H.P. Lovecraft vs. Hasbro · 12:18am Sep 7th, 2015
One of the more interesting aspects of the My Little Pony fandom is that because the online presence skews towards older dudes (and ladies, mostly dudes because the same problems that plague the rest of the net are here too) who really like shows not targeted at their demographic, you get a lot of fan-created content that likes to move away from the established tone of the show and into completely new genres. Cupcakes, Fallout Equestria, and god knows how many others are solid examples of writers taking the characters or world established by the series and transplanting them into a completely new genre or setting. Cupcakes in particular is ridiculously efficient because it tries to keep the characters featured as close to their show counterparts as possible while still having Pinkie Pie do horrible things in the name of confections. It's fun to watch what fans come up with, even if a good chunk of the content winds up being dispassionate crossovers or weak stories in general.
Crossovers aside, though, new genres and new story concepts that move away from the tone of the show always have to contend with one thing: exactly how much is the show going to inform the story itself? How close are the characters going to be portrayed to their show counterparts? How much of the story is going to be about the actual cast of the series, and how much is going to be taking that cast and using them as signifiers for new ideas?
I'm going to be harsh on myself to start with, because in the one story I think I've contributed more to (even if it's not on my page) than anything else in the fandom, I've got it about half-right. The Fading World was born from me jokingly coming up with a few Equestrian Servant-concepts while introducing my boyfriend to Fate/Zero, and spiraled out of control from there. Most of the story's central conceits came from us trying to reverse-engineer an Equestria where a thematic crossover with Zero would make any degree of sense. The result, however, is....
...Well like I said, half-right. The Fading World's been on hiatus-but-not-really for a while as Chuck works on other projects and I work on adjusting to the store I work at being twenty employees understaffed, effectively giving my part-time job full-time hours with an inconsistent schedule and relatively low pay. What that means is I've had a chance to take a break from it, and use what free time I have to watch things. Specifically I've caught up on a bit of season five, and tried to get more in touch with the MLP community itself. I've read some stuff by Bookish Delight, started watching Jerry's videos that aren't "In a Minute", and I discovered Silver-Quill's youtube channel existed and that it takes the art of talking about the show beyond navel-gazing and speculating about how terrible Twilicorn is.*
What that bit of separation and re-engaging with the show has taught me is that when Chuck and I came up with some of the character concepts for The Fading World, we really weren't thinking about how to make this feel like an alternate universe of the show so much as we were trying to come up with an alternate timeline for Equestria to wind up being a little more like Fate/Zero's crapsack world, with magic fading in efficiency even as researchers frantically try to come up with more insane concepts to stay ahead of the fade. Probably the worst offender in this mess is me- Chuck is the one who contributes the prose, but I'm responsible for a good seventy percent of the characterization on some level. The two of us jointly came up with the Apple family's lore, I'm responsible for just about everything related to Blueblood, and I'm also responsible for Trixie and Luna. I think the worst of that really comes down on my Luna- I missed a shocking number of opportunities with her because I was building off her season two characterization and using her as the closest analogue the story has to Iskander. I missed some of the episodes that have come to define her character in the more recent seasons, where she's a dream-watcher and guardian and isn't quite as aggressive. I can argue that the show is Luna post-redemption, but in The Fading World my goal was to have the major universe-split occur because Luna and Celestia were both in the wrong on some level, and to show she would have been as good a solo ruler as her sister given the chance. The problem is that I failed as far as getting the character "right" goes.
Twilight is also a mis-step for the fic, evaluating it on these grounds. For some reason the two of us fixated on the Kirei/Kiritsugu dynamic of the original Fate/Zero and reshaped Applejack and Twilight to fit it. Fans of Zero will notice that in the Fading World, Twilight has basically the same issues as Kirei- she's got a void in her heart where she should have emotions, she jumps from job to job seeking any spark of passion, and she becomes a player in the Grail War mostly because a more powerful patron sees her as a loyal subordinate even though Twi obviously has her own goals. The only difference is that Kirei summons Gilgamesh, the avatar of amoral awfulness, and Twilight gets Princess Celestia.
I fucked up so hard there.
Twilight as an emotion-dead wreck wasn't the angle to take, even for the sake of the Zero dynamic. We should've built her organically from Twilight's season one concepts. Twilight could've been emotionally detached from everyone because she's laser-focused on solving a problem in front of her, or proving her theorems correct, or generally living up to some high expectation she has of herself or that she feels like others have of her. That's who Twilight is. But Twilight as emotionally dead? We have a sort of in-canon explanation for all this, but I feel like we would've been more accessible to people who love My Little Pony if I'd kept my focus on keeping Twilight as close to her show characterization as I could.
