The Season of Spooky: "Adaptation Issues" · 3:00pm Jul 3rd, 2016
Adaptation can be a tricky business for anyone, particularly when you're talking about a beloved, well-known property. While this usually applies to Hollywood making sanitized, less-interesting and wonderful film adaptations of novels, adaptation itself extends far beyond such petty boundaries. In a way, some fanfiction is itself a form of adaptation - we are, after all, converting characters and a world that previously existed in the form of a film or video game into serial novel form. Some authors understand, instinctively, how this transition affects what they will need to do when presenting elements from a canon source. And some authors, regrettably, do not.
The point I'm trying to make is that Silent Ponyville doesn't understand the fundamental difference between a video game and a story.
Silent Ponyville by SamRose is reasonably popular - enough to have an official sequel and several fan stories set in the same universe - but it's nowhere near as iconic a pony horror story as "Cupcakes" or "The Rainbow Factory" are. Hell, I wouldn't even put it at the same level of notoriety achieved by "The Cough". I listed it as part of my "triforce of creepypasta" not because it's as prevalent as the first two members, but because it showcases several trends in popular pony horror fiction that need to be exorcised from as many stories as possible. Two in particular bother me: one is the use of pony horror memes, and the other is a flagrant misunderstanding of what Silent Hill is and what that means when adapting it. i'm largely going to focus on that second one for the sake of trying not to tangent, but keep the meme horror in the back of your mind. I'll come back to it.
When I say SamRose doesn't understand what Silent Hill is, I want to make something clear: I don't think he misunderstands completely. All of the superficial elements of an early Silent Hill game are part of Silent Ponyville. The protagonist is trapped in a town filled with fog, isolated, and forced to contend both with the obvious and immediate threat of scary monsters that want to tear her face off and the slow-burning sense that the town knows something she doesn't, and is trying to get her to remember it. You may remember this as literally the plot of Silent Hill 2, widely considered the best game in the entire canon by critics and players in general. SamRose understands the things that went into Silent Hill 2. He doesn't seem to understand why those things were there in the first place.
Her'es some context for those of you who are reading my blog and have somehow managed to avoid the first four Silent Hill games. First of all, play them if you ever get a chance. They are all great. Second, an explanation proper: after Resident Evil was a smash hit, it opened the door to future attempts at survival-oriented horror titles for the new Playstation console. Konami's contribution to this was the first Silent Hill, which ditched RE's clunky tank controls and single haunted mansion setting in favor of shifting between a large, explorable town and a series of smaller environments the player was locked into to solve puzzles and complete the story. This alone would have been a big shift, but Silent Hill also decided to up the story ante while it was at it. While Resident Evil is basically Zombie Virus Time, Silent Hill decided to portray its various split-mouthed hell beasts, grey children, and evil praying mantis demon things as manifestations of a single character's anxieties, fears, and traumas. This theme intensified in Silent Hill 2, which took monster designs in a very H.R. Giger direction and built the lore around the masochistic and sexual hang-ups of a thirty-something year old white guy with a dead wife.*
The thing to understand about all three of the early Silent Hill titles, and to an extent The Room, is that almost every decision made when working on the titles was made in service of player experience. The monster designs all have extensive lore associated with them, but the lore was actually written after creepy monsters were already drawn, weaving a universe out of a bunch of creepy concept art. The famous "gun, flashlight, radio" trio was meant to serve the atmosphere of a game. A gun is a useful weapon, but it's limited by ammunition, forcing players to explore and find bullets, putting them at more risk of running into a dangerous situation or monster each time they do. A flashlight casts a single, controlled beam of light, useful if you want to stick a player in a dark as fuck environment and still have them move around. The radio that produces static when a monster comes close is meant to create tension for the player and also serves as a way to avoid having them feel cheated if they walk into a hallway and get slammed by monsters hanging on the ceiling. These are tools that exist because horror games are about creating and controlling a player's experience.
Let me tell you all a secret.
YOUR READER IS NOT PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. THEY ARE READING A STORY.
Every time I sit down to read Silent Ponyville I find myself borderline screaming in agony at how little it understands about what separates how to use a radio or flashlight in a video game and what changes when you put those tools into a serial novel.
I can't even begin to explain this without providing a quick summary of Silent Ponyville too, so here goes. Spoilers ahead. Do you care? No? I thought so.
