Quill's Thoughts: One Last Act of Tragedy (Majin Syeekoh)

So after an incredibly hectic few months, I'm officially claiming to be back—hopefully for good. Who knows how long that'll last!

In all seriousness, it's good to be back doing what I love: writing incredibly long blog posts picking up on minute details of fics and generally chatting about how we can all become better writers. And what better way to come back to that than with today's story—an absolute gem from, it appears, a writeoff that I missed. Writeoffs are probably another thing that I should start doing again, if I'm honest.

One Last Act of Tragedy
Read the story here!

Chapter titles are pretty cool things. Quite often, we don't even really notice them on fimfiction—I know that I don't pay them all that much attention, regardless of where or what I'm reading—despite the fact that, in many cases, they can provide so much deeper meaning. Sometimes, just reading through a list of chapter titles can give a reader some idea of how a story might progress, and this is something that is absolutely true for One Last Act of Tragedy. Let's take a quick look at them here:

• Manuscript
• Errata
• Commentary
• Synthesis

Imagine, for a moment, that we haven't read the story. What would we expect, seeing this? I admit that my initial reaction was certainly to question the relevance of the word "synthesis", which seems to have no place among the other three: after all, the first three points are clearly allusions to aspects of a (probably academic) text, with the first being the text itself, the second being corrections to it, and the third being a commentary on that text which adds more meaning. Synthesis, as I understood it, had more to do with chemical reactions than academic texts... until a quick Google search pointed me in the direction of Hegelian philosophy.

For those of you who don't know this context, synthesis is a word used to describe the final step of a three-stage process of reasoning, or presenting one's thoughts, which is: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The idea, of course, is that the thesis sets up an argument, and the introduction of the antithesis introduces conflict, which is resolved by the introduction of a new idea in the process of synthesis (an allusion, of course, to the way in which the new idea brings aspects of both the thesis and antithesis together).

Synthesis, then, suggests the resolution of conflict through the introduction of new ideas: and, being the follow-up to Errata and Commentary, one could probably expect that the resolution is to conflict between ideas brought up in these two chapters. And, as it turns out, that expectation is wholly correct. As, in fact, does our expectation that the earlier chapters involved the set-up, criticism, and analysis of some academic text, which just goes to show that good chapter titling can do wonders for not just communicating the ideas of the story, but also further clarifying them—a point I'll cover in more detail later in the post.

First, though, I wanted to talk about a really important decision: Syeekoh does not present the text in Manuscript, but instead only presents the title of the book. It's an odd choice: single-sentence chapters are a personal favourite of mine (see Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Chapter 99 for my personal favourite), and in some sense I think using them invites the reader to engage with the story by just tempting them with a hint of what's to come. It's an extreme equivalent of using a really short, but loaded, sentence as your story description: the reader can't help but jump to fill in the gaps, and this helps to provide a solid hook. But the real reason I think this is an important decision is that it allows Syeekoh to put off an important reveal: that the text being commented upon really is a single paragraph.

It's something you really don't expect from Errata—the sentences all seem so disconnected, as if there should be filler between them in any rigorous, academic text (as the thoroughness of the commentary suggests it is), and so you get the impression that Twilight is only quoting relevant passages here and there as she adds to and amends them in her journal. Indeed, in Commentary we get some evidence of this: "I quoted these two sentences together", Twilight writes, suggesting that she would normally comment on the separately.

It's an interesting anomaly, that phrase, because it tells us that two of the sentences are, in fact, together—that they're not as separated as we might have been led to believe in the previous chapter. But it presents itself almost as an apology—as if Twilight feels somewhat guilty for not giving each sentence the attention it deserves, as she had done in the past. And her reason for doing so? "to remind myself that the only reason my niece has such a beautiful name is because I woke up"—a comforting thought.

This, I think, is key to understanding One Last Act. Because, of course, Synthesis shows a Twilight who has reduced all her arguments and complaints and commentary on the text to a simple, reassuring sentence. Some might argue that this is the story of Twilight Sparkle coming to terms with what she has done, but I think a compelling argument is to be made for this message being a little more sinister than that. And to make this argument, we're going to have to look a little more closely at some of the phrasings in Twilight's notes, and how they compare between Errata and Commentary. I'll do the first one, because it covers most of the general points anyway, and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader:

Errata:

[1] The way this is phrased, you'd think this is when I murdered Tirek. This would be incorrect. This is when I teleported both of us to the moon and accelerated the celestial bodies to build up the momentum required to murder him.

Commentary:

[1] I can just imagine the level of care that was put into constructing this sentence. I have this picture of ‘Starshine’ or whoever wrote this racking their brain over how to convey that I killed Tirek without saying I killed Tirek. Because, in a sense, I did remove him from Equestria. Both technically and thoroughly by teleporting both of us outside of the atmosphere and then by sailing back through the atmosphere quickly enough so that his individual atoms fused with those of the air.*

*A side effect of which would prevent future attempts at necromancy. Can’t resurrect what doesn’t exist, right?

So the first thing to note in this section, of course, is that already we're seeing the change from Twilight's notes in Errata as corrections, to her notes in Commentary as additions (just as the chapter titles suggest). Twilight no longer seems to care that the statement is incorrect—instead, she's searching for a way to justify the sentence's wording to herself. I use the words "searching for" deliberately, because although it's not clear from the context, I think the fact that she's gone from saying outright that the sentence is incorrect to this nebulous, "it's right if you think of it in the right way" approach does, in fact, suggest that she's looking for justification. You could probably go so far as to suggest that her mental image of Starshine is a kind of reflection of herself: she wants to accept the history as presented by Starshine, in which she is good, and is racking her brain for a way to make the words fit.