Ugh, and Rarity. I got Rarity so wrong. I'm not even sure why we included her in the story beyond a way to keep the entire central cast of the original series involved, but she's a Ponyville native and it would've made more sense for her to be stuck with Applejack's commune. She could've made a very interesting rival Master, driven by dreams of pulling herself out of a community where her talents and abilities are undervalued and making a place where people like her can shine. Actually if I'd been thinking straight, she would've been a great character to pair with Luna. As it is she's Blueblood's assistant and unofficial consort, and that was a terrible waste of a Rarity.
That's not to say I don't think we did a good job. Chuck's writing is fantastic, I'll stand by everything we wrote for the Apples and for Blueblood himself even if I don’t like relegating Rarity to being his designated Spike for the entire fic, and even if we messed up on canon grounds the story is strong enough to overcome that and be enjoyed on its own merits. We did embark on the adventure knowing the audience wouldn’t be familiar with Zero, necessarily. It follows that if we built the story strong enough to work separate from one half of its source material, we’re probably strong enough for it to work without complete fidelity to the other half as well.
So aside from me feeling bad about missed opportunities, what’s my point here? Mostly that it’s really hard to write a story that both feels like it’s faithful to My LIttle Pony: FiM, and yet works as part of a completely different tone or genre. Some stories do the second but not the first very well, and I love them. I think I’ll pay special attention to Chatoyance here- her Conversion Bureau stories are intended as hard science fiction with a quasi-spiritual tone to them. I’ve already mentioned I love “Michelson and Morely: The Speed of Right” more than words can say. That story is anything but a My Little Pony story. It’s a screwball comedy set in a crapsack future of our own world which just happens to intersect with Equestria on some level, with Equestria more or less standing in for something very personal to the author: namely, her desire for a world where people aren’t jerks and aren’t engaging in terrible, self-destructive behavior that’ll eventually doom us all**. Do I like it less for not conforming to the intent of canon? Hell no. I love it.
Occasionally, though, I run into a story that I think works both as an example of genre fiction and conforms to the tone and characters of the show. And I feel like celebrating those people in particular.
So here’s “Twilight Sparkle and the Strange Case of Old Res”, by Meta Four. It’s published under Team Collab and is the last chapter of a six-story horror anthology based on the prompt “Pony Horror”. I don’t really recommend the rest of the anthology beyond maybe “Applejack’s Law”, which is a nice little Twilight Zone-ish story in its own right. “Old Res”, on the other hand, actually manages to seamlessly blend MLP’s tone with the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
One common misunderstanding of Lovecraft is that to work, everything has to be hopeless for everyone. Yeah, if you’re a purist, that’s true. But what really gets overlooked during that discussion is that Lovecraft was as much a fan of dreams and fantastic imagery as he was of cosmic horror, and that even his horror evolved over time. Sure his best-known stories all end with the protagonist dead, a monster, or insane, but you’ve also got stories where the protagonist actually escapes his terrible fate. Just take a look at “The Whisperer in the Darkness”, where the lead character actually does encounter cosmic horror and escapes- completely intact. Sure someone else doesn’t, but that character isn’t actually the protagonist- in fact, the protagonist never directly interacts with him, instead meeting him through letters.
“Old Res” takes a similar approach. Twilight is spared the consequence of eldritch horror for two reasons, the first of which is that she doesn’t directly encounter it. Instead she’s given a journal which gives the account of a wizard who, though an experiment intended to boost his magical capacity, ends up inadvertently coming into contact with a very disturbing world in his dreams. Eventually his dreams begin spilling over into reality, with terrifying consequences.
What I love about this story is that the Lovecraftian horror is still present, but rather than going for the easy route of making his characters go mad with the knowledge, Meta-Four makes them resolute. Resonious immediately realizes that what’s happening to him is a very bad thing, and he works to counter it at every turn until he finally comes up with a way to- effectively- win at Call of Cthulhu. it’s a hollow victory and it’s not without cost, but his actions are still successful. Twilight then wins a small victory of her own. After encountering the journal, rather than becoming entranced with the possibility of ultimate power, she seizes on a small part which might be able to help her connect better with one of her friends and then chooses to ignore the rest. It’s those spots of hope (and Twilight’s staying more or less true to her show counterpart) that keep the entire story rooted both in real Lovecraftian horror and in a world where friendship is, quite literally, magic.
For even more bonus points, Meta-Four references his story “Alarm Clock” and its sequels, easily some of my favorite fics in the entire fandom and also great at combining influences. Again, great stories that both work off concepts and characterizations which (at the time) were entirely within the bounds and tone of canon, but which are also firmly in other genres. It’s just zany fun all around with this author, and just, all of my love.
Eventually I’ll get back to continuing on the train of blog posts people actually read (because Chuck cross-posted), but it feels nice to get that off my chest. To those proud few of you I’m writing to, thanks for putting up with me and feel free to send me your thoughts.
*Dear portion of the fandom still whinging about this: Get over it.
**Someday I really should talk about why an outspoken atheist is the one person in this fandom who writes deeply spiritual sci-fi.
I haven't read your Fate/Zero crossover on Chuck's channel, haven't watched the series. I'm not sure what other stories you've worked on, but I like following your excellent blogs. There's also a few titles and names here I'm not familiar with, so some of this has been lost on me.