Silent Ponyville is the story of Pinkie Pie's struggle with her own mind. In a clever decision, which are words you will not see me use often in reference to this story, the author cuts out the middleman of a haunted town and has Pinkie Pie diving directly into a warped version of Ponyville created by her own subconscious after Twilight attempts to help her confront the source of her ongoing nightmares with some ill-advised dreamwalking magic. Before anyone asks, yes, this was written well before it was established that dream-walking is a Princess Luna thing. While trapped in her subconscious, Pinkie must contend with monsters, more monsters, Slenderman, more monsters, Pinkie from "Cupcakes", and at least one awkward pictogram puzzle.
None of the above paragraph needed to be a bad story. I want to stress this. it's just too bad that SamRose has played enough Silent Hill to understand the rough structure of the game's 'levels', but not enough to understand how to make a Silent Hill-esque town actually feel frightening.
Observe, one of the many examples of this story not understand how video game logic does not translate accurately into story format!:
“I need to get to Sugar Cube corner. If I can make it there I can get my hot air balloon and try and see if there’s any pegasi in the sky, they might have an explanation for the fog.” Pinkie Pie said confirming her plan of action in her head. She also admitted to being worried about Gummy, she hoped he would be alright. She quickly checked her route on the map before packing the map and the pen into her bag. She’d mark anymore unusual occurrences she encountered in Ponyville on the map for her to remember.
Ignoring the fact that the prose of this story seems terribly uninterested in painting any sort of emotional picture and the fact that the story tells us Pinkie is worried without showing her doing or thinking anything that directly demonstrates said worry, those last two sentences are basically transcribing game actions that have little to no place in a story. In a video game, a constantly updating street map of the town is necessary so the player doesn't spend six years running around the same block trying to just find the next god-damned plot critical building already, or the location they need to backtrack to once they have puzzle-necessary items. In a story, a map is something you can establish a character having or checking back to, but it makes very little sense in this case. Why, for instance, would Pinkie Pie need a map of Ponyville? She's lived in the town for years. Harry, James, and Heather are all out-of-towners. It makes sense for them to require a street map to find locations. But Pinkie should know basic things like where the hospital is, or how to find Sugarcube Corner from the library, or where town limits are. In fact she definitely knows where the town limits are because in true Silent Hill fashion there is a bottomless pit surrounding the boundaries of the explorable area.
And here's how the story describes that, by the way.
There was a gigantic chasm that had never been in Ponyville right before her. It cut right down the road to Rainbow’s House…in fact it cut off the entire way outside of Ponyville if you didn’t have wings.
“What’s going on?” She asked as she stared into what seemed to be a bottomless pit.
"What's going on" indeed, Pinkie. She's reacting with all the emotional investment of someone who just discovered the remains of last night's block party on their front lawn.
The reason she's reacting this way is simple: in Silent Hill, it's really not a big deal when you discover that the town is bordered by a drop into the Stygian Abyss. On a meta level, the bottomless drop-off really only exists to corral the player into the boundaries of the rendered town and keep them from wandering too far from where the game developers need them to be. Even in the narrative though, by that point your character has usually already been attacked twice by monster demons and has goals completely unrelated to leaving town. Harry is looking for his daughter, James is looking for his dead wife (who just sent him a letter), and Heather is looking for sweet, sweet vengeance. Pinkie really needed a goal here too. Finding Twilight, perhaps? Attracting attention? Getting Spike so she can send a "Help, please, my town is infested with demon mist" letter to Princess Celestia? Finding a snack? All of these things might be able to distract her from the giant death abyss and justify a reduced reaction. Instead, she sees the most significantly weird visual in the story up to that point and her only reaction is "Oh dear, that's terribly confusing."
The story doesn't even understand how to use a goddamn lantern. In a video game, lanterns with oil exist to run low, forcing the player to explore a space with the full knowledge that they are going to run out of fuel and must find some. It adds tension and forces them to do things they might normally deem too risky, like try to run past that giant abomination of cancerous cells in the next room over. In a story you can use the lantern to create tension as well, but generally you want to do this by having it dwindle and go out to communicate how dangerous the situation is.
Here's the bit where Pinkie Pie finds an oil lantern, conveniently provided for her by Magic (tm):
There were two things inside. The first one was obvious what it was, it was a lantern. Inside was oil with a wick. There was a knob on the side; she assumed it would turn the lantern on. If she was going to use it, she’d have to make sure not to use up all the oil. She gently placed the lantern back into the bag.
This is in chapter one. First of all, the author does not know how an oil wick lamp works - the knob on the side is meant to control brightness once the lamp is lit, not to turn the lamp on. Second, Pinkie doesn't ever comment on how much oil is in the thing to begin with, or provide a rough estimation of how much time it will take before she burns through it all. She doesn't even explain why she thinks she's going to be trapped in a magic dreamspace long enough for the lantern to burn out, since by this point she's clearly realized she's in a survival horror game and must begin thinking like a game protagonist.
