Interview with FanOfMostEverything · 11:24pm Apr 24th, 2016
What isn't he a fan of?
I don't even know which of FanOfMostEverything's 42 stories (41 at the time of interviewing) you'd most likely recognize, so I'll introduce him as that person that you see most everywhere. He reads, he writes, and he even comments on your stuff.
“I’m kind of obsessive about remaining as anonymous as I can on the Internet.”
That’s from your RCL interview from a while back. That in mind, what are you willing to tell us about who FanOfMostEverything is?
Hmm. Not much, but I suppose I can compile the tidbits I’ve made public elsewhere. My age is the sum of two perfect cubes, I’m male, and I live in New Jersey (insert joke of your choice here.)
I have an older sister who lives in New York City, and she and her wife had Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy toys on their wedding cake in lieu of a bride and groom. They like the show, but they aren’t part of the fandom, so they’ve helped me independently confirm that Gilda does come off as Dash’s clingy ex-girlfriend in “Griffon the Brush-Off,” Cherry Jubilee does at first appear to be a brothel owner in “The Last Roundup,” and so forth.
This rapidly stopped being about me, didn’t it? 
Again, I’m a rather private individual. Mom raised me not to trust anyone or anything on the Webernets. Plus, I’ve never really bought into the mentality that everyone needs to know everything about who I am and what I do.
Pretty much the only other thing I’m willing to share at this juncture is that MrNumbers once said that looking at my mustache could restore one’s faith in humanity, which I can confirm has happened on several occasions. Also, I have a fondness for a certain trading card game, but I think I’ve made that more than apparent.
A comment you posted on an interview post with Kwakerjak suggests that you are familiar with “Anime Addventure”, though I know not if as a writer. What experiences with writing do you have before MLP fanfiction?
I did, in fact, contribute to the Addventure under the handle “Animethropologist,” which I thought was clever at the time. I also still have an account on fanfiction.net as “Overactive Mind,” which contains some… well, less than impressive work, mostly stories based on the Teen Titans animated series (the one that wasn’t made on drugs.) Among them is a Magic: the Gathering crossover. As noted above, that’s kind of my thing. Heck, I even made the penguin from Neon Genesis Evangelion a planeswalker on the Addventure. In my mind, he was voiced by George Takei. It seemed like the best choice.
I also wrote some short Homestuck stories on the MS Paint Adventures forums using the pseudonym “A Fan,” but they’re probably buried in the archives. This was around when I first heard of Friendship is Magic, so it’d be 2010, 2011, thenabouts.
As for original work… Well, there’s not much to report. Ideally, I’ll use the experience I get from fan fiction as a springboard for independent ideas at some point, but the idea of doing so is more than a little intimidating.
Why did you decide on ponies, at least for the time being, to invest your efforts in?
The sheer potential on display. Equestria manages to stay in that sweet spot where we know just enough about it to provide a sense of structure but still have a lot of wiggle room to work with. (At least, it has up until now. Given this season’s “Explore Equestria” theme, who knows what will happen…) The same applies to magic. We have a basic sense of it, but the details are left for the author of a given story to define, especially for earth ponies. The cast offers a rich variety of personalities and countless background characters that can be used to fill in the gaps as needed. Character histories offer both springboards for motivations and vague stretches that can be populated by whatever the story may need.
In short, Equestria is an excellent narrative sandbox, a setting that can accommodate virtually any story with minimal adjustments. The source material presents a number of potential threads to explore, and applied creativity can realize countless others.
(Also, I watch very little TV anymore, so there hasn’t exactly been a lot competing for my attention lately.)
With 41 published stories (totalling over 500,000 words), including some aggregations of smaller stories, such as writeoff entries, are there any that stick out to you (for any reason)?
Over half a million? Wow. I hadn’t realized.
Anyway, all of the incomplete non-anthologies stick out, especially My Little Praetor: Phthisis is Magic. That exploded out of control and I still haven’t found the time or willpower to rein it in. Plus, I really should give it a better title than the formulaic fallback.
My Most Dangerous Game entries are both pretty bad. Outlier is probably my weakest work. It is literally me sitting in a field outside of Ponyville and brooding because I’m afraid of the narrative consequences and implications of being a human in Equestria. Then I wake up. A Darker Shade of Pink is a sound concept… if you don’t know that it’s an adaptation of a Writeoff entry I hastily rewrote into something vaguely resembling Cupcakes. In the first case, I forced something out quickly to make sure I wouldn’t wait until the last minute. In the second, well, I waited until the last minute.
