• Member Since 14th Jan, 2016
  • offline last seen Jan 10th, 2018

Ddraigtanto


Writer of Fanfiction within the worlds of Ponies and Dragons. Main Account is on DeviantART, so be sure to drop in and say hi.

More Blog Posts5

  • 347 weeks
    Hello again!

    Hi! I'm still here, and I'm still trucking along. First off, thanks to all the people who got the Manehatten Project up to 200 views. That's pretty neat for me. :D

    Good news though, I'm nearly done with my Creative Writing MA. I've handed in my dissertation, and I have just one more piece of coursework left to do.

    And, yeah, I'm still working on stuff. I'll upload stuff... Erm, eventually.

    2 comments · 301 views
  • 364 weeks
    I'm STILL still here! ...Sort of.

    As of 06/05/2017, I'm still on FiMFiction, but I'm also studying a master's degree in Creative Writing, and have a sizeable amount of coursework to do, as well as a dissertation proposal, and a 15-20k word dissertation to write. So I'm still here, all you very small number of people who do take the time to follow me (and thank you sincerely for that!), but I'm not going to be very active here for

    Read More

    9 comments · 286 views
  • 408 weeks
    I'm still here!

    Thanks to all three of you who are still following me. I am still coming up with stuff to write for this site, though The Manehatten Project is on the backburner for right now.

    0 comments · 236 views
  • 427 weeks
    The Manehatten Series and Changelings.

    With regards to the notion of Changelings in my series, I don't think I need to go into extensive details about the fact that they're pretty much a stand in for whatever popular scapegoat demographic we have in the real world; it's something I plan to explore in more detail later, perhaps develop some backlash for some of my characters who stoked the flames for it later on, but at present it's

    Read More

    0 comments · 182 views
  • 431 weeks
    Downvotes Aren't Helpful Feedback.

    I've mentioned this on one forum thread already, but I'm going to say it here too.

    Read More

    12 comments · 270 views
May
6th
2017

I'm STILL still here! ...Sort of. · 5:34pm May 6th, 2017

As of 06/05/2017, I'm still on FiMFiction, but I'm also studying a master's degree in Creative Writing, and have a sizeable amount of coursework to do, as well as a dissertation proposal, and a 15-20k word dissertation to write. So I'm still here, all you very small number of people who do take the time to follow me (and thank you sincerely for that!), but I'm not going to be very active here for a while... Well, I'm not all that much anyway, but... Less so. Sorry. ^^;

Report Ddraigtanto · 286 views ·
Comments ( 9 )

Good luck on that, friend. It sounds like a real gauntlet. :twilightsheepish:

4522689

Thanks. I do have my hands pretty full with the degree, yeah. But regardless, good luck to your endeavors as well. :)

4523175
Thank you, Ddraigtanto! :twilightsmile:

I completely understand. Success in school an Pony FanFicing often don't mix well. Like oil and water usually. I wish you the best of luck in your studies! Don't feel too bad about it though. It took me a month to check up on this site again because I've been busy. :ajbemused: And at least you have some quality content (unlike me still rocking a solid 0 Stories)! :rainbowlaugh:

4573563
Thanks, Tangle. :)

Things have gotten a bit quieter as of right now, so I am secretly writing against at the moment. Got this little thing planned for a human story of all things. Yeah, it's got a bit of an air of the 'human goes to Equestria' story, it's quite a saturated genre, but I do have some elements which I believe I can fall back on to make my attempt slightly more interesting: if nothing else, the protagonist of this particular fic I got planned isn't actually a brony, but has to go to Equestria, just to deal with a pony curse she got stuck with, thanks to some botched packaging from someone who actually DOES want to be the lead of a 'human goes to Equestria' story. Should be quite interesting, I hope.

However, I'm not uploading it until I've finished it properly; I'm quite sick of my page being filled with stories which are all WiPs. So this one goes up when I have something complete to show the world.

4573776
Your human story premise sounds interesting. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of the Human in Equestria genre, but yours sounds different from the usual premise of "Brony magically goes to Ponyville!" or "Random person who has never/barely heard of MLP goes to Ponyville and makes friend with everypony just cuz'!" Hopefully your story will be more interesting. Now you've made me excitied to see what you will write! :pinkiehappy: Unfortunately, this excitement will make it seem so much longer to me until you are ready to publish! :raritydespair:

I can understand why you want to publish a story in full. As a reader, one of my personal pet peeves is that so many awesome stories are unfinished. I understand that it is a lot of work on the writers' parts to make the great stories they do, but I can't help but feel at least a little annoyed that I can't find out what will happen in the story until the next update. :flutterrage: If there ever is an update... (RIP all the dead stories out there...:pinkiesad2:)

And that's part of the reason why I haven't posted a story yet, because I actually want to have a completed story before publishing it. (Well also that I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, and as perfection increases, progress goes down. Exponentially. :applejackunsure:)

