I've tagged Twilight Discovers Literary Analysis here because it's based on one of its themes. If you're not interested, feel free not to read this; it isn't required in any sort of way for an understanding of the story.

No, this has nothing to do with any ponyfic in particular that I've currently got going. Have an essay, though, that I wrote without the internet in a tent in the middle of nowhere in the midst of French communist hippies. I would have written an actual story instead, but a great deal of my writing requires research - how do I write a story (which you will probably never read, by the way) about Snips being a transgendered individual if I can't remember exactly what his cutie mark was so I could make a silly backstory for it? I thought Snails' cutie mark was a little pink spiral before looking it up a few seconds ago, for heaven's sakes.

Anyway, The Importance of Verisimilitude, wherein I note what a wreck I am:

Why is verisimilitude important? Why do I write like I do, every character as real as possible regardless of their circumstances, even in a world with pastel-coloured talking ponies and princess goddesses who raise the sun and moon? Why do I plan nothing but the most vague, easily-changed endings? Why do the threads of my characters guide me rather than the threads of my plot?

Let me first say, quite honestly, that I have not been in any way affected on a personal level by much literature that I can remember anything of.

Yes, of course literature gives me emotion. When I read Somewhere Only We Know and my eyes ran over the last line, I felt a wash of emotion that was so overwhelming that I think that I might have cried, although I do not remember. As I write this, as I wrote the title of the work, I felt something similar, and brushing my eyes over the title still gives me a great shifting feeling in my chest.

note: I went and looked back at the story after regaining the internet, and god god god god god aaaah god so goddamned sad there is no grey here aaah the sky is a perfect shade of blue whyyyy

But it did not change me.

Plenty of works have given me enormous, painful, desparate, unshared depths of emotion. Bubbles, Forever is Forever, Yours Truly, Growing Up Sonic.

Yes, the titles themselves can often hurt even if the stories themselves don't. The Light in the Darkness, Memories of Days Long Past. Of course they hurt beyond any possible words. Plenty of titles hurt because they are beautiful in themselves, and sometimes they hurt because they represent a story which I will never ever read (because it probably sucks) and as such they represent a part of the human experience which I will never ever share.

Yes, the sadfic binge I went on a while back certainly left me in despair. That being said, though, that despair was easily negated; reading any very good work gives me pure emotion, emotion I can simply channel into being happy. I can change the vector of this silly quantity, in other words. I can redirect its momentum, because in the end it's just hollow emotion, easy to change.

'Feels', one might call it.

Perhaps it is because I have no urge whatsoever to engage in escapism; I never put myself into the shoes of those bits of text on the screen, and I refuse to even think of staying in their world. When I was around eleven or twelve in Pune with only Eragon to pass my time, I began to wish that I, too, could change the world with words, and fell into a rather deep sort of despair because I knew it would never be so. Perhaps that is why I have forced myself to believe that the real world is the only one in which it is worthy to live. I might even venture so far as to say that the only true despair I feel is the despair of writing nothing, but that's not entirely true.

Pipsqueak's Day Off is a fairly innocuous fic; it's about Pipsqueak the little pirate-dressed foal having grown into a dashing young stallion, and has the character narrate his semi-perfect teenage life. He smokes clover and drinks bourbon and cracks jokes and judges people with jealousy and makes out with the Cutie Mark Crusaders and deals with dilemmas like the alcohol disappearing at a party.

It is the most painful fic I've ever read.

It's not the most painful because of its intensity, certainly; it's painful because it's genuinely hurt me at all. It's not painful because it's sad or horrid or terrifying or anything else. It's painful because it is so utterly real that at some point I actually find myself wishing that I might want to be Pipsqueak.

That's terrifying.

Because in no work of fiction before would I want to be in the situation a protagonist is; I wouldn't want to be James Bond or Bruce Wayne or Twilight Sparkle or any other fictional character, no matter how powerful, for one simple reason:

Their purposes are decided by their universe.

Take Twilight Sparkle, who, despite being the Element of Magic, lives in a world which is steady-state, controlled by living gods who raise the sun and moon, tormented by cruel deities without respite beyond the supernatural, the facts of their world decided by what sells more toys; even if that wasn't so, the ever-present scourge of the writer and the narrative exist, controlling the characters absolutely.

What Pipsqueak's Day Off did was to present an imperfect protagonist in an imperfect world with no inherent meaning. Yes, of course Equestria has meaning, but the way it is presented in the fic makes it appear as if it most certainly doesn't.

(If you are wondering why I consider meaninglessness to be such a determinant of a universe's quality: the thing about a meaningless world – like the real one – is that individual meaning becomes so much more important in it.)

Of course the author still is the absolute dictator and of course the universe itself is still horrifically meaningful even if the purpose of the universe is only to have the beer disappear, but what terrifies me is that he is so skilled as to make me forget that, to make me think that perhaps I would like to be Pipsqueak. Perhaps I would have liked to grow up somewhere other than the nightmarish, disgusting country that calls itself Singapore. Perhaps I would have liked to live in a place which would have left me a person far less bitter and cynical and hateful of authority and driven to isolation and bestowed with complexes of both inferiority and superiority, competing with each other and running against each other and forcing themselves into mountains of spiteful creativity and hateful genius.

It gives me a thousand perhaps, and it makes me think of myself as much as it makes me think of Pipsqueak. The talking pony makes me think of him as real even as he mentions his pegasus friend. It makes me wonder if it is worth it to have lived as I have and makes me force myself to remember that I cannot think of the possibility because it did not happen and never could.

But there is always that doubt. That little, soul-scarring doubt that eats away at me with quiet persistence. That makes me wonder about myself and the world and doesn't bring tears to my eyes but still hurts so horribly that it is impossible not to feel a little, to feel in a way and with such a quiet intensity that it is impossible to change that feeling's direction, that it is impossible not to think when it hits.

In other words, it hurts me like no other literature ever has managed.

That is why verisimilitude is important.

That is why I write like I do.

18th August 2012
Beg Nod, Bretagne, France

Mended 19th August 2012
Paimpol, Bretagne, France

tl;dr my characters tend to act real because I want to punch you in the gut

edit: as a reward for getting this far, have the cover picture for Cutie Mark Crusaders Capsuleers.