On Magical Realism, and other pitfalls of writing in a fantasy fandom · 5:19am Oct 10th, 2017
I was reading a short bit of literary fiction today, Kamisama, a Japanese story about a man who goes on a walk with a new neighbor of his with old-fashioned sensibilities, who has no name but when asked what people should call him replies "Anata [the Japanese word for 'you,'], but when you say Anata please say it with the kanji [the Chinese characters, 貴方] rather than the hiragana [Japanese script, あなた], because it sounds better to my ears."
Also this character is a bear.
Magical Realism is a genre of fiction most often associated with Latin American writers, most famously Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, among many works. Magical Realism is predominantly realistic (i.e. it is not Fantasy or Science Fiction), but it includes prominent use of fantastic elements such as magic or the supernatural, usually in the service of giving the story more focus on some idea or concept the author wishes to express. With Marquez, and the Latin American school, Magical Realism allowed for social and political commentary that wasn't possible with pure realism. He used magic, in other words, to express the impossibilities and contradictions that, for much of his life, tormented South America.
Anyway, back to our talking bear friend. In just a few sentences at the start of Kamisama, we're introduced to a main character who is an old-fashioned bear. None of the other characters seem particularly perturbed by this fact – it is noteworthy that he is a bear, and his old-fashioned sensibilities catch their attention, but they make no particular bones about the fact that he is a talking bear.
I am a fan, if you hadn't caught on by now, of Magical Realism as a literary style. When done well it can be delightful and ingenious and subversive in ways that other styles struggle with. It is captivating and entertaining while also being able to convey complex ideas, and peel back the layers of society to accomplish literature's greatest requirement: make the reader ask a question about themselves.
It's also pretty much impossible to use when writing in the MLP fandom because, you know, everything's already magic. Talking bear? We practically already have one. One of the main character's whole shtick is that she talks to animals. For everything else there's unicorns or spells or harmony or whatever. Magical Realism struggles when the setting is already high fantasy.
It can still be done – I've written a few stories that I think stretch the bounds of realism in an admittedly unrealistic world. Small-town Charm is a story about a billion spiders who visit Ponyville once every five years for a week-long festival. The Adventuring Type is about floating icebergs and Rainbow Dash's quest to become the greatest iceberg wrangler of them all. Big Princess Week explores the fact that alicorn princesses are actually highly social carnivores and once a year a minotaur National Geographic team comes to make a documentary special about them.
But, reading Kamisama, I realized that the power of Magical Realism is in its ability to introduce small discrepancies in reality, and force its characters to react to them. An old-fashioned talking bear. For Marquez, time that flows backwards, and streams of blood that sometimes run up hill. Little things that add magic to a realistic world.
So, here's a question for my writers friends. We know what makes writing in the FiM fandom easy (a deep, open world, likable characters, a vast scheme of pre-made conflicts), but what do you find that makes writing hard? What can't you do with pony stories that you wish you could? Post in the comments below!
Oddly enough, the first thing that comes to mind is aliens. The discovery of an existence that is completely unique and so unlike your own that it turns your perception of reality upside-down. With ponies, there are already multiple species of sapient creatures. There are monsters of every imaginable shape and size, so throwing in a new one won't be much of a shock. To me, the reality-breaking discovery that we are not alone is something that can only be properly conveyed with humans.
4693265
Not sure why you can't alt-universe away some of those hassles and honestly humans (also known as two-legged talking monkeys) are usually presented as sufficiently odd to ponies. There are probably other but many MLP characters and creatures, especially the sentient talking kind, seem to be four legged. I would think the crystal mirror? and alternate realities/timelines which have become basically canon dilute the matter a bit more than Ursa major's or dragons or changelings.
Also it probably works best with humans because we have as yet to discover any evidence of life remotely as sophisticated as us and not for want of imagining or scoping out the galaxy/universe as best we can. It is entirely reasonable thus far for us to believe that we are alone. Odd to a scientist perhaps who wishes to know how any why and wonders what if we weren't. So a sudden discovery or arrival of aliens would be a shock especially if they were actually in our galaxy and we completely missed out on detecting them.
