The Safety Bell was Silent: Afterword · 5:00pm Sep 28th, 2017
That's right, it's not just for Oroboro anymore!
So. Recently I completed my very first story for FimFiction. And it has been awesome. I want to thank all of my regular followers from before I began the project who took time out of their day to read what might not ordinarily be your thing, as well as welcome the new people who decided I was worth paying attention to on the back of a smutty mystery. Thank you, all of you, so much. You've made me feel incredibly happy.
Now that the story is done and I don't have to worry about spoiling anything prematurely, I thought it would be fun to do a blog post similar to Oroboro and Bookish Delight's post-mortems of their own stories, just shedding some light on what went through my head while I was writing, what I was trying to do, and how successfully I feel like I pulled it off. If you've read the story and you feel like getting some insight into that (or at least sharing in all my little in-jokes), this is the place for you.
If you haven't read or finished the story yet, be warned that after the break I'm going to be assuming that everyone reading this post has either finished the story or is someone who follows me but had no interest in it for other reasons (coughPresentPerfectcough). That means you will be walking into massive, unguarded spoilers. You have been warned.
There are basically two kinds of stories in the world: stories you write hoping to win over a big audience, and stories you write because they make you and a small audience happy. The Safety Bell is Silent is something I wrote intending for it to fall squarely into the second category, and the very small audience was me, my future husband ChuckFinley, and my future wife Cynewulf. They are both wonderful people, if you are not reading or following them already you are obligated to get on that. Cyne in particular really gave me an initial push to start writing what initially could've just been one of a hundred other plot ideas I've discussed but never written into a full length story.
Given that, I figured that even with the attachment to CTS I'd get moderate to middling traffic at best. The fact that the story's been as popular as it has, albeit I'm never going to shatter blockbuster writer numbers with it, has been absolutely awesome. I initially suspected that most of my readers would resent the nature of the story, but it turns out that smutty pony mysteries starring original characters have a niche and I've been able to win it over. You all are beautiful and I love you.
That said it wasn't just the urgings of Chuck, Cyne, and basically all of the CtS people I regularly interact with that got this story off the ground. it's also a bunch of really personal itches I needed this story to exist to scratch. And since I don't think anyone else was planning on writing it, I figured I'd just get it done myself. So here they are, in no particular order.
Itch #1: The Deconstructionist Clocktower Fic
I'm in love with the Clocktower Society expanded universe in a big way. Some very smart, very talented writer friends of mine are not. Given that it's an expanded universe built around kink it's easy to say that the reason for that divide is I am way more into the carnal aspects of the universe than those writer friends, but the fact is that like ninety percent of my friends are kinky so that's really not the case. The divide's built into the specific kind of worldbuilding CTS engages in moreso than anything else.
The Clocktower Society is a ridiculous setting when you stop and examine it for any length of time. It's a massive BDSM fan universe that incorporates soaring fantasies but also granular rules to guarantee that all of the stories follow its stated ethic of "safe, sane, and consensual". That's not unusual, plenty of stories on FimFic are about consensual kinking. What makes CTS stand out is its embrace of absolutely wonkybonkers goofy amounts of scale. Scarlet Letter's comment on how nobody in CTS knows the meaning of "overkill" is my own. It's a universe that allows consensual kink to dip into the same kinds of excess you usually find in really out-there porn.
I kinda get where some of my friends come from with their attitude to the universe. I see the worldbuilding of CTS as often being silly and worth paring back or changing to find a more focused feel; I have really intense feelings on how badly the PipSub, for instance, breaks the universe. Or the descriptions of some of the mocktail-potions supposedly served by Zecora, which seem to have been written by people who have absolutely no clue how alcohol or gastronomy work: again, Scarlet Letter's little jab in the final chapter is my own.
I can roll with this though, because CTS is silly in the best way possible. It makes a great setting for a kind of Dn'D campaign approach to writing where you iterate on a pre-made setting, pulling every genre and character possibility you can out of it. Most of my writer friends who dislike CTS have the exact opposite approach to how they write things, and would rather retroactively build settings around the kind of character interactions they want. This is fine and I respect them for it. But a fun setting that inspires a lot of potential story threads is itself something to celebrate.
The one thing those friends and I do seem to agree on is that CTS is a universe that needs challenging, though. And that rarely happens in the kind of stories that typically get submitted. If you read a typical CTS story they're usually either a short porn one-shot dedicated to exploring particular kinks, or they're longer stories dedicated to characters coming to terms with their own kinkiness within the setting. That's not to say either of those things are bad, but it represents a really limited range of what both the setting and the characters within it are capable of being.
