Ghosts: Afterword · 8:32pm Sep 11th, 2014
!WARNING! THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE STORY GHOSTS! CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT!
Hoo boy, where do I start with this one?
As some of you may know from the Author's Notes of Ghosts, this story was based off of a dream, a dream in which I was a human. So yes, this story could be as easily pulled off without all of the pony elements in it. But at the same time, I feel as if the pony elements strengthen what the story has to offer because I had to work around an existing, well established world, the new race of Ghosts only adding to the content that's already there. If this was a human story, A, it would probably take place on a bus and B, it wouldn't have garnered all the views it has gotten on this website. When I submitted the story, I had to cross my fingers in hope that it would actually get approved, because I was afraid it didn't have enough MLP content in it. Thankfully, the Story Approver saw no harm into adding such as story as Ghosts to the website and sent it to the front page immediately.
I imagined this story and it's events as if it were an anime. The main character is male, in High School and is most prominently not a huge dick. Soul Dew, on the other hand is a quiet teenaged girl with a soft, pleasant voice and is cute as all hell. They both are having tea, which I realize is not solely a Japanese trait, but it was that and the fact that the two were sitting on cushions on the floor instead of chairs made me think of the entire story as an anime episode. Are the characters a little bit flat as a result? Sure they are, but granted I feel as if I've given them an appropriate depth considering that Ghosts is a one-shot smaller than five-thousand words.
Ghosts also takes a lot of liberties in veiling the audience's eyes over, a.k.a. suspension of disbelief. Really, I tried all I could to make a conversation between two teenagers of opposite gender of different species alone in a tiny house in the middle of the night as accurately awkward and protective as I could, but there were too many plot elements I wised to introduce to the reader. Soul Dew's backstory was a huge part of it, because I needed the audience to understand what made Soul Dew different from all the other Ghosts even though they've never seen one before. The only Ghost that we get to observe in a story titled Ghosts is the one that barely resembles a Ghost. It's a little bit backwards, and I'm not entire sure if it works. It gets worse when Soul Dew has to talk about the assault on the main character's class and that she hates kill and hates being a Ghost and blah-de-blah-de-blah. Suspension of disbelief comes in because there is no way in hell an individual would be so open to telling another about secrets that are as deep as Soul Dew's. My excuse for her open-ness is that she finally has someone to talk to that isn't a Ghost, that can relate to her and maybe understand her pain, which the main character does. But really, I don't think it's enough to warrant the comfort of speech Soul Dew displays.
Truthfully, I think this story's dialogue is mediocre and there's too much of an exposition dump, but that's really all up to the reader to determine.
Also, I have concepts of a sequel in my mind if this story gets enough attention. If this story get at least 50 likes or 20 favorites, I will make a sequel.
Favorited!
I hope you reach twenty. Or fifty likes, whichever comes first.
~HiRi