Here is Pinkie finding her first shot of oil, in chapter three:
“Oh! Is that lantern oil?” she said as she walked up to the small pedestal, noticing a small bottle of yellow liquid. She sniffed it real quick to confirm what it was before picking it up and placing it in her bag, “Good, that should keep me stocked for a while.”
Here are the times in between these two passages where it was established that the lantern was in any danger of running out of fuel, creating the potential for terror as Pinkie navigates dark spaces filled with half-rotted pony demon zombies and messed-up things that look like pony children but bite you in the ankles:
...
I suppose this mistake is understandable. After all, Anton Chekhov did say that if you put a gun on the mantlepiece in the first act, the characters should talk about firing it in the third but decide against it and just leave it to gather dust.
Just to confirm I wasn't being unfair to the story, I speed-read through every chapter specifically looking for mentions of the lantern. Here is what I found:
*gentle noises of chirping crickets*
Nothing! Nowhere in this story does that godforsaken lantern ever get used to build so much as a cheap, .gif-induced jumpscare! Pinkie uses it when the lights go out in Ponyville for no reason a few times, but she never runs out of oil or even has to break into the reserves she found in the Room of Convenience. She never even thinks to try to set one of the hellbeasts on fire with it. In a video game, not running out of oil just proves that you're very good at the game and you know where the oil is, but it doesn't entirely eliminate the tension because you the player still had to go and search for the oil. In a story, you have to actually go out of your way to communicate that the oil is running low and this is a problem by presenting information. Perhaps having Pinkie be in the dark all the time, with the lantern being the only thing that wards off hellbeasts. Perhaps putting the exit from town down a long, narrow path stretching out over nothingness that she can just tell she doesn't have enough oil to keep her lantern alight for all of yet. Hell, just have her use up all the oil trying to escape a monster by torching the thing!
If Pinkie Pie never runs low in the story, why establish that she has a limited supply of the stuff in the first place? Why hand her an item that ultimately ends up being shockingly irrelevant?
The story manages to at least handle persistent injury a bit better. Across her multiple encounters with hellbeasts, Pinkie establishes two things. One, her primary weapon is Kicks McGee, and she bucks and stomps on just about everything she has to fight. Two, everything in this universe studied under the asshole at the end of the first Karate Kid film and their primary method of interaction with anything they want to kill and/or eat is to sweep the leg. Pinkie's legs are bitten, slashed, and otherwise injured multiple times throughout the story. This is a good idea. First, it limits her ability to fight back, making every successive monster encounter that much more frightening for her and by proxy for the reader invested in seeing her survive. Second, it makes it harder for her to escape. There's just a couple of tiny problems. First, the extent of what counts as a crippling injury seems to vary wildly. During her fight with her evil twin, Pinkie's legs are all slashed, and she begins to have a hard time dodging. However for some reason, she is then able not only to deliver kick that breaks her evil twin's jaw, she then finishes the fight by bucking evil-Pinkie in the throat so hard that it kills her.
On injured legs that she can barely stand on without intense pain.
The story then commits a crime that... oh, hell. Here. Look at this:
The bandages quickly soaked with blood, but they would seal her wounds for the time being. She placed the remaining gauze inside of her bag and then turned towards the exit. She slowly limped her way back into the grimy hallway, walking past the steel doors. She carefully began to climb up the stairs, her wounds slipping once or twice due to the grime that had grown all over them. The climb was slow, her body ached with pain and exhaustion, but she made it to the top.
She slowly walked across the rotting floor of Sugar Cube Corner, heading straight to one of the grime covered counters. In a dry spot on the counter sat a brown bottle, the label of it called it a ‘Health Drink’.
I'm not sure I even need to explain why this is stupid. Pinkie wraps her wounds in gauze and disinfects them, chugs the contents of this, and then her wounds are magically not an issue for the rest of the story. It's stated that they're 'healing properly', which apparently means she can sprint away from hellmouths and the like. I just don't understand why the story felt the need to restore her mobility when her final confrontation is with a monster that she defeats by learning to laugh at it.
To be clear, my issue isn't with weaponized mirth. If any character deserves that, it's Pinkie "Giggle-At-the-Ghosties" Pie. It's with negating injuries that could be used to render her immobile and unable to fight back conventionally in time for her showdown with...
...ugh. Slenderman.
