Reincarnation Decision and Apology · 11:58am Oct 17th, 2016
Sorry for jerking you guys around so much. I was overcome by some the very reasonable arguments put forth against including reincarnation. That said, I'm happy it happened as the criticism encouraged me to put some more serious thought into this element and come up with explanations on how it works.
And yes. That means reincarnation is back on.
I can't promise that I'll never flip flop again, especially in the face of some valid criticisms. However, I hope you guys can be patient with me as I try to avoid making any rash decisions in the future. Like I said, the criticisms presented did help me to answer a few of my own questions on how to make reincarnation work, something that won't be fully explained for some time to come. All I'll say is that Thomas is not the first human in this world, but he is the first in Equestria.
This story is largely the product of free writing, with most chapters being written in a day as I let the story carry me from event to event. Little is planned to any serious extent. I wish I was a better writer, but I believe that, in writing this story, I am improving. There is more of a plan now than in the beginning. I have a stronger grasp of the characters, have learned from my mistakes, and will hopefully continue to give my readers what they want.
Oh well, it's your story. I can't say that I'm pleased, but I guess I'll just have to hope it's not a key plot point from here on in, either way I'll personally just try to ignore it.
Looking back on the whole story (read it from the beginning over the weekend) and looking at it much closer from a critic viewpoint, I want to say that I think you are making a serious mistake. After rereading the story, that little nugget of knowledge does basically cut out over half of the growth of Thomas as a character.
He's less "admirable" (not exactly the word I want to use, but the closest I can come up with atm) for having adapted to a seriously foreign culture and forging a new life for himself, when that was the culture he spiritually came from in his previous life/lives and already had (whether you want to admit it or not, your course makes it feels this way) a "guaranteed" base of support from his precious lifetime's friends/family. It tarnishes and cheapens the effort and work done by Thomas, as a character, to make those things for himself in a world he doesn't understand nor comprehend.
The compromise decision worked well to keep the rather shoehorned plot point in, without damaging Thomas as a character. To be brutally honest, the inclusion of it to this extent leaves enough of a bad taste in my mouth that it does hurt my interest in continuing to read it (not enough to kill the interest, but makes me much less enthusiastic about the story).
At the end of this, it is your call, but I can only hope that this isn't a point that we'll all look back and point to as the beginning of the end (of the high quality writing) for the whole story.
I can see the reincarnation part working for the pony and other natural inhabitants of the equestrian world and that is fine, the natural inhabitants given how the world works would seem likely for such a thing to occur with the power of friendship literally being magic and Love being strong enough to take down a sun goddess.
As for Thomas' case I think he SHOULD be kept a outside factor, a anomaly thrown into the cycle of carnation. Sure in the distant future he could be a reincarnate, but as of now he is a outside to the world a new soul in the land of old beings. Though that's my line of thought, your the boss man in the end how you do it is your choice and only your choice, as the author of the story you have the ultimate say in the end.
Hey, you said it yourself, your writing of this essentially freehand and off the belt.
If you want to free write though, your gonna have to accept that you'll be criticized for it and either not let that affect you too much or go the other way and plan your stuff.
You can't go in the middle and semi plan it or, god forbid, let your readers essentially determine the course of the story while your freehanding the rest. That style of writing leads to some of the most pedantic and cancerous bullshit that you can see on this site, whats even worse about that is just how the proles will eat that crap up, thus leading to cancerous stories with high visibility due to lots of dumb upvotes.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't react to overwhelmingly negative responses to a story element, but what I am saying is that you should to stick your guns and not fop about.
You're doing good, just draw a line in the sand somewhere and hold it, don't let it waver or zig-zag.
4259401 "To this extent"?