Jerry Peet, oi. I think someone can get a lot of thoughtful ideas listening to him, but I had to get away from him, it was kind of toxic for me.
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Jerry's pretty much had it with the fandom's bullshit, and if you watch his videos you slowly realize he has a very "tough love" philosophy about everything. That's why he's so blunt and generally negative about the fandom, that's why he likes episodes like "The Mysterious Mare Do-Well", and explicitly why he has issues with both "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" and "Filli Vanilli" since he saw both as treating actual medical problems or self-destructive tendencies as things that don't need immediate medical interventions. Once you accept that, he's generally pretty easy to follow and he has his own opinions, which makes me want to pay attention to him since it means I'm going to get a viewpoint I won't hear inside the rest of the fandom.
The other stories I've worked on aren't really mine, and are up on Chuck's page as well, because I'm officially his muse. The Fading World is the only one I'll claim real creative credit on because I've added details and maybe some dialogue here and there for the others, but not enough to ever claim co-writer credit. I think the biggest example I can point to is that some of the lines in "We'll Dismember it For You, Wholesale" are jokes that I made while Chuck was writing that he just threw into the story (like Gilda's crooning over her "zero horsepower" chariot, and the entire bit where she's reminiscing about the snapperdoodle she raised as a cub). The Fading World has bits where I explicitly slipped in ideas for the dialogue and action too, but I also helped build the world, premise, and characters.
Basically if you're reading Chuck's (non-porn) work and you hit a really corny gag, you can flip a coin and if heads, it's me.
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I've read Chuck's Trixie and Gilda power hour stories, great stuff.
None of the problems I've had with Jerry (his online content and persona, I don't claim to know him IRL) involve how he feels about how entertaining episodes of MLP were, or what their messages were. I thought his Self Destruction video was constructed well, and was really thought provoking, even if I didn't get the same feelings at all from that episode.
It wouldn't be good for me or the people I interacted with if I liked them based on just how we differently interpreted pieces of art. That's why I didn't have a hissy fit when he spoke of how he couldn't stand The Legend of Korra, which helped change how I think about death, even if I thought his criticisms of them didn't really hold water with me. I watched Jerry Peet for awhile, and was even on his Patreon for a bit, even though he never cared much about that and never advertised it (and I'm not sure if he still has it).
Putting content creators aside, I've never understood the sense behind phrases like "this fandom's bullshit." Not just for the MLP fandom, but any fandom, or online community or website. For something like a fandom , how do you even begin determining who is in it? The amount a person watches a show? The amount of time they spend thinking of it? The difference it makes in their behavior? And that doesn't even take into account how they interact with other fans, in terms of output, attitude, frequency and interest. So I'm not sure how someone talks about a fandom or demographic like everyone in it averages out to have the same traits and perform the same actions. Even though I know it's acting under a smaller scale, it seems to be operating under the instinctual generalization our brains apply when we say "the problem with America today" or "the problem with kids today."
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Good point on the fandom generalization, though it is just that- a generalization. Sometimes for the sake of compression it's just easier to type the words "this fandom's bullshit" instead of the implicit "the bullshit perpetrated by members of the fandom X, Y, and Z, but not by A, B, and C who are totally nice people and do not engage in any of this behavior". It's also a matter of emphasis, since in any given group the tendency is to respond to criticism of the actions of members by going "well they don't count because No Real Member would do X" rather than evaluate whether or not the prevailing attitudes within a given space controlled by the group enabled or encouraged them.
I only now stumbled on this particular blog. Thank you very much for your kind words about "The Strange Case of Old Res." You said it properly captured the tone of both the show and of Lovecraftian horror. Would you believe me if I said that, at the time I wrote it, I didn't think staying true to both sources was possible, and my success on that front was really a happy accident?
Also possibly of interest: Part of Res's dream was based on a dream I actually had. Specifically, the part where the door closes and the black liquid seeps out under the door. In my dream, it was people instead of toad things, and instead of a weird stone building it was an ordinary auditorium or sports stadium. And there wasn't any disembodied heart with eyes. (And there were some other details in my dream which I left out because they would read like dumb edgelord BS.) It was one of those dreams where I can't explain why it scared me so much while I was having it, but at least it was surreal.
I've heard that Conan, in Robert E. Howard's original stories, encountered some of Lovecraft's monsters and likewise made it out with his sanity intact. (Howard and Lovecraft were pals in real life.) The theory I like for the disparity is that your average Lovecraft protagonist is a very modern man who thinks he understands how the whole world works. So discovering how wrong he is, shocks him enough to drive him insane. Conan, on the other hand, isn't that concerned with the whole universe. He doesn't know much about The Grand Scheme Of Things, and he's okay with that. So the existence of giant calamari from space doesn't break or even bend his mind; Lovecraft's horrors are just more weird things in a world already full of weird things.