Pony Dreams · 7:09am Apr 20th, 2017
Pony Dreams
In Memoriam
Pony Dreams was the very first fic I published to FIMFiction, way back in July of 2012. We’re rapidly approaching the fifth anniversary of that...sheesh. While not my first foray into fanfiction, it’s pretty close to that and was certainly my first major attempt. It shows. The fic has not aged well, frankly. It is with a somewhat heavy heart though, that I hammer in the final nail on this thing far too late after I really should have.
Nostalgia, or maybe just a sentimental love for the ugly thing, has kept me from switching the fic over to the dreaded ‘Cancelled’ state. But it is done now.
This is my goodbye, of sorts. I want to share with those that might care (or just find this minutia interesting) what inspired the story, where it was intended to go, and how it has continued to pop up in places in my later fics. The way I see it, I need some closure, and I might as well share the catharsis. Pony Dreams was, once upon a time, something I looked on with joy. It morphed though, and became something I just wanted to avoid...and I did so exceedingly well. So I feel I should explain myself.
I know that there is no small part of my popularity that was birthed by Pony Dreams and riding the wave of Luna’s growing fan popularity back in the halcyon days of the Season 2 Hiatus. Luna, if you recall, was super popular after her second appearance in Luna Eclipsed/the Pony Halloween Episode back in 2011. I was already a card carrying member of Team Twiluna before it aired, and the idea that would become Pony Dreams was already well under way by the time it aired. The episode was really just the push I needed to go from a fan the merely viewed the show to an actual producer of fan content. I started building up the idea and by the time I had enough of it down, I started posting it.
I obviously didn’t know what I was getting into. Or how to really write a good story at the time either.
You can see, in the early chapters that I was mostly writing with my libido. Lesbian horses was still a novel idea back then and I latched onto it. The storyteller in me, honed from years of gaming experience and other writing projects, needed a little more than just cute horses with yuri undertones though. So as I went on, absorbing little points from the scant canon available at the time and the early fanon, I added on this huge plot going on behind the scenes to try and explain the biggest elephant in the room when it came to Luna: Nightmare Moon.
Really, if I had been smart about it, I would have left that for another fic. But again, way back then, I thought Pony Dreams would be my ONLY fic. Magnum Opus status nonwithstanding, I assumed that I wouldn’t write anything else, so I sort of crammed a bunch of other ideas into one thing. At the level I am now, I can do that. In fact I love to do that, much to many of yours and my own consternation. But back then? Nope. Couldn’t handle it.
So I developed a headcanon on Nightmare Moon. And this is where I say that Pony Dreams keeps popping up in my current writing. I saw Nightmare Moon as a foreign entity to Luna. Some sort of possessing force. I honestly likened it to a dark reflection of the Elements of Harmony. I liked that interpretation because it eased up on Luna’s complicity with the whole Nightmare Moon event. It wasn’t Luna, it was this other personality.
I was, and still am, a Luna fanboy. Get off my back.
Either way, that idea, that Nightmare was something other than Luna, stuck with me well beyond Pony Dreams. It’s come up here and there. See Hoofsteps in the Dark, that abandoned fic-let in my Fuzzy Fables collection: Darkest Chocolate, and even in an upcoming Crackshipping & You fic. But of course, that then begs the question where did this ‘Other’ come from? I went back to my idea about her being a dark reflection of the Elements and picked up what was being teased about the Princesses’ war with Discord. Out of that formed what would become the core of Pony Dreams, which I had only just started to reveal when I suddenly couldn’t even look at the fic without plummeting into despair: the Titans.
It was the idea that made and killed the fic for me. It turned this little drabble about Twilight helping Luna reintegrate into modern society into an adventure story that skirted the edges of horror. It made the fic big. Grander than I could do justice, and I knew that. Writing Pony Dreams suddenly became an inevitable spiral into a brick wall of expectations set WAY too high. So I just quit. I moved on to other projects.
It almost killed my writing entirely, but I got around it. Eventually. You can even see the dip in my productivity if you swing by my stats page and track the story views.