That gets me thinking. What if it wasn't to that extent? What if, in the thousands of years the Princesses have been around, Luna has only encountered Thomas' soul 3 or four times? He was there at the beginning, but his presence since then is minimal. As you and others have said, the strength of the story is the relationships and the human adapting to culture shock. You also think that this cheapens the relationship by making it guaranteed, but I don't really see it that way, as it was already guaranteed before that. Pretty much everything in this story before has already been set up to help Thomas along, from friends like Talon, to the scheming Princesses, and even protective Moonlight. Reincarnation is just one more thing to add to the pile. And like I've said to others, the foreshadowing was already present. For good or for ill, this was something meant to happen for a while now.
4259554 Here's hoping to no future fops.
I say do whatever makes you happy with your story. Take the constructive criticism and run with it. First and foremost, a writer needs to be happy with the way their story is developing before they can please their audience. Don't let naysayers tear you down. Filter out those that are just complaining for the sake of complaining.
And to those that are saying that reincarnation won't work with Thomas in this story. How do you know it wouldn't work? For one thing, the story writers have never explained how pony afterlife works, if there is even a pony afterlife. All we have are those that fanfiction writers have come up with which are not based on canon as there is nothing in canon. For all we know, the Afterlife is shared by all beings from one end of the cosmos to the other. So that would mean that humans and ponies all share the same afterlife experience. With that in mind, reincarnation for Thomas is completely possible within the world of Equestria.
4260523 First and foremost, people are hardly "complaining for the sake of compainging", the author has repeatedly asked for peoples opinions thought this 'saga'. I don't think it's fair to criticise people for having opinions different to yours. In fact in almost every post from people saying they don't like reincarnation, they tend to say something along the lines of "it's your story, but my opinion is... ". These people are not tearing the author down, they are providing constructive feedback in response to a request for such feedback.
I don't think many people are saying reincarnation cannot work, most people I've seen who didn't support it did so usually because they felt it weakened the plot and character development that had, up until then, been excellent. Others simply said they felt it didn't feel right, or they thought it was out of place.
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Let me clarify. By "to this extent" I mean that to include Thomas in the reincarnation bit. It doesn't feel anywhere near as awkward with any other character. By making Thomas a "reincarnated pony" you do serious damage to the growth of his character. He's no longer adapting to a foreign/alien culture, he's relearning his old one. That's significantly different than the premise that I thought this story was based on. You lose that big part of the draw that is inherent in a HiE story (at least the well done ones) by following this path. Where before I'd stop reading another story to read this one when it updated, now I'm more than likely going to finish other stories' updates before coming to this one.
Now, I'm not (and never have) said that reincarnation cannot work (despite what some other dipstick in the comments seems to think, I would never waste this much of my time on something that I couldn't give a single shit about). The major issue, as it usually is, is about the implementation of that plot point. The way this was implemented was terrible. The "foreshadowing" was all but nonexistent (and anyone saying otherwise is only doing so by using the most asinine of examples that could mean a million different things which have just as valid [if not even more valid] meanings, and even then it's the weakest form of "foreshadowing" I've ever seen in a written story; fanfic or professional) and made the entire reincarnation bit feel incredibly forced. It doesn't feel natural (as in, in tune with the rest of the story) which is why it started getting such backlash in the first place. It comes from so far out of left field that you can't even provide incontrovertible evidence that it was foreshadowed at all versus it being thrown in because the author just wanted to for shits and gigs.
One last things about this: just because you wanted to have it in the story from the beginning, doesn't mean that it needs to be or even should be in the story. Like all things, it needs to be weighed and considered to ensure that it adds value to the story (one of the reasons why "filler" is so thoroughly despised by audiences, especially badly disguised filler). There are several things that I've wanted, desperately, to be in various stories I've written (from shorts to a full length novel I've been working on for almost 10 years now) that I've ended up scrapping because they just didn't fit or damaged the quality of the story. In my opinion, this is something that should have been left on the cutting room floor. It fundamentally changes the main character in a negative way that doesn't grow the character (in comparison to a negative change that has the character grow, like having the character expose a major flaw, resulting in the character floundering due to it for a while before eventually dealing with/overcoming that flaw). It only harms the character. It makes the story feel fixed. There's no suspense. There's only finality. This story, prior, still had suspense. It may have been a forgone conclusion, given how the deck was stacked heavily in their favor, that Luna and Thomas would end up together, but that felt like it was due to the natural chemistry between characters, not because "the plot demands it, so it must be done" (read: plot armor).
