. I'll try to be responsible about it in what remains of my own college years.
Anyway, I'm brimming with questions now. The tendency to make your works more heavily morally and emotionally charged than most writers – do you recognise that in yourself, or am I talking nonsense? Am I on to something when I see a virtuous "in-group" versus a sinful "out-group" in stories like The Talk and Every Little Bit, and if yes, what's your idea behind such a contrast?
If you can't, or don't want to, come up with a sensible answer to these, no problem, but I can't help but be curious.
I enjoy his work immensely due to the fact it's difficult to find wholesome morals wrapped up in engaging stories. Not to mention he manages to connect with a variety of people on a variety of levels.
TD. Idealist.
Have to say I'd never put those two words together, myself. I definitely agree that there is frequently a stark line between good guys and bad guys in his work, but I think that a certain amount of semantics come into play here.
I don't think the problem is that TD's work is unremittingly 'wholesome', but that what he considers wholesome is likely somewhat stifling to you. As voluntarist/anarchist, I imagine I think very differently to the both of you.
For example, in my epic read-through of the entire EqD summer fanfic competition, there was one story about a windigo looking for food and homing in on an angry and and frustrated colt. Said colt runs away from home, gets cheered up by Pinkie Pie, and then runs home again to a relieved mother. The mother, however, very subtly blames the child for scaring her. This is, in my own experience, fairly normal in parenting mentalities: 'don't scare me like that!' rather than 'I'm sorry I upset you enough to make you run away'. The latter is almost unheard of and my emotional reaction was somewhere along the lines of 'this stupid fucking bitch needs to get fucking stabbed. Of course, I'm perfectly capable to deciphering that reaction and turning it into something rational, but it shows what one person thought was the 'sweet' ending deeply pissed of the moral philosopher in the room.
So while TD's work may have a fairly consistent 'blanket' of wholesomeness to it, I think the only fair comparison would be against the similar leanings of other authors and the different underpinnings thereof, rather than picking it out as having focusing on wholesomeness at all. If I were to try and qualify his style (which may be a nonsensical idea to start with, but what the hell), I'd say it is that he categorises his own characters by virtues first – everything else is icing. For me, that really works, because his characters almost always make more sense to me than anyone else's, but I completely get that to someone who doesn't look at people that way the same characters might look a bit polarised. Me, I always build characters by collecting together all the effects that define them and backtracking the causes. There's no such thing as 'a jerk is just a jerk', and that confuses some people as well.
Naturally, I often ask authors what the motivation behind a character is – usually while editing – and a lot of the time, they don't know. When I push them to go deeper and really understand even the bit-part characters, they tend to come alive on the page that much easier. TD (I think) understands them through their virtues, and I understand them through their childhoods (although, I wonder if TD doesn't this more than he realises, sometimes), which leaves the question as to how a third party de-constructs those characters. It sounds like it is stifling to you on an emotional level, which inclines me to ponder your experience with wholesomeness as something limiting rather than freeing.
My point being that neither side is right or wrong. What matters is how our experiences colour our perception of the virtue TD writes about.
I even wonder if there are some conservative vs liberal principles at work, here, but that's dangerous stuff to bring up :P
-Scott
P.S. Not trying to pigeon-hole you or anything, just making a few reasonable assumptions for the purpose of commentary.
Your right, most if not all of, TD's stories are wholesome. And that okay. I've read liked and faved most of the his stories (that stared or featuring, Spike) and found them to be wholesome. And at the time, it was exactly what I was looking for!
After reading a few (2 or 3) of his stories I started to notice that warm funny feeling I got when I first started watching, MLP, just on a more real and mature level. But I'm a well-rounded reader. Read it all! Every tag, every rating, with just about every character at least once. Hell it's what I came here for!
Like, TD's work, like that you thought about him and what he does enough to make a whole blog about that, and I'm sure he does to. Very constructive criticism right there.
Now, if you we excuse me. I need to go get someone from under 'their' blanket.
