Commentary on "Hope" · 11:16pm Mar 29th, 2016
Fellow author HapHazred has recently written a commentary on their entry to the EFNW contest, and this inspired me to do a commentary on my own work. In general, I like to analyze my own prose, as I tend to find stuff in it that I may not have realized at the time of writing it. Another reason for it is to clarify the details of the story once and for all, as I feel that the vagueness can lead too many people to the wrong conclusions.
One example, in my opinion, is Titanium Dragon's review, where I'm not entirely convinced he actually got the right idea about the plot. Granted, I think it's a terrible defense of one's work to simply claim "you don't get it" (the meaning of a story does not equal the quality of the story as a whole, and the latter should still be able to impress), but at the same time, if you interpret the fic in certain specific ways, it does fail to live up to expectations, such as the one TD pointed out.
That said, my commentary below the break will give the "official version" of what's going on, a couple of theories and alternate interpretations, and maybe a few "behind the scenes" tidbits. If you've not read the story yet, please do so first, as this blog contains SPOILERS!!!
Also, allow me to once again publicly thank* JLB for his assistance with this fic. Aside from pre-reading and editing, he deserves full credit for the exact premise of the story, which I then built upon using the concept I wanted to explore.
*Seriously though, fuck you for linking me to Night Mind. I'm still spooked even as I write this...
The concept in question was, like almost all of my writing, inspired by music, specifically an (at the time of this blog's writing) unreleased track by the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, named by fans as "Hope Drone" due to the word "hope" flashing on the screen behind the band during live performances, one of which I had the honor of witnessing. The song's vibe, however, is anything but hopeful, instead sounding apocalyptic, or hellish, if you prefer. In a way, the flashing word feels like a taunt, asking the listener "would you be able to have hope even now?"
Music was not the only inspiration, however, and the thought above reminded me of a story in "The Darkness" comics, where (SPOILERS!) Jackie Estacado is trapped in Hell after he committed suicide, and he is desperately searching for his dead girlfriend, Jenny. Hell, in this comic, appears bizarre, cruel, inescapable, and what's worse, everyone goes there when they die, regardless of how they lived. Even so, Jackie eventually escapes when someone goes after him and tells him that Jenny had already gotten out. By giving him a sliver of hope, he is able to escape as well, and his rescuer realizes that the only way out of Hell is to have hope in it.
This gave me the idea to try something similar for the contest. I didn't want to just do a Slice of Life or a cutefic or whatever. I wanted something dark and unsettling, though ultimately hopeful, as overly dark stories feel out of place for me unless tagged as AU. I initially came up with three different concepts to choose from, one of which was "a character is trapped in a hellish void, and can only escape by stubbornly clinging to hope despite all the efforts by their adversary to take it away." Since I like Princess Celestia and didn't get the chance to write much with her in it before (outside of very brief appearances and a smutfic), I decided she should be said character.
So let's recap quickly what happens in "Hope": Princess Celestia wakes up in a cocoon (much like in the S2 finale) and breaks out, expecting to find Canterlot under a changeling invasion. Instead, she goes out and finds an army of guards battling some monstrosity flying overhead. They then disappear, and she wanders through a hellish city until she stumbles into Luna, who offers nothing but despair. They get chased around by what appears to be Nightmare Moon, and then later by Twilight and her friends, who had apparently set up some kind of cult that drains ponies to survive among the monsters consuming what remains of Equestria. The panicking Celestia is then confronted with her own reflection, which looks as twisted as the world around her. With all hope seemingly gone, Luna offers a chance to escape to a land of happiness in their final moments. She opens a portal, but Celestia refuses. Luna gets blasted, and the Nightmare lunges at Celestia. Fade to black.
Those of you who have watched Season 5 of MLP:FiM may remember an episode called "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?", and if you look closely at a certain scene in "Hope", you will get a fairly straightforward clue as to what is really going on. In the episode, Luna uses the Tantabus to relive her own nightmare of becoming Nightmare Moon over and over again (every night, for all we know), each time concluding with the Mane Six using the Elements on her. Since she believes she deserves to be punished, this is her way of going about it.
When coming up with the idea for the fic, JLB proposed an unused premise of his where Luna goes through a nightmare and is confronted with something rather evil. While the outcome isn't exactly uplifting, she does at least get some relief in the knowledge that her wrongdoings were but a mishap compared to the horrors wanting to prey on Equestria. We decided to go from here, except replacing Luna with Celestia and altering the source of the nightmare, while sticking to the horror-like vibe.
