Force and Consequences- Author's Note · 7:47pm Jan 7th, 2018
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I started writing this story one year and one day go. The seed that’s grown into Force and Consequences was an idea about inverting the dynamic between two characters. In the beginning, the story was supposed to be a little one shot. It was supposed to be a quick little break from writing my first long story. I naively and arrogantly set out on this adventure thinking that somehow I would be able to take an incredibly dark and traumatic situation and turn it around into a trashy little shipping story in 5,000 words or less. I then proceeded to write more than 5,000 words in the first twelve hours. I should have known (when I finally forced myself to stop writing and take a 45-minute nap at 4:30 AM so I could go to work, function as a mom, and be a responsible human being for the rest of the day) that I’d started something much more significant.
Alas, to my shame, that horrible original premise stuck around for quite awhile. Thankfully, I received a wonderfully professional and critical review that helped me see the differences between the story I was trying to write and the story I should be writing. The reviewer gave me very good notes on the first few chapters and called me out for using sexual assault as a plot device, which is just not an ok thing to do. I never intended to treat such a serious and relevant topic so lightly, and my only excuse is that I honestly didn’t realize what I was doing. Once I realized my mistake, the horror haunted my dreams- literally.
So, I made some major course corrections, and I started doing my research for the story. Before that, I’d mostly been working from my own existing knowledge and assumptions; along with a few life experiences that didn’t even come close to the level of trauma I was trying to depict.
Thus, I present my list of Resources and References. The list is in no way comprehensive. It’s organized semi-chronologically by the date I looked at the information. Some entries have my own annotations and some have direct quotes from the resource that I found particularly helpful. Most of the links are to scholarly articles or websites providing information about sexual assault prevention and recovery, but there are also links to relevant blog posts and the National Sexual Assault Hotline (US).
One of the most disconcerting parts of researching this story was researching and trying to understand the mindset of sexual offenders, and then to represent some cross-section of that group in a realistic way. Some of those resources are listed as well. All the links are SFW, but some of the blogs include references to Reddit threads and other materials that may be NSFW.
I am still working through the chapters to eliminate all trace evidence of that horrible original premise, but I’m sure it will continue to lurk in the dirty corners of the story like that stuff that gets stuck in the crevices between couch cushions and never really goes away. All, I can say is that I couldn’t get rid of all of it without burning the story to the ground. Maybe that’s what I should have done, but I can’t be sure. My hope is that those traces will be few and far between and that they will not distract from the bigger, hopefully much better, story I tried to craft in the end.
Even when I was writing with my misguided premise, I felt strongly about keeping Rainbow’s experiences and reactions not only believable but as real as possible given the lens I was using to tell the story. Perhaps that is why the story naturally started turning into something much bigger than I originally thought it would, even before I got called out for making plot decisions that were in incredibly poor taste.
I’ve made no attempt to write a story that represents the experience of sexual assault victims everywhere because there is no way to do that. Each victim has their own story. The combination of trauma, post-traumatic symptoms, and coping mechanisms is unique. They always are. That said, the coping mechanisms (the good and the bad), the physical reactions (or their human equivalents), the emotional responses described, etc., are not entirely of my own invention. They are grounded in real, reported responses and documented patterns from sexual assault victims.
My hope is that I’ve written something meaningful and worthwhile. Yet, I must acknowledge that this story is not for everyone. I’ve thought a lot about all the readers I may have already turned off by tagging it as a dark, mature, non-con, violent, story with smatterings of profanity; but the story is what it is. It’s brutal in some parts. Please take the trigger warnings seriously.
I never expected to be a writer. I’ve always been an avid reader that liked the idea of writing but never thought I had the creativity to write something worthy of a reader’s time. I still don’t know if I have the talent or creativity to write something worth reading, but in writing Force and Consequences I’ve come across a story that is definitely worth telling, a story I couldn’t let go. I hope I’ve done it justice.
As of today, the page count for the master draft of this story is 480 pages. The listed word count is about 225,000 words and there are 41 chapters listed in the table of contents. Maybe that’s enough to really tell this story. Maybe it’s too much. I’m sure I’ll be editing and rewriting for months ahead, but I’ve written the bones of the entire story. So, I’m confident that someday I’ll get to mark it as complete.
The basic publishing schedule will be a new chapter every two weeks on Tuesdays. There are some sections that just had to be split into multiple chapters, but they really should be read together. In those cases, I’ll post the first chapter the Sunday before my usual Tuesday update.
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Dusk Raven, for being the first person to agree to take a look at my story. Thank you for checking in on my progress even after you told me the story was too traumatic for you to work on.
Thank you, Typoglyphic, for that brutally, but wonderfully, honest and accurate review of the first few chapters. Without your insight, I fear this story would have ended up being I what I originally set out to create and that would have been terrible.
Thank you, mikemeiers, for agreeing to be an ongoing editor. Knowing that there’s another set of eyes trying to catch all my comma splices and out-of-character moments is what finally made me brave enough to start posting this story.
To everyone else, I hope you enjoy the story. I welcome feedback and greatly appreciate comments.
As always, thank you for reading.
Headcanon Notes
Force and Consequences does not have a specific place in the existing timeline. I drew on aspects of the show, but characters were my focus more than the timeline. Nothing after Season Five is accounted for, and I freely admit that I was pretty generous about cherry picking my references from the show and some of the Equestria Girls movies.
That said, the story is meant to take place approximately a decade after Season One. It’s my personal headcanon that the Mane Six were the pony equivalent of late teens or early twenties in Season One, meaning they are early to mid-thirties for this story (this isn’t a hard and fast thing, that was just the general mindset).
Yep, I'm following you.
I'm proud to have helped you with this despite the emotions it brought out in me - which of course was a sign that your story was having the intended effect. I wish I could have helped out more, though...
I actually have a few more questions, some of them hypothetical, but I'll reserve those for PMs. Also, it seems you're still working on this, so if there's anything I can do to help further, I'm listening.
You definitely have what it takes to be a writer. And a good one at that.
The story isn’t just something “worth to read”, in my case it’s helping me in ways to cope with the fact that I was, at a 99% possibility, raped as a small child. (Only “learned” about it over the last year because I suddenly started getting flashbacks, and with some past events that wouldn’t make sense otherwise.) I can’t even press charges, since I only know from the sniggering in the flashbacks that it’s a young man, maybe in his 20s. I have no idea how to tell my parents (long story short, their (alcoholic, smoking) parents had to watch over me and my sis when we were really young) without them thinking I’ve finally completel lost it.
Sorry I don’t know why I’m even telling this.. .-. The point is that I for one can say that what you write is very VERY much what it’s like.
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Thank you. I'm truly glad that the story can help you in some way. I hoped it would have that kind of capacity.