Impossible Things Wrap Party and Story Notes. · 2:29pm Aug 21st, 2015
Wow, guys. I actually got through it.
That storyline took… ages. Half a year, in fact. And it was super exhausting and now that it's done I want to work on something else entirely for a while. But I did it, I got through the entire storyline, and I honestly think it was pretty damn epic.
This was young Star Swirl's make-or-break mission. Sent out farther from home than he had ever been, to a strange land he did not know or understand, where he would have to prove himself against foes far older, more cunning, and more powerful than he if he was to return home victorious. Only I flipped that last bit upside down, or at least sideways, because I do that kind of thing and because Star Swirl is larger than your petty storytelling conventions.
In the year and a half (or thereabouts) that I had this storyline simmering in the back of my head it just kept growing and growing, getting increasingly intricate, detailed, and significant. As it is, I had so many ideas competing to get in that even in 40k words there wasn't room for them all. Other things were pushed into the background. There was so much going on, in fact, that I thought I'd do something new: write up a list of things I thought were interesting that might not be obvious, or that ended up not making the cut, or were just part of the writing process that I thought you guys might enjoy.
So here goes.
Things that didn't make it in.
Here's an obscure mythical creature you might not have heard of: the Al-mi'raj, a bloodthirsty killer rabbit with a two-foot horn similar to a unicorn's horn protruding from it's forehead. An early idea for act 2 had Star Swirl trying to sneak into the royal palace at night, only to be thwarted constantly by the Khalif's demonic pet rabbit. And yes, the rabbit was to be named Malak, Arabic for “Angel”.
For a very long time I intended to have a subversion of the literal genie trope when Star Swirl faced the Mared (which is a horse pun for Marid, the most powerful and arrogant class of genie). Star Swirl was going to try to outwit her, and trick her into promising him a wish, in the genie tradition. He would then wish for her to give up all her plans and her power. To which she would respond “No.” Unfortunately, when the time came the whole idea just seemed too comical for this tense climactic encounter. That said, I loved this line too much not to share it:
“Rules?” the Queen laughed and bent down as if to whisper into Star Swirl's ear. “I will tell you a secret free of charge: there are no rules. There is only power. I once plagued a city for ten years. I lay stretched outside their walls, forbidding anyone to enter or leave. Every full moon I demanded as tribute that they send me one of their finest lawyers, to try to talk their way out of being eaten. I never once went hungry.”
Callbacks.
Lots of times in The Education of Clover the Clever, I refer to noodle incidents from Star Swirl's long wizarding career. Some of those incidents have later been retold in The Crown of Night. By my count this storyline has four big ones, ranging from the obvious to the obscure.
1: Way back in the first chapter of Clover, posted two years and one month ago, Star Swirl talks about how he learned the Amniomorphic Spell from “entities that live beneath the desert dunes and hunger for pony blood.”
2: In chapter 5, Star Swirl told Clover that he once solved one of the great mysteries of unicorn magic while he was plummeting to his death… and therefore she has no reason to complain about the working conditions in his house.
2.5: Also in chapter 5, Clover first summarized the pulp novelization of this story like this:
The Caves of Maretania. The first of the Star Swirl the Bearded adventure books. I remembered it well, having read it only twenty or so times: Star Swirl the Bearded delves into the cave of the Maret in order to learn its secrets. He is captured, but escapes deep into the cave and steals the treasure of the Maret from right under her snout, and leaves the cave just as the furious monster brings the entire mountain crashing down on top of herself to stop him. Then he returns to his home and uses the treasure to create the Amniomorphic Spell, the greatest discovery in recent pony history.
3: In chapter 6, Clover is brought low by jungle weather and vegetation, until Star Swirl makes her a simple cloak with enchantments to protect from the elements. We saw young Star Swirl learned to make those cloaks by trial and error when he was wandering Braytannia as a teenager, but Saddle Arabia is when he first began experimenting with enchanting them.
4: In chapter 7, one of the ghosts who comes to speak to Star Swirl appears to Clover to be “a spider the size of a zebra”. There as here, Womeluki gravitates towards filling Star Swirl in on what's going on. Back then I had the idea that she was going to be known as “the Mother of Spiders”, a title that also never made it into the text. I may have given the impression of a more malevolent entity than she actually was.
Other points of interest.
A lot of ideas and inspiration for this storyline came from these two articles:
“The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture.”
“Witchcraft, Magic, and Divination in Ancient Mesopotamia.”
The first article is where I found the epigram which opens the first act, which in turn inspired the name of the storyline. Now that the storyline is over, and the details are fresh in your memory, I'm gonna ask you to just take a moment and look at it again:
After viewing the fellows of my age, I found no true friend who could stand by you at times of need.
I have known then that the impossible matters are three: the ghoul, the phoenix, and a faithful friend.
When I first saw those lines I thought that it would be very hard to find something more Star Swirl than that.
The Game of Ways is stolen from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. If you're gonna steal, steal from the best.
There is, in fact, a form of spider divination in West-Africa, but it bears no similarity to the ideas I had for Womeluki. To be honest I was quite shocked when I couldn't find any folk traditions for scrying in spiderwebs.
At long last we have an answer to the eternal question, “Just what the f**k is the Amniomorphic Spell?”: a spell dealing with the morphology of amniotes. Admittedly, “four-limbed” doesn't work with mythical beasts that have the four legs of a mammal plus a completely superfluous and biologically nonsensical extra pair of wings, but what can you do.