In the "official interpretation" of the story, Celestia is trapped in a nightmare that's fueled by the Tantabus' meddling, which had somehow escaped from Luna's dreams and entered her own. The Tantabus has the same goal as in the episode, but this time it goes about it in a much more subtle manner, disguising itself as Luna and introducing various images and events to wear down Celestia enough to want her to give in and try to escape. The moment she does, the Tantabus has a chance to break out into the real world. When Luna and the Mane Six try to intervene, the Tantabus simply weaves them into the "story" it's been building up, making them appear as Nightmare Moon and the horrifying cult respectively. And when, despite all this, Celestia doesn't give up hope, they manage to zap the Tantabus, and Luna dives in to grab Celestia, after which she finally wakes up.
Speaking of that last scene, I made it vague what exactly is going on, but the idea was that Twilight and Luna realize Celestia can't just be told to wake up (the Tantabus' meddling makes it impossible for her to understand them), so they need to find a more drastic measure. And one way for a nightmare to end is with the death of the one having it.
But despite this one being the simplest and most obvious explanation for the events, not to mention it was what I based the plot around while writing, we don't get the most obvious clue to that until the very end, and even then it's not explicitly shown that the Tantabus is responsible. While the behavior of "Luna" may be odd, it's not that surprising if she had indeed spent the last who knows how many days (or years) fighting all kinds of monstrosities, only to find no hope for the world and be met with the twisted figure of her sister. And while the world behaves very dream-like, if all sorts of nightmarish powers had broken loose, they could easily have had such an effect. With that in mind, Celestia refusing to escape has rather dark implications concerning her student, not to mention her sister's fate at the end.
Of course, another interpretation can come from the story's description: "Princess Celestia finds herself trapped in the depths of Tartarus itself." Either she died, and was condemned to suffer in the warped version of Equestria, or some unknown force banished her there, and she's trying to get out.
Going back to TD's review for a moment: yes, as a story that's simply about a broken Equestria, it's not that spectacular. Most of the scenes are just montages of the apocalyptic environment, and Celestia barely has anyone to interact with that might give the story a better "drive". One idea I recently had was to keep the guard captain around, have him be someone to lean on so when I take him away, it hits harder. Honestly though, there was no room for it, and it would have been too much of a detour from the overarching plot. In fact, some of the seemingly monotonous scenes are intentional. JLB suggested that Celestia have rather mild reactions to most (if not all) shocking events, just to further throw off the reader and have them suspect early on that all is not what it seems.
This brings us to what the imagery is all about. My idea was that everything represents some form of failure on Celestia's part, or the consequences of said failures. Personally, I'm not a fan of the idea that she constantly "failed" (her sister became NMM, Chrysalis beat her 1v1, etc.), she did keep the nation in one piece for a thousand years after all, but it is interesting to speculate how individual failures and hardships might affect her from the inside. No doubt she outlived countless close friends, witnessed many conflicts, watched Canterlot (and the rest of Equestria) change, and I imagine she has plenty of fears as well, which could manifest in her nightmares. Her idea of how Equestria might have ended up if she failed to teach Twilight about friendship ends up being the very world the Tantabus creates around her.
On that note, we also cannot be sure what level of skill and power the Tantabus truly has. No doubt the creature is much more cunning than last time, as it intentionally takes the shape of Celestia's sister while twisting the image of her real friends and family, just to twist the knife in the poor mare's heart that much deeper. Even its speeches are carefully pieced together to maintain the illusion, while also working as fast as they can to drain Celestia of all hope. No doubt it feels the pressure as its pursuers close in and slips up, or perhaps its method ends up a little too perfect. Celestia either sees through the "perfect hoplessness" or she gets pushed so far that, at the end, she does not want to just run away to a fairy tale land.
But are these intentional results at all? Can the Tantabus read the minds of its victims and construct the perfect nightmare to bring them despair? Or does it only fuel existing nightmares and "goes with the flow", taking on whichever role might suit its own interests... or perhaps the interests of its victims? I must mention that one version of the story – which was ultimately abandoned, though traces of it remain – was built around the idea of Celestia having a Tantabus of her own, which she uses to forever remind herself of past failures and avoid letting them happen again. Luna would then have peeked in and found that Celestia's self-torture dreams are astronomically more hellish than her own little "Nightmare-cosplay". With that in mind, one has to wonder how things must have looked from Twilight's perspective, especially with how Celestia reacted to her.
