Interview with Bugsydor · 1:55am Apr 17th, 2016
Another interview, this time with a Bugsydor.
One of the strange things you can find right here at Fimfiction, a Bugsydor may be known for having written Tastes Like Heresy and Desert Spice, or even a headcanon megapost that is more than twice as long as this interview. If, like me, you still don't know what a Bugsydor is, and always wanted to know, here's the closest thing we may get to an answer.
“- No Bio Provided -”
So just what exactly is a Bugsydor?
You got me there. I keep meaning to put a bio there, but I never seem to get around to it.
There are a lot of answers to that question. One of the obvious ones, though, is where the username came from.
Back when I was 11 and my dad had just taught me about email. I went to set up a username on yahoo (that I don’t use anymore, by the way), and was wondering what to put in that field. I didn’t want to be the next GameBro20X6 or what have you, so I mashed-up a couple of other things instead. I was a huge fan of Homestarrunner.com, especially the Strong Bad Emails, so I took part of Trogdor the Burninator’s name and glued it to the end of my childhood nickname Bugsy. Bugsydor is a really convenient name to have, too, as it’s almost always available whenever I need to make an account on some web service. I’ve always liked the name Bugsy better than my given name anyhow, so I am not at all sad that Bugsydor has stuck with me through these 12+ years.
As for who a Bugsydor is, I’m afraid you’ll need to be a bit more specific with your questions.
What is a Bugsydor willing to share about what it does with its life?
Despite being rather introverted, I’m not actually that much of a private person. I’ll tell a lot of things about myself to anyone who will listen. I’ve already divulged my age, for one thing. I’ll talk about my religion, about which pony is Best Pony, about why my life sucks, about why my life is awesome… I’ll share just about anything except for my politics on any sort of non-superficial level. Talking about that last one is one can of worms I am not willing to open here.
But yeah, I love talking about myself on the internet. Whether it’s about things I’ve written, stuff I’ve accomplished, or awesome fiction that I’ve read or watched. Heck, I’d even talk about my writing schedule if you thought that was interesting. Fire away.
We’ll start with Tastes Like Heresy and Desert Spice, then. What does a Bugsydor get out of writing about what it itself has called “floofy racist unicorns”?
I get a kick out of fantastic racism. Real life racism sucks, no buts about it. Fantastic racism, however, opens up a ton of possibilities for humor, character exploration, and worldbuilding. You get to look at a group of people and imagine what sorts of stereotypes they’d have about some other group, which is even more fun and fascinating when said groups of people have legitimate biological differences.
As for the floof, you can blame CardsLafter for that one. When I presented the idea for my first real fanfic, he demanded that I make the protag floofy. I thought the idea sounded wonderful, and came up with the justification that extra floof was a beneficial mutation that would be selected for in mountain-dwelling unicorns to the point where it’s approximately as prevalent as red-headedness is in California.
The A funny thing about Tastes Like Heresy is that it was originally intended as a one-shot, and I got the idea for it after I had the idea to make Desert Spice. I’d been brainstorming headcanon ideas about how the different pony tribes would culturally diverge if they all went their separate ways instead of banding together after the Windigos froze their old home, and Laffy challenged me to actually make a story about it. I decided I wanted to have an exiled, heretically-insufficiently-racist unicorn be the lens that the audience saw desert pegasus culture through, and then I realized I needed to make the audience care about said unicorn. That’s how Tastes Like Heresy got started, and then that ballooned out from a one chapter backstory to the 40k novella that it is today. Not a Warhammer 40k novella, sadly, as many people seem to think when they see HERESY (*BLAM*) in the title, but what can you do?
Would a Bugsydor say that these stories are more about Amber Spice (and why she’s a somewhat consequence-prone, floofy unicorn protagonist), the world around her, or both?
