Tumbleweed talking Tumbleweed! (Part One) · 1:19am Jan 15th, 2018
SO.
Once again, I'm hanging around and procrastinating from working on my ongoing (and currently somewhat terrible) 'original' fiction attempt, and I haven't even started outlining that 40k thing I may or may not work on ... so, naturally, I thought I'd be silly and self indulgent on FiMfiction. Woo?
So yeah. I started writing pony-fic back in April of 2011, and started posting my pony fics here in January of 2012. Crazy to think the cartoon and fandom both have been around that long. And, like I mentioned before, I'm feeling terribly self indulgent, so I figured I'd do a retrospective commentary on my various pony stories. Kind of a 'director's commentary,' as it were. The whole ... dozen of you reading this would be interested, yes?
Still, with 37 stories (so far!) and over 350,000 words between them, that's ... a semi-respectable body of work. Or, well at least as 'respectable' as fanfiction can be. I might look at one story a week, or I might lump some of them together based on theme/era/whatever, or some combination of the two. But for now, let's take a look at the very first FiMfic I ever wrote, What Do You Do With a Drunken Unicorn?
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Man, hit the fandom with a bang, didn't I? I'm not gonna say I was the first fanfic author to write a "Drunk Ponies" story, but I'm probably close.
See, I had gotten into FIM a few months earlier-- at the time, I was teaching ESL abroad, which made English language entertainment hard to come by. But there was a silly pony show on Netflix, and there you go. Another thing worth noting about living abroad is that booze over there was pretty damn cheap, even if it was often pretty damn terrible. You couldn't have a gathering of expats without a couple of liters of cheap beer going down, and, uh, yeah. So I'd usually wind up watching the pony show on Sunday morning while nursing a hangover. As you do.
In any case, I realized early on that Applejack was named after liquor-- and so, while bored (and probably drunk), I hammered out a little under two thousand words about magic ponies getting hammered. I'd dabbled in fanfic for other shows/games/whatevers before, often with a satircal bent, so writing What do you do with a Drunken Unicorn? was honestly fairly easy. It's a credit to Lauren Faust & co. that the characters they created were so well fleshed-out that a rando like me could just jump in and 'get' their voicing down right off the bat.
This reminds me of something mentioned in Eric Lewald's Previously On X-Men, a book about the making of the old X-men cartoon (which is a must-read for nerds of a certain age, but I digress). In it, he describes the "Winnie the Pooh" rule, or the "Sex in the City" rule, in which one can immediately tell which character is saying any given line, just from the dialogue alone. The Mane 6 absolutely fit into this niche-- and so, while I wasn't aware of said rule at the time, it made writing What do you do with a Drunken Unicorn? stupidly easy.
This fic also was the start of one of the key aspects to my pony-writing: comedic juxtaposition. I mean, you have cutsey magical ponies, but seeing (or, well, reading about) them getting tipsy and talking about guys is unexpected, and therefore hilarious. Honestly, I'm something of a hack in that most of my stories basically boil down to "Let's put in something that would never be allowed on the show!" and ... there ya go. Most of my early stories revolve around this conceit. Hell, most of my later stories revolve around it. I mean, I've done Ponies + Booze, Ponies + Beards, Ponies + Transformers, Ponies + Flashman ... there's a lot of stuff you can add to pony, I guess.
In any case, the story also got featured on Equestria Daily, back when the fandom was young and any pony content could get six stars. Does that make me a fandom celebrity or something?
So yeah. At the time, I figured What do you do with a Drunken Unicorn? would be a one-off story ... and, well, look where we are now. Yay?
THE GAG NOBODY GOT
I'm a comedic writer, obviously. Some jokes will land, others ... don't. Which either means I'm writing stuff going over everyone's heads, or (more likely), the bit wasn't too good to begin with.
Even still! In What do you do with a Drunken Unicorn? there's a mention of a pony named Moonshine discovering how to ferment alfalfa, and I am inordinately proud of that joke. I mean, Moonshine's a perfect pony name! It's probably the name of your terrible OC who's Luna's daughter or something! And now I'm explaining the gag which makes it not funny anymore.
So yeah! There's a little bit about my SECRET PONY ORIGIN, not to mention the first, shameless, silly story that got me writing fanfic again. Stay tuned! I'll hammer out some words about Friendship (With Benefits) is Magic next week! Or possibly sooner, possibly later than that depending on what I'm up to.
I mean, at least a couple of you are still reading at this point, right?
Hey, don’t excuse away your six-star fic by saying it simply hit the center of the pony Overton Window; it’s objectively a well-written comedy! (And no accident, judging from the rest of your work.)
Yeah, this is amazingly well done in MLP. I wrote a scene where Twi is waking up from passing out, with her friends talking around her, where I challenged myself to write fragments of dialogue with no attribution that would nevertheless be perfectly clear as to which pony was speaking. Turned out it wasn't much of a challenge at all.
Wait… nobody got Moonshine? I think it must be because it’s just that nobody mentioned it. I certainly got the joke… but my mom’s family comes from backwoods Arkansas, so maybe that’s just me. (But I doubt it.)
From a purely selfish perspective, I hope you keep writing pony fic long into the future, particularly with Flash and Golden. Can’t get enough of those two!
But if you get your non-pony thing into publishable shape, I’d love to read that, too! Good writing is good writing; the inclusion of ponies is just a plus!
WDYDWADU? works amazingly well even today. I trust Princess Twilight has learned to drink more responsibly. (That alicorn constitution may help!)
Oh, we got the 'Moonshine' joke, it was just so obvious that it really wasn't funny.
The rest of the fic was good, though.
Sometimes I wish I could've jumped on the fimfiction bandwagon early. I didn't publish my first pony fic till 2014.