When A Pony Calls - Redux · 5:29pm Jul 11th, 2017
Hey folks! It's your favorite/not favorite pain in the arse author, Seven Fates!
You're probably wondering why you see me making a post about an older story many years after it was finished, right? You might think, "Wait, Seven... wasn't this done and over with? Why bring it back up now?" A couple of reasons, to be honest.
Way back when I began writing When a Pony Calls, it started out as just a silly little side-project while I worked on what was, at the time, my main project: Displaced. It was intended to not be something I took seriously, and therefore only put minimal effort into. When I got close to finishing Displaced, I guess I just started taking the story's plot more seriously, especially when it was so well-received for what began as a Self-Insert fic. People really seemed to like the adventure of Soren Friedrich—and later Silver Script.
The story's reception is what drove me to evolve Soren/Silver into their own person, rather than a literal Self-Insert. As When a Pony Calls went on, and Soren was changed more and more by Lyra's memory imprint, you could pretty much see the difference in his personality as it went. It was a fun project and people kept wanting more.
In spite of this, the story was, and to a certain extent to this day, largely unpolished. A few days ago, you could look at the first dozen or so chapters of When a Pony Calls and see the difference in quality to what I write today. I say 'a few days ago' because that's changing.
As of July 10th, 2017, I'm going back and giving the story some proper TLC. I've gone back through the story, from 'Chapter 1: My Son, the Unicorn Mare' up to 'Chapter 19: Responsibility', to fix a number of issues. One of the biggest issues present has been dialogue tags and ending a spoken segment with a period, which you just don't do. There's also been some word-tense issues—Soren/Silver's POV is always first person present—that I've tried to tidy up. Can't forget the whole lay/lie thing, either.
To a lesser extent, I've made various tweaks to dialogue and wording of things, both to make things clearer, and change emphasis on certain points. One of the biggest things among these wording tweaks is the 'gelding' issue that came up a few times in the story, and was a plot point later on in the sequel. It was never my intent for it to seem like the Equestrian justice system was biased against stallions, nor was the idea for physical castration of a pony to be the actual punishment. Ideally, it was supposed to be just Lyra's own poor word-choice leading Soren/Silver to believe they actually gelded stallions. To better reflect this, the word appears much fewer times when not being spoken by Lyra, instead being referred to as being sterilized: a much more neutral term.
My editing run is ongoing, but I do not expect to take more than a few days to complete it.
Despite the title of the thread, When a Pony Calls is not going to be pulled and re-released to celebrate this long-overdue editing run; rather, it's merely a reference to one of my current gaming fixes, Metro 2033 - Redux. Fun game, that.
Being Sterilized is still a horrifically biased and barbaric punishment which is still heavily leaning towards sexist connotations.
The story still disturbing mess than pretend to be light-hearted romp
I did really enjoy the story but found the morality in it pretty horrific. Between the entire one sided gelding thing (even worse with sterilizing as it doesn't fix the problem but permanently damages the male, not to mention that there was nothing on if the mare did the equivalent while in heat, if she abused it in any way, or any rules or exceptions with magic, like say tricking someone into a body swap and using the stolen body), how Lyra gets off completely free for all the crap she pulled (not truly consensual body swap, sexual assault where the punishment went to the stolen body and not her, plus much more), and the rather horrid treatment of Soren, with the bias against him (and not against Lyra), especially when he was going insane from Lyra's memory imprint slowly killing him and causing him to lose his mind. If they were willing to sterilize Soren's body and took a princess gender swapping it (which ended up permanent and forced the body into being a pony) to appease them, why not push to cut off Lyra's horn to stop it from killing the person she essentially tricked into a body swap? The actual events, laws, and reactions felt more like they were there to push the story forwards rather than world building which painted Equestria in a horribly biased and prejudiced place when that didn't seem to be the intention. Still, the story itself was great outside of that and I'm planning on reading the sequels.
4598672
Unfortunately this story like remain the same mess that it always will be that scare any normal and sane individual off
4598670 I have a folder in GDocs that hasn't been touched since 2013, if that counts.
4598672 As far as the gelding bit goes, I think I referred to the actual process as being rendered [reversibly] 'dormant' and 'inert' via magic rather than true sterilization or gelding. I actually am trying to work in that wording without killing the whole misconception that Silver Script would later have in the sequel.
4598690
That raises a different problem, if it's reversible and temporarily disables sex drive, then just doing that to Soren's body and reversing it before the swap back seems a lot less drastic than switching the body's gender without consent. Twilight and Lyra did it without any contact with Soren during the entire debacle, so he didn't push for it with his misconceptions either. Now Twilight just used magic to forcibly transform a species she's unfamiliar with (which did lead to unforeseen consequences, including it being permanent) without consent instead of a reversible temporary spell that only stops sex drive.
4598707 I don't deny that, either way, flawed logic comes into play. On the flipside of what you've pointed out, rather than being stuck as the opposite sex, Soren would have likely been unable to have children at all. Just as his body absorbed the spell that was only supposed to temporarily invert sex, it would have incorporated the spell that rendered his sexual organs inert and dormant. Either case would have been undesirable for him.