Celestia, Talon, and the others all acted (in character) in order to make Luna and Thomas being together a reality, and worked hard to get it done. That's why readers can easily accept that it was a forgone conclusion with so little backlash. With reincarnation stating that they would have been together anyways, that effort all feels wasted, cheapened, and pointless. In fact, with that being stated, why even include those characters at all? What's the point? Filler? Because that's what they now feel like. Talon doesn't feel like a major supporting character now, she's just filler to get to the point that Thomas is actually a reincarnated pony predestined to fall in love with Luna again. And as an author, you can claim that that's not what it is all you want, but that doesn't matter. The reader's view is significantly more important, because if your intent and the reader's view line up, you've done your job as an author. If they drastically differ, then something went majorly wrong, and (whether it's true or not) the blame for that lies on the author.
TL;DR: As I said before, it's your call, but I'm warning you (like any good critic/editor/reviewer) that this could be a major mistake being made, and I can only hope that this is the outlier (that doesn't pan out) rather than the start of a trend that sinks the story.
PS: Work sucks (especially when the boss is looking at cutting your preferred position, and when the boss' boss decides to do something that results in the entire workforce, unanimously, declaring it a bad idea within literal [and I'm not exaggerating that word] seconds of hearing about it) and that's why it took so long to respond.
4264523 God damn it. I'm flipflopping again. I made the change because of overwhelming support for it, but then changed back because one person made a passionate plea to keep it as is. The "as is" crowd have all given only a modicum of reasons while the change crowd could not be more passionate or convincing in their pleas. After the change was made, I'd edited later chapters to start a subplot of this being just one more thing that Thomas feels excluded from.
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Welcome to the world of fanfiction, where everyone knows how to write your story better than you
But seriously, I just make it a matter of policy that I don't make revisions without rewriting the whole story from he ground up. I do a lot of work on the front end (I talk to somewhere around fifteen people about my stories, and five other fanfic authors, to see what they think about any kind of serious event, or M. Night Shyamalan style twist, I put in) to ensure that this kind of thing doesn't happen, but if it does, I dig my heels in and refuse to change it, only so that I don't end up pleasing no one by trying to please everyone. The only things I make retcons for are when I make a continuity mistake or some basic grammar/spelling edits. Other than that, I throw it under the "Lesson Learned" label and move on.
4264943 You think you'd be up for doing that for me? I've tried to spitball with the few people willing to volunteer as editors, but they rarely offer anything remotely as insightful as what you've written.
4265233
Sure, but one thing to remember is that almost all ideas sound good when spit balling; it's the application that shows whether an idea is truly good or not. Just know that I'm not going to hold back, and I can be very critical about things I'm editing (I've made more than one author cry [insert Nightmare Moon evil laugh icon here]), but I do that because the great stuff can withstand it, and the good stuff can be improved.
4265447 So is that a yes to taking a look at the Google docs?
Regardless of romance or foreshadowing, bringing reincarnation into the story makes it head into some serious BS territory, where the story can seriously fall apart if done poorly. The idea of reincarnation alone made me want to face palm the moment I read it in your story. It makes me think of anime that goes completely off the rails when they tried to bring reincarnation into the story, and you are just left wondering why. I can only hope that it's not a big part of the story, as it only causes me to groan. I'll just skim over those parts and try not let it sour things for me.
Write what you will, as long as that it's needed and fits properly in the story, and not just shoe horned in.
Also, be prepared for other folks to give much more negative feedback for future chapters when this element comes up again.
4270416 Yup. I'm about 99% convinced on going back to the change of keeping reincarnation but leaving Thomas out of it.