So, what I put together was this:
- Every intelligent race, once they reach a series of thresholds, like sheer biomass/numbers and magical/spiritual development, etc; spawned a Titan.
- Titans were larger, more powerful versions of their base race. Once a Titan was birthed, it was effectively immortal. A Titan can be killed, but it would simply ‘respawn’ after a while so long as the race in question still met the thresholds to have a Titan.
- There is only one Titan per race.
- Ponies were the last race to meet all the requirements for a Titan. Once they did, their Titan was an Alicorn and that Alicorn was Celestia.
- Celestia is therefore the only natural Alicorn.
- Celestia had perfectly normal parents and Luna is her sister by blood.
- Luna was born as a unicorn.
- Luna’s cutie mark talent isn’t controlling the moon. Luna can see the dreams of sleeping ponies, but her power it limited to dreams that already are about her. This was pre-helping the CMCs in their dreams, so go me for ‘predicting’ that.
- Since ponies were the last to have a Titan, they suffered a lot under the less friendly/more predatory races that did have Titans.
- Celestia became the leader of ponykind by defeating the other Titans. She did this by capturing them and somehow sealing them away in stone, ala Discord, and in advertantly creating Discord.
- Using this same unexplained magical BS, Celestia took some of the power from one of the other Titans and gave it to Luna, thereby creating the second Alicorn.
All of that then leads to the question I was going to present to Twilight and the readers: Is Nightmare Moon a part of Luna that the Titan power gave personification, like a multiple personality situation? Or was the Nightmare completely foreign?
Pony Dreams was supposed to slowly reveal this info to Twilight as Luna’s memories started to come back and they fought off the big bad in the Dreaming. Once they saved Celestia, she would confirm the basics of the situation and then help them put away that last ghost of the Titans to return things to the more or less normal of their lives at the time.
I had this whole scene in my head of Luna teleporting all of them to the Moon so Celestia could let loose and go full bore on this guy without vaporizing Canterlot in the process. Obviously this was back in the day when Celestia was still a good deal more goddess like. The whole ‘former warrior’ trope for Celestia is also something I’ve come back to again and again.
sigh
If you were a fan of Pony Dreams, I’m sorry that all that won’t come to be. As I mentioned in the Twiluna Discord chat, I’ve moved on, and I’m too busy with other stuff to breath life back into Pony Dreams at this point. I’m always a fan of saying something like ‘who knows, maybe I’ll go back to it some day?’ But I’m not. I can’t at this point, and I’m sorry for that. But hey, Pony Dreams tested me and I became a better writer for it. Better for what it did right and better for what I did wrong.
It’s a mistake I’m glad I made.
But now it’s high past time to put this old nag to pasture. So let me leave you with some of my notes and then, officially, I am done with Pony Dreams.
-Fuzz
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What it boils down to is I got overwhelmed. It was a bigger idea than I was prepared to tackle and all I could see before me was failure. The fear of that failure nearly ended my writing career. Nearly.
If it had, I wouldn't have tortured you and all the other users on this site with my crap! Heh. Can you imagine?
Welp, goodbye to Pony Dreams then. I remember enjoying that old story. You've become a better writer, so it wasn't for nothing.
Honestly, thank you for sharing those last chapters and giving some closure.
Most dead fanfictions won't ever get that.
I had to do the same to Luna's Librarian and my other prompt-ish compilations after I realized I'd lost the drive to update constantly, or even occasionally. Killed me to switch that tag, Complete or not.
Looking through your non-Complete stories...
Wet Pony Dreams - moving this one to Cancelled too?
Sun & Stars - did all the prompt-based group collabs die at once? This, Dark Paradise 1 & 2, Full Moon Fever, Hot for Teacher...
Chemistry - Wow, I miss this one. Brutal, and I can imagine how this might get squicky to come back to.
Hoof Steps - I'm a sucker for MoonLight. Not exactly a shipfic, but my shipping goggles are more or less permanent, so "stalker ghost" seriously had me addicted.
