2012: The Lemuracolypse - Part Three: Horsemen of the Apocalypse · 12:03am Jan 16th, 2018
2012: The Lemuracolypse
Part Three of Twelve - Horsemen of the Apocalypse
In 2012, I was desperately needing some distraction. I let Vimbert, my other editors, and the rest of Ponychan know all about my self-imposed sabbatical. I recall receiving ample support--not so much from the reading community of Equestria Daily. As we all know, that there was a veritable desert of literary rapport, and I had learned to not expect much in the way of comments... which ironically made the intense desire to upload End of Ponies at the site all the more redundant... further adding to my gloom.
Thankfully, though, holy pillow-humping panties were we in the biggest goddamn explosion of brony popularity ever. The start of 2012 was midway through Season Two--which to this day I still consider to be the absolute best season the show's ever had (nostalgia goggles). I remember episodes from that time with tender-loving-toasty-warm nostalgia salads. There were cold saturday mornings where I crawled out of bed and lurched onto brony network streams, where episodes would be broadcasted before thousands of fellow neckbeard internetters. You'd have the obligatory hardware store amv, and then it was a full fledged flail into horse heaven... and the trembles of excitement were real, my friend. I remember watching the opener to S1 and thinking to myself "Discord is voiced by some dude named John De Lancie? (Star Trek glands belatedly kick in) Holy goddamn fucking shit it's John De Lancie!!!" Sharing the moments with chat was a priceless experience that can never be duplicated. So much of my early-early writing shiet is synonymous with the run of Season Two, because it was the first season that I actually enjoyed poni poni poni "live."
And did we have fan works? Boi, lemme tell you, we had fan works.
Let's face it. 2012 was the Friggin' Year of the Cartoon Horse. I mean, of course it was. What other year has Tara Strong shaking her drunken butt so hard in public it can make spaghetti leap into the stratosphere?
Long story short, I was submerged in plenty of enthusiastic colleagues who had my back... even if I didn't really brush shoulders with any of them. I felt the same overall sensation that I first experienced back in mid-2011. I knew that I was still part of something, and that made the initial EoP sabbatical all the more manageable because the friggin' joy was still there.
Every day I'd come home from work and there'd be a bevy of new images on Deviantart, videos on Youtube, or interesting articles/commentary on EquestriaDaily. Long story short, ponies were here to stay, and I had faith that... although I was floundering for the moment... I would eventually get back on my tentacles.
But what to do with my material in the meantime? Sh00r, people had gotten to know me on Ponychan, and I know that my uploads to EqD at least got me hits. In a way, I almost hoped that marsupials out there would get lonesome for regular EoP updates, but a part of me probably knew better. If only there was another website where I could share my horse fiction so that others might be exposed to it--hey, what the heck is this place:
Okay, confession time. I'm cheating a bit here. In truth, I first discovered and posted to Fimfic in 2011. I just didn't... give two shits about it. No offense to Knighty or anything, but I didn't think anything truly stood out about the place when I first learned about it in the Fall Season that I first uploaded EoP. After all, it wasn't getting the gargantuan number of hits that EqD was, and it appeared to me that just about anything could get story-approved, while it took a herculean effort to burrow one's way through the moon-humping editorial board of EqD. I had spent most of my pre-2011 days submitting things to Fanfiction.net... and--as we all know--the literary equivalent of popcorn farts could get through the upload system of Fanfiction.net. I expected more of the same of this place.
However, Fimfic was (and always has been) pretty dayum gorgeous a website, which won me over compared to... say... PonyFictionArchive. Ultimately I figured... meh... if some marsupials were gonna be reading things on Fimfic, then I might as well upload to that whinny-watering hole as well. But back in 2011 I was a different, special slice of douchebag, and I felt that EqD deserved to have my EoP uploads "first." The plan at the time was to upload each arc to EqD and then upload the same arc to Fimfic after the next subsequent arc was uploaded... like fucking map packs to Call of Duty or some garbage. Sooooo... in other words... Fimfic was the cesspool repository of sloppy seconds. F'naaaa. Crazy, huh?