It's also worth noting the footnote to Twilight's note because, despite the fact that a footnote to a note seems like the least important aspect of a text, it's worth noting that there is one for every single note Twilight leaves in this chapter. The very idea of adding a footnote to these notes makes these few, short sentences into afterthoughts—and yet every single one of them is, in some way, a positive thought. It's clear that, in this chapter, Twilight is trying to look on the bright side of things, even as her guilt weighs on her, and she's coming back to what she's written and enforcing a more positive tone on it.

Finally, even though Twilight's description has become more detailed, it's worth noting that words like "murder" have become "killed". It's an interesting payoff—on the one hand, Twilight is clearly becoming more and more able to discuss these matters, and is thus coming to terms with what she has done; on the other, she is now striving to distance herself, emotionally, from what she has done, which might be necessary for her recovery but is certainly a sign that she has not accepted it.

To me, I think, there is something incredibly dark about this piece's approach to Twilight's "recovery", and I think the key to understanding why that is so lies in the final passage of each of the main chapters. Of course, it is worth noting how Twilight's response becomes less and less emotional with time—this is only to be expected. But the most damning line to me is the very last one:

Errata:

I can check that off my list for this year. Now I have my niece’s birthday party to attend.

Commentary:

That should be enough introspection for this year. My niece's birthday party is later today and I wouldn't miss that for anything.

Synthesis:

Now that that's done with, I can make it to Radiant Dawn's birthday party.

The first, of course, seems innocent enough—a nice nod to Twilight's character as somepony with a To Do list for everything, even emotional recovery. And the second, too, has echoes of themes from the chapter: "enough introspection" has connotations of Twilight not wanting to open herself up to too much pain, of covering that pain up or stopping short of delivering the full emotional impact that she could. And neither of these are particularly harmful! But it is the last chapter that truly seems worrying, for by this point reading over that passage from the Book of Starshine has become little more than ritual, and Twilight feels nothing at all for it any more.

To me, this is the real tradgey of this story—that Twilight has come to feel nothing, truly nothing, for what she has done. She thinks so little of the event that she no longer even gives each sentence the care and respect that she once did, instead opting for the simplest possible route of quoting a full paragraph and scrawling an excuse beneath it. This is why it's so important to reveal only at the end that the quote is one single paragraph, because it shows to the reader just how much care and attention Twilight used to pay the text and, in doing so, further emphasises how little care is being given now. (This point took far longer to reach than I anticipated, and for that I am very sorry.)

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on Twilight—perhaps this story is meant to be a cheering tale of her recovery from a traumatic, heroic incident... but where I feel one should be seeing acceptance, I cannot help but feel denial. I feel that denial in part, I think, because of the chapter titles. They describe, of course, the approach that Twilight has taken in her notes in each of the three chapters: in the first, she is correcting the text and telling us the truth of the matter; in the second, she is commenting on the text, no longer correcting it but twisting its meanings until they match the truth; and in the last, she has reached a resolution of her conflict by accepting the narrative that history and society have provided. And this, ultimately, is why I think the chapter titling in One Last Act is so important, because without the chapter titles that distinction would be a lot harder to spot, and certainly not regarded as a key aspect of the story; the fact that the chapters are titled the way they are suggests that this progression into denial/acceptance really is the story.

There is, of course, one last point to remember: Twilight is wrong. We know for a fact that the Twilight of this story did not do "the best [she] could at the time", because the show's canon demonstrates a better alternative. The Twilight of this universe even admits that "perhaps whatever was in that box the Tree of Harmony produced may have helped"! This, ultimately, is why I think that this piece is intended as a much darker story than a simple hero's recovery from trauma: taken on its own, the piece is fairly ambiguous, but fanfiction cannot be understood outside of the context of the canon it originates from.

I could talk about this for hours (it's a favourite subject of mine, as it turns out), but I think I'll save that for another blog because there's only so many words I can really get away with writing without making this blog unreadable. I will however just note that I think one of the key lessons to take from this story is that one can use a show's canon in surprising ways. As fanfiction authors, we are in a unique position of being able to assume a great deal of knowledge on the part of our audiences, and I think the ways in which we can exploit that to give a story greater impact and meaning are very much worth exploring. This story compares a canon universe to an AU, and in doing so allows the reader to pass judgement on a character that otherwise might be unwarranted, and allows a story of a hero recovering from a traumatic event to be twisted into a darker tale of a leader who comes to dismiss and deny any responsibility or emotional repurcussions for her actions.

All in all, what Syeekoh has accomplished in this piece is nothing short of marvellous. In such a short story, it is key that everything is tight and close attention is paid to every detail—and in One Last Act of Tragedy, it seems, not one word is out of place. I think an awful lot can be learned from this one, and I encourage everyone who reads this to think carefully about it.

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Hoorah! I'll admit, it feels like an achievement to even write something after quite so long out of the game, so please do forgive me for how rambling and full of tangents that blog post was. I'm hoping to get back into doing these more regularly, and in doing so start to tighten up my style a little bit. Let me know what you think!

Also, some might be interested by the change in blog titling since the last time I did one of these (especially given how much I went on about titles in this blog!) Expect a short blog post tomorrow discussing that change, and why I want to dispense with calling what I do "reviewing" in anything other than an informal manner. And I'll probably also talk about Pokemon Go because that game is cool.