Behind the Scenes of Writing Legacy of the Greatest

As I've said in a previous story of mine where I detailed a lot of behind-the-scenes development, below is basically me rambling on about things that didn’t make it in the story, things that got changed, and so on. I always think Word of God interviews and the like are cool, but similarly dislike it when authors dripfeed stuff (see: J.K. Rowling and her releasing new tidbits nearly a decade after the Harry Potter series is done). Feel free to ask anything as well in the comments, and I’ll try to respond in a timely basis.

I've thought of two separate ideas for extending this story, but they would each be a few thousand words, nothing lengthy. Given that, I will probably hold a few things close to my chest until then.

If you haven't read this story yet, then obvious SPOILERS BELOW

As I've mentioned both in the story synopsis and in my author notes for LotG, I was inspired by this picture. I very much don't use cover arts unless I have permission from artists to use it, and this is the second story I've written that was inspired by a picture (the first was Trixie Re-Bears a Relationship). Upon seeing that picture, I was the one who wrote the Background Pony post 'The greatest trick Trixie ever pulled was convincing the world she was a mere stage magician with delusions of grandeur'. The wording has changed a little bit, but that's pretty much the opening line of the story synopsis, 'The greatest trick the Great and Powerful Trixie ever performed was convincing all of ponykind that she was a mere unicorn.'

Of course, that was several months before I actually wrote the story, and I left the idea sit for a while. May was a Trixie month for me, as I pushed through 30,000 words of my Trixie epic Phantasmare and then another 6,000 words between two one-shots, so I was definitely up for writing Trixie again, but I was looking to write something a little more melancholic as I was burned out from more conventional adventure and slice-of-life. So I came back to that picture above.

The obvious takeaway from that picture would be Twilight Sparkle dying young from an accident, but I got stuck on the idea that Trixie was actually immortal, and outliving Twilight. Most people write alicorn Twilight as being non-aging, and at this point in time I was sick of reading it over and over again, especially when there's copious amounts of angst. I'm not trying to rib on anybody here if you've written something like that, it's just that I like seeing new ideas that can work reasonably (if not perfectly) within established canon. Mortal Twilicorn isn't exactly a new idea, but for how much it's been written it may as well be.

But from that I got the idea to flip Twilicorn immortality blues on its head by killing off Twilicorn of old age, and having one of the ponies she affected in life, one of her rivals, actually be the one to suffer from immortality angst, and to reflect over how Twilight Sparkle affected her life. Of course, Trixie wallowing at a gravestone by herself would have a hard time carrying even a short story, so along comes Princess Celestia. The two play off one another well. They both do different things, they both have different life paths, but they both were affected by Twilight Sparkle (one more than the other) and both have immortality blues, suffering in different ways.

(Making alicorns other than Luna and Celestia mortal also allows me to handwave the existence of multiple alicorns over the last thousand years, though they've all died of old age as well. This lets me knock off another pet peeve of mine, the congregation of 'special' events by happenstance or destiny around extremely narrow points of history. Here, it's not that after over a thousand years of only two alicorns in existence that suddenly two more ascend and another one is born, it's that alicorns come and go with only a special pair that is immortal)

It's mentioned in the author notes, but something I'd like to elaborate on is that originally, Trixie wasn't supposed to have any background at all. She would be implied to be immortal and wandering the land for quite some time, but that would be it. I do lots of running, and when I don't have any stimulation besides music it's easy for my mind to wander off. That's when I decided that maybe Trixie should have a background. I didn't really consciously decide on Trixie being Clover the Clever so much as that I stumbled over it, and when I did I knew I basically had to go in that direction. I think it worked out rather well. My only disappointment is that being the author, I'll never get that 'holy smokes' moment when reading through the story and realising just who Trixie is.

When it finally came to writing the story, I had it done in probably three hours top, and that was being easily distracted by other things.

Something I wish I had expanded on (and might still if I feel I can fit it in there in an edit) is Celestia's mention of the Hearth's Warming Eve play from Season 2. Since I'm the author, I suffer from bias because I know what the plot is going to be about, so I can't really tell how subtle the hints were or weren't about Trixie's true identity. Even if I had a few people to pre-read it, pre-readers aren't necesssarily always representative of the greater population (and once they know the twist, they're useless as a pre-reader for a revised story with fewer hints because they also have that bias like I do). I nipped the mention early on so I didn't flat-out give away Trixie's identity, but in the end the remaining hints were easy to pick up on. In any event, I would have pointed out the irony of the situation, that Twilight admires Clover the Clever, playing her in a HWE play, completely unwitting that she met Clover several times in her life, often on an antagonistic basis.

Another thing I may try to work on is the dialogue Celestia and Trixie exchange between one another. This is an issue of what they know versus what the reader knows. I can't let them be exposition-heavy, so some of the lines have to be picked up in context. Some things they've already gone over many times in prior conversations, and Celestia points out that this is at least the second time that Trixie has gone through a nihilistic 'woe-is-me-what-is-life-worth-living-for' phase. Celestia's mention of the Alicorn Amulet could probably use some work to be less clumsy (on that note, someone said that Twilight should have been able to realise that the Amulet was a fake. To that, I point to you the Staff of Sameness in the Season 5 premier: all Twilight knew was that Meadowbrook only had 8 items. She never showed any suspicion that the SoS was a fake, and this was with two seasons' more experience and being an alicorn).

To end off, I'd like to copy and paste one of my comment replies:

I like writing Trixie as a character, simply because she has near-zero background (Word of God from the show runners constrain this, but I ignore that as needed for show-canon only), so I can do almost anything with her. I'm especially fascinated with giving her a Wandering Jew archetype, where she wanders, never really able to settle. In her case here as Clover the Clever, who achieved something great a long time ago but has never been able to do much since, filling her life with travelling and alternate egos such as 'The Great and Powerful Trixie', it's a lot more on the nose than some of my other stories.