Like, let's focus on something for a moment: The Clocktower Society has a stable of scientists with a massive research grant who have invented handheld computer technology. The PipSub has massive, far-reaching implications beyond anything CTS uses it for, and is kind of a complete excess in terms of what you need to be able to have safe kinky sex. But they invented it anyway. There are a hundred stories I can think of about developing this technology, about what was going through the minds of its builders, about why it isn't released into Equestria at large yet. But most CTS stories are never going to examine that because they're limited in scope.
That's why The Safety Bell is Silent had to be a smutty mystery, not just a smut story with a mystery sub-plot. That's why the conclusion was ultimately about the resolution of the mystery and the relationships between characters, not about getting anyone laid. That's why I deliberately hewed to genre tropes (okay, that and other reasons). The setting of CTS is big, and useful, and provides a lot of 'but what if' questions. I wanted to ask a few.
Itch #2: Smashing the Myth of "We're All Normal People"
There's a thing in the kink community where we tend to be very insistent on the fact that we're normal and okay people. This has to do with years of stigma surrounding the kind of things we get up to when the lights are off, and also to do with the fact that one of the moral objections occasionally leveraged against us is that we're all just victims re-creating our trauma, somehow. It's tempting to just play the we're normal, it's all normal, we're just great people card. We're not weird!
In a way, the entirety of CTS exists because of that precise impulse. We're Normal and Okay People. We're fine. We're all fine. There's nothing wrong here. See? It's a big safe place for self-expression. Come on, you don't want to be a prude! Get in, enjoy yourselves, the cum bath is fine.
The thing is, this impulse is messed up. First, a lot of us are victims. I have met more than a few people in the kink community who have had really, really messed up experiences in their lives and use the space to sort of deal with it. Some of them do it in a way that's ultimately healthy. Some people... well, some people don't. It's something you have to evaluate one relationship and individual at a time. And even those of us in the community who aren't victims are often using the power-play to cope with things. Anxiety and stress are big.
Or in my case, well. Hi, my name is Scarlet, and I managed to avoid an autism diagnosis until my twenties and nobody can figure out how I pulled that off. Kink is a great way for me to sort of just indulge in a lot of my weird, hyper-focused interests at the same time as I deal with a lot of the social anxiety and irritability that I deal with in my normal resting state of "trying to lead an ordinary life."
The thing is, we don't eve write about these people. We write about funhouse mirrors of ourselves. It's rare to see a kinkster trying to write characters who feel like the kind of people you know in kink communities. Even i didn't quite do that - I'm writing a pulp genre, my character are pulp characters. But I wrote Scarlet Letter because I'm tired of erasing myself from the universes I spend the most time in.
Itch #3: Your Trans Story Approach Sucks And Here's Why
The final reveal of The Safety Bell Was Silent is that Scarlet was trans the whole time. My longtime followers probably aren't surprised by this. What's surprising to me though is that this puts my fic into roughly .0000001% of anything I've ever read. Because I'm writing about a trans character in a story that isn't about them being trans.
Like, okay. Nothing against really good depictions of what it's like to be trans. That's great. But so often, so very often, if I read stories about people like me they aren't really stories that have plots, they're stories that have issues. When a trans character is in a fic, it's usually a fic about how they're trans and being trans is rough and you know what, sometimes I'm just tired of that. Sometimes it starts to read like a very special episode from the '90s. I'm not a special episode, I'm a goddamn person. I want to read about characters who, you know, do things. Go on quests, fight crime, solve mysteries, rewrite history (woo-hoo). I don't want my life reduced to a footnote of "and being trans is suffering". Thanks, I know, I live there.
I've always had this bias. Too often when people try for trans or LGBT or neurodivergent or whatever "representation" in their stories, they forget that what most of us really want is for the stories to be stories. Having a trans character at all is a big deal, but you know what's a bigger deal? Them just happening to be trans while the rest of the story is about them doing things that cis protagonists do, unquestioned, all the time.
Sometimes I just want to read about a lady who used to be a dude solving mysteries. There aren't many of those kinds of stories out there. So I wrote one.
Itch #4; Book Titles
I had way, way, way too much fun coming up with Equestrian versions of authors and novels I'm fond of for Scarlet to enjoy. If you missed any of the in-jokes, here's a comprehensive(ish) reference. Let me know if I forgot any:
Short Stock's Market Crash: An amalgamation of several books about financial fraud I've read, but mostly The Big Short.
The Mare Called Stardust Comet: Not really based on anything specific. In my head it's got a similar premise to Steven Universe.
The Mare who Was Thursday: The most direct allusion in the entire story. This is G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, a book I cannot possibly explain except to recommend it. It's great, trust me. Chesterton was a newspaper columnist and armchair theologian in the vein of C.S. Lewis, but he was also a contemporary of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and the mystery-writers' club. His Father Brown stories are classic examples of the golden-age mystery formula and quite good.