One might also ask what exactly was the meaning of Celestia's twisted form, coupled with a dying sun looming overhead. It implies a lot of things, especially with "Luna's" commentary in mind. Celestia fought for years, and it reduced her to a husk, while her sun scorches the entire world. That, or she herself became one of the many nightmares unleashed upon Equestria, to the point that the changelings locked her away in a cocoon because she was outdoing them in causing damage. 
Well, that's pretty much all I can think of. While I enjoy the end result, I also feel like I could have done it way better, not to mention I didn't exactly achieve what I originally set out to do. While the central theme is "hope" and the lack thereof, I ended up focusing more on mindscrews over emotional twists. The tone of the story is at an almost constant low, with only a glimmer of hope at the very end which the reader cannot fully trust. In my original vision, I intended to give hope, then take it away, then give again until the cycle reaches rock bottom, and from there Celestia would push herself back up, despite everything. Within the confines of the contest, I don't think I could have gotten away with it that well. The only real restraint was the word count, I don't think having to limit the violence was a big setback. The story has no need for blood and guts.
And who knows? Maybe I'll return to this someday. See what else might be lurking in that abyss. Until then, thank you for your attention, and have a nice day!
- DA
I didn't get that it was the Tantabus doing it (though it was impossible to rule out because the story never really seemed to pin down the origin of it), nor did I get that the Mane 6 were really in the dream.
I did get that it was all a dream, though (which was very obvious from early on in the piece).
The thing is, it didn't really matter.
A long time ago, I wrote a story which was about 3/4ths a dream. And, as was pointed out to me after I wrote it, it didn't work.
The problem with the "it was all a dream" twist is that it sucks. It is a crappy twist because it makes the rest of the plot moot.
There are ways of making it work, and the plotline of people trying to break Celestia out of dreams has worked in previous stories - Eternal, of course, has a huge sequence devoted to this, and No Regrets is a good execution of such an idea.
What's the difference, then?
A few things, but the largest one by far is character development. Here, Celestia is confronted by horrors, but it isn't really important - in the end, how does Celestia change as a person from these events? Why does it matter? In Eternal and No Regrets, what is inside is very important and serves to develop characters - No Regrets develops Luna and Celestia, Eternal is developing Twilight and Celestia (and Twilight's relationship with Celestia), as well as some other things.
The second problem is that the underlying conflict of Luna and the Mane Six trying to break Celestia out of her dream is basically off-screen, leaving us with little more than Celestia's witnessing of the messed-up dream.
This was better than my take on it, which was simply that Celestia was ruminating over her failures in a nightmare while paying the consequences for another one - losing to Chrysalis (i.e. she was doing it semi-consciously). Thanks for clarifying.
Looking forward to more from you
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I don't like bringing it up as an excuse, but there was really no room for that much character development when it comes to Celestia, since I believe in her case, one would need to dedicate (at the very least) an entire chapter to whatever event it was that changes her character. Keep in mind that she is over a thousand years old. I really don't think it's that easy to change stuff in her, especially in a one-shot, nor was that the point of the story in the first place.
Also, yes, for all intents and purposes, the plot is "just a dream", but there is actually something at stake if one recognizes the Tantabus and knows it intends. Granted, this relies heavily on one noticing all the clues, so being vague doesn't do the fic too many favors, but it's there. I should also mention that, like I said in the blog, it's not the only plausible version of the plot. It's just as easily possible that Celestia really is in Tartarus (or somewhere similar) and is being tormented in various ways. To me, that version actually feels a bit meaningless if I look at it your way, but then again we can also hope she'll find a way out.
Going back to her character, I think it's more interesting to focus on what is in her character as opposed to how it could change, as the latter is far more difficult and lengthy to implement. The idea here is that Celestia had seen many things go sour over the years, and while she could just have solved each problem by "torching it with the power of the sun" or something, she wanted a more permanent solution, namely a promising student like Twilight Sparkle. This is why Celestia remains calm through the first half of the ordeal, and only begins to crack when she sees what became of Twilight. And even so, she clings to her faith in her student, a bit like how she did not intervene during past conflicts that Twilight had to solve.
Bottom line is that this is more of a (subtle) character exploration, rather than development. One half is speculation on the various emotional burdens Celestia might be carrying, the other is a look at how she would act in the face of complete despair. I could also claim that whatever happens after the cut at the end would be where any character development could take place, but since we don't get to see it, I can't defend myself there.* I may take a look at the stories listed though, just in case they pulled off what you approve of within the same amount of words.
*Unless I come back to this fic later. Who knows?
Oh, and don't take my ramblings the wrong way. This isn't meant to forcefully make you approve of the story. I just find it interesting to debate over it, since it tends to make me find things in my work that I hadn't thought of before.