Annual free-for-all story voting! · 1:35am Jan 3rd, 2018
One of the perks I offer my Patreon supporters is that they get to vote on which story idea I'll write next. But now, anyone can vote!
A little late this year, but it's back: I'll let anyone vote on which story I'm doing next, regardless of whether they support me on Patreon or not. I have a list of all my potential story ideas, and just once per year, all of you get to vote on which one of those I'll write next.
Vote Here! Voting ends on Feb 2nd.
More detailed instructions and explanations are on the voting page.
Just three things I want to point out here:
- Please vote only once. That's mostly on the honor system; be fair to the other people voting. (Though I will throw out any results that look like obvious cheating.)
- You'll need to log in to Google in order to cast your vote, hopefully that's not a burden. (Don't worry; voting is anonymous, and the form isn't storing names or email addresses.)
- Some ideas are NSFW (All links/pictures are SFW); the ones that are NSFW will be marked with a [NSFW] before the description.
For those of you who already support me on Patreon: Don't worry, your story voting will go on as usual. This poll is in addition to that. (And you're still free to participate in this one as well!)
For those of you who don't support me on Patreon: That's fine! I love all my fans, which is why I'm doing this -- this one's for you in particular. If you'd like to help keep me writing, or if you'd like to have more control over what I write ... or even if you'd just like to get to 'proofread' my stories a few days early, please consider signing up. I'd be glad to have you!
Here’s hoping for some more Batsy Flufftentuft in 2018.
It's like the November elections in the US all over again. No votes for anything I want.
Could I vote that you write nothing, and spend the year learning ethics and what consent is?
4766014
Me too! ^.^ I hope I have time to do it.
4766059
Nope!
I'm a writer, and writers write.
They just spam the same youtube video.
And nobody seems to want to have an actual discussion about consent, either.
I voted. Though, like last year, I'm concerned, seeing how many NSFW fics vs. SFW fics are in there and because you're not really writing anything else than NSFW anymore these days..... Can you let two fics win again, one SFW and one NSFW fic, like you did last year?
Also, I'd like to make a point for "From the Sidelines" here:
This is a story about a background pony experiencing the attacks of Tirek, Nightmare Moon and other villains. A fic that, for once, shows those events from the view of a background pony rather than the Mane Six.
I think it is very important that this fic wins and gets written. Not for me or because I like the idea so much, but for the state of our whole fandom.
As the brony fandom, we have this great history of taking background ponies and writing amazing, epic stories for them based on just a few seconds of screentime. We only saw Lyra sitting on a bench in a for pony awkward and unexpected way, and we spun a whole universe of stories from this tiny moment!
Unfortunately over the last few years, this positive trend of creativity has pretty much died.
Today, most new fics are about the Mane Six, the Cutie Mark Crusaders, Starlight Glimmer and just very few background ponies and only the most popular ones that are with us since the start like Lyra or Vinyl Scratch. Or about the "Pony of the Year", which currently is Tempest Shadow.
But what is with other, new background ponies who hold huge potential? Lily Longsocks is a filly with the hint of an amazing backstory with her super strength and while she has gotten a bunch of fics in the last two years we know her now, she's far, very far away from the status of Lyra and Co. and still gets fics rather rarely.
Then there is Petunia Paleo, who introduced a whole new aspect of lore and worldbuilding to the show, paleontology in Equestria, yet she has barely gotten any fics in the one and a half years we know her now and her storytelling potential as a character lies unused.
The show continues to deliver us with interesting new background characters and the creative potential within them is huge and vast, yet, barely any author used it and rather writes about the most well-known ponies, even though those hold the least creative potential by now because everything has been written for them already.
There is a certain, big problem here:
The pony fic writing community has become largely uncreative and unimaginative.
This is a problem, because, with as much has been written for the Mane Six and Co. already, readers will get tired of reading the same characters and stories over and over again.
And if they get tired because ponyfics don't offer many new things for them anymore, then they will turn to other kinds of fanfiction or original fiction.
The pony fic writing community is old now and if we want to keep up our writing output, then we need to return to our roots of taking background/secondary ponies and telling their stories where the show or other official media doesn't.
Because at this point, we need fresh air. We need fresh air to keep readers interested in ponyfics and the only way to get this fresh air is by turning to underused background/secondary ponies and writing about them instead of the established and well-known ponies.
And this is why you should vote for "From the Sidelines". It is the kind of story I described here, a background pony story that breaths fresh air into the pony fic writing community and while we don't know which background pony ocalhoun is going to choose for this story, it will offer more variety than the one-millionth story about the Mane Six.
By voting for this story, you will contribute to more variety in ponyfics and do your part for it that we can keep up our pony fic writing long into the future even if you don't write ponyfics yourself.
Please go and vote with a 10 for "From the Sidelines" after reading this, this seems like one small thing to do, but it in the end, it may be the biggest thing of all.