I’ll always remember the lessons taught by my featured stories. For example, A Mad Glimmer taught me that if you make a story about a controversial character quickly enough, people will use the comments to debate her political philosophy. A Moment’s Hesitation taught me that people will get upset over anything, even giving the Mane Six last names. Induction of the Innocent taught me that I apparently cannot write sleazy characters. It’s always fascinating to see what personal or sociological revelation will come with getting into the box.
I still have complicated feelings about A Crazed Gleam. I knew that I would write a sequel to A Mad Glimmer if Starlight returned for the finale, and thus started planning it shortly after writing Gleam. I was always going to use the setting and circumstances that I did; the question was just how Starlight would be defeated… and somehow, I never accounted for the possibility of her redemption. Almost everything else, from running away again to getting eaten by time weasels, but not redemption. On a show called “Friendship is Magic.” 
Writing the story did a lot to help me come to terms with Starlight’s redemption… though that doesn’t necessarily mean I should’ve published it. As I said, complicated feelings.
On the more positive end of things, Mandatory Fun will always have a place in my heart for being my first breakaway hit and the topic of my RCL interview. I am immensely proud of the multichapter stories that I have finished, though I feel that Oversaturation has been relatively overlooked. (Granted, it’s an Equestria Girls story, so that’s going to alienate a fair chunk of the reader base, but I still feel some Magnum Opus Dissonance there.) And I feel happy with pretty much every story I haven’t mentioned yet, especially the ones with novel ideas, like Restoring Agency introducing people to the Svendagio pairing.
While the raw number of likes that a story has may not accurately communicate its quality, I generally consider a story whose with likes are 10% or greater than the number of views it has as being recognized by its readers for having at least one significantly enjoyable/interesting quality. What do you think of that more than half of your stories (27/41) currently have at least this ratio of likes per view (in some cases, well over 15%), including the aforementioned A Crazed Gleam?
It’s certainly an interesting model for a metric of success, though I’m not sure about the rigor of your study.
Taking off the scientist hat, it’s pretty darn flattering. Still, the thing about upvotes, at least for me, is that they feel kind of intangible. Yeah, it’s nice to see some high numbers to the left of that hopefully mostly green bar, but seeing my numbers increase hasn’t been very satisfying since I tore myself away from Cookie Clicker.
More than anything, I gauge a story’s impact by the comments. It’s one thing to be good enough to make people click the upthumb. It’s quite another to get them to type something out. Comments give a sense that there are actual other people seeing the story, not just some random number generator forged from public opinion. When a story doesn’t spark much discussion, it feels like I threw the manuscript into a black hole that emits thumbs as Hawking radiation.
Heh. So much for taking off the scientist hat.
I don’t want to come across as egotistical or starving for attention. It’s just that comments let me know how well I did, good or bad. Especially the bad! Constructive criticism is some of the best feedback I can hope for. I can’t improve if I don’t know what I did wrong, and I can’t know what I did wrong without an outside perspective chiming in. Downthumbs without context are meaningless and completely unhelpful. Upthumbs without context are nice but unfulfilling. Even a “nice story” shows someone cared enough to perform the ten keystrokes and hit “Post Comment.” If I can’t coax even that out of a reader, how well did I really do?
Of course, that leads into the question of how many comments are “enough,” and that’s a whole other can of worms.
But yeah, long story short, I’m insecure about how good of a writer I am, and apparently all the statistics in the world aren’t enough to quiet that doubt.
Similarly, the first module on your user page ends with “Any other common pitfalls you'd like to see here? Leave a comment!” – that is, the sizable box of text by the title of “Helpful Tips”. Are there any stories behind this box, or its origin?
It boils down to a pet peeve of mine, the misuse of “millennia” as a singular noun. In a show that opens with a thousand-year banishment, that’s going to come up a lot. It’s far from my only linguistic pet peeve—I’m the son of an English teacher and she taught me well—but it was the one that broke the camel’s back. So I decided to do something about it, throw together a list of everything that makes me twitch and explain why people shouldn’t do it. I opened the floor to anyone who saw it and had similar conniptions because of some flub or another. As you can see, several people have taken the opportunity. I use bullets to lessen the wall of text effect without making it stretch across my user page for a good mile. (At least, that’s the intent…)
I don’t remember quite when I first instituted the thing. It was definitely there when they implemented user page customization, probably before then.
Oh, and I’ve garnered at least one follower just from the Tips box. That was a delightful surprise.
