FINISHED!

Well that's it then! After four years (almost to this day!) I am officially DONE!

Finished!

I have finally completed Secret of Andalantis. Thanks to all of you who stuck all the way through, I hope you enjoyed this long journey despite all the delays and months without any updates. It had been a crazy few last week as I blazed through those last few chapters.

I'm not 100% satisfied with this story, it feels like I started with Ditzy as the main character but by the end she was ecliped by Trixie, Lyra and even Bon Bon to an extent. there was a lot of character to juggle and I wasn't even sure 100% of what Ek'idna was up to! A lot of my plans actually changed along the way, new elements were brought in, others removed. I don't think I'll try improvising a long story like this again.

Mild spoilers ahead for Secret of Andalantis, only read if you finished the story.

You've been warned!

For those who enjoy trivia, some of the discarded bits and ideas I had were:

-Originally the third faction were octoponies. Then they were abyssponies. I settled on inventing plesioponies because I liked the visual and I wanted to use an extinct animal as the base for my extinct tribe.

-When I started writing the villain was going to be Lotta ('discord' in Portuguese I think?) a Discordian who used her chaos magic to turn from merpony to seapony and actually found a way to channel the random effect of her power outward, thus creating the kaosharks. Yes, at first there was no Jellyfish Lantern. In the end I decided against this because it felt like too many Discordians (we already had Zizanie and Lemon Heart), and dedicating a part to a Discordian fight between Zizanie (sporting a white tiger paw! which admitedly would have been badass) and Lotta was devoting too much time to what was essentially a secondary character.

-Zizanie's role in the story was actually toned down, and some of her role was given to Trixie to make our actual protagonist more wily and clever. I also felt bad promoting my 'special snowflake OC' so much. It's why she ditches the fight when the Kaosharks return to normal.

-I came up with Thetis as a giant turtle with the city on her back sometime AFTER I started writing!

-At some point there was a prophecy and a chosen one meant to lead the aquatic ponies to Andalantis. That chosen one would have had golden eyes the same color as Ditzy's, and there would be a statue with jewels for eyes that had been knocked out of alignement, making them look like Ditzy's own eye. I wisely decided against 'chosen one' tropes. It's not how the Elements of Harmony work in our 'verse so it's not something we should feature too much.

-At some point Lotta/Ek'idna was going to come out cured of her leviathan transformation and pursue our friends into Andalantis for a final showdown to gain the Urn of Aquarius, her ultimate goal (instead of draining Thetis of magic), only to find out it was just full of plesiopony eggs.

-I didn't originally had Bon Bon doing much in the fic... but when Trixie and the others went back to the ship to consult the map, she just... imposed herself. I just couldn't justify her sitting on her rump while Lyra was missing. It was one of those "the characters write themselves" moment that writers always talk about.

-While the eggs were always there, Aquarius' inclusion was literally LAST SECOND as I came up with it only when the question 'what happened to Aquarius' came up in the fic itself as I wrote it. This was another 'characters write themselves' moment because I couldn't conceive of a kind being like Thetis just letting Aquarius sacrifice herself for nothing.

-Finally, the title came from a message board april fool day thread I had made of a discussion for a fake FiM episode of the same name . It featured Doctor Whooves. I decided to turn it into an actual Lunaverse story... which is why it was so improvised because I mostly had a cool title and the idea of Ditzy going missing underwater as a premise.

Anyway that's all for now! I hope you guys will give my future stories a chance! I'll try not to make them take this long!

See you in the funny papers!