Finding What Was Lost - Story Notes · 9:12pm Mar 9th, 2015
I keep finding that I want to talk more about this story, so I thought I would write up some longer notes to go along with it. I hope you don’t mind.
The story itself is about 60% different from what I first came up with. The core idea was always the same, Mary had been in Equestria for a year and found the Clarinet, but so much else changed along the way. The original plan didn’t even involve Canterlot or even Lyra.
In many ways this story has been a good example of ‘killing your babies’ when it comes to writing. Pretty much every joke that I came up with during the early stages that I thought was good ended up cut, though parts of the gags are still present in things like her Mary’s full name (which is Marian Lilith Shepard) though some of them are less obvious then others.
There was also one comment she made about things she missed from Earth that I thought was rather interesting, but the more I thought about it more the icky it got. Yeah it was somewhat reasonable to bring up in the context but I felt it just was the wrong feel for the story. I don’t think the story loses anything but cutting it, but I still think it was the right choice.
I also had a whole sequence of her getting beef sandwich, which was kind of fun to write but just felt really out of place and was more of a distraction than anything else. I decided not to make a big deal of the whole meat thing simply because equines can eat it, so they saw it more as a weird dietary choice than anything else.
One thing I really wanted to have going in was the fact that Mary really wasn’t friends with any of the Mane Six. This is why she’s rather formal when talking about Rarity or Twilight. One is a business relationship, the other is not really what one would call friendly. The whole idea is that she’s pretty much falling into the role of background pony (even to the point of being in the chores of a few songs), so she gets to see things from a different point of view.
As for why Lyra is her friend… well really I couldn’t think of a better fit, but I did decide to avoid the whole ‘Lyra is obsessed with hands’ bit. That seemed to play out well and she made a good guide for Mary.
What’s funny is how much one joke can really go into how a character is built. Early on I knew I would have to mention the Equestira Girls ‘verse, simply because it was a human universe. Now whatever you want to say about the setting, it is rather weird that it seems to be timeless and has people at the School that really shouldn’t have been there based on the real Equestria. Even just thinking about the timeline, Sunset Shimmer had to have been there for at least a decade in order for Twilight never to have meet her. Which means that she’s been a senior in high school for a very long time.
If you spend some time thinking about it, the whole place feels like Shinji’s weird high school AU universe he created during Third Impact. Thus why I made the reference, of course once I made that I had to work out how Mary knew about it, which defined some of her character as well and kind of settled her into a lightly nerdy role without going to an extreme. It also worked well with her knowing the requiem piece, as that was always part of the plan. It’s nice how these things sometimes all work together like that.
Oh, and that Ice Cream shop in Portland, totally real. You should check it out if you get the chance.