I’m pretty sure that you’ve dropped comments in more places than I’ve even looked – and they aren’t all posted to stories – to the point that your name was one of the first that I reliably recognized on Fimfiction. How do you manage such a presence on the site?
It’s always kind of funny to see people comment on my profligate commentary. They’re wowed by my poor time management skills.
Anyway, the answer is time, plain and simple. Between how long I’ve been on the site and how much time I spend on it on a daily basis, the comments add up. (Heck, Wise Cracker just cursed me for a comment I left almost two years ago!) Plus, in most cases, I feel bad if I don’t leave a comment. Given my attitude towards feedback, it’d be horribly hypocritical of me if I didn’t provide some of my own whenever I could. The only real exceptions are stories by dead accounts. Plus, as you noted, it gets my name out there. Always a plus.
Also, I follow over three hundred people. That’s a lot of blogs to comment on, especially when many of those people write thought-provoking dissertations on literature, science, the nature of realities both fictional and actual, and other intriguing topics.
Rage Reviews, the Writeoffs, even Bad Horse prompts, as well as contributions to stories such as Verse Averse. Why do you write for these, and how do those experiences compare to writing – for lack of a better term – your own ideas?
Collaborations and prompts give me a chance to explore concepts I wouldn’t think to develop on my own, or at least guide my thoughts through unusual avenues. In the Writeoff alone, I’ve written chaotic apocalypses, an origin story for Silver Shill (Applejack’s key pony, for those who’ve forgotten,) and a tribute to Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer. I wouldn’t say they aren’t my ideas so much as they are ideas I wouldn’t have had without the prompt. Therein lies the beauty of the competition.
The different competitions present very different experiences. A Writeoff is frantic. You have only a day or two to conceive and compose a story. Minifics have to be trimmed down to somewhere between four hundred and seven hundred fifty words while still trying to tell a complete story. Just look at the early part of the average discussion thread to see the kind of panic that takes place.
Other contests and collaborations are leisurely strolls by comparison. In theory, that means there’s plenty of time to ensure quality. In practice, I very rarely take advantage of the full submission period. My most thorough use of entry time would probably be Rerouted, my most recent entry into a major contest, which suggests I’m at least learning from the experience. I’m also taking my sweet time with that one idea PresentPerfect suggested about Applejack visiting her parents in Elysium, but that’s less thoroughness than it is procrastination. Deadlines can be very useful motivators.
Rage Reviews is a different creature entirely, though the F*CK THIS PROMPT! contests are fantastic examples of having to stretch my creativity. With the reviews themselves, I break my self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m a fan of most everything, yes, but that’s because I don’t read most everything of which I’m not a fan. Rage Reviews provide an exception, a chance to dig into the proof of Sturgeon’s Law and break down why it doesn’t work. More importantly, I can also explain why it doesn’t work. It ties back into the principle of good feedback. Just because the gloves are off doesn’t mean I can’t still be helpful. It’s just a blunter, more sarcastic kind of help than my usual. I actually haven’t done a Rage Review in a while; I’ve been focusing more on my own stories.
Every week (on Sundays), you post a few remarks on an episode – the one that aired the day before, when applicable – and make a small pile of Magic: The Gathering cards. What is the story behind why you started doing these, and what drove their expansion, given that the first Friendship is Card Games post opens with a statement about you not wanting to write reviews, and your most recent posts now include remarks, even if brief, about two episodes along with the cards for the most recent one?
You may have gathered (no pun intended) that I don’t have a very high opinion of myself. Following hundreds of people means that I’m inundated with review blogs every week, and at the time of the Season 4 premiere, I had convinced myself that the market was saturated (because obviously everyone’s user experience was identical to mine. 
) However, I still wanted to participate, so I decided to provide something most others couldn’t, something I knew I could do well: Magic cards. And it worked.
Of course, the reason I don’t have a very high opinion of myself is that I almost never stop thinking. That means that my self-evaluation consists of spraying myself with a stream of consciousness like a fire hose. Focusing that same analytical impulse towards ponies and seeing people enjoy my work both wore away at my hesitance to comment on the episodes. It started with bits of analyzing the aspects of the episode, especially the Mane Six, through the lens of Magic color philosophy. (Yes, that is a thing.)
I think the turning point was FiCG: Trade Ya, where I broke down rather complex feelings about the episode. The first two commenters were Georg and archonix, responding not to the cards but to that analysis. Much in the same way I don’t think much of myself, I tend to quietly idolize the authors I really like. Seeing those two validate my little weekly project convinced me that maybe, just maybe, people might care what I had to say beyond converting caballos to collectible cardboard.