I love describing characters cook and play instruments, because they're so good at occupying a character's body while leaving their mind focused, and it gives me extra sensory detail to work with.
Hard to do with hooves.
Don't think about hooves on guitar strings too hard. Don't think about a hoof holding a chef's knife too hard, either.
It's really hard for me to do dark action in a way that fits the show's world, I feel. I know people like what I do, and I love what I create (for the most part). But I feel that I'm not experienced enough to be doing what I really want to yet.
One of the issues I spend the most time thinking about how to overcome regards discarding canon in alternate universe stories. Generally, readers regard everything as canon unless you very specifically say otherwise, which gets in the way when you want to throw some set of expectations and concepts out the window without disproving each and every one of them one at a time.
Say one wanted to write a story about Sunset Shimmer's backstory, for instance. Most everyone has either read or heard of the comics, so they're going to expect her to be Princess Celestia's star pupil who became obsessed with ascension after seeing herself as an alicorn in a mirror, and eventually ran away. Do you drop a notice in the story description that says the comics aren't canon? Somewhat heavy-handed and implies the story can't speak for itself. Do you use a point-of-divergence AU? Now you can't go in with the expectation that it will end the same, and in fact will inevitably tick some people off if it does, even when all you want is to write about her backstory. You could even try introducing her in a setting so vastly different from everything everyone knows that they can't even begin to reconcile it with canon and just sit back and watch, but that walls you out from even trying to approach or play with things that officially happened.
Playing with peoples' expectations is an extremely powerful tool when everyone is guaranteed to have a certain set, and you know exactly what that is. Getting them out of the way when you just want to do your own thing is another matter altogether.
I suppose one problem I have writing MLP fanfic is working with an ever changing show canon, that in many cases, I disagree with the direction it goes. A couple examples being where the characters are a little too forgiving of the actions of other certain characters, and willing to be their friends. Another being where the royalty of Equestria are treated ... non-royally we'll say. Considering most of our princesses are regularly defeated so often that it's going from comedic to outright tragic, in addition to what they actually do in Equestria being pretty ambiguous a lot of the time. More than a little bit of me says things like, "no, what you're doing is wrong!" "No! This is bad writing! Why are you doing this to your characters?" "Are you looking beyond what you're writing just to get through this episode?"
So it's a major struggle with me to keep with canon, when I disagree with that direction of that canon. Now I'm increasingly tempted to treat the canon exactly how the show writers seem to treat it a lot of the time: as a loose guideline, and to just do what I want to do with my stories. I try and keep everything in-character, but there are just elements in the show I have trouble abiding by.
4693265
The difference in humans (or aliens of a different sort if you want) is that we don't come from a world with multiple, advanced, sapient species. That contrast is one that I've seldom seen explored. I touched on it in a couple of my own fics, but not remotely to the degree I'd like.
I'd quote or link, but my phone is being a bugger.
Body language can be tricky to capture in a species where it's mostly in areas that humans don't have. That said, I find a lot of stories that can't be told with ponies are still MLP-compatible by way of either other species or the human worldline.
It's hard to write about social issues, because ponies just aren't inherently mean, selfish, or any of the other negative traits that define humanity. :B
Though she, in particular, is weird even by Equestrian standards. She lives with a whole menagerie of animals and her best friend / possible lover is a super-equine Chaos Spirit -- she almost literally has Tea With Cthulhu on a weekly basis. We might do well to consider what the Mane Six look like from the Point of View of ordinary Equestrians.
One can't really do a story about the futility of fighting political corruption in a world in which the supreme authority is a super-intelligent, immortal benevolent despot. Or, rather, though from the Ponies' POV (and Celestia's own) the problem seems intractable, from our POV it looks rather easy to fix to at least the point of tolerability.
4693265
To put it another way, the Ponies have always been only one of numerous sapient and even civilized species on their world, so the knowledge that more such species exist isn't that shocking to them. They're even used to the notion of extradimensional aliens.
