it's dim and lightly raining here right now, actually · 12:25am Aug 10th, 2016
I was dizzy this morning and started planning out a new fanfic that had been loitering in the back of my mind. I already know the perfect way to begin this one. here's the opening sentence:
It was a dark and stormy night.
yeah, I know. check out the wikipedia page for that phrase, it has quite a history. though it's more like 200 years old writer drama, heh.
I was inspired by seeing a lot of recent WriteOff feedback saying not to start a story with the weather. I had to question if it was really such a crime, or if it's just one of those things everyone repeats. I'm a Fool, so I always question the advice I hear from writers better than me (so I can find out through experience they were right all along). and I like experimenting as a challenge.
looking at the original example written by Bulwer-Lytton, it's not so much that it's about weather, just that it's so long and boring. it's really two sentences combined with a semicolon; it just goes on and on describing what a storm is like. we get it already! nothing's actually HAPPENING, and we learn nothing about the story taking place (except an awkward parenthesis telling us this is London, because he couldn't find a way to naturally fit that detail in 
). obviously one of those examples where SHOW DON'T TELL went too far and became purple prose.
but could it be that just the execution was awful, rather than the concept itself? true, usually it's not particularly exciting to open with weather, but I don't find it offensively boring either (if you don't drag it out like that Victorian guy). It's usually just average.... except when it's not. I love how Madeleine L'Engle brazenly used it for A Wrinkle in Time, as if she's daring you to call her out on it. She was so confident that she wrote a great book, she didn't even care. 
I'm not as confident as L'Engle and not as good of a writer either, but I'm using that infamous line anyway. it'll work, because this is MLP fanfiction. stay with me, it'll make sense. (though in practice i'm like Pinkie Pie -- my logic makes sense to ME)
here's the thing I realized was so ironic about weather in the context of pony fanfics. you ready?
in MLP, weather is not random. It is controlled by pegasus ponies.
there's that one episode about a sleepover during a dark and stormy night. it's no surprise to the characters, because the night was engineered to be stormy! Winter Wrap-Up is another obvious example. Hearth's Warming Eve is a story about how weather manipulation is an ancient tradition, and the tribes blame each other when they lose control over it (Lauren Faust said this was one of the episodes she had the most direct involvement with, before she left the team).
only uncivilized lands have "natural" untamed weather: the Everfree Forest, the snow storms surrounding the Crystal Empire. the ponies react to these places by thinking it's queer uncanny. this is such an important part of the *magic* of the MLP setting that they take it for granted! we laughed at the EVIL STORM CLOUDS being the villain of the season 6 opener, but remember that to ponies, it's sort of like how we would view a rampaging machine that's out of control. it's their Frankenstein.
however, I'm having a lot of trouble recalling fanworks that use this part of the setting at all. well, there's the classic song Rainbow Factory, and all the sequels and spinoffs that grew out of that. in the Phoenix Wright x MLP crossover animation, a thunder cloud was the murder weapon, I thought that was really neat. it doesn't seem to come up in fanfiction very much, except as an obligatory reference to Rainbow Dash's day job (now THIS I consider offensively boring! it's like "Twilight was reading books" or "Applejack was bucking trees" -- you're using a stereotype to tell me nothing new!)
there's a bazillion stories about Unicorn magic, and a couple hipsters who attempt to justify Earth Pony magic, yet the weather magic of Pegasi is stuck in the middle of the two audiences. not as flashy and powerful as magic spells, but not as subtle and «underrated» as... whatever it is earth ponies do. (
) I think we still have this real-world prejudice against weather. we can't control it and it's unpredictable, or so the average person believes. it has nothing to do with characters and stories, just a background effect often used for lazy & trite symbolism. but in MLP, we have this unique opportunity to actually use it in new ways. throw the accepted wisdom away, and believe in magic 
so, this is my informal challenge to anyone still reading this far. write a fanfic about weather in the first line, and try to make it immediately interesting! (if, if you want to 
)
oh yeah, my fic idea... it's a suspense thriller about farming. uh, i promise THIS one will make sense too, if when i finish it. so don't steal my idea.
I don't actually know anything about farming, besides playing Dota 2.
What if Applejack bucks books or Twilight reads apples? Would that be an interesting opener?
4141403
automatically.
4141421 Well that seems promising, then.
4141422
wait hold on.
that's basically the opener of Magical Mystery Cure. almost.
do it anyway.
4141425 I'll see what I can manage.
Weather? Interesting..
4141403 Yes; ye dogs yes!
This is really cool. One of those pieces of canon I've always wanted to write about, but never have (Like the crystal ponies being time displaced, or my personal fave, each unicorn having a unique color to their magic). I take your challenge! Maybe. Hopefully. Someday.
It was a dark and stormy night; apparently, somepony had forgotten to pay the weather bill.
I did some:
Flailing around with weather magic during the big climactic scenes of In Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps and A Game of Hearts over on my AugieDog account, but my favorite depiction of the bureaucracy of magical weather management is in the background of a "rated mature for sexual situations" fic by AgentSnail called Disinterest.
Mike
Yeah, that was mostly me being angry at my pet peeves.
And this is exactly why weather openings bug me so much. It's not that I hate meteorology, it's that weather openings almost never have anything to do with the actual story taking place. You only have a few sentences to make a first impression, and a generic weather opening is like marching up to your date and saying "I'm wearing deodorant!" The fact that you are drawing attention to it is making a statement and it is probably not the statement you want to make.
4141870
This is exactly how to do it. Make it part of your hook.
4141867
I keep wanting to do something with crystal ponies like that idea. but after 4 seasons of them, they're still relatively unknown in the show.
4141870
well, still different....
dangit, that's close to my planned idea.
4141984
I'll look through those
excellent!
4142062
I saw some others saying it too, so I swear I'm not picking on you!
you sure you don't hate meteorology? even just a little bit? (say yes or my whole theory falls apart)
4142864 I don't have any intention of using that opening in any story, so feel free to write your idea.
*mumblegrumble* stupid meteors
4142864
uH I MEAN
YES
TOTALLY YES
THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY I HATE METEOROLOGY EVEN JUST A LITTLE BIT