From there, the analysis portion of the column grew gradually. Going through the first three seasons helped a lot, since I could pause the playback to type commentary. With premiering episodes, I had already been writing down potential card names as I watched them as early as “Daring Don’t,” using the same notebook that I use for stories. By the time Season 5 premiered, I set up my current system of discussion topics on top of the page and card names on the bottom. When I watched “The Crystalling,” the two met in the middle. (It’s a fairly small notebook; it fits in a cargo pocket.)
As for the recent addition of mentioning points about the previous episode I missed on the first sweep, well, it started by mentioning a few things I missed about “The Cutie Re-Mark” (and I missed a lot the first time I watched that episode) and carried over from there. I try to keep it to the most interesting and/or headscratching aspects of the episode that I didn’t already note.
With several tens of stories, hundreds of blog posts, hundreds of followers and followed, and such a broadly-encompassing name, I’d say, to wrap this interview up, a similarly unbounded question is in order: Is there anything more you’d like to add?
Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts, to those who read this far, and to everyone who proved that contrary to my own beliefs, people actually do care about my ideas. This is one of nicest, smartest, all-around best online communities I’ve encountered. I’m glad I’m a part of it.
And, of course, I’m happy to answer any questions on this blog for the next few days.
Not enough Magic? Fortunately, FanOfMostEverything has hosted an AM(Most)A that you can read the comments of for more. If that's still not enough, ask away! (Comments reagrding my end of the interview are, as always, best placed here.)
The 10% views/likes idea isn't my own directly, and I will admit that of course it doesn't necessarily indicate quality, though if you've gotten more than 10% of your readers to provide some form of feedback, you've done something.
Blasphemy it may be, but I read his Friendship is Card Games posts for the episode reviews rather than the Magic cards.
3893804
I can see that. He just seems great at everything other than spending time away from the site.
FoME:
You are simultaneously offered jobs as a Magic: the Gathering designer and as a writer for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Which do you take?
3893804
You don't read it for the cards? HERESY! *BLAM*
Silliness aside, I really do enjoy both parts of FiCG. FoME's weekly blogpost is the highlight of my Sundays before church.
FoME, I'm not going to ask you about when you'll be redoing that fic. I do want to say, though, that Phthisis is my favorite card for one reason: whenever I play it, I can mispronounce its name as a raspberry. I do hope that the story can keep its subtitle.
As for actual questions for FoME:
How are you so awesomeHave you ever considered what a game of EDH Magic would look like from a narrative standpoint? Also, which Magic "game mode" is your favorite to play? Why do you agree to do interviews, when you are such a private person? (I do enjoy reading about you and a few others I follow, by the way.) Where did the name FanOfMostEverything come from? Do you plan to do anything Adamsian to celebrate having made 42 story posts to Fimfiction?3894429
If you follow the RCL link near the top of this post, they have already asked him that. I recommend checking it out anyway.
3893804
Fine by me. There are plenty of folks who feel that way. So long as they enjoy some of what I make, I'm happy.
3894189
Aww, you make me blush.
3894408
Magic designer. Cool as it would be to work with ponies, my ideas usually don't fit what's needed for the show itself, be it in terms of subject matter, length, or headcanon content. Designing cards would work out better for everyone involved.
3894429
I'll be sure to preserve your opportunity to do a Fluffle Puff impression. As for the rest, let's take it in steps.
Sometimes, though while playing one, I'm usually too wrapped up in the proceedings to think much about it, aside from ludicrous or wonderfully appropriate flavor moments.
Commander/EDH. It's tailor-made for all kinds of enjoyably ridiculous shenanigans.
Everyone likes to talk about themselves. I just don't like to do it unsolicited, or about a few subjects I want to keep to myself.
No, though I am a bit tickled that my forty-second story consists Star Swirl trying to preserve life, the universe, and everything.
3894643
I agree. EDH shenanigans are best shenanigans.
Dropped by to once again marvel at your awesomeness, FoME.....and also ask a question:
What's your favorite Color?
3895655
In Magic, or in general?
3895655
3895999
He's actually already answered both iterations of that question in the AMMA I linked to at the end of the interview. (I'll make the link a little more obvious and describe it a bit better.)
Bugsydor:
FanOfMostEverything:
~ ~ ~
G S tol Kriaal:
FanOfMostEverything:
3898377
3894643
Ack! Sorry
3898500
It's fine.