Even though I set out to write these fics with worldbuilding in mind, Tastes Like Heresy is definitely primarily about Amber Spice. Worldbuilding is still clearly one of the focuses, but I feel it’s more of a background element there. What drives that story is finding out who Spicy is and what her personal world was like before it all fell apart. I will admit that watching her world fall to pieces like a house of cards that got attacked by three simultaneously falling lines of dominos in the final chapter was cathartic.
The sequel, Desert Spice, I can’t really say it’s primarily about Spicy. That’s because that fic actually features a veritable herd of viewpoint characters. The main stars of the show are pegasus-camel (two species, not a pony-camel hybrid) culture in the desert, and Spicy and Horizon’s relationship.
Part of the reason I love writing Amber Spice is because I’ve fallen in love with her as a character. Not in a “candlelight, roses, and a fancy dinner” sort of way or in a “let’s make out under the bleachers” sort of way, but in a way that I care about what happens to her in the things that I write and I want to see what sorts of things she manages to do with the circumstances I set her up with.
Another reason I love writing her is that she has a tendency to both cause and overreact to chaos in her environment. This makes it a lot easier for me to insert humor into a story, and I really enjoy making life miserable interesting for her. (Take that alongside the above paragraph as you will.)
When I’m writing her, she’s like a fragment of my own personality that’s been broken off and then warped and exaggerated in a few key ways. (Take that alongside the above couple of paragraphs as you will.) That’s how I approach writing a lot of my characters, really. That’s not to say that I have a bunch of ponies sitting around in my head telling me what to think all the time; that would be silly. What I mean is that when writing a character, I tend to ask myself “How would I react if I were X, Y, and Z?” Most of the time, this question gets asked unconsciously.
The fact that nobody has yet called me out on how similar all of these characters of mine are to each other either means I’m better at being creative than I thought I was, or it bodes poorly for my mental health.
Taking a step back: when, how, and why did a Bugsydor get into writing fiction?
I covered this a little above, but I guess I could lay it out in greater detail.
For starters, I love reading. I’ve loved reading since my seventh grade English teacher introduced me to her library of dragon books. Throughout the rest of my public school career, I was never without a nice fiction book in my hand. Usually fantasy or sci-fi, because those had the most wonderful worlds for me to explore.
I’ve also gotten a lot of enjoyment out of pondering new ways to abuse whatever magic, superpowers, or applied phlebotinum I ran into in ways the authors never intended. I’m the sort of guy who would say Twilight could totally kick Rainbow Dash’s plot in a fight just by using her ability to teleport others against their will to make RD slam herself into a quarry wall. And then I might turn around and say why RD would totally kick Twilight’s plot in a fight for some other reason. And yes, I do use the word “plot” as a euphemism for pony butts. My inner twelve-year-old finds it to be hilarious.
After high school, I had no intention of ever writing any sort of story again. I was going to be an important wizard a mad scientist inventing new life forms to solve some of humanity’s problems, and would satisfy my creative streak that way. That plan didn’t exactly pan out, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyhow, I hadn’t really written anything except for essays, along with a couple of short stories I’d put together for high school English class.
I got introduced to ponies in May of 2011 by the (now completed) webcomic Massive Pwnage’s injunction to watch ponies because they are filled with friendship and magic. Shortly after that, I discovered the MLP Know Your Meme Page, which led me to Equestria Daily, which led me to reading pony fanfiction. (Technically, I may have started by reading pony fics off of the TvTropes Fanfic Rec List. My memory’s a little fuzzy on that part.) I ended up creating the TvTropes page for Pen Stroke’s Past Sins and CardsLafter’s Through the Eyes of Another Pony. CardsLafter noticed that I was his self-appointed troper-in-chief and that I was the co-chair of his fanart Deviantart group, so he invited me to become one of his editors on TtEoAP and we’ve been friends ever since. He’s a cool guy, and you should totally read his stuff. It’s classic, even if it’s not technically finished yet.