4766284
Well, last year I did the top three, plus an extra one to make sure there was at least one NSFW and at least one SFW...
I was able to take on that much of a commitment because I wasn't attending school in the winter quarter. But this year, I am. School starts back up on Jan 8th for me, and besides a scriptwriting class that will take some of my writing time, I've got two high-level literature classes that come with massive reading loads (Not to mention weekly essays for each that are supposed to be quite in-depth and well-researched). So, while I'm trying to keep up this tradition, I have to be realistic with my expectations of how much MLP writing I'll get done. Thus, sadly, only one story. Even that might be difficult to make good on, but I'll try and force myself to get it done.
Kind of... Yes, my SFW publishing has been very sparse lately. That's for two reasons...
1: Blame my Patreon supporters ... the majority of them signed up for smut, and they usually demand smut in the monthly poll, which means I write a lot of it.
2: There is some SFW progress that you haven't been seeing. I'm working on a gargantuan Lovecraft-inspired tale of how Luna first began her dreamwalking, her adventures in the dream realm, and how she got her cutie mark (not to mention the origin of the moon itself). It's currently at 46,000 words and really still in the beginning stages. I expect it to be epic novel length by the end. But I'm holding that one back, preparing to publish it at a controlled rate, probably a chapter every day. (Rather than publishing it sporadically every few months.)
I think that might actually be part of the problem.
Part of the fun in the early days was to take this no-name, featureless background character and make something special out of them.
But now we're faced with two problems:
- They're already special, typecasting them in the roles given to them by the show. Picking a random no-name filly and giving her super-strength would have been a fantastic story in the early days ... but now that the show itself has already done that with her, that's the only direction you can go, making it less original and less creative.
- The sheer glut of background characters we have available these days makes it difficult for any one in particular to stand out, makes it difficult for writers and readers alike to care about any particular one. Background characters were more interesting when there was a limited cast of them, making it feel like giving one a personality and backstory was accomplishing something meaningful. But it seems less meaningful to flesh out one of a thousand different background characters available.
And then there's the readers' preferences, which have always been a bit of a hindrance to writing less-popular characters. By and large, readers don't come here to read about new characters, they come here to read about characters they already care about doing new and different things. It's possible to get attention and readers with background characters or OC's, but it's far easier to get attention and readers when you can tie in characters that they already know and love.
4766411
Lily Longsocks was only one example. Her super strength is what provides for exciting story opportunities, yes. Where did she get it from? How is life for her with that super strength? Thankfully, one brave author has explored this rather early on after her first appearance in the show.
Then other authors did the same thing more than a year later.
Despite this, though, those aren't the same stories. They have a common theme, but they don't approach it from the same angle.
The first one is an origin story, explaining where Lily got her super strength from to begin with. It got a sequel where Lily dreams of becoming a superhero after getting her super strength and then unintentionally becomes one as Ponyville gets targeted by two villains while the Mane Six aren't there to help. This story deals strongly with the deeper theme that being a superhero is not an exciting game and has Lily realizing that when she got more than she bargained for.
The second story explains her super strength with it that she is, secretly, the daughter of Big McIntosh from a love affair with a mare from years ago. This story touches on her super strength only marginally, it's a mere plot device and the fic is actually centered around Big McIntosh's realization that Lily is his daughter and his desire to form a closer bond with Lily now that he knows the truth.
The third one has a similar basic idea as the first one, Lily becoming a superhero, but it has Lily being completely insecure about her strength and afraid to hurt others, and she begins to fight monsters after Applebloom, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle encouraged her to in order to lose the fear of her strength, to learn to control and accept it and to accept the way she is. It's quite a deep story that deals with Lily's insecurities a lot and is more about that than the actual monster fighting, unlike the first story in my list.
And the last one is an action-oriented short fic, where Lily has the opportunity to have a fight with someone who is equally strong as her, and then gets more than just that, because he is the only who understands how it is to live with such a strength, basically, Lily finding a soulmate.
Finally, there is my fic, where Lily has a secondary role and likes to use her super strength for little, harmless pranks and where I touch on the possibility that some ponies might have prejudices against her because of that strength and see her as bad influence or maybe even as dangerous.
These are five stories about Lily, all having her super strength as the basis and drawing inspiration from that, but each of them does that in a different way and they all read and feel different from each other.
I feel a little silly telling you this, considering who you are..... But every subject can be portrayed from different angles and in that way, used for a multitude of different stories that are all equally interesting in their own way.
However, even though the fact that most of the fics she has gotten so far center around her super strength, it doesn't mean she's tied to that, as this fic demonstrates. Here, Lily Longsocks simply tries to get a letter to her mom in time for Hearth's Warming Eve.
In the end, it depends on the creativity of the individual author what to do with a background/secondary pony and I know this fandom has this creativity, it has shown it in the past already, so there shouldn't be a reason why it can't do so now.
