The Document of PGS: Chapter 11 (When All Hope Bleeds Out) · 9:29pm Jul 14th, 2016
It's the Solid Snake and Twilight Sparkle Super-Show! *throws confetti*
For anyone who's recently subscribed to the story, let me welcome you to The Document of Pony Gear Solid, individual blogs which illustrate various bits of trivia about recently posted chapters and the writing process behind them, blithely named after supplementary material from Metal Gear Solid 2.
First up: Revisions on the rest of the story are going along nicely. I only have five chapters to go, not counting the two Interludes. Of course, those chapters collectively account for about sixty percent of the total verbage in the story, so... Might be a while before it's done. 
I've been doing them out of order; if you're curious what a polished turd looks like, the chapters I've done so far are the Prologue through chapter two, and chapters seven through nine. Slight changes, nothing major besides Applejack's characterization, although there are a few retcons in chapter nine which won't be apparent for a while.
Now, with that out of the way...
Let me draw attention to one particular comment for chapter 11:
Good to see a new chapter. You're still in top form, Posh.
This is a very kind thing to say (and, really, thank you for the compliment), but I have to respectfully disagree. I haven't written creatively in a long time; this was my first stab at anything, period, in two years, and if you had a look at the sausage as it was being made, so to speak, it would be obvious just how badly out of trim I am. Writing this chapter was a debacle, plain and simple, a complete mess that took longer than it needed to. The first draft was full of inconsistencies and plotholes that necessitated thorough revision, and the length... To put it mildly, the damn thing got away from me. It was not supposed to be twenty-one fucking thousand words long. That's just how it worked out. Even after all the work we did, too, it just turned out a disappointment. To me, anyway.
Let's talk about some of those problems now:
1. The first draft of the chapter featured a very different depiction of the golems than what wound up in the final product. The golems were originally these grotesque, dried-out husks of ponies, with desiccated gray flesh, no hair, rotten teeth, bloodshot eyeballs, and blood turned to powder with a texture like flour, and they shambled and stumbled around instead of being fast and agile. In short, they were far more zombie-like than the already zombie-like versions you see. That didn't work for two reasons, the first being that their depiction was inherently at odds with the idea behind their creation: that they were technically alive, but that losing their souls robbed them of their identities, destinies, and sanity. Put simply, there was no reason they should have been alive with the way they were depicted; they were just flat-out zombies, and I didn't want them to be.
The second problem with that depiction was that they didn't pose the kind of threat needed to push Snake and Twilight to the brink; they were slow and stupid, and in the original draft, Snake and Twi just let themselves be cornered by them without any kind of plan, which runs completely counter to their characterizations as forward-thinking tacticians. Danny suggested the change from slow to fast, 28 Days Later-style zombies, and then later, he and I revised the depiction of the golems into what they are now: washed-out, desaturated, braindead ponies with no cutie marks. Sort of like if Starlight Glimmer's village was modeled after Pueblo in Resident Evil 4.
2. The fight in the saloon was much more of a clusterfuck, with Snake's positioning and the height of the stage relative to the saloon floor being the primary flaws (in a nutshell, there should not have been any way for Snake to lay down cover fire from on stage while Twilight maintained the barrier without the stage being illogically high up, which meant moving him onto the stairs instead). Not as much of a problem, but a stupid plothole that I'm embarrassed needed to be pointed out to me. Twilight used furniture from the saloon to make a makeshift wall instead of a magic barrier, which seemed like backwards thinking to me, and the chapter ended more or less the same way as the fight in the castle did, with Twilight pulling out a deus ex machina to save the day. The Operator didn't really do anything, either, besides spout exposition and be vaguely menacing.
Special shout-out to DannyJ for putting in overtime to resolve those problems and keep the chapter afloat.
Of course, those problems came up over the month and a half it took to actually write and finish the damn thing. Let's not forget that there are about two years before that which are unaccounted for. Aside from vague and unnamed real-life problems and concerns keeping me from writing, whenever I sat down to write the chapter, I couldn't quite get anything about it right. I went back and forth on whose perspective to write it from before deciding that it would be best to stay out of Snake's head for a while and look at him through someone else's eyes. But even after that, there were problems with how both characters were written.
Twilight always came across as too cynical and rude to Snake, and Snake always came across as a whiny teenager who's pouting because he didn't get his way. Neither is particularly true to the characters, and resolving those characterization problems were my biggest hurdle early on in the process. I eventually struck a balance by looking to MGS1 for inspiration: Snake is constantly growing more irritated with Colonel Campbell, but begrudgingly carries on with his mission. He's a professional; he's got a job to do, and even though he's pissed, he's going to get it done. And besides that, there is a part of him that's worried about Twilight and wants to watch her back, because he can tell how compromised she is and doesn't want her to get herself killed.
And Twilight's characterization just sort of altered reflexively in response to that. The end result was a duo who are mad at each other, but who are nevertheless capable of being mature, putting aside their differences, and collaborating (and well).
The only other big deal I can think of in this chapter is the character of the Operator, who I wanna say a few things about. He, or rather, the character that would evolve into him, has been a part of the story since its inception. Just to give you an idea of how comically bad I am at updating, he was originally conceived as the captain of the royal guard, long before Shining Armor was introduced in the show. That meant changing virtually everything I had about the character's place within the story, which was honestly a change for the better; he went from being a taciturn, no-nonsense soldier to being this smarmy, self-assured spy with shades of Revolver Ocelot and Skull Face.
His design, and even his name, underwent many changes too. At various points, he was either one of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse (specifically War), fucking Sleipnir from Norse mythology, to just being a black panther, to the blue hodgepodge that he ended up being. As for his name, at one point, he was The Operative, until I remembered that the bad guy in Serenity was called The Operative. Needless to say, "The Operator" isn't his real name.
I don't want to say too much more about him or his role; I don't want to risk giving too much away. All I can say is that the Operator is the key to all this, if we can get him working, because he's a funnier character than we've had in any of the other chapters.
I'll just give this away, too: Yes, he was the character that Twilight saw talking with Celestia in the last Interlude. The two were talking about Macbeth, specifically, which is why the Operator is so amused when Twilight namedrops him during their last scene together.
Last thing: The quote at the beginning of the chapter comes from P.T., not Metal Gear, but it was an easter egg in The Phantom Pain. You can find a radio playing the radio show from P.T. in the guard outpost directly outside of the tunnel leading to Nzo ya Badiabulu. Sometimes I like to visit that guard post and listen to the radio messages and cry, thinking about what might have been...
Oh yeah, the chapter's working title was "Nzo ya Badiabulu" for a little while. Before that, it was "Venceramos," which I'm hanging on to, but moving to a different chapter. The actual title, as was pointed out in the comments, comes from the lyrics to Quiet's Theme. I thought it fit the tone of the chapter. Plus, there's all that stuff about bleeding souls...
That's really it for this chapter, I suppose. Next up, finishing the rest of the revisions, updating Murphy's Law, and then it's on to the "exciting" conclusion to the Dodge Junction field trip.
And now you all know why one of my two major suggestions were to put Snake on the stairs.
But you will never have context for the other one.