Anyhow, I’d been inspired by a number of authors around the pony community. Pony fanfic was almost all that I read anymore, thanks to its prevalence, quality, and convenience (no need to go to the library to get a new book when I can just read off of my phone’s screen). Seeing so many people do so much cool stuff with the world of ponies and magic they’d been handed – Capn_Chrysalid putting together a picture of Equestrian nobility in This Platinum Crown that should make G. R. R. Martin jealous, Admiral Tigerclaw showing us how first contact is done right in Arrow 13: Mission Logs, and so many others writing things more amazing than I’ve found in just about any traditionally published – it inspired me to do some worldbuilding of my own.
As I mentioned earlier, I was putting together a mental picture of what the different pony tribes’ societies would have looked like if they all split apart after the windigos moved in instead of banding together. I figured that, rather than them all choosing to go to the same promised land, each tribe would intentionally pick an environment that was hostile to the other two tribes. Unicorns like the mountains because it brings them closer to the sun, and they don’t feel much need to be connected to the soil or the open air. Earth ponies would see the swamps as being full of life (which they are) rather than as being full of icky, mucky, gross stuff (which they also are). Pegasi would love the freedom of the wide, open desert skies, while nopony else would be able to shrug off the wild temperature fluctuations and general lack of easily accessible moisture you’d have in a desert.
I had also come up with weapon design ideas for exclusive use by the different tribes. For instance, it never made sense to me for unicorns to have hilts on their blades, since they’d never grip them in their mouths. In my headcanon, the implements we see on the show that are obviously designed with humans in mind (e.g. hammers, rakes, benches…) don’t actually look like what we see; we’re just being shown analogs that serve the same function in our world as whatever tools they’re actually using. Similarly, the ponies aren’t actually speaking English; it’s just translated for the viewers’ convenience.
So I got around to designing pegasus weapons that made sense for pegasi. Underhoof stiletto spikes for use in divebombing, wing axes to take advantage of a wing’s chopping power when they’re on the ground, and a couple of other ideas that struck my fancy. I presented these ideas and other bits of my worldbuilding to Laffy, and he asked me why I didn’t make a story out of my ideas. That’s how Desert Spice was conceived, though that story had to wait for Tastes Like Heresy to be finished before it could be born.
I started writing Tastes Like Heresy, intending to fit everything into one chapter. A few weeks (or months, maybe?) in, and I had thousands of words on digital paper with the end still a long ways away. My friends convinced me to post what I had so far on fimfiction and send it in to Equestria Daily, so I did. Somehow, I managed to get it accepted onto EqD after only a single round of altering the framing device I was using for the story, and the story kept going from there.
So yeah, I came up with my favorite mildly racist flooficorn so that I could make horse flies hack at each other with wing axes. True story.
Technically, Tastes Like Heresy wasn’t the first piece of horse words I’d ever written. I had previously written a short, cute little one-shot vignette called Ditzy, Derped and posted it to DeviantArt, and you can find it today as the first chapter of Bugsydor’s Cryogenic FicFrag Storage here on Fimfiction.net. While it was the first fanfic I’d ever written, nothing ever came of it. It was a one-and-done thing, unlike Tastes Like Heresy, which springboarded me into my “career” as a fanfic author.
And that’s how Equestria was made. Maybe one day I’ll tell you the story of how I got into writing; it’s a gem!
Desert Spice is written in first person present tense, and both Tastes Like Heresy and Monster Hunter: Equestria are written in first person past tense. Is there a specific reason that a Bugsydor likes to write in first person, and isn’t afraid to use present tense?
I like to write in first person limited because it’s a lot easier for me to get into a character’s head and show the audience what they’re thinking that way. It also lets you color what the audience sees with the perceptions and mental state of the viewpoint character. For a good example of what I’m talking about here, take a look at one of the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. Getting trapped in an illusion is a lot more terrifying when you’re reading about it in first person.