In Greek myth, the slaying of Medusa, whose two sisters are Stheno (“The Forceful”) and Euryale (“The Far-Roaming”), led to the birth of Pegasus. Completely unrelated to the story (hmmm… 
) but interesting to think about, no?
Foreign-language names and phrases.
You know what's hard? Making pony, horse, and camel puns in a language you do not speak or read.
I don't know Arabic, and I don't know anyone who does. So all the Arabic words and phrases come from Google Translate plus this transliteration app, and it may very well all be wrong for all I know. Still, this is what I intended and tried to write:
Sarāb. The oft-intoned phrase for the Queen's hypnotic message is in fact the Arabic word for a mirage.
Hassan al-Rashid, Khalif of Saddle Arabia. His name references Harun al-Rashid, and “Hassan” means “horse”.
Mussadas ibn Hassan, the prince of Saddle Arabia. The Khalif's son, his name means “colt”. Hence, Mussadas ibn Hassan is “Colt, son of Horse”.
Rehalet Tawyla and Rehalet Amina, the Bedouin camels who lead the caravan. Their names mean “Long Road” and “Safe Road”.
Makhloub Al-Sarya, the Sinbad-style jackal protagonist of the story the Bedouin leader tells around a campfire, is supposed to mean “the swift claw”.
Womeluki is Zulu for “weaver”. Speaking of Zulu, a detail that didn't make it into the text was that Womeluki's tribal chief is named for a beetle.
The Longma of Qilina. He doesn't get to do much, but when I saw this I knew he had to be in there. “Qilina” is a pun on “China”, of course, which is named after Qin Shi-Huang, of course. The Qilin, meanwhile, is a Chinese mythical creature which was typically, albeit inaccurately, translated into English as “unicorn”.
While on the subject of languages: One of the Sphinx's plays in the Game of Ways is the werewolf. However, she never actually uses that word. Why not? Because a friend of mine pointed out that the “were” in “werewolf” is Old English for “man”, and that if I were truly so dedicated to pony puns as claim to be I would find a way to ponify it. The Greek word “lycanthrope” is constructed the same way, and literally means 'wolfman', so I couldn't just use that instead either.
So what did I do? I used the Greek and Old English words for horse instead, “hippo” and “eo” respectively, and got “eowolf” and “lycippo”, words nobody has ever written before and which likely will never be written again.
Yeah. I'm not actually a linguist, but I'm a word nerd. There are ideas about language woven fairly deeply into the structure of this story.
I have absolutely no idea if the Arabic word for werewolf, al must'thib, has the same problem.
Okay, I think that's it for the story notes. Hopefully you found them interesting, and thank you all for reading the story. To close: what I will continue to insist is Star Swirl's unofficial theme song, “Promise to the Moon” by Jason Webley.
References! References everywhere!
Wow. That is quite impressive.
I found a handful of those crossovers with Clover and started "translating" the names once I realised you were working various puns into them, but I certainly did not spot them all. It is like a written novel version of Where's Wally?
I love these kind of hidden Easter eggs. I certainly will be on the lookout for them in the next, upcoming arc.
WRT Game of Ways: I imagine Star Swirl eventually develops the "nuclear option" and names his opponent's species during his turn... Now they are stuck with either loosing face or loosing the game.
3337770
Glad you like it. There are probably more things I could have pointed out (who figured out that the Sphinx's story about how she was beaten once before was a reference to Oedipus Rex?), but I began to feel that I was going on for too long already
But yeah, this storyline had a lot going on. Too much, really
if I keep going like this I'm never going to finish anything until long after the show ends and the fandom dissolves. I'm afraid I really need to limit myself more if I hope to actually reach the end sometime.
Anyway, now that this is done I'm planning to go back to The Education of Clover the Clever, which I think I actually have a chance of finishing in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm not quite so sure that would be practical for the player myself
Admittedly the Sphinx is an extremely vain and arrogant creature, who is also the only one of her species (or at least so she claims... 
), but her nature is no great secret: she must be outwitted by someone who can see through her riddles and her tricks. So she could respond by declaring that she could only be beaten by the all-seeing Mimir, for example, and ask what Star Swirl would put up against him? For most other creatures though merely admitting that you are mortal is not a big deal. Plus I imagine the judges/audience would find that move to be unsporting 
a. Huh. That things neat!
b. HAHAHAHHAHAHA Angel.
Headdesk. Mared is a horse pun for Marid. Oh my god how did I not see that one?
Seriosuly? That seems like a thing that should be a thing.
Ahhhh. I was expecting their to be foreign language horse puns (the best kind!), but I never actually checked the words. And nice job on the lycanthrope issue.
3457918
I know! But I couldn't find anything like it
Oh, but here's something that greatly amused me: only a couple of months after I posted the story the MLP fighting game project Them's Fightin Herds revealed that one of the fighters is... a Longma.
That made me unreasonably happy.
3458266
Ohhhhh. I have not heard of this game, but if they are a going all out enough to stick in a Longma? I better look into it!
3458290
I'm not into fighting games, unfortunately, but it looks like it'll be great fun.
3458290
Watching this stream right now and Lauren Faust just said that she hadn't known that a Longma even existed and that this is what she should have made when she designed Discord!
3459350
Discord could have been designed after a Longma? The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Excellent follow-up! Yes, I missed most of the Arabic puns (for some reason), but I still appreciate that you put them in!
Thanks for providing a soundtrack as well.
Yeah, I've had similar problems with "werewolf", except I ended up at Old English hors. Which works, I guess, but is pretty boring. I did manage to come up with loup-cheval, though; and I've seen people use "marewolf", which works if you're willing to abandon strict etymological correspondence (
).