For instance, in my Shadow Wars Story Verse, the mere existence of the Night Shadows isn't what scares them -- it's their power and malevolence. Which is to say that, for the Ponies, it's more like a standard major-hostile-Power problem than what we'd think of as First Contact.
4693376
Certain episodes in the canon would disagree.
But, yes, I do notice a general trend for people to have griffons engaging in plot-required vices, rather than assigning that role to a pony character.
4693360
Yeah, one thing I realized when I started writing EQG stories was how much a difference characters with HANDS made.
That may be why I focus more on dialogue than anything.
4693376
Nah, ponies are those things, they're just...generally less those than humans are.
I think it's hard not to write, but to write something that utilizes things like this and incorporates a more 'literature-like' feel and influence from genres/certain content because of how many other people don't. Ponies are treated as simple human stand ins that are expected to behave, think, feel, and have a culture exactly as humans do, along with the same technology and social problems.
People don't adapt the social problems to fit ponies or presume that they can exist at all at other times. Like, let's say if you wanted to write about a transgender pony in modern Equestria, they wouldn't have the same experience as a transgender person on Earth in the modern day. Or if someone wanted to write a fem!Clover/Platinum romance, it'd likely wouldn't be the same as modern F/F romance stories, y'know?
4693324 points out a good deal of other stuff. Canon contains a lot of bad writing, bad execution, bad ideas/world-building, and bad characterization now that was kind of on this nasty downward slope since about S5. It becomes better to just ignore a lot of what it's been presenting in the show, comics, and movie and just write what comes to mind and have creative freedom in some way. I mean, why wouldn't you want to write sweeping historical dramas or high-fantasy adventures in a world full of magic and many rich cultures with ponies that can be very cute and have the capacity to learn and grow in so many ways instead of just eking out plain tales about whatever in a world where everything is starting to feel like its like artificial in how sweet it is? It just doesn't seem to work.
But within writing? I guess that it would be organizing a lot of how the culture works, and making them feel like horses because that is something a lot of people seem to neglect, along with how important magic is to their world, and the fact that they have long-lived/immortal beings, so, 'how would they function?' and all that.
I posted a blog about a similar topic, covering how writing things like differing body language or speaking patterns is a good way to provide a bit of subtle insight into cultural discrepancies between species.
It's sad less writers want to do stuff like that, because it's one of the first things readers notice, and I have never seen anybody ever complain about it being done. The fact of the matter is, we aren't writing in a familiar setting or using familiar species, nor is it a setting/species that is really all the developed. The show gives us little clues into the world but not much beyond that, which fortunately frees up a great amount of creative freedom for us writers to explore different things.
It's just so sad people would prefer the simple route of "write them like they're typical humans," instead of playing with the little nuggets of magic that a fantasy world offers.
4693444
I'm a firm believer that canon is mostly overrated to some degree. I think that, if a writer can use characters or settings the show presents but swing them in a more complex and well-written way, they should, even if it may contradict some detail that the show presents. We should stay true to the core of the show, but it seems many writers are afraid to venture too far, which sadly takes a toll on their writing potential.
I've been really impressed with what people have been able to do. My imagination is so narrow and specific that I'm often floored by the creativity of writers in this fandom. Stories of horror, introspection, and even romance have been done remarkably well by many pony-writers, even though the show doesn't explore any of those themes to a satisfying extreme.
I think the innocence of the ponies makes for interesting reactions when placed in unusually tense or high-stakes environments. I like how shocked the ponies are when they encounter things that we in the real world find realistically grim. I think that's why "dark" or "serious" fanfics are often more enduring and memorable than some very good fun ones, simply because -- when done well, and when maintaining the characters' canon personalities in a more complex world -- they surprise us and allow us to see deeper into these characters we love.
That being said, to answer your question about what's hard to write in this fandom, I've always found it difficult to 'stay on course', and to be tonally consistent through a story. Because of the nature of the show, it's easy to revert back to FUN, to make the characters say silly things or do cartoony things even while the world is crumbling around them. I can't quite find the balance between the humor of the show and the weight of where my imagination wants to take a more serious story. That's almost exclusively my own downfall, though, as I've seen that balance written very well by others.