For the most part, I mostly didn't understand Fimfic or how it worked in early-early 2012. I didn't even understand the Feature Box. Back then, it was a weird Window Insert at the top of the page that would cycle automatically through horizontally-arranged bullet points. I don't even remember when the site started differentiating between popular uploads and popular reposts. It was all Greek to me. Also, the notification system didn't precisely work. I mean, at first, it did, and it would send you e-mail pings when people commented or liked or group-added your content. But inexplicably, those e-mail pings stopped, and I could no longer keep track of who or what was reading my stuff. On top of that, I just... didn't really care. So it wasn't until much much later that I finally caught up to just how much attention my stuff was actually getting on the (legitimately) superior and (dramatically) improving website. More on that later...
Still, it's kinda funny in hindsight. I wasn't "horsefamous," and outside of Ponychan my name didn't mean a whole lot. Early 2012 was this small pocket of invisibility that I didn't get to enjoy much after April of that same year (boy does that sound assholish to say). So... for a while there I had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about shitposting a random story with a non sequitur title featuring uncanny valley raping cover art. I vaguely recall coming home the evening after I uploaded that story in particular and I saw it linked across the banner at the very top of the page.
"Huh? What? 'Featured?' What does that mean? Ehhhhh whatever. Moving right along."
Art by darkflame75
Not to sound like a zen hippy or nothing, but putting EoP to the side is probably one of the best "brony" decisions I ever made. Why? Because it got me to stop taking shiet so seriously and just... enjoy the community around me. One by one, I started making acquaintances in the fandom.
One of the first notable marsupials I ran into was none other than Darkflame. This melon fuck was working on bits of artwork on Ponychan, and one or two of them were tangentially related to EoP. Since I was a whore who would write for fan art, I was all for conversing with him to make sure his illustrations came out as Skirtsian and accurate as possible. Naturally, this led to random conversations and nightly tentacle-bumping. Darkflame would go on to make some pretty killer Princess Luna art for many future conventions, and he also did cover art for many of my fics, including Funeral of Derpy Hooves and that other story that nobody reads.
Naturally, since I was "on sabbatical" from EoP at the time, the soon-to-be-dead-elephant was a common topic of conversation. To this day, Darkflame and I continue to joke that somehow he's responsible for the death of the fic... since I more or less gave up on it around the same time that he and I began talking online. That basically makes the dude a living brony curse, and I couldn't be more proud of him.
Art by darkflame75
It was either a conversation with Darkflame or someone else during this primordial period of marsupial-making that I was poked to look at the "shortskirtsandexplosions" thread over in Ponychan (yes, I had one of those). "Why? What's up?" I asked. "Dude, this guy's been livestreaming fan art of your shiet while broadcasting text-to-speech audio narrations of End of Ponies to his watchers." "Wait, what?" "Go and have a look."
And I went.
And I looked:
That, my dear marsupials, is a scene illustrated straight out of the Petra Arc-Kaizo Edition. It depicts Scootaloo lost in the subterranean wreckage beneath former Cloudsdale, stumbling upon the corpse of Rainbow Dash after the Cataclysm has rendered Equestria a barren wasteland. It's a deeply-melancholic sequence that I was incredibly proud of writing at the time, and seeing it drawn so fantastically was a source of supreme inspiration for me. Especially since all I had felt about the Petra Arc up to that moment was nothing but remorse, disgust, and failure. Realizing that someone had chosen to draw something based on the "Open Beta" draft without asking for anything in return--and broadcasting it to a group of loyal followers via stream while listening to the goddamn story being read by a computer to boost--was Mariana Trench levels of flattering.
I came into this fandom wanting to have my abstract literary testicles massaged by the talent of artists. So, naturally, when I saw this delightful gift of an illustration, I had one predictable reaction: "MOAR."