I have written a couple of things in third person omniscient, such as the aforementioned Ditzy, Derped along with a fic about Twilight’s non-unicorn alicorn powers acting up that I have no intention of completing or releasing, but first person limited is how I’m most comfortable writing the kind of stories I want to tell. Part of that is how I tend to get into character when I’m writing a specific person’s perspective, too.
As for why I used the present tense in Desert Spice, it’s because I didn’t know any better when I started it. Tastes Like Heresy was originally supposed to be a journal that Amber Spice left behind, but Equestria Daily didn’t like that particular framing device so I made that detail less obvious. Spicy does still talk to her journal like I do, but that’s going off on a tangent. Desert Spice, on the other hand, was going to be told as it was happening, so I thought I should write it in present tense. My point is that at the time I was writing it, I was convinced that a story could only be told in past tense if it were actually set in the past relative to the reader. I’d missed the fact that every novel I’d ever read was past tense through and through, but that’s one of those things that’s easy enough to miss if you’re not looking for it.
While writing a story in present tense can be done, it really complicates the flow of writing for me. It feels harder to leave out chunks of time that you don’t want to talk about, like the uneventful walk to a destination. It does make the events of the story more “present,” but you can also make a story feel like it’s happening here and now while still writing in past tense. I am seriously considering going back and combing through every line of Desert Spice to change it all from present to past, if only to make things easier on myself when I get back to writing it. If anyone can tell me what sorts of things present tense is good for in a story (aside from character dialog, where just about anything can be said to “go”), then please tell me about it in the comments or something.
Before I try to wrap this up, a Bugsydor appears to make its own cover art, and posts a few of its creations to Deviant Art. How does a Bugsydor get into creating art?
That got started thanks to my desire to do a little of everything in the fandom. I’ve written horse words, drawn horse pics… hay, I’ve even composed a piece of horse music. Dabbling in all these different fields has given me an immense appreciation for the people who manage to get good at them. By the way, Linux Multimedia Studio would be an amazing piece of software if it didn’t crash every time you tried to do anything at all once your file got big… But I digress. I kinda do that a lot, in case that has yet to become clear.
Art!
I got started drawing ponies during one of the earlier Artist Training Grounds on EqD. Pretty sure it was 2011, since I had the idea to put my ponysona Double Quote in a suit of archon armor from Through the Eyes of Another Pony, and people in the TtEoAP DeviantArt group comment page encouraged me to go through with it. I started by making Double Quote in General Zoi’s Pony Creator – We all have to start somewhere – and tracing over that in Inkscape. Then I borrowed ToastWaffle’s picture of Captain Storm Wing (screw Captain Storm Wing, by the way), with permission, and used that as a reference to draw the armor on Double Quote. It didn’t look amazing, but it was a thing that was mine.
(Fun fact: I like to give Double Quote cameos in my fics. You can find a stallion that at least loosely matches his description in any of my multi-chapter stories.)
Since then, I’ve drawn a number of things when I felt the need for them. One time, I saw a sketch of a grown-up Nyx (from Pen Stroke’s Past Sins) that LeoVictor had drawn, and I got permission from LeoVictor to trace and colorize it. A little bit to my chagrin, that trace is still receiving faves to this day while the rest of my “art” remains largely neglected. I blame my unwillingness to seek out ways to self-promote.
Anyhow, immediately after that drawing, I created new versions of it with Nightmare-Moon-style hair both with and without armor. The unarmored one is my only pic to date that’s made it into an EqD drawfriend.
Since then, I’ve done my own art for stuff without tracing anything, though it would be fun to colorize someone's sketch for them again sometime. I’ve tried drawing a few of the Mane 6 in different art styles, with mixed results. I’ve drawn a couple of ponyfinder characters: one for a friend in a one-shot I was running, one for my own character in a 5e game I’m currently loving, and one that I had an idea for while having a text conversation. I eventually redrew my Double Quote picture, which is what I use for my Fimfiction profile pic. I’ve even drawn a couple of entries for VikingZX’s Dusk Guard Fan Art Contest. That sleeping Sky Bolt picture is the drawing I’m most proud of, by the way. It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve done with vector shading, and it’s freaking adorable besides.