How do you react to My Little Pony? Do you watch the show?
2405820
I'll have to take a rain check on having you plumb my emotional depths at the moment, Ramb. Today has been an exhausting day for me, both in the fandom and in real life.
I guess that the only thing I can say in my defense is that I have been attempting to work on using more subtlety and even-handedness in my works—namely by copying the styles of those who do it better than me, like Cold in Gardez.
The only thing we can take away from that, in the end, is that I'm not as good a writer as Cold in Gardez... something that should come as a surprise to no one.
I haven't read all of TD's work, but what I have, I really liked. Wholesome? Maybe, but for me and others, that's a GOOD thing. It's like with Star Trek. It's idealistic, but in this world, we need that idealism.
I just read 20,000 words of Descendant, specifically Spikey stuff. "Idealist" can mean almost anything--Hitler was an idealist--and I consider rough sex with strangers good wholesome fun. So instead I'm going to say it's "cute". Or "sweet".
What I read seems sweeter than the show itself, so I can see where MidnightRambler is coming from. Lots of emphasis on nostalgia, frequent use of words like "little", "soft", and "puppy".
I think this will show up better in a word-frequency comparison than by me blathering on. So I used stylo's oppose() function to compare 207K words of Descendant Spike / Cake stories to 75K words of somepony less Spikey and more spiky... me. (See Stylometrics for an explanation of stylo, and Pros vs. Fans for how to use oppose().)
When I remove about a dozen words that aren't on either end of the sweet / bleak, Descendant / Bad Horse axis, these are the words The Descendant uses more than I do:
Having just read many of those words in context, I think TD uses these words to relate things to images of childhood. "Fought", "fighting", "cried", "pelted", and "dove" suggest children playing. "Placing", "lifting", "gathering", "cheek", "floated", "wrapping", "embrace", "chest", "forelegs", "whispered", "breathed", "hug", "slid", "washed", and "nuzzling" probably occur in descriptions or metaphors that invoke parents displaying physical affection, with children or with each other. "Laughter", "cried", "chuckle", "giggle", "blush", "sigh", "kiss", and "frosting" invoke babies, children, and sweetness.
If I keep going down the list of words TD uses more than me, it's mainly either neutral words, or happy, positive, family-oriented, physical-affection words: son, whelp, happily, warmth, sensation, fireplace, beaming, embraced, lifted, hearth, brushing, touching, daddy, nephew, daughters, descendant... wait a minute.
2406711 The words that I used more often didn't suggest any such pattern:
...So I think probably- aside from Bad Horse's word comparison- the best response to this post so far came from InquisitorM. The "Wholesomeness" of TD's stories generally provokes a reaction in me based on the exact context of that wholesomeness vs. my life experience. And in my case, it's actually kind of sweet when I run into some of the religious undertones in his stories- Children of A Lesser Dragon God Boy Whelp Thingy Oh God I Hope I Got This Title Right is a great example of religion poking fun at itself on top of being a legitimately strong comedy piece. Every Little Bit is more of a "I know you probably meant it to read it like this, but man did that not read like you intended to me" type of story.
"Wholesome" is probably a useful-ish catch-all term just because T-D's stories tend to be very much about the pure/innocent/good/warm/whatever word you want to use against the Outside, which isn't necessarily. And sometimes that's appropriate, particularly in Children of a LEsser etc. etc. where the whole point is how absolutely exaggerated and comical the outside is. It's when this isn't being played for laughs but drama where it becomes slightly less easy to consume for me.
I mean, to quite a few people, I would be considered unwholesome for existing, so I tend to buck back against things which remind me of that. On the other hand I do like the idea in T-D's stories that sometimes it's good to protect people you care about- and nurture them- and stand up when there's danger- etc. It's a broadly Good Thing from my point of view. Sometimes it ends up breaking weirdly along various lines, however, and I'm not as fond of that.
