LOVELY FAREWELL: If You Give a Little Love Postscript, Volume 1 · 5:36am Dec 4th, 2017
[Since IYGALL has been such a massively long ride, I figured there's too much for me to talk about in just one blog post. Today's is more cut-and-dry history, while tomorrow's will be more of just random thoughts I had at various points while writing. Also, just gonna warn you, I do crack some dumb jokes in this section]
January 4, 2014. A lot of authors don't know exactly when their ideas come to them, but for IYGALL, I can trace an exact date, place, maybe even time. Some tiny idea fragments had been in my head for a while, but that was the day they all came together. I was home from college for the weekend, my dad was asleep on the couch, and I was watching a pretty darn good new episode called Rarity Takes Manehattan. If I'd chosen to fast forward through a very crucial part, IYGALL might not have been a thing, but the important thing to know here is that I, Quillamore, actually watched the credits.
Quick show of hands: how many people do that for every episode these days? Nowadays, I mainly watch them if there's a new chara I'm curious about or if the background music is different for the episode. Any other time, I zoom through them, and the theme song most times, too. (And no, don't take this as a slight to MLP, especially once I reveal that I never once fast-forward through We Are the Crystal Gems or the Gravity Falls theme. I don't hate the theme, but I can only really take it in small doses, and-)
Anyway, that credit scene is probably one of those things that'll flash before my eyes as I die, because the minute I found out Suri's assistant was named "Coco Pommel," my brain cells started rubbing together like nobody's business. The first thing I thought was not "what a clever Chanel reference," but rather "Pommel looks like pomme. Pomme is the French word for apple. She must be related to the Apples somehow!"
And the following couple of months were spent coming up with random fan theories about how she could be related to them. Hey, there are worse things to do in college than come up with MLP headcanons, right? I actually needed the distraction a lot, too, as I was slowly and steadily getting used to two terrifying concepts: A) that a small college with a great English program will have at least ten writers who are better than I am and B) today's creative writing classes focus far more on literary fiction and that therefore I could not go full Rod Serling on the class. (Remind me to write a Twilight Zone-esque dark oneshot later, as I love that stuff.) Additionally, I was getting used to the fact that my main writing platform, Neopets, would never accept me for anything other than oneshots. To give you an idea, the Neopets fanfiction realm is cutthroat, one of the most popular writers also runs a huge fansite, and you don't even get to write shipfics to cope with it.
So anyway, FiMFiction was my "write what you want" spot, and for the first time in a while, I had two big ideas on my hands. One of those, a never-published Neopets fic series was reborn into Actress Square a few years later, but that's a different story. The other was the fragment of IYGALL I mentioned before, that came around before Coco existed. Back then, my pet cause (as every college student tends to have) was child labor in the toy industry, and the proto-IYGALL was supposed to be a big anvil to knock Hasbro over the head with. It was this weird, cringey mouthpiece fic about how the Flim Flam Brothers foalnapped the Crusaders, gave them fake cutie marks with magic, and somehow convinced them that unpaid labor was all they were ever destined to do. Apparently, they'd caught Babs in the operation several years before, and the filly had already become a cynical shadow of a pony.
I found out before ever writing a word of it that Hasbro had established anti-child labor rules in all their factories, and had done so since the '90s. I gained a ton of admiration for Hasbro that day.
I bring this up because somehow, in the process of writing this "Coco's related to the Apples" fic, that image of Babs as a foal laborer snagged onto it. I figured Babs didn't have any confirmed parents, Coco would save her, she would adopt her after Coco quit the job with Suri...
...and it would end there. If You Give a Little Love was originally meant to be a chain reaction fic, in which one act of kindness would flow into another. Hence why I took the title from a sappy Coke commercial about people being nice to each other. Babs would do something nice to Sweetie Belle, Sweetie Belle would pass the baton to somepony else, and we'd never see Coco or Babs again. However, as I started writing it, I actually grew so attached to these two that it became an adoption fic all on its own. That's probably one reason Act I took me so darn long to write: I planned a lot of it as I went, just because these two had so much more potential than just a oneshot.