I really hope that what your explanation implies here, that pony authors these days aren't able to look past the obvious aspects of a character anymore, isn't true, because then we have a much more severe problem here than I think.
Though, from my own research and observations regarding this problem, this does not seem to be the case, luckily.
What speaks against that is not only the one example I showed you above, of a fic for Lily Longsocks that focuses on something else than her super strength, but also that even background ponies who don't do much and who can be freely interpreted in any way, like it was the case for every background pony in the first few seasons, don't get better treatment by the fandom either these days.
A better example than Lily Longsocks would be Chirpy Hooves.
On first glance, there isn't much to her at all, a filly who is interested in books who gets then scared away by Pinkie Pie. But if one looks closer, pays more attention, there are several tiny details about her that give Chirpy huge potential for stories in a very subtle way.
Chirpy is one pony who is very suited to be compared with Lyra. Back in the days, Lyra was not doing much in the background. But like with Chirpy, there was a detail about her that made her incredibly intriguing to write for and the fandom took this and went creative with it.
But Chirpy, she hasn't gotten anything and the fandom largely ignores her to this day, for almost four years straight.
It's neither not enough nor too much (or, too precise) potential that makes the fandom ignore new background ponies, this is something I can already tell.
For your other explanation, I cannot answer much on this. Obviously it should go without saying that not each and every background pony can get equal attention. We know indeed too many for that by now.
However, this does still not explain why most pony authors don't do the effort to pay more attention to new background ponies in general and why they don't pick a few who resonate with them for whatever reason to try something new, rather than going the easy route and writing their 1,000th Mane Six fic.
I can give an example for this..... One fic about two ponies stranding on an island and having to fight for their survival there, while they slowly fall in love with each other. A very basic premise that works for literally any two ponies. Yet, the author has chosen Rarity and Rainbow Dash for it:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/382470/surviving-sand-island
This fic might not be the best example, as the author implied in his answer to me after I asked why them, that RariDash is his favourite ship and his OTP, which somewhat explains his choice of characters. But I think it still demonstrates nicely what I'm talking about.
Essentially, what happen these days, is, that the decision which ponies should be the stars of a fic doesn't get made anymore by the roles being tailored for a certain pony, but rather by the popularity of said pony, regardless if a pony even fits a certain role or if there is the opportunity to give the roles to other interesting, but underused ponies.
It is pretty much as you said in your last reason, however, this is creating a black hole of creativity by pony authors forcefully trying to be popular without realizing that this might be the thing that prevents them from becoming popular:
Only until they have read about those ponies so often that they become bored by them and they just aren't enough anymore to draw them into a story.
I see a lot of Mane Six fics these days (general ones, not so much ones that are directly based on a new episode) that get very low attention, even though many of them sound like good story ideas.
While I'm still busy with nailing down the exact reasons for this unfortunate development, if fear of not becoming popular enough is one reason for sticking to well-known characters only, then I can only recommend every pony author to step out more of their comfort zone and tackle to write about underused ponies.
Sticking out of the crowd is a key factor to get attention and success. And if pony authors don't dare to write the unexpected, then of course no one will become interested in those underused background ponies and cling to the popular ones even more, which will result in even more fics that go exactly by the common formulas.
It's a vicious cycle that has to be broken eventually.
i vote for a sequal to https://www.fimfiction.net/story/288366/arachnophillia and https://www.fimfiction.net/story/165594/equestria-in-human
4767528
How would that even...?
4767661
you know you want to baby
4768028
I really have no idea where I would go from the ending of that one...
4768037
with the spider one, you could turn it into a full-fledged story, and the Equestria in human one you could have it be a thing where the object is studied and the ponies react to all the changes.
but really I just want more Fluttershy and spider romance
PLEASE!!!!!
4768058
I mean ... out of all the sequels I'll never get around to writing...
4768097
aww
I still vote for Arachnophilia
also
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/196796/a-rose-for-luna
Finally, Roseluck's special project is complete. Now, it's time for her to request an audience with Princess Luna, and see if her rose really does give her luck.
A short and sweet one-shot ship. Thanks to the overwhelming popularity of this pairing,
As always, I adore getting comments, the more specific and prolific, the better.
4788418
Oh my, I did.
Maybe Dirty Little Secret can write it...
Did I say that?
4788432
please don't leave me hanging
4788464
I mean, at the moment, I barely have time for the things I have to write...
4788467
ahh shucks
4788467
so who are the lucky winners?
4788898
Just made the post a minute ago: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/794716/annual-free-for-all-story-voting-results
Spoiler: Sex Ed: Pony Style won.
The literature classes I'm in right now have a very high homework load.
But the highest SFW story was Badass Nightmare, which I'll try to find time to do as well -- no guarantees on that one, though.