Cutie Mark Crusader Magicians, Yay! - Author Notes · 1:45pm Feb 26th, 2016

And so my third multi-party pony fic comes to a close.

Once again I'd like to thank my three awesome pre-readers, Albinocorn, RT Stephens, and Cerulean Voice, for their help, and thank you to all of you who read and commented.

So, let's look at the elephant in the room - Crusaders of the Lost Mark came out while this story was being written. Once again, the ending was planned all along - Trixie and the CMC face the ursa, then she tells the CMC the truth of her motives and cutie mark, and they part company. What was up in the air was the epilogue. I wanted to do the ursa story bit with the CMC joining Trixie on stage to perform with her, but how to handle their cutie marks? Do I give them cutie marks and show them, give them and not show them, they don't have them but are happy to see Trixie, they get their marks performing with Trixie? All of those answers posed problems.

Then Crusaders of the Lost Mark happened. And the show itself gave me the way out. Not only does the moral of CotLM line up perfectly with my story with the true meaning of cutie marks, but it allowed me to do the epilogue in a way that was satisfactory for me and for the characters. As I once said before - CotLM didn't ruin my fic. It improved it.

That aside, one thing I wanna bring up is that, while I had a lot of fun writing this story and the CMC and Trixie were a ball... I think the plot is very weak. I wish I had paced this thing tighter. Twilight Falls, Sunset Dawns, has problems, I admit, but I think it was pretty well paced, every chapter served some purpose in the larger narrative, and with the exception of Sunset's dream sequence, I didn't really have to pad anything out. Here, oh boy. Trixie and the CMC getting into hijinks is fun, but when I look back at the story itself I dislike how thin and stumbling it is. And then the ending rushed up on me and suddenly we're done.

But, my personal dissatisfaction aside, I enjoyed writing this piece and hope you enjoyed reading it.

For some more specific notes:

- In earlier versions of the chapter, it was Rainbow Dash, not Pinkie, that Trixie was speaking to after the fight with the Crusaders. Then I included Rainbow earlier and swapped in Pinkie for better handling of the scene and to give her some screentime.

- Related to that last point, Fluttershy. As they joke, she was barely in this story. I did have plans to have a chapter where they go to her place for some ingredients (the chimera venom was the hook for that), but the idea wasn't going to hold for a chapter. Also, I wasn't sure how to have the meek and quiet Fluttershy could interact off of the loud and hammy Trixie in a way that would be funny for more than ten seconds.

- Another planned scene was where Trixie confided her plans with Applejack. This was scrapped and reused when she confided in Twilight.

- Yes, Sun-Cryst is a reference to Final Fantasy XII. It was a good word and fit what I was describing.

So, yeah, that's a wrap. My next fic is hard to say. I've a couple short ones in the pipe I want to do, one starring an OC and the other being an experiment in writing styles. There's also a fic coming to my alternate account, if you know what I mean. For the immediate future, my focus is on finishing Filly Fantasy VI and getting it out. After that, I'm not sure what my next multipart fic will be. We'll have to see what ideas come to me.