4574261
Yeah, I'm not a fan of mixing humans and human cultural elements with Equestria and pony culture; I was very soured to that concept after a run-in with a Brony who was a Jehovah's Witness, and decided to put his faith, unchanged, directly into MLP, to such an extent where he'd put various religious figures in it as his own OCs, and all the good-guy ponies were inexplicably religious all of a sudden. It was... It wasn't very good, just because it lacked any sort of class.
Of course, it's not especially fair to criticize if I can't suggest how to do it better. How do I do it better? Well, swallow my pride, and actually try my own hand at it. Injecting that sort of human culture makes a lot more sense, when humans are directly interacting with ponies... Enter, Equestria Girls. I don't think that town ever got a name, but it's clearly, clearly, American. From this, we can deduce that the portal to Equestria is not only on Earth, but we can narrow it down to being somewhere in the United States. Then, consider the Friendship Games movie, where several different portals were opened between Equestria and Earth, and viz versa, and boom: That's how you explain human elements in Equestria and Pony elements on Earth: Ponies and humans have gotten trapped in each other world.

Course, I'm not stopping there! The Friendship Games happened two years ago, and human aware of Equestrian magic, and Ponies aware of Earth have to work together to ensure that everyone and everypony is helped get back to their own worlds... But what do you do about the ones who want to stay? And, what do you do about the ones who integrate, but tell their companions about their home world, and people want to go to the other places?
But, as I said, none of that matters at all to our protagonist! She's just freaking out, because she's touched some horseshoes, and now her legs have turned ponified, and she's trying to figure out what the hell just happened to her, and how she can fix it. Yeah, that a spoiler, but it's a spoiler from the very first chapter of the story, so you're not getting THAT spoiled. ;)
I should also note, none of these characters are going to be author inserts. I know it's hard to avoid putting a bit of yourself in the characters you create, but it's a common trope of these kinds of story, so I'm going to take a different approach.
The main character of the story is Mahdia Davey, a 3rd Generation Pakistani-British woman, studying History and Politics (the closest to being author insert part of her character!) at university, in the lovely little city of Nottingham. She's home alone in her dorm over the summer holidays (since she doesn't get on with her parents very well), when a package arrives, in a horrible state of damage, for her roommate, Claire Trotter, a rather short, pudgy Welsh pegasister (yeah, I'm Welsh, so there's more insert ^.^;). The package contains a pair of golden horseshoes. As soon Mahdia touches them, they vanish in a flash, and she's horrified to discover that, from the waist down, her legs have been tranformed into an anthropomorphized MLPony. Keep in mind what I said before. She's Pakistani-British. The only known portal to Equestria, where she might get some answers, is in the middle of the United States of America, in 2017, complete with ALL the problems that might bring. Drama!

Yeah, it's a bit of a tragedy, I certainly understand what you're saying. I will admit, a lot of my stories in Pony have slowed some. I'm a slow writer at the best of times, but I've also been working on some non-pony stuff, both for the Internet, and for university. However, my uni classes have finished completely, and I only have two pieces of coursework left to do, both due in September. I have time to unwind, and try to carve out some work for Pony. If it helps, I'm three chapters in, and I have a completed synopsis for this story I have planned. It WILL be another long one, but the chapters themselves are much shorter than my previous stories (about 1-3k words long each, compared to 5-10k+ like I've done before).

Heh, I hear you, friend. I hear you. ^.^;

4574759
Interesting head-cannon you have for your story. I always like to try to analyze "ponyland" scientifically, like, how did all the same plants and animals like apples, strawberries, oranges, bears, blue-jays, and squirrels all evolve similarly on Earth and on Pony-Planet? Seriously coincidental convergent evolution? :rainbowhuh: And what are the orbital mechanics going on in their solar system? How does that all work? :derpyderp1:
Your idea of exchanges of human and pony culture makes sense I guess, so I'm excited to see where you are going to take it!
I applaud your efforts in avoiding author insertion! You sound like you're having better control over it in your characters than I'm having in mine! Of course though, I also think it's important to share some of our individual experiences with the characters we created. I feel it makes them a little more believable and also helps to share our experiences in an interesting way.

4579529

Yeeeeah, I'm basically handwaving a lot of the more magically-influenced mechanics of Equetria to an extent; the sun and moon mechanic is something which really doesn't influence the story very much, but we do know how it's handled already. Enough powerful unicorns can do the necessary spells themselves, and for all the non-bronies who might be reading the story, they'll just assume the sun and moon just operate in the same way they do in real life. Then, well, there's things like Fallout Equestria, where it just seems to keep happening even when everypony's dead.

I'm honestly not that bothered about exploring how Equestria works in more detail in this story. I can have Maddie and Claire go all confused boggle eyed at how Equestria works if I ever make a sequel about them LIVING in Equestria, without any of the rose-tinted view of a person who both knows about Equestria completely, and really wanted to live there from the start. For Bronies, there's no real sense of exploration here: We KNOW Equestria already. That means I really CAN'T have the main character be a brony, it has to be someone unexposed to the story. Claire undermines this a little, but... Yeah, I might have an idea or two on how to fix that.

But thank you. I'm going to bit my tongue quite hard now, otherwise I WILL just spoil every last detail in the end. :twilightsheepish:

Login or register to comment