You mentioned that I do all my own cover art. This is true. This is due in part to the fact that I have no art budget, but it’s also a throwback to my tendency to dabble in everything. I’ve even drawn a couple of illustrations that I’ve inserted directly into the text of Tastes Like Heresy as in-universe artifacts Spicy was showing to the audience. On the family portrait, I even got to use my drawing tablet to draw in the shadows and highlights on GIMP after drawing the rest of it in inkscape. Seeing the lighting layer without the underlying picture was pretty cool, by the way: It looked like a family of ghosts or glass sculptures. My favorite bit of art that’s in Tastes Like Heresy, though, was the piece of fan art Bemmo (aka Standard Brony Browser) drew for me in oil pastels. A person doing free traditional art because they loved a story I made was one of the most amazing feelings ever.
As for why I do art or writing, or anything creative, really: I’ve found that whenever I create something tangible, whether it’s lines of text in a story or pictures of ponies, I am a lot happier as a person. Even if nobody is going to look at the thing that I’ve made, I still feel the satisfaction of having completed what I’ve set out to do and added another nice thing to the ‘verse. People seeing my stuff and commenting on it does help a lot, too, though, which is part of why I write a lot more than I draw. I do hope to get fast enough at drawing someday where my dream of turning Tastes Like Heresy into a webcomic becomes a reality, but it’s not my first priority at this point in time.
Can we expect to see a Bugsydor in the comments of this blog for the next few days if people want to see it in its natural habitat have questions for it?
Yep! You can expect me to be watching this comment section like a gryphon for the next several days, at least, going so far as to keep a tab of it open on my phone. I love responding to comments, for the most part, and would be happy to tell people more about myself and things I’m connected with if anyone has any questions.
If a Bugsydor's long-winded replies aren't enough for you, just keep an eye out for it in the comments. Feel free to use some bait, and ask a few questions! (As usual, comments regarding my end of the interview are best placed here)
I still can't be sure if a Bugsydor likes talking about itself, or if it gets nervous and thinks it doesn't know how much to say. Regardless, this interview legitimately is 20% longer than previous ones, and if it is equally as cool word-per-word, happens to be 20% cooler... though it's 20% more of a lot of things if we justify it like that.
On the whole 'things in the show are noat actually as portrayed' idea (hiltless swords, etc) . What do you imagine as the biggest change as?
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This pleases me.
Anyone with questions for me, please reply to this comment.
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It's hard pick out what the single biggest change would be, but the widest categorical change would be the removal of third class levers from most pony tools. The way I see it, since ponies primarily grasp things with their mouths, they wouldn't be able to get much out of swinging a tool like a hammer or a sword. Now you could strap some tools, such as axes, to limbs, but you could only really do that with tools that can take advantage of a kicking motion. Dextrous pegasus wings and versatile unicorn TK are wildcards here, though.
I prefer to think that most of the time, pony tools would rely more on wedges than on levers, and on multiplying pressure rather than on multiplying speed. Instead of a hammer as you or I know it, a pony might use a special full-hoof metal shoe to stomp a nail into place.
Huh. I didn't realize how pivotal a role CardsLafter played in Bugsy's journey to where he is now.
You horrendous tease!
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I doubt that I'm the only person who got his start this way. Maybe his having written one of the fandom's great early works on a drunken dare has influenced him to get other people to turn their dreams into reality.
I do blame him for a lot of things.
Yes, I am a horrible tease. As for that alicorn fic, I just had no idea where to take it after that opening scene. And then even that scene went up in smoke about the same time the Twibrary did. Still, I figure it wouldn't hurt too badly to toss what I have into the FicFrag storage...