So I tracked down this semi-elusive gentlecolt. Turns out he was a dude named "insomniacovrlrd," a veteran of the more... fuzzy sides of the Internet Art House. In 2012, he was adopting the moniker of "Spotlight" and was venturing boldly forward into the realm of poni poni poni doodles:
I was immediately impressed by his poni poni poni arts--the colors and shading and dedication towards the show's aesthetics while pushing for another, higher level of smexxiness. I learned that not only had he been reading EoP with intense dedication, but he had supreme lurve for the failed Petra Arc--which was a breath of fresh air for me. Turns out he had another fan art in the works, based on an intense action scene in the story that everyone hated but him--apparently. What's more, I could actually watch it(!) live(!) on the interwebs(!)
Although it was 2012, I hadn't ever really partaken in personally-broadcasted livestreams before. So this was new territory for me. Also, Spotlight on the whole was generally less into drawing ponies and a bit more intro drawing dicks and the cartoonish orifices they occasionally went into. Naturally, this was the primary content of his livestream WIPs. But I didn't mind too much. Remember, 2011 had already happened, and Skirts was well worn-in by the wankery of Second Life. Besides, Spotlight did a lot of other stuff in his Livestream... like work on music or perform LPs of games or just generally faff about, all the while being charming and entertaining to the audience he had gathered about. I wasn't the only person perving in him either; I had arrived late to a party that was already filled with other bronies and personalities, among which was the illustrious SamRose aka Jake Heritagu, author of Silent Ponyville fame.
Already I could feel that I was bumping elbows with worthwhile members of the horse-horse community, but that wasn't the real reason I stuck around. Spotlight was just such a cool guy, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. Eloquent, provocative, inspiring, sarcastic, flattering, critiquing... everything you would ever hope to have in a fascinating human being. I found myself hanging on his Livestream--not so much to see references to my own works (although that was a plus)--but mostly to see what he'd be talking about, vidya gaming with, or working on next. He wasn't a one dimensional token background friend from a romantic comedy either--he was a remarkably complex individual who wasn't afraid to call one out on their bullshiet, especially in regards to artistic integrity and creative ambition. For every cheerful conversation we had, there was an equally twitchy debate over the merits of horsewordery or pony art farts or what-have-you. Spotlight instilled in me early on a very healthy philosophy: to question everything... and to never settle for anything below the absolute best. He was a true artist to the core, and how fitting that best pony for him was none other than Rarity.
I did lots of chill stuff during this time in my life, a period that must have lasted three to four months in early 2012. I downloaded and played Minecraft, which was an interesting and mellow waste of time. I re-installed TF2 so I could join Spotlight in some well-meaning frags. I lulz'd out loud as Spotlight hopped into Gmod via Livestream and narrated romance dramas with ragdolls of Applejack and Rainbow Dash. I finally got relaxed enough that I actually worked on a oneshot.
For months and months, starting in late 2011, I had fallen in love with... the idea of Applejack and Rainbow Dash falling in love. No, believe-it-or-not, I was not an Appledasher from the very beginning. Instead, it was something that I gained overtime, a religion inherited osmotically by the predominant memes of the romantic bronies out there. I would gradually end up developing a end-all-be-all "Appledash" headcanon in my brain... something that would finally make it to the written word in 2013 when I began the pathetically self-destroying epic that is Appledashery.
But long before then, shipping stories was an untouchable subject for mesa. And it's not because I was homophobically opposed to lesbian horse hugs. Far from it. Back in 2011/2012, I had a gazillion reservations in regards to writing etiquette... reservations that would see themselves almost entirely dissolved by 2013. One such nugget of reticence revolved around how friggin' cheap and spaghetti-inducing it was to write fanfiction solely for the sake of getting two cast members to lock tongues.
