Magnum Opus · 6:31pm Apr 20th, 2016
Well that's it guys, wrote the story I got into Ponyfic for, see you all on the other side bbbyyyyeeeee~!
I kid, I kid. But Seriously: Three Years, probably close to the day I have been working on this story. I know because I joined Fimfiction shortly after committing the opening lines to paper in the basement of the Kenyon Review office in my Junior year of College.
Gosh it has been a long time.
So that's my excuse internet. That's why the Elements of Harmony are inexplicably spherical despite the season 4 opener clearly showing them to be concavely faceted 6-pointed star gems. But I couldn't fix it. Because an embarrassingly large part of my set up depended on them being spherical like the stone Elements from the show's Pilot. I'm sorry.
Wow there are so many emotions here. Get ready to strap in Ya'll because the rest of these Author's notes are going to Ramble something Fierce.
Celestia Cannot Sleep began in my head in response to Lullaby for a Princess, which at the time was basically my first interaction with Pony fan culture beyond editing the many and wondrous works of Fedora Mask. It was really a revelation for me, to whom the mythic quality of the fourth generation opener was sort of the above average part of an otherwise solid "OK" of an episode. But this song made it epic. It drew Celestia and her conflict with what happened in these like perfect strokes. I had not really considered Celestia's side of the story beyond the requisite "Awww" when she and her sister were reunited, but hearing Celestia speak of her own faults and culpability and sorrow just made the whole thing very real for me.
And I had this image in my head (Remember the song was just out, so there were no handy animations to color what was happening in my head) I had this image of Celestia walking the empty halls of Canterlot Castle at night when everyone else is asleep and singing this song to her sister who the rest of the world has almost forgotten. From this image came the title "Celestia Cannot Sleep" from the idea that since Celestia is in charge of both the Day and the Night, she is no longer able to sleep, and is instead prone to wandering the halls of the Palace by herself during the long nights of Luna's Absense.
In it's original incarnation, the story was going to be the inter-cut story of three separate nights: the Night where Celestia Raised the Moon for the first time after defeating Nightmare Moon, the Night where Celestia discovered for the first time that Luna might be able to come back and the Night before 1000 years passed when She contemplates whether Luna will ever be able to forgive her for what happened. The idea was to focus around the Element of Magic and explain that Celestia herself had lost the ability to wield the elements of Harmony after sealing Nightmare Moon away because the trauma of doing so had thrown her out of balance and touch back on this theme of guilt-ridden sleepless celestia at various points in her life. But as I planned out the story--at the prompting of Fedora Mask, I realized that there was enough material three whole stories here and that in fact cutting between them was just undercutting the tension of each one. So, why, of the three stories set in three nights is this the one that I wrote?
There was a fic, I don't remember what it was--I had started browsing fimfic at this point after helping Fed with his chapter of Lost Friends and I read this fic about Celestia with all her advisors preparing to raise to the moon for the first time after she sealed Luna away. And Celestia in it was like, wistfully sad saying "is there no other way? Well if I must..." *dramatic hoof on forhead* It was terrible. It was like the degree to which I am sad when I realize I am going to have to skip dinner with my friends to work on a paper. The whole execution was just so half-hearted and something in me just snapped. And I said, "Fuck! If I had to kill my sister after she attacked me and almost ended all existence, I would probably be pretty damn mad about it. Propriety be Damned, I would not give a damn about my sister's memory at that point." Because, you know, I am a sibling, and things are often complicated in sibling relationships.
I planned out the beats immediately including the ending. It was important to me, that this was not going to be a problem that was going to get resolved in a happy hopeful way. We as the audience know that one day Luna will return, and that Celestia will make it through, but the world just came crashing down on Celestia and she doesn't get to have that perspective. She feels horrible about what happened, she feels responsible, she feels mad at the world. And she gets to because it is perfectly normal for her to do so after committing what amounts to Fratricide. Grief doesn't get solved all in breakthrough, it's takes time. This first night was, then, a mini arc about Celestia realizing the full magnitude of what she has done: Celestia walks from feeling nothing, (nothing) to feeling overwhelmed (Anger, Bargaining, Depression) to taking the first steps into becoming functional again (Acceptance).
