CANCELLED -- Twilight Sparkle Versus the Forces of Darkness · 3:27am Dec 21st, 2017
Well, not much else to say. Like the title says, it's over, it's done.
I don't like cancelling stories. This is the third one I've had to do it to since coming to FIMFiction (and one of those was cancelled twice!), and it bothers me the same as it did when I first cancelled Legacy back in 2013.
Unlike Legacy, however, I'm not going to give you the way this story was supposed to end. And that's because, well, I didn't really have anything planned. I know how I wanted it to end, don't get me wrong, but I was making the whole thing up as I went along. The plot was supposed to be intentionally stiff but that was supposed to contribute to the endgame, and so on and so on.
There are several reasons why I felt I couldn't do this anymore. This was supposed to end with an Undertale payoff, but by the time I got around to the ending, Undertale would have been out for several years, making it a bit of a dated payoff. Also, almost none of my planned jokes were original, which bothers me, as I like some originality with my humor (the time I tortured Nova Shine with the Cake Song a la Those Lacking Spines notwithstanding). The story was even way too meta to conform to site rules, though. It was supposed to feature things like the Mane 6 getting thrown into my different fanfics and needing to be rescued and a couple of other things.
Basically, though, I just lost the desire to write this. Without a path to the end, I had no way to see how close I was getting, and no way to tell where I wanted to even go. I got halfway through the third chapter just making one joke, and it wasn't even original. Hell, the April Fools Special was just a copy-paste of the Bee Movie script, compared to two specials where I put effort into a Death Star trench run and a Gilgamesh Final Fantasy battle. That April Fools joke was the last time I touched the story, by the way. As far as legitimate updates and chapter progress, it's been dead for about a year.
And that's a big thing to mention too. Up until I made that chart detailing current progress that's on my user page, I sort of forgot it existed. I meant to put this story on hiatus months ago. I only got around to noticing that today. So unfortunately, it's time to pull the plug. Forces of Darkness was in no way one of my better efforts, it saw too little love from me and the readers, and got left in the dust, so it's just time to put it out of its misery.