4693358
Technically, we did have that world like a hundred thousand years ago, when several branches of the human tree still existed alongside us. Until they all died or we actively helped kill them off.
4693593
Pretty sure we fucked at least one of them out of existence.
Which reminds me: sex and ponies. I've written it, I've read it (not least CiG's own Redemption, which uses sex the same way an old master uses light), but I can never quite get over the fact that it's a, for want of a better word, base pursuit.
Let me clarify that, because it sounds snobbish. I love sex. It's great. It's also a bit silly when you get down to it, full of awkward noises and sticky things and silly expressions. Real sex is mundane; the mundane doesn't fit in high fantasy. High fantasy, if it had a sex scene, would use it for some greater purpose, the same way it uses battles and magic and gods and prophecy and scenery and everything else. It probably wouldn't necessarily use it to advance the relationship between characters, or if it did it would turn it into some beautiful, idealised thing.
So I find it hard to write sex, first because it's all a bit silly, and second because it doesn't really fit in the world, at least if you take it at face value. MLP is idealism reified. Sex... isn't.
Not that it's going to stop me writing the next scene of my current fic.
Discord being reformed, only not really, only yes really, only hah no fooled you again, only yes really againalicorn population explosionOver-powered characters. Lots of story ideas seem to require explanations of why Celestia / Luna / Discord don't deal with the problem. So I wrote to Hasbro, pretending to be a 7-year-old girl, and asked them to please kill them all off in Season 8. Keeping my fingers crossed.
4693295
Oh, yeah. It's no problem in a light piece, but in a serious piece... argh. Also, writing body language.
I got nothing as interesting as your magical realism example. Hmm, maybe science fiction. MLP SF doesn't interest me much, because the tech doesn't matter. It can't be much more than academic in a world that already has powerful magic. And the technological problems
The main difference between Fantasy and Magical Realism is that in Fantasy, magic is supposed to be constrained to some extent by rules, whereas in Magical Realism magic and other forces don't have to follow any rules or logic.
4693358 4693593 4693676 Red beat me to it. Humanity as a whole has the same view of neighbors as crabgrass or kudzu.
4693444 In any world where you have multiple writers, you have wide variations in canon. Take for example, the Simpsons vs Babylon 5. Simpsons laughs at canon, or on occasion laughs AT canon. (The scene where Mr Burns is looking at Maggie and says, "Cute kid, why do I think I've seen you before?" and Maggie makes a finger gun is hilarious in context, but baffling without knowledge of the other episode) Babylon 5 was written almost exclusively by JMS and it holds tight to the integrated concept of the series without many creative wanderings.
4693425
I feel like those ponies are exceptions.
Also, they show up more the longer the show goes on. :B
I've been hoping to write, among many other things, a real crossover between MLP and science fiction. There are a few problems with this, though, and I'll try to list them out here.
1. Science fiction (the real uncut cocaine shit) tends to focus on high-concept questions, more specifically ones that revolve our station in the universe as human beings, and what it means to be human and all that. MLP, thematically speaking, is incredibly simple in its themes most of the time, sometimes to the point of obnoxiousness. The two are so different that trying to invoke the former in the setting the latter can seem jarring.
2. MLP is about magic. Duh. And it better be, because on a scientific level it has very little in the way of internal consistency. If you're going to write a sci-fi story, be it hard or soft, you want the internal logic that story to be consistent while also leaving room for exploration. Simply put, it's very challenging (if not impossible) to have magic and science cohabit in the MLP universe.
3. Ponies and humans are, both culturally and mentally speaking, quite different from each other. To ponies, friendship is so important that it seems to eclipse every other existential factor. For humans, the question of what matters most is far more ambiguous and individualistic, since few things are treated as universal truths and most things come down to personal preference. As much as the ponies are meant to be surrogate humans, they're not us.
4. There's a lot of debate revolving around whether or not we have free will, or if such a thing even exists, and some of the best works of science fiction deal with that very question. But in the MLP universe, there is no question; it's made pretty clear that destiny is a legit thing, that there is only one "correct" series of events, and that characters are often forced to do what they must, rather than what they can.
