Zephyr's Job Interview · 9:31am Jun 10th, 2016
An Apology
So I feel that I ought to apologize to start with.
In the past, I've always written grimdark and horror out of a place of love. I really love mlp, and most of the characters in the show. So when I write about them being tortured, dismembered, and otherwise abused it's not because I hate them or want them to suffer. Far from it! It's just I find the characters so interesting, I find myself day dreaming about them being in the kinds of stories I enjoy the most... And for me those just happen to be stories that are of a darker slant.
This is not the case with Zephyr. I hate his guts. I don't just hate him as a character, but I hate him as a concept. I hate the meme he is intended to represent, how he is represented as an avatar of this particular meme, and what it means that I keep seeing people talk about how his character struck close to home for them. But i'll get into that later.
For now, I apologize. Though I have killed off characters I didn't particularly like in my previous works of horror, previously it was always to get a laugh, or a perverse thrill from the audience. Those deaths were played for comedy, to lighten the mood a bit, to give the readers some blood that they didn't mind seeing spilled. But writing this particular story, and this particular demise, this is purely for me. This was all about feeding my own demons.
But enough about that. As I said, I'll get back to that later. Lets talk about this story.
The Inspiration
Zephyr's Job Interview has several inspirations. Firstly, of course, is just how intimidating a job interview can be. All the decorum, all the questions, and knowing that you could just be wasting your time if the person you talk to doesn't like how you shook their hand, or made (or failed to make) eye contact, or disliked that you were bad at making small talk. The whole process is just an absolute nightmare, even if you take the role of basic social anxiety out of the equation. It's a very straight forward way of doing things, but it's about as sufficient as using a set of tweezers to move a hay stack.
Secondly, I've been on a Texas Chainsaw Massacre kick again. The original movie is a master piece, and a true work of art, doing more with a few hot summer weeks in a rundown shed than an entire legion of remakes and reboots could ever manage with their buckets of gore. The suspense, the insanity, the raw nature of that original vision was so fantastic that it would shape the horror genre for decades to come. But that's not to take anything away from it's many sequels necessarily... they have their charms. One of my favorites is probably the direct sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Not only did the poster for the movie lampoon The Breakfast Club (a popular movie in the 1980's) it was genuinely funny, along with being freaky and a little frightful. It's marvelous 80's B-movie shlock, and it's hard not to love it's over the top sensibilities: High speed chainsaw attack on a bridge! Chainsaw fights! Chili cook offs with only prime meat! It was really fantastic.
So what gave me the idea to put Zephyr through such a mental and physical hell?
Well of course there was the fact that I hated him, but I also felt that he got off a little too lightly when it came to the different jobs his sister had gotten him to try. There are some places you can work where you can goof off and get other people to do your job for you, and there are other places where if you try that you'll end up getting yourself or your co-worker hurt... or worse, killed. I can think of plenty of bosses I've worked for that wouldn't give Zephyr the chance to quit, he wouldn't have just been fired, but prosecuted in a court of law. And there would be others that wouldn't even bother with that, but take a few of the boys and take him around back and teach him the real value of hard work and diligence.
But I digress.
So for a while now I've been thinking about writing a story with my own OC The Knackerman. I've started and stopped several stories involving the character over the past few years. In my mind, he was always something of an anti-hero I guess. Oh, dark sure, but he didn't necessarily want to hurt anyone. Being a representative of my own sensibilities, I thought of him as more of a protective type, though touched by darkness... Basically your Hellboy or your Punisher. A killer? Maybe. But not of anyone that didn't deserve it. but the thing was I could just never write him like that. I'd get to wrapping a story around him and I'd get to the part where I needed to craft an antagonist for him to face and I'd just keep drawing a blank. There was no one I could put him up against that felt... right.
But writing him like this? Writing him as the degenerate head of a whole clan of Knackers? That came just a little too easy.
The Knacker Clan
So "Pa" Knacker, the masked maniac with a mouth, the alliterative amoral asshole that he is was born. No he's not a straight up insert of my OC The Knackerman, though his character design is pretty much the same. Pa Knacker's personality, on the other hand, is very much inspired by Drayton Sawyer, or 'The Cook' from Chainsaw. Oh he seems friendly, out going even, and he'll talk yer ear off to put you at ease, but the entire time he's sizing you up as either a potential mark to take advantage of or a piece of meat to exploit. He sounds stupid, but he's smarter than he lets on, and in actuality he's the one holding the entire show together... If you hear him tell it anyways. The idea of Pa Knacker mixed this personality with a real monster, a sadistic masochist who definitely held views about hard work and perseverance, who puts more stock in social norms and etiquette than in morals and ethics. So The Knackerman became the head of the Knacker Clan and the Boss of the Knackeryard, a place where ponies who were dead or worthless would disappear.
But how entertaining is it for him to be the head of a clan of faceless flunkies? No, we need more memorable characters than that.
That's where the idea of the twin brothers Nuke and Bubba came from. Nuke is the smartest of the brothers, but still fairly dumb. He was raised to fight in the next big Equestrian war... that never came. Old Nuke is based broadly around Chop Top from Chainsaw 2, though not nearly as unstable or annoying. He does the talking for his brother, and typically tries to calm Pa Knacker down when he loses his temper with his kids. He also has the shortest temper, even shorter than his Pa's.