I could go on. And I will. but I am both out of time and ready to move on to a new topic. Join me down the line as I examine how memes hurt horror in a way few other things can, with guest star Freddy Kruger.
*better than it sounds
Sweet fuck yes thank you
SP might actually be worse than Fallout: Equestria in this regard. D:
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Why do you think Fallout: Equestria suffers from this problem? Genuinely interested here, I've read it three times and never noticed anything that might incur that criticism...
Balancing a crossover is precarious. Put too much on one side, and the other side is rendered superfluous. Though I suppose the main issue is that the author put too much on the video game part of a video game crossover, and completely forgot to transition to a non-interactive medium, resulting in a series of actions without any real emotion.
We both have experience with that either way, don't we friend~?
It actually reminds me of a series of Mega Man fics I read years ago. Each individual story was arranged in a timeline relative to the games, but the only game adaptation written was of Mega Man 3. I asked the author about why that was the only one, and I forgot what she said exactly, but it was something along the lines of it would just be constant description of moving from platform to platform and shooting things, which is what that adaptation was, with the most original parts being added pre-battle dialogue for the Robot Masters. Of course, the Archie Comics have proven since that the games could be adapted in different ways that make them just as engaging without interactivity.
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With FoE and its imitators, it's a little different, in that you've got the "stats" and "level up" garbage at the ends of each chapter. But there's also healing potions, obvious boss fights (Project Horizons is guilty of this as well), targeting spells, inventory spells, just all kinds of stuff that's lifted directly from the game without much consideration for narrative or literary realism. Of course, a lot of that I may be remembering from PH, but that's because it's been a while since I read the original FoE. <.<
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I never read Project Horizons, so unfortunately I can't comment on that half of things. As far as FoE goes, I don't think the majority of those directly-pulled elements are major enough parts of the work to have anything approaching the impact on its totality that Silent Ponyville (apparently?) suffers from. Basically, none of those things are mentioned enough or important enough for it to really matter. SATS and potions are definitely exceptions, though. To me, they're both given relevance and believability through world-building and so are net positives rather than dragging the story down by breaking immersion or just being nonsensical. I can only comment on the contents of this blog post, but the problems with Silent Ponyville seem to stem from simple insertion of game elements rather than adaptation of those elements into the world and proper handling of them in a linear, unplayed narrative. In my eyes, one of the great strengths of FoE is how Kkat adapted the gameplay of Fallout 3 into a compelling different-yet-recognizable narrative form.
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It's just one thing to have a spell that helps you aim better and quite another that said spell looks exactly like a video game HUD. Healing potions make sense in a magical setting, but we've never seen the like in the show, and they're just stimpacks. Rad-away and Fixer and all those other things are lifted wholesale from the game, explained away with magic, and don't fit the setting.
Of course, I may just be really irritated by these things, but I was really irritated by them. That said, the memes and show references were a far more story-ruining element, to put these complaints in perspective.
4066044 See, here's the thing. I don't mind spells that have a video-game HUD aesthetic. I mean, why not? It's certainly not an elegant transition, perhaps, but it's not world-breaking. It doesn't force you out of the story.
I remember a certain Skyrim crossover Cold in Gardez wrote fondly, and every chapter ended by listing level up information/perks in the Author's Notes. Details like that aren't quite the same problem I'm raging against here, because they're both supplemental to the story and easy to skip over, while enhancing the experience for people who have played the game. Slipping in references to your source material is not the same thing as failing to deliver on story elements because you wrote your story expecting the narrative arc of a video game to port over without finagling at all.
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It's still bad for breaking immersion, though. That reminder of "This is video game!" detracts from "This is a story!"
4066260 As if the two are mutually exclusive...?
I mean I know what you're getting at, but supplemental and silly allusions, particularly in stories that aren't trying for a single mood throughout, can withstand references like this far more easily. It's all about controlling when and how that information is presented, and what kind of a universe you want to build.
What bugs me more than the superficially game-y elements of stories is using them without ever thinking about what it means to be or not be a game.
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It seems like at this stage we've more or less come down to a difference of opinion, which is, of course, fine. Humorous, even, to me, as all the things you've listed are things I think are more justified and make far more sense as a part of the world of Fallout: Equestria than they ever did in the original Fallout universe. Magic is a far better handwave to me than technology, and most of that stuff is handwaved HARD in Fallout.
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I think this is the page that I'm on.
4066260 IMHO the worst immersion-breaking in F:E were the jokes from Fallout, like one about a can of beans. But they may have been a bad within Fallout in the first place.
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Luckily, I was not aware of any of them at the time! :) Or I might have hated the story more.