I suppose it all comes down to the fact that science fiction as a genre specializes in "What if?" scenarios, and while MLP does leave a lot of holes in its world-building and characters for chumps like us to explore, it is ultimately a fantasy series, and the fantasy genre doesn't regularly handle "What if?" scenarios like science fiction does.
4694008
It all started with that dang Iron Will episode, and the Farmer's Market of Scum and Villainy.
Normally, I love gender-bending as a way to shake or even shatter characters' worldviews so I can force them to drop their masks and explore more of their inner selves (because we/characters see gender as such a foundational piece of our and each other's identity, yet you can flip it and nothing "should" change, unlike, say, turning into a bird or tossing the person into a new setting. It's basically the purest way I've ever found to throw a big monkey-wrench into a character's worldview and see what shakes loose.)
...but, as you say, in a setting like MLP, everyone's already so used to the strange and unexpected that it lacks that special spark that makes it so effective.
Now, sci-fi does present an alternative, in that you can speculate about society and psychology by hypothesizing worlds where changing sex multiple times in one's life is easy and common, but that also doesn't really work for MLP because, if you're going into that speculative mindset, the "one central change from the norm" is already occupied by "What if magical equines, rather than mundane hominids?" and piling on a second puts them into an "AU of an AU" situation where it takes a lot of skill to keep things feeling relevant and interesting.
4693295
And this is why I get a headache. Because I have the undying need to explain it and other weird shit somehow.
4693996
The Simpsons is also a mostly comedic show intended to give you a laugh with zany antics and comment on pop culture - it has only so much consistent world building.
But MLP? It's one world, and one whose genre isn't rooted purely in comedy. The characters are dynamic (or are meant to be) but still have numerous defining features. Writers make mistakes no matter what kind they are, but there's a point where a viewer/reader/freaking space alien can lose suspension of disbelief over the apparent dips in the writers skill at certain points in time. It's why I expect a season one episode to be rough compared to, let's say, season six. They get paid to write professionally and have been able to do well. When there's so many of them to work together and look over things, and a show bible and other resources, making what could be seen as a rookie mistake or a doing something tired and cliche just leaves such a sour feeling at best. I'd never expect one of the show writers to write at the same level as an eight year old, and I wouldn't expect an eight year old to write things at the level of a professional writer.
I could go on about the horrible, icky things that are opinions forever, but I'll just leave it at this.
4694244
I forgot to mention that, in the MLP setting, the closest substitute I've found for that kind of "inducement to character exploration" is various types of fics with changelings as main characters. ("X is a changeling" stories, stories where a changeling learns about Equestrian culture for the first time, etc.)
The utopian assumptions of Equestria make many kinds of mysteries hard — not impossible, but much harder — to write. I tried doing a Blueblood-gets-killed murder mystery in a Writeoff round. It didn't go over terribly well, partly because it required some big statements about major Equestrian figures at odds with the principles of the show and Equestrian culture, in a way that wouldn't have made anyone blink if they were human. (I mean, come on, with human characters we've got Game of Thrones.)
I've tried several times to write stories that reconcile canon, modern Equestria and realpolitik. I keep failing. It's not like they're opposite poles of a magnet, but it sure can feel that way when the attempts keep coming up wanting. I think perhaps it's more like building an antimatter drive: there's massive power in those opposites meeting, but unless you have ridiculously precise and rigid mechanisms limiting their interactions, all you get is a messy explosion.
That's kind of a working-with-established-characters thing, too; it's really tricky finding ways to make show ponies, especially Mane Six or major figures, bend from their canon status as exemplars of virtue. I think the closest I've come was Hearth Swarming Eve, but I screwed up the ending. Social Lubricant pushed boundaries there, too; it's done remarkably well for me in terms of views and upvotes, but for some people Rarity/Dash's behavior is a dealbreaker and they have some very good arguments for their position. (Everyone who enjoyed it seems to handwave that character destruction as part of the crackfic nature of it, and I think it only succeeds via refuge in audacity.)