EThe Bird... or the Cage?
MLP: FiM
Sad
Tragedy
They say that I must send my sister to the moon for one thousand years. They say that she is too far gone, and that it is for the best. But I cannot believe that. I refuse to believe it! Yet I still find myself asking... What if they're right?
Crossover
Celestia
Luna
Nightmare Moon
Other
The Wandering Bard · 4.2k words · 83 1 · 3.1k views

Presenting: The Bird... or the Cage? · 1:09am Jan 12th, 2016

Greetings, everyone! Well, the story that I promised in my last blog has been released! I've been elated and jittery about it all day, but I am happy to finally share it with you. This is a story that is near and dear to my heart for a few different reasons, and I'd like to share with you why. Now, this next part of the blog will contain some spoilers for the story itself, so I recommend reading before continuing with this blog.

The first part of my inspiration:
Anyone who has talked with me about video games for more than five minutes will likely know that BioShock Infinite is my favorite video game. I even posted a lengthy blog about the main characters, Booker and Elizabeth, and why I see them as heroes. I have wanted to do a crossover fic for the longest time, yet I could not come up with any ideas beyond taking the story that is already present in the game and ponyfying it. I know that part of this is because I have such respect for the game and for its world, characters and story. The other part is that ideas sometimes don't come easily to me. I also did not just want to ponyfy the original story because it is unoriginal and understandably not allowed on the site. I shelved the idea in the back of my mind for a while to see if it could be resurrected at some point. Yet even though the Lutece twins had a cameo in Trade Ya! and I was extra excited over it, inspiration did not strike.

The second part of my inspiration:
Princess Celestia is my favorite pony. Hands and hooves down. She always has been and always will be. And because I always saw her as a kind and wise ruler, it made me wonder how some could see her as cold and uncaring towards Luna's plight. This interpretation of her never sat right with me because that was not how I saw her at all. However...

The third part of my inspiration:
...If Celestia claimed to love Luna as much as she did, why would she send Luna to the moon for one-thousand years? It seemed like an inordinate amount of time to me and so struck me as odd. I longed to find an answer.

These thoughts and questions surrounding Celestia brewed in my brain for quite some time with no satisfactory resolution. I can't say for exactly how long, but then... I remembered! The Luteces! It would make perfect sense for them to be the ones to tell Celestia to send Luna to the moon. Suddenly I had my crossover. Suddenly I had my answer. Everything fell into place.

It took a few months for the story to come to fruition, however, as I was beating my head against a wall with my latest Lyric story or was being creative in other ways as I worked on my voice recordings. But finally getting this down really felt great. And not only that, I had a wonderful editor in my good friend Reneigh Haycart to help me put on a good coat of polish and really help me think about what I wanted to convey. In this story, I wanted to leave some things up to interpretation still. And as much as I love Celestia, I wanted to show that she is not infallible. I hope I succeeded in these regards. Even the title - a well-known line from Infinite itself - has more meaning to me than just being a line from the game. I won't say what that meaning is, though. I'd like for you to come to your own conclusions.

Of course, even after the editing was complete, I started to have doubts. Should I release the story in chapters and potentially maximize the amount of readers while potentially minimizing impact, or should I release it all in one go so that the story had the largest impact that it could? I even began to worry that the story would be rejected since a large part of it deals with Luna's transformation into Nightmare Moon and the subsequent battle as portrayed in the show. Fortunately, site moderator Wanderer D helped me to allay those fears. And because my other worries only kicked in so late into the game and were very likely due to my brain being in uber-editor mode, I decided that I just needed to take a deep breath, release it anyway, and see what happened.

So far, the response has been largely positive. And now that the story is displayed on the site, I shall be placing it into the relative groups over the next few days. Thank you to all of the readers who have read it so far and enjoyed, and to those who will read and enjoy. And to those who read but did not enjoy, I thank you for at least giving my story a chance. And many thanks again to Hay for helping me to make this the best it could be, and to my friends Turning Gears, Kirito-Persona and Protopony350 for pre-reading and weighing in. I am happy to finally share this tale, and my interpretation of these events, with all of you.

Cheers!