So when it came time for me to cave-in and write an Appledash story, I went the subtle route... which has caused many to comment how Spelling It Out amounts to 16k words of pretentious nothingness culminating in platonic friendship... not romance. To that, I say, look harder. Pay close attention to what Rainbow Dash does for Applejack and why she can't elaborate on the motivations behind it. It has to do with who she was in S1 and S2 and how she goes about expressing (or not expressing) her feelings. I mean, do I have to... spell it out for you?
It felt good to upload Spelling It Out, cuz it showed that I could do poni poni poni content that fell outside the singular narrative that I once felt I was bound to. And while I may have been taking a "vacation" of sorts from EoP, in truth the fanfic found ways to come back and haunt me... even when I was keeping my distance in order to clear my head.
In the thick of my cozying-up to Spotlight's Livestream, I caught wind of someone else doing a creative tribute to the dead-and-dying Petra Arc:
Piercing-Sight was a poni poni poni dude who evidently shared a lurve for all things Scootaloo and Cataclysmic, hence the musical instrumental featured above. Eventually, he would join the pool of like-minded marsupials whom I chatted with in early 2012. As fate would have it, the dude was headed off to a two-year "mission" outside of the country. Sound familiar?
I vividly remember poor Piercing expressing extreme woe that he wouldn't be around for when End of Ponies eventually came back from its hiatus and culminated into a complete literary project (whoops). At the time, the only person who knew anything about the future of EoP was me and myself alone (I had told Vimbert about the future Rarity Arc and--to my surprise--he was hyped for it). But when it came to the ending I had in mind for EoP, it was a secret I was having to harbor all to my lonesome. In truth, I was bursting for an opportunity to outline and spoil the plotline to someone... just so I could get a healthy reaction that would let me know if I was on the right track or not. After all, the last thing I wanted to do was re-experience the travesty that was Petra arc's calamitous failure.
So, I proposed the idea of spoiling the plotline of EoP to Piercing. After all, he'd soon be leaving on a journey to preach the wonders of Space Mexico to the world. To my elation, he was down for the idea...
...although I doubt that he knew that he was in for an entire friggin' week of hours-long conversations via Steam chat... just to get the dayum plot expressed.
Poor bastard. Looking back, I wonder how hard he wanted to say "I CHANGE MY MIND PLEASE GET ME OFF THIS HORSE HOLOCAUST TRAIN". Nevertheless, PiercingSight--as it turns out--is a pretty cool guy. He weathered the storm, and the reaction I ultimately got for all of the hitherto untold plans of EoP was mostly positive. That gave me a much-needed confidence boost for the overall direction of the fic, and I egotistically felt as though I helped him by giving him ponitastical catharsis for his long journey overseas. Lo and behold, the dude would ultimately show up two years later and find that nothing in EoP had been continued. F'naaaa... oh well.
In the end, those days of conversing with Piercing-Sight gifted me with something priceless. I had transcribed our conversations down into a word processing document. This would ultimately prove useful for the day I finally decide to get off my lazy ass and spoilercast the long-planned culmination of EoP to the masses.
Art by contrail09 / buckweiser
But the ghost of EoP wasn't done poking me in the lemur butt.
Between January and February, a dude by the name of Typhlosions launched an "End of Ponies Fan Art" contest... because apparently the universe wanted to see how hard it could out-flatter me, or something. The rewards for the contest included $100 for first place and $50 for second... which is pretty intense for spontaneous Internet fan-fappery.
While I was intrigued, a part of me felt a bit... weirded out by the whole thing. Spotlight would eventually put it in a far more logical perspective: "Why just pay $150 for a single piece of fanart when you could advertise a contest with monetary rewards and then earn yourself 10-20 fanarts for the price of one?" It made a lot of sense, and I still cringe a bit when I think back on the contest... especially when the host suddenly decided to replace the judging with a friggin' democratic vote, because we all know how well that goes.