(And yes, Spike is, as per usual, something of an anomaly. T-D writes him with much less of a snarky edge than the show, where he's sort of Twilight's conscience and reality check half the time but equally capable of being a snotty little brat when he has a mind to be. Like many little brothers.)
Having read this, linked from Descendant's blog:
(Apologies in advance to the more... sensitive souls that might read this; I write on the eve of a funeral, and so being more unvarnishedly candid and some of my usual self-censoring may not be up to par.)
I think I can say that I fall into the same rough age category TD does... But probably VASTLY more jaded. I find myself annoyed to the point of derision about "edgy" and rebellious for the sake of rebellious things (thought to be fair I NEVER liked them even when I was young; I was categorised by more than one teacher ion my youth as being middle-aged at eleven. I now thus consider myself definitely "old" (at 34), since I clearly must be twenty-odd year later.). I particularly dislike gratuitious anti-authoritarianism, as it always strikes me as little more than a childish tantrum being thrown over "you can't tell me what to do!!!" I find myself increasingly at odds with the way the world doesn't work these days: my thoughts are often full of fire, darkness and fury and bitter hatred, fuelled with each new injustice, inequality and act of senseless incompetance, greed and/or evil that humanity continues to throw out relentlessly. (I have - quite literally and honestly - lost all hope in humanity altogether. I have become utterly convinced that the robot slash alien slash whatever overlords cannot come fast enough, since humanity has proven to me it has neither the ability nor the right to rule over itself.)
I find, then, for me personally, TD's works - like canon pony itself - offer a brief glimmer of light, something I can (generally, lookin' and you Zentih Celestia) - read as a break from the unrelentingly stupid/ infuriating/ injust/ greedy/ ineptly run (etc etc) real world (which I sadly cannot bring to heel with the excessive brutal force it deserves): something I can read without feeling a fresh surge of boiling fury and the desire to go in there and start tearing characters bodily apart. (As I do all too often these days.)
So perhaps in my case, TD's stories DO act as blanket - not a security one, but a fire blanket; bringing a moment of peace and silence; something that stills the raging furnaces... just for a little while.
I suspect that, if you are of college age at the moment, you may indeed find yourself more jaded and seeking something that's more "wholesome" in another ten years. Perhaps no nearly so jaded as I, but then again, that takes some considerable effort...
Everyone's posting long opinions about this compelling blog and I'm just sitting here thinking about angry birds.
*insert picture of 60's spiderman behind desk here*
...but you murder one piano...!
2408471 Hey, I said if! If!
It occurs to me just now that there was no discussion of Dear Idiot in this blog. It certainly stands apart from The Descendant's main body of work. So now I have to ask you about it.
2408646 Funnily enough, Dear Idiot is going to be the subject of a side remark in another blog post that has been bouncing around my head for months.
...I suppose there's no way out of writing that one as well, now. Expect it in the next week or so.
2408676
Oh God...
Immature was a story by The Descendant where the characters where very much not wholesome.
And it was easily one of my favorite fics on fimfiction.
2408836 He won't save you now.
2406484 Sure, take as long as you like. (Or just plead the Fifth, as you say in the colonies.)
Cold in Gardez is an excellent example to follow. His style is more quiet and introspective. I think it suits you, while at the same time pulling you away from the more heavy-handed stuff. So, great choice overall.
2408978
The only thing that I ask you keep in mind when using Dear Idiot as an example is that I intended it to be a response to a work of a noted fandom artist which portrayed Blueblood as a rapist. My interpretation was meant to be a "positive" alternative... a self-obsessed hedonist (which still kept him useful as a protagonist rather than make him all nicey-nice like so apologetics like to do) rather than a sexual predator. That was my intent, not to get all "Holy Wholesome Morality Guy" with the piece.
2411295 ...okay, your concern is actually the opposite of where I was going to go with this. You'll see.
2411295 2408646 Here we go. Like I said, the bit about Dear Idiot is only a side remark unrelated to the main point of the rant, but it's definitely in there.