The Document of PGS: Interluna (Night Flight) · 2:46am Jul 31st, 2017
"Interluna" was what I called this one in my head.
I don't usually do document blogs for interludes (I don't even submit them to EqD, to be honest), or if I do, I include them in documents for full-length chapters. This one, I decided to elaborate on a little bit.
Not that there's a whole lot to say. But, while I didn't accomplish all my writing goals for July, I'm happy that I at least got two editions of Horsepionage out the door. I figure, why not keep that momentum going a little longer?
Check below for a couple of behind-the-scenes notes.
There's only three of them this time.
1. The first is about something I forgot to talk about in the previous document: geography. Back when I started PGS, there weren't any official maps released for the show, and I kinda had to speculate regarding what was where, both in and around Ponyville. When the first official map was released, I remember being relieved that it didn't majorly contradict what I already had in mind; everything was more or less where I needed it to be. But there are still a few discrepancies here and there.
The biggest one is the Everfree Forest. I wrote PGS on the premise that the Everfree sprawled out east of Ponyville, and while the official map does place it east of Ponyville, it's really more oriented to the south. It's also, er, smaller than one would think. Editor Man gave me a talkin'-to over its placement in 16, but the reality is that I can't really make everything more geographically accurate to canon without mucking up things in previous chapters.
Besides, season four blew my layout of the Everfree castle straight to hell, so... there's precedent here for me ignoring or tooling around with canon. Heh. But I am trying to make the effort of keeping this closer to series canon, so... assume that the Everfree (and Rambling Rock Ridge) are rotated a few degrees counter-clockwise, relative to where they appear on official maps. The other stuff's more a matter of geographical distance and size; Canterlot's probably farther north, there's more land between Appleloosa and Dodge than what the maps might suggest, southern Equestria (or "the frontier," as it's known in PGS) is considerably larger... etc.
2. I'm intrigued by a comment that Lauren Faust made on twitter, years and years ago: "Celestia has loved and lost. She will not love again." You don't live for a thousand years without falling in love at least once. Being ageless means experiencing the agony of outliving friends and loved ones, time and again, and one imagines that outliving a lover, watching them grow old and knowing that you can't do that with them, must be a sort of agony unto itself.
I figure, if that could happen to Celestia, it could probably happen to Luna, too. And Luna, being the younger sister, is probably less equipped to deal with the maelstrom of emotions that such a loss would unleash in her.
The point of all this is to put those two sentences of cuddly flashbackery into context. This is the second time I've brought it up in-story, the first being way back in chapter eight, when Luna briefly contemplates the marriage of Shiny and Cadance. When she was younger, probably at an early point in her rule, Luna took a lover, and had to watch them grow old and die. That loss served to destabilize her, contributing, over time, to the conditions that gave rise to Nightmare Moon.
I don't know how much I want to talk about this, because it's not impossible that I'll want to write that story someday, but I want to give you an idea of what was going through my head when I wrote those lines. To me, they're important parts of Luna's character, in this story, and others in which she might feature.
...The flashback, as originally written, was also a little bit longer and more detailed. But, for the record, it is intended, in both forms, to be a depiction of cuddling, not sex (at worst, maybe post-coital cuddling... or, okay, most likely post-coital cuddling). It wasn't until after Editor Man prevailed upon me to shorten it that I realized "hey, wow, he totally read that as Luna getting laid, and everyone else probably would have too. I'm gonna buy him an apple pie for pointing this out to me."
3. Luna's playing out a role that I originally envisioned going to Rainbow Dash, before Luna became an active part of the storyline. More on that in a future document.
And that's all for now. See you again real soon.