"Always Had" Chapter 5 · 4:46pm Dec 27th, 2015
The title of this is more to give you readers an idea when I wrote it, rather than a commentary about chapter 5, although there will be some of that here as well.
Almost two hours before I posted this blog, I posted the fifth chapter of "Always Had", in which Star Swirl and Twilight go shopping and in which Twilight starts being called Clover the Clever. It's also the chapter that I got my first dislike on this story, and two comments stating that they're neutral about the particular chapter.
One comment said that they were too interested in the story to stop reading, and I took that to mean I'm doing my job right. The fandom, I've found has come to terms with Twilight as an alicorn. It accepts time travel as a thing that exists within MLP canon, even if they might not understand it and the paradoxes involved. We know very little about the canon characters that Twilight is meeting, which I realized when I was preparing this story, and the canon characters are more or less, as I view them, OCs. It's similar to how bronies created the character and personality of Derpy Hooves (and other background ponies), often from just a single image.
One of the theories in the fandom that the fandom seems divided on is the idea that Twilight was Clover. Some of the people who insist that she cannot be cite certain ideas, which include "She's not Clover. She was just playing a part in a play!" and (what I believe) misunderstanding the nuances of time travel. The videos posted by DRWolf001 and The Brony Notion address issues such as these, and also give other reasons why Twilight could be Clover the Clever.
Both views are valid. Both views are invalid. Unless we get an episode that goes into more detail about the first Hearth's Warming, that's all it will be: Schrodinger's validity. It's headcanon, and little more.
Regardless, one sign of a good writer is if you can jump a shark, if you can write about such controversy, or if you have a chapter or episode of lesser quality than previous work, and your readers continue to read your work. MLP has done that at least three times: when Twilight became an alicorn, when the first Equestria Girls film came out, and "Slice of Life". After all this, the fandom is still growing because we recognize that the overall quality of the franchise is still quite high.
The first two chapters were designed to set up the story I was about to tell. The third and fourth chapters were designed to create the world we know so little about canonically. From chapter five on, I'm going into the main plot, developing the world, and developing the characters. I do hope that future chapters will help those who are neutral about chapter 5 to choose whether I'm still worth following. I'll understand if they decide I'm not. I can't please everybody, after all.
This came out longer than I expected. Happy reading, and Happy New Year!
Speaking of New Year's, I'll be publishing a story on January 1st that I've been working on (off and on) since May of this year. Without giving too much of it away, it will involve Starlight Glimmer and a lot of cutie marks.