Not to say that the writing process for this has been anything like straightforward. Having everything Planned out doesn't mean it makes sense when you get there. Celestia being held accountable to each of the Elements of Harmony sounds like a great idea until you say "laughter" out loud and you realize that this was a terrible idea and you are going to pay dearly for it. But most of the story's complexities emotionally don't even enter until the second half. In fact the two years of writing was basically limited to the 700 words which have been written and re-written in about 6 different configurations as I figured out what took Celestia and the Audience from their emotional crescendo to my desired ending. There were a lot of wrong movies and I made most of them at one point or another. But there's really only one scene I missed when it didn't fit:
Celestia fliched, but no glass came flying out. Instead a spiderweb of cracks struck out from a central window into some dark and impossible courtyard where two alicorns battled for the fate of the world. She turned her head away, she tried to look anywhere else. But the mirror was vast, inescapable, and in every shard she saw herself.
She saw the vain princess who enjoyed compliments that she knew were not her due, who dismissed problems when she could not solve them, who threw a party so large and lavish and decadent that she only noticed afterward that her sister was missing. Elsewhere she saw the scared and petulant child, who balked when her advisors told her of the dark power marching to their gates, who ridiculed and denounced them, who refused any proof but her own eyes. She saw the sentimental fool, and the disbelief that stayed her hoof, even when the truth was plain, and those who died because of it.
And no matter where she began each chain of moments lead inevitably inward, to two sisters in a courtyard, fighting to the death. She saw the fight from far above, away from the fire and the wind and the rawness of the universe bent to their wills, yet she could feel its beautiful pain. She could not watch, but she could not turn away.
There were no tears when the deed was done, only the bitterness.
Meant to take place between the two reflections shown to Celestia by the Moon, this deeper backstory into how it all went down was full of really good emotional meat, and I spent a long time polishing it and mulling it over and in the end I just COULDN'T
MAKE
IT
NOT
AWKWARD.
It never fit quite right in the story so I ended up cutting it. Kill your Darlings you know.
This is a story that has caused me no shortage of grief, and has caused pretty much everyone else I know so much more. Having it all out there in the open is just... such a roller coaster for me.
Thanks to Taslin, my friends A and B, and he members of my old writing group for helping me edit various drafts of this over the years. Thanks to Axis of Rotation, who not only held onto interest in this story long past when others would have given up, but who also provided last minute edits.
And finally, greatest thanks to Fedora Mask. Without whom this story would never have been conceived. For hanging out with me while doing laundry, for taking walks at 1 am to work through the element order, for poking me, and most of all for telling me that this was a story worth telling.
Happy Birthday.
As I noted on the story itself, thanks so much for sharing your story with us! I agree on the decision to cut the block quoted bit; there's a fine line sometimes between genuine pathos and melodrama, and the piece you cut may have just tiptoed over the line. I dunno if you've got any more stories in ya, but I'll eagerly read them if so!
Sororicide, LG, come on.
(I'm being irreverent because this is a good blog post and I have no actual commentary. I'm glad you got it done finally, and reading this was a really nice rush of nostalgia for all the times we worked on this story together. Your process is never not interesting and I hope to bring the same levels of passion and convinction and care to my own projects.
Now hurry up and write the rest I want to read the goofy 4th installment you didn't mention)3887653 There is a cut version of THIS post where I go on to talk about the sexism implicit in the fact that Fratricide is a word with huge connotation, and Sororicide is a made up word using latin roots via parallel structure. I decided it was one ramble too far and got rid of it.
3887705 Tbf I never hear fratricide either so I'm not sure the connotation thing is actually accurate, at least as far as modern usage goes.
Anyway I like sororicide, and its existence as a neologism created as a counterpoint to an existing but exclusionary word doesn't necessarily invalidate it (or else bisexual, asexual, and especially pansexual [with its weird greek prefix latin root hybrid nonsense] would join it).
Though in a pinch we could always redefine it as "sororicide: when the girls form Mu Epsilon finally push you too far."
Three years? Got ya beat. I've got a story going on four ^_^
First. That you wrote first.
Right? Yes? Yes! (Seriously, control of the moon forcing insomnia over Celestia is a great idea. Wasting it would be a sin of biblical proportions.)
I love learning how a story evolved over time. Until I experienced it myself I couldn't appreciate all the million little but significant ways that evolution expresses itself. Given enough time, even the most certain elements can find themselves lost on the wind. Stories grow alongside you.
Reading it, I did wonder about the title Celestia Cannot Sleep, and your earlier versions ring a bell, probably with how you described the story to me way back when. (And hey, when it comes to a Celestia story, it's 'until death do we part'.)
3885996
Anyone can chime in here, since we all
obsess overlove writing. I'm going to put forward a claim: the line you mention is the plot. Plot (which I'll summarize as the internal and external action) marks the difference between real emotion and melodrama, or the sense of over-emotion. It is the vehicle for emotion, and is what justifies it.