Regardless of how spaghettified things got, I did get some pretty dayum good pics out of the experience:
Art by JackieBloom
Needless to say, my jaw dropped lower and lower with each entry that showed up along the shores of the contest. Spotlight had this insanely complicated illustration in the works, and I figured that he should submit it to the event. The problem was that his WiP was based on a moment in the Petra Arc, which was now defunct. Specifically, the drawing depicted Scootaloo and Wart escaping goblin thugs while galloping out of the heart of Petra. So I was all "Hell, why not repurpose it into a moment from the opening of EoP where Philomena is chasing Scootaloo out the Royal Throneroom in Canterlot?" So, working his magic, Spotlight reconstitute the sketch to fit an entirely new scene, and I watched him do it in real time on the Livestream. This was the result:
This piece of art is something that I still consider to this day to be among the greatest fanworks made in relation to SS&E, up there with Sinrar's map of a slice of Urohringr, the Russian translation of Background Pony, the creation of the Noble Jury Hoodie, Argodaemon's Austraeoh SFM video, and that one time a crazy awesome dude named WanderingArtist decided to make an entire friggin' concerto for an unwritten fanfic of mine.
Spotlight would eventually win the contest (partially thanks to yours-truly deciding at the last second to out-collude the other colluders), and I started feeling as if the Internet was giving me a lot of love. Most of it undeserving.
Whelp, if there was ever a better time to get back on board the EoP train...
I still wasn't ready to give up on the Petra Arc--aka the "last minute buffer before we dive full-fledged into Rainbow Plot" story chunk. I agreed that the Kaizo edition was suffering from... well... too much kaizo. I needed to dial back the action sequences, because they were the most flagrant problem with the tone of the arc fitting in with the rest of EoP, and overall they didn't really contribute to much. I also decided to reduce the three timeline structure down to two, focusing even more and harder on Scootaloo's experiences immediately following the Cataclysm. I decided to make even greater use of the arc's choice antagonist, Razzar. This time I would depict the shape-shifting naga as a goblin in disguise with a lot of similar angsts and experiences that ran parallel to Scootaloo. Razzar would appeal to Scootaloo's plight this time. The two would bond--or at least Razzar would attempt to form a bond--until climactic circumstances forced Scootaloo to foil Razzar's plan in a series of actions that would result in Razzar's death. The whole point of this was to make Razzar so similar to Scootaloo that Scootaloo would see a portrait of herself in Razzar. In the end, the arc would achieve a great deal of self-analysis on the part of our main heroine, which is precisely the kind of thing we need for a post-apocalyptic survivor steeling herself for a time traveling run-in with her mentor.
I decided to call this new and improved draft the "HHH Edition"--because of how "cerebral" it was (lulz). I tried to be as "smart" as I could about the upload process this time. I threw tiny, bite-sized chunks of it at my editors on a regular and consistent basis. I didn't want to repeat the mistakes that I made in the Kaizo draft.
But... then I repeated the mistakes that I made in the Kaizo draft.
While I had whittled away most of the action scenes and melodrama and other chaff, I had still allowed most of the core structure of the original Petra Arc to remain. In working on top of the material, I forced the characters and their decisions to shape themselves around the already faulty narrative. A truer solution, perhaps, would have been to completely re-write the arc from the ground up... or perhaps... y'know... destroy it altogether and just go straight for the Rainbow Dash arc... which I still wasn't prepared nor willing to do.
And this wasn't all a reflection on just Vimbert's words of contention. The other editors were feeling very "meh" about the arc as well. Even with the changes I made, none of it appeared to make any sense or hold any weight. This all confirmed the fact that I was constantly wishing to deny... that there was simply no need nor desire for the existence of the Petra arc.
Hey, remember that significant other of ten years who left you standing alone at the altar? Let's pretend that he finally shows up one minute before the wedding ceremony is over and proceeds to make out with an entire Japanese cheerleading squad right in front of your mom and dad. Or remember that kidney that you ripped out? Let's pretend that it was replaced with a sea urchin wielding chainsaws.