Bubba, of course, is patterned after the iconic Leatherface. In Chainsaw 2, Leatherface's family refereed to him as Bubba in private... a nickname my siblings used to have for me and an archaic southern way of referring to someone as 'brother'. Bubba, like Leatherface, is actually a gentle soul who's more afraid of you than you are of him. He's also terrified of his family, specifically Pa Knacker. While he'll stand up to his Pa to try and protect his siblings, he'll crumble into a mass of self abuse to try and keep anyone else from hurting him. Of course his real passion is taxidermy, and he'll take any opportunity he can get to make things out of scraps of leather or rotting carcasses.
Lastly we come to Candy. Now, Candy many of you will recognize as an homage to a character from the horror series 'Something Sweet to Bite'. Now don't get confused, though Pa Knacker refers to her as 'Candy Mare', in this universe she's just his slightly deranged daughter. That's right! A ton of people have been asking about alternate universe Candy Mare's, and Candy is one of them! Instead of being a filly that was experimented on and became a terrifying ghoul, Candy Knacker is the youngest member of the ghoulish clan at the Knackeryard. She still loves Nightmare night and frightening ponies, and she's actually far more sadistic than her older brothers, being the one in the family to really take after her Pa. She was also vaguely inspired by the character of 'Baby Sawyer' from Chainsaw 3, but the similarities really begin and end at both characters being crazy female children.
Truth be told, each member of the Knacker clan is invested with a bit of my own personality. Candy is my raw sadism and playfulness, Bubba is my artistic side and desire to be left alone, Nuke is my anger and my sense of devotion and duty to family... And Pa Knacker is probably just the devious and misanthropic part of my soul. Ma Knacker would probably be my sense of mercy and restraint... there's a reason she's dead in this story, and preserved as a semblance of defiled beauty.
The Story Behind the Story
So getting back to the elephant in the room. This story was really written because of my strong feelings about the episode 'Flutter Brutter'. I was relieved to see that many fans agreed with me that Zephyr was a horrible person, but few seemed to agree that he was a horrible character. Fewer still agreed that the episode itself was bad, finding some redemption in Rainbow Dash's uncomfortable scenes or rationalizing that at least Fluttershy wasn't a doormat for Zephyr like her parents were. All of that just seemed to miss the point for me.
Zephyr is very much intended to represent the generation of young adults, often called millennials, that find themselves living at home and unable or unwilling to seek employment. For some it's because they're still in school, for others it's because they have no real marketable skills, and for others it's because they have legitimate disabilities or disorders that keep them out of the wider workforce. While I am also sure that there are some who are merely lazy, sheltered, or afraid like Zephyr, reducing them all to such a stereotype is not only insulting, it glosses over the very real employment problems that we have in this country. Middle income jobs that these young adults used to be able to rely on are quickly disappearing, either being shipped over seas or being choked up by the over qualified and aging Baby Boomer generation who refuse to go into retirement. what's left are two truly brutal options: accept lower income part time jobs as a permanent source of income rather than a stepping stone towards something better OR shackle themselves to massive amounts of debt in the form of student loans on the gamble that getting some kind of degree will open up an opportunity for them to land a higher paying high competitive job. Truth be told, some of these poor shmucks don't even have that option, genuinely shackled with family responsibilities of having to care for their own out of work or ill parents... which often leads to them having no time to persue higher education, better paying jobs, or even families of their own.
Making Zephyr the idiot face of an entire generation of surplus humanity offends me on such a deep level I actually found myself biting back my own disgust, trying to rain in my outrage so that it was not directed at someone else who simply 'liked' the episode and found it 'funny'. Or someone who sadly felt that it was 'close to home'. I'm sorry if you find Zephyr relatable, I really am. I don't mean to attack you, but rather the stereotype he stands for. This idea that anyone who can't get a job just isn't trying... Is just some lazy good for nothing with a five-o-clock shadow that feels entitled to everything but doesn't want to work for anything... That's something I truly can't abide.
But symbols are powerful things.
For some fans, Zephyr is the very symbol of a generation of collage drop outs and wastrels. A worthless, disposable generation that society finds no value in. That the media actively mocks instead of showing them even a shred of pity. Well, if Zephyr was going to be the face of such a pathetic lot, he might as well face the wood chipper that they have to face. The disappointment of their family, the indifference and hatred of the very employers who's favor they seek, and the society that allows them to be lost between the cracks and never cares to ask 'what happened to them?'
Oh, to be sure, I made Zephyr as big an asshole and jerk in this story as he was in the show. Bigger in fact, to empower the symbol with all of the suspicion, disgust, and fear that we seem to have for the generation he stands to represent. Zephyr is still a bad person, a bad character, and a bad stereotype. But he serve a purpose here. He serves as a kind of nihilistic catharsis, a bloody scapegoat to be sacrificed on the alter of indifference that we have allowed to be erected. In the end, it is not Zephyr who is destroyed. Zephyr gives up. Zephyr doesn't care anymore. At long last all the hard decisions are made for him. What we destroy is the symbol he represents.
And all that is left is sadness and regret.
Or madness and decay.
Depends on how you look at it.
Well that is a good way to look at it, honestly that was distasteful in my opinion as well. Even I didn't Hasbro would go that far to actively mock those too lazy to work for a living but...................
Well there it was,
I loved the way he was taken care of in this story, no merciful end for that bastard.
but that's just it... even we never see him actually GET a job. just a degree for mane therapy.