Spicy Tuna - We're all Tuna fans here. Sooo many fantastic little snippets in this one.
And despite my having read (nearly) every (properly tagged) Twilight x Princess story on this site, I'd somehow missed Hot for Teacher. For shame! I'll have to fix that.
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Wet Pony Dreams - I will be, yes. Which is extra sad, as it was my first clopfic and I was working toward a joke with the chapter titles.
Sun & Stars - Yeah...they did all die right around the same time. I've been holding onto hope that there'd be another wave of fresh Twilestia interest to get us to 500 chapters, but frankly, I don't think that's going to happen at this point. I'll let the new season get running, but if something doesn't come in after I advertise it again, than I think it's time to slap the big green 'Complete' button.
Chemistry - I fully intend to finish this. It's personal, even if it's painful, and I want to get it off my metaphoric chest.
Hoofsteps - Heh...you know...originally this was going to be a Luna + Nightmare ship fic with Twi as just the connector, but now it's gone full horror, so...probably not the usual short of shipping gonna end up there.
Spicy Tuna - Like Chemistry, I still intend to finish this. I set up a thing and I want to see it through to the end. Plus it's the best way for me to write human!Tuna erotica and skirt that clop line like a boss.
Lesbian horses with comedy bits set in a epic horror adventure setting would have been grand. I'm sorry to hear you don't feel up to the task of writing it, but it is better to finally be told such than to hold out hope forever while the ending never comes.
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I don't know if I've ever seen Luna+Nightmare shipped before, so I'll pay attention, however it turns out.
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You know, to be honest, I've never read more than a few things by either Cold in Gardez or Estee. Both are very good and fuck me if they are participating in a given WriteOff. I might as well just crawl into a dumpster and light a match, cuz that's what my paltry offerings look like in comparison.
But to be clear, it was the fear of failing to meet my own goals that killed my drive to write Pony Dreams. I would say that as I am now, I COULD probably pull off what I wanted with it. But back when I conceptualized it, nope. But the fear of the possible failure kept me away for too long. The story dried up and I technically scratched the itch it created by porting bits and pieces of that headcanon to other stories. I became too separated and as time wore on, the fear became further loaded down with the anxiety that no one would care. When I released the last actual chapter for Pony Dreams, after struggling so hard with it and myself to make it as polished as I was capable, I got a hell of a lot of nothing in response. There was no gratification in getting the chapter out. Almost no comments, very few views, etc. The lack of positive feedback was a real big indicator of the story wasn't connecting with any audience.
Now I know there are a lot of factors that come into play with how a story as a whole or an update might be received. Time of posting, the size, overall conditions and trends on the site, etc. But that was the most let down I have ever had with an update to a fic and still stands out to me. I learned to watch when the site was more active, tracking the best times to get the most potential views and so forth. In that sense it was yet another lesson that Pony Dreams taught me. But the pain and the lack of any benefit from that actual update closed the coffin lid on this fic.
It just took me getting tired of that emotional baggage to do the ol' girl a final justice.
All good things must come to an end, and sometimes things must end before their time. But hey, at least this story ending has reminded me that I got some fics on the back burner that need to be looked after, and I have been itching to write again.
Dang, shame that this story won't get any more love. The worldbuilding about the Titans was super intriguing to me.
Oh well. This was cool to read, and it's probably a good sign all in all that you're willing to cut away stories you'll never finish. I don't think I've ever managed to do that, and write a blog post explaining why.
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I suppose, had I come up with the idea later in my career, I'd have been more likely to complete it. It was an idea that needed more experience to write even close to "correctly" that I have now, but not so much back then. Starting projects based on ideas too big for me is kind of a persistent flaw of mine, so who knows, I might have still overblown it. But I like to think I have a better perspective on things these days.
Rewriting this beast would be a massive undertaking, and if I weren't hip deep in other fics, it might happen. But until I unbury myself, Pony Dreams is going to have to stay six feet under.