People like to toss motivational posters with dead cats around, claiming that anyone and everyone can "climb back up" from failure. The truth about life is that failure happens repetitively... in sequence... like dominoes. Once in a while, the game gets so long and redundant that you kinda sorta get sick of picking all the bones up only to knock them all over once again. This--like many things--formed another knot in the elephant's noose. I was more than saddened and frustrated this time. I was a tad bit angry--not at any particular person (other than myself)--but just grumpy and agitated in general. The really tingly kind of irascible that makes you wanna prowl down the street and have angry sex with the first ballgown you see.
I may not have stated it, but I quite definitely wanted nothing to do with EoP anymore. I just needed an excuse... any impetus whatsoever to latch onto a different, branching story idea and let it carry me to the stars. My soul was charged up and pumped to burn the effigy of my accomplishments down and erect a brand new lemurriffic marvel. If only I had something to inspire me... to challenge me.
Then... one night as I stewed in virtual vegetation on Spotlight's livestream... he decided to broadcast the audio-read of a certain story while drawing random vaginal stuff for his watchers...
Ohhhh the places you'll go.
To be Continued in Part Four: Behold a Mint Horse
This is a nostalgia trip of epic proportions.
coming soon: Sing Skirt's Song and become Nothing
Funnily enough, I had more or less the same reaction to Fimfiction when it first came out. I was already on EQD and the PFA! Who needs a third fanfic site?
What a chowderhead. :V
Season two was my favorite season of the show as well for a long time, and in fact I kind of assumed it always would be, yet somehow now I like one, three, and seven more.
Even I don't read Appledasherhy anymore, and Appledashery Vol. 1 was my favorite fanfic ever.
I remember liking Spelling It Out, and knowing that it was a romance fanfic . . . though it probably had a romance tag.
Getting to Background Pony now, which is how my Skirts cherry was popped. To this day, I've only read the first chapter of EoP.
That entire collection of 2012 fanworks makes me cry.
Damn you skirts
4774394
Never read EoP, never will, let the dead stay dead. On another note, I don't remember the first Skirtsian ponyfic I read, I'll have to search around and see if I can remember just from the title.
(addendum) After literal minutes of searching I've discovered that my first experience with Shortskirtsandexplosions was....out.of.character....
I haven't read The End of Ponies, but this is making me pretty curious about it. I may have to give it a go sometime soon. Though, with how you explained how much of a funk it put you in when all your work didn't have the reaction you might have expected, twice, I can see why it's now just a fading memory. Still, all that fan-art is amazing; I think that's what's driving me to give it a read the most, cause the art paints it as something beautiful, especially the piece with Scootaloo holding Rainbow Dash.
This walk down memory lane man. Geez...
Wait, you mentioned you at some point gave out what the plot and ending of EoP was going to be. Did you also post that in a blog? If so, can I get a link? I've been wanting closure to the story for years.
4774632
I think he's building up to it.
imgur.com/amoBaCJ.jpg
I totally get why EoP will be forever dead.
But maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan... :(
Oh god. As soon as I read "Second Life", I had a full body shiver. That was a train-wreck of epic proportions.
Oh, here comes the fanfic that pulls my heartstrings, and my first Skirts story, I think.
4774391
What he said. When I first published Under A Luminous Sky, it was solely on GDocs, because that was where I read all my favorite stories. It wasn't until an editor told me, "Dude,. you're NOT on FIMFiction?!" That I realized I had to shift.
4774709
I had an opportunity to be one of the first handful of users on the site because I was working closely with EQD at the time. >.> Oops.
And yet, I would still recommend anyone to read the unfinished story. It almost adds to the theme.
Wait, was the Rarity Arc the one where you were going to have Scoots transfer "wrong" and see the ghost of the goddess of time everywhere and tease that she had a time-traveling nemesis? Years later, I still remember that outline, and it was fucking RAD.
4776990
Rarity arc, Did he already spoil the ending yet?