The Zodiac Murders of Sunrise City: Another pretty direct one. This is The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada, one of my favorite mystery novels and one of the precursors of Japan's "new orthodox" literary movement. It's been translated into English and is now available in E-Book form, so I highly recommend tracking it down. On that note, Elegant Scene is a reference to the mystery novelist Ellery Queen. The real Queen was actually the pen name of a pair of authors, but the other details are correct. Queen was a huge influence on both the classic Japanese mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo and on the writers who formed the "new orthodox" movement.
The Rose Without a Name: A reference to one of Cyne's actual favorite novels, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Much like the real novel, it's as much a theological study as it is a mystery and leans heavily into that. Perique's comment that she prefers "mysteries with a capital M" is a reference to the concept of Divine Mystery as it's understood by Christianity and similar faith traditions, so I really couldn't have her reading anything more perfect.
Rose And Maiden: A shamelessly horrible pun. Scarlet Letter is describing the rough premise of the anime Rozen Maiden, a series which i think is pretty neat and worth watching.
Alright. Wow.
I'm stopping here. This is plenty of information for now. If you all end up wanting to hear more about my thoughts on mysteries in general or the story, I might someday make a more focused follow-up post.
In the meantime, well. I've got A Study in Neon to outline.
I'm pretty sure the anticipatory squee I just made could only be heard by dogs.
In any case, thank you for this look over the inspirations and in-jokes that drove your first story. Personally, I do find the Clockwork Society having no sense of scale more than a little ludicrous. Especially the PipSubs and the conspiracy that involves wha seems like half of Equestria. Nice work in the deconstruction there.
The Kayfabe of CTS is delightful, I think, mostly in that it is absurd in so many ways. Credo quia absurdum--I believe it because it is ridiculous. The gall of CTS, married to its internal consistency, produces a charming and powerful effect. It creates a mythopoeic feeling, in its own way, without actually needing the myth. What an odd happening! But it happened.
The Clocktower feels like a Thing, and its conventions feel slightly larger than the base mundanities they represent. One of the reasons I love CTS is because it is often trying to do what I have often tried to do, which is suck the mythic marrow from the physicality of life. One can observe silence and see that silence can be a lot of things. Likewise, one can extract from any mundane scenario a mountain of meaning and poignance. CTS refines the base (in that it is very materially oriented, not in that it is bad) sexuality and attempts to refine it into an Idea, namely Devotion.
Does it succeed? I think in a handful of spots it really has, but the attempt is what I enjoy.
Dunno why I'm getting name dropped for this one. I don't actually do story postmortems all that often. I'm too lazy most of the time to try and organize my thoughts about my work. =P
Still, congratulations again for completing and publishing a story. It feels good, doesn't it?
Now that I'm, done with the shipping contest, I'll get around to actually reading it. I swear.
4680870
gdi Oro get your butt in my fic.
God you're a nerd
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Takes one to know one, dweeb.
Looking forward to Neon, especially what bits you've told me about n_n. Also yay Rozen Maiden
You made one hell of a debut, babe. My ego would be unthinkably huge if my first ever story had been as good as this one.
That was definitely one hell of a debut you made into the writing world. Now I'm hooked on both your stories and your blogs, so thanks a lot for that.
And yeah, Clocktower is a wonderful place, and I really like what it stands for, but damn is it weird. I kinda want to write a story about one of those scientists, maybe one who isn't really into kink but hey, grant money is grant money. Coming up with ways to implement outlandish sex fantasies is probably the least icky thing you could do to gain access to near-unlimited research funds, and it's kind of fun too in its own way.
I think we all have our own way of dealing with the over-the-topness of CTS.
Some embrace it, of course. The wilder, the merrier.
Some try to deconstruct it. I had that somewhat in mind when I started my CTS fic, but after the first few chapters that started taking second seat to telling the story the characters demanded. It looks like you've been better at keeping that intent front and center in your plotting.
What I've ended up doing is shrug and try to ignore the parts that don't fit the scale and focus I need. You'll probably never see me mentioning a pipsub or a phaser, though I do keep my mentions of play money blurry enough to be consistent with phasers. I think that works reasonably well.
Viewed in that way CTS is not so much a monolithic setting as it is a smorgasbord of setting elements in a common framework for kink. I think I like that -- it's somehow very MLP, very Equestria.
im speechless honestly, I have rewritten this comment multiple times and I feel like im repeating myself but this story was magnificent. I loved every part of it and I am happy to hear that you are making more.
Left some comments on the story. I did my best to leave my Blunt/Rage Reviews hat at home, but I wasn't able to discard it entirely.
Overall I thought it showed promise, despite some serious flaws.