Grey Hat Commentary: Prologue

This entry contains spoilers for Grey Hat. Be warned...

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I honestly have no idea why I joined this collab. I have no memory of it whatsoever. Well, kinda, but nothing concrete. Time to turn back the clock. You see there is a guy named shirotora who wrote a story a while back in my earlier years as a writer. I was kind of an unofficial editor that camped it when I was stuck in a box with only an internet connection. That makes sense in context. I had nothing else to do, so I read stories that were in my read later list to kill time. This was back when that list was around 20 and not 500.

I liked it well enough. Less so now because my tastes have certainly changed, but by that time I had invested quite a bit of time into this story. This was theorized during that area of At the End when... I know this will sound seriously self-deprecating, but when I thought At the End was actually a good story. As time progressed, I used what I learned from that story to help mold this one.

As shirotora claimed that this would be a multi-part series, and a collaborative one at that, I volunteered. I had a reputation as an editor, so I had a fair bit of credit to my name. Part of the reason I wanted to join was I could get to choose which one of the Mane Six I’d get to write, and I wanted Rarity. My pathetic animated crush aside, I had already had a bit of a story in the works as it was. Nothing came out of it, and I still haven’t had much work on it since, but it’s still there. I had wanted to adapt the coming collab option for Rarity into what I had planned. I had Rarity. I had a potential collab to introduce new readers to my wares. Seemed about perfect. Almost. There were a few tiny but necessary differences that prevented me from going through with my plan, so I scrapped the project and my decision to use Rarity. I switched over to Fluttershy instead.

I was issued two editorial demands upon accepting the role as a collaborator: Fluttershy and Applejack needed to have something to do with agricultural development, and... I can’t say due to spoilers. Sorry. But what was I to do? An entire world from scratch? Not just that: Into the Black, the original story, was set in space. I would need something much larger, or at least something that implied a much larger world by necessity. I took a momentary break from At the End in order to brainstorm and develop items and places of interest in order to fill in the gaps. I created a shitload of things as a consequence.

If you’re sharp, you’d know that a lot of it isn’t mine... yeah, I kinda went through a Shadowrun binge at the time, so I... adopted a few things. No names, and I modded plenty, but I had to build an entire universe from scratch. One of the things that I didn’t like about shiro’s story was that it didn’t have much in terms of world-building. I love epic fantasy; I bought out a shitload when Borders was going out of business. I love to read, and one of my favorite tropes in MLP is when one of the ponies gets stuck in a different situation, especially in a battle/wartime. I find them more interesting because there is not only a lot of material to deal with, ponies tend to confront ideas and problems that directly conflict with their own ideals. That’s my reasoning for why crossovers are so popular: an easy source of story conflict and tension that’s easy to digest. Now this inverse is true: because it’s easy, it’s easy to hate and easy to mess up and I’m getting a little off topic.

I love Shadowrun. Not only that, it’s one of the universes of future tech-fantasy that I know best. I know quite a lot of the ins and outs, so I adopted some of the formula. No, I didn’t copy the backstory concepts. No dragons, Awakening, or metahumanity. I did use the corporate presence, however, as shiro kind of led me straight into that one.

You see, in his story, humanity has been in a constant war with magic users. When fighting in a war for survival, you’d need to outsource a whole lot of things in order to keep the war effort running. That provided the seed for the planet where my story would take place: Magnasanti. I named the city after a particularly interesting project, and it tangentially fit well with the city and what I plan to do with it. A lot of thematic elements are used in Gray Hat, including the ideas of self over others, security over safety, and some that would be spoilers if I said what they are just yet; don’t want to ruin the surprise.

It took thousands of words of notes to develop this story. Just the miscellaneous folder, where I keep all the stuff that doesn’t have a proper place just yet, is over 25 pages. I have over two dozen pages of stuff unrelated to actual chapters. I have four separate folders for further supplementary material. I created a hub for the authors to post characters and places for reference and to keep consistency and continuity. I crafted a timeline of events so we knew when things could be referenced. I was adamant on not making the same mistakes I did with At the End. Will I succeed? I’m going to try my damnedest to do so.

Now... to the actual story. I developed this chapter because shiro was unsure how DaemonJack would react to his client at the end of the chapter. I originally wrote it for the lulz, but it worked so well as a prologue I decided to keep it for just that. I flexed my mental muscles here. It was a challenge only because I had to inform new readers of the events of the prequel without actually devolving into an exposition dump. By then I had developed Jack out of necessity for... something else...uh, spoilers. Anyway, Jack, whose mojo will be revealed in a later commentary, is an information broker of uncertain morality coming for information on the information superhighway. After getting the exposition out of the way, it was a lot of fun. I discovered, due to Jack’s job, I could clock exposition as him just scrounging for information. I could hide it behind the veil of Chekhov's Guns and Red Herrings. What was exposition was nestled in between facts of varying fallaciousness. The idea stuck me out of the blue and I hammered out the details and the chapter over the course of two days.

My only concerning was that him waxing philosophically to his client was a little too operatic. I counter that is exactly how I talk to you guys and gals, but even if it’s not your cup of tea, the discomforting vibe is understandable.

I deliberately avoided describing him because who he is and even something as simple as his species was never important for the prologue. My only goal was to make his motivations ambiguous. It’s not a clear black and white mentality in the real world, so I wanted a character who stood somewhere in the shades of gray.

Themes all around this bitch.

I really went all out in terms of editing. Not only do I have a lovely team of people to work with, I greatly desired to use whatever features I could to mimic the feel of internet chatrooms and classified documents. Every little dirty trick I could think of went into play revising the original copy. I wanted to give the best impression I could, with my only remaining fear that it would come off as too vague, or people wouldn’t like Jack for expounding his disgust for society around him.

I can’t really talk too much about the setting of Jack’s motivations just yet. We’ll see Jack again, don’t worry, but it’s still a little early. However, I did drop the seeds of unreliable narrators. Everything you the reader see in Jack’s workshop is what he wants. The articles are interpreted by him. He is your conduit for information, and only I know how right he is.

As he talks, I finally touch on the topic that I liked so much above: clashing ideals. Jack’s word choice is deliberately unusual when talking about the ponies, as he states he can’t believe such an idealistic society truly exists. It’s that idea that sets the setting for so much.

The Alice in Wonderland message, the OCO document, King Kludge’s surprise at his friend’s interest and inexplicable arrival, Jack’s lament, everything has a purpose, even if that purpose is to mislead you. I’ve set the stage. I hope you enjoy my new epic.

Welcome to Maganansti.