(That random acts of kindness series, though? Could be a killer collab. Whoever sets up these multiuser series, I see a potential idea headed your way!)
So Act I basically took up a good part of a year to year-and-a-half. (For those confused on my timetable, IYGALL's parts used to be suuuuuuper long, so I rereleased some of them back in June 2016. I'm still going by the long part-timetable rather than the current shorter versions FiMFic lists.) In the middle of writing it, I read up on some common fan theories, and I figured I had to address the Orange thing sooner rather than later, since they're at most Babs' biological parents and at least her distant relatives. So I cooked up the idea of having Coco be invited to a dinner party with the Oranges, have them be about canon levels of snooty, have her realize that one of the Oranges is actually her producer, and then move on after a "boy, is that awkward" moment.
Then Mosely happened. To this day, I still have no freakin' clue how Mosely happened. The best I can come up with is that we were reading some messed-up Victorian texts in English class, but suffice it to say, he completely and utterly changed the story. From there, we had Babs' backstory and a pony who was truly messed-up enough to incite all of this. But even then, that wasn't going to be the focus of Act II. It was going to be more about ponies protesting Spellshock, asking why anypony would perform a unicorn-centric play in an earth pony-dominant town, a particularly prominent protester who called herself Pink Lady, and all that happy stuff.
And then Mosely happened.
His secret wasn't about to be revealed until the Madmare in the Attic arc, alongside Cameo revealing that she was a ghost all this time. (Which was canned because IYGALL's whole "adopting somepony as an act of redemption" thing already plays off Les Mis enough without going full Phantom of the Opera on top of that.) But, quite honestly, I was getting so into writing him squaring off with Scene that I kinda sorta...accidentally had him reveal his secret in the beginning of the act. So that, along with having a totally random dream about him kissing Coco, basically brought us to the Act II we all love to hate. To this day, I still think it's the best out of all of them.
Acts III-IV all suffered a sort of "hard act to follow" as a result of what I let loose in Act II. Not to say I'm not proud of them, per se, but Act IV in particular wasn't planned out as much as it could've been, especially with college wrapping up and Paging Doctor Sparkle releasing at the same time. The only thing I probably would've changed about them, though, is that I wish I'd crammed more Scene/Coco time into them. I realized about halfway through that the "romance" wasn't a particularly quick or prominent one, and while I always wanted this to be an adoption fic first and foremost, sometimes I swore Cameo and Coco got more screen time together. (/and so they became my iygall crackship)
However, I can honestly say two of my favorite arcs ever came from Act III--the reunion arc and the Midsweet arc. I did enjoy the OC development that came from these two, and I hope to figure out how to draw some of them soon. (Valencia's new manecut was absolutely based off of Queenie Goldstein from Fantastic Beasts, and I have no idea if I can ever do it justice.)
Act V was basically doing a bunch of law research, getting hooked on John Grisham, and getting emotional about how the series would be ending in a matter of months. Not too much other than that.
Basically, the main point behind this story's history, though, is that from the beginning, all of you have always helped me out. I'd won kids' writing contests before, but the rush of satisfaction from those was nothing compared to this. I rejoiced at every 50 like checkpoint, every Feature, every time someone came up to me at a con. And somewhere along the line, I realized I didn't have to be "better" than my fellow writing students. I didn't even have to write classy literary fiction. Writers can't control whether they land in the history books, but they can control what they write, and that's where the magic happens.
The magic that brought Actress Square back to life.
The magic that created Paging Doctor Sparkle.
The magic I hope you all experienced after reading If You Give a Little Love.
Because at the end of the day, it was more than just a story to me. It was the thing that gave me hope to write again, and keep writing for good. And hope is the key word for the future, in more ways than one.
After everything, i just will tell you.
tank you
For every heartwarming noment and every part of this world that you kindly show to us.
Tank you
for keep creating your wonderful world until it was complete.
Tank you