2012: The Lemuracolypse - Part Five: Building the Nocturne · 9:34pm Jan 17th, 2018
2012: The Lemuracolypse
Part Five of Twelve - Building the Nocturne
This is something of an anecdote I've rambled about before, and I still take pride in it: "I came up with the idea of Background Pony while taking a shower!" The reality of the matter is far less impressive. Looking back, I think I can retrace the steps my brain took:
Lyra's defined solely by a predictable brony gimmick, and that is the problem. The solution, then, is to replace her chief quirks with an entirely different gimmick. Not just any gimmick, but a gimmick that can be exploited on both a literary and an emotional level.
The first step, then, is to find that gimmick.
The second step would be to figure out what sort of character or introspection that particular gimmick can bring out of Lyra. What might it shape her into being? How would it shape the readers' reaction to her and her choices in light of the gimmick?
And, thankfully, that twenty-nine-year-old virgin taking a shower had several past fanfictional exploits in his brain to choose from, some epic and others philosophical.
Should Lyra go on an epic, arduous adventure?
"Naaaaah... I'm too lazy to do that," sputtered Shower Lemur. "I've still got End of Ponies to get back to, after all." A sigh into the steam and rivulets. "Besides, I'm obsessed with Lyra wearing a hoodie right now for some reason. What's something laid-back, slice-of-lifey, and bittersweet!cuddly that I can put her through instead?"
So my thoughts likely tossed themselves back through nostalgic archetypes of "slice-of-life" that I had floating around in my noggin. This included an amnesiac in Hyrule learning to help those around them. It also triggered memories of the more-than-thrice failed Majora's Mask fanfic about Link and his unsung accomplishments. Then, of course, there was that one silly XME fic about Shion Komine wandering around like a ghost bishie in a hoodie.
"Blessed Nietzsche on a bike, I'm getting all pruney. It's a good thing I don't live in Arizona."
And then--out of nowhere--my mind remembered something that I had seen somewhere... although--ironically--I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
At some point in the late 2000s or 2010s, I was surfing the Internet (and not looking at princess pr0n), when I stumbled upon some random fan site discussing "obscure mutants" in X-Men. I faintly recall a paragraph or two in some forsaken article speaking about a single issue where a major character stumbles upon a mutant girl whose abilities are--quite literally--to be forgotten by everyone she meets. If I recall correctly, she used this ability to sneak into shopping malls and peoples' homes, basically living like a perpetual vagrant. I can't say much about the plot or anything further than that, because that's quite literally all I remember (F'NAAAAAAAAAA). But the idea stuck with me as having seemingly limitless potential, and I was quite amazed it hadn't hit the mainstream in some way or another.
While hammering this blargh together, I attempted to google the character I was thinking about at the time. There is indeed an "X-Man" named ForgetMeNot, but he was first seen in a 2014 comic (hell, maybe we're crawling into some deep recursive shiet here). The character I fixated on at the time was easily crafted before 2010. Maybe even in the 90s. It's hard to say... it was just a faint shadow of memory attached to a momentary, casual glance at a flimsy article floating across a forgotten web page that is probably long dead at this point.
But the concept immediately seized me...
"Everyone else's memory of the protagonist rolls back to zero... although time is still moving forward for everyone, the protagonist included..."
Does this concept seem familiar? It should:
Only... there's one thing that all of those implementations of the idea have in common. The nature of the information loop is dependent on time. What if--instead--there was a situation where a singular character's experiences and accumulation of knowledge remained the same while everyone around him or her was static and unaffected? Yeah, having to constantly go back in time seventy-two hours to save the world or re-experiencing GroundHog Day for infinity is existentially horrifying enough. But what if one could experience that horror without the blatant, hyperbolic mechanism of a literal time loop? What if one lived out each day constantly being forgotten?
Come to think of it, haven't we all felt that way? Don't we still do on a daily occasion? Isn't that the sort of existential horror which we're all doomed to face when the road of life ends and we have to come to grips with not only the annihilation of our physical bodies but the inevitable decay of our abstract extensions into the finite social data-stream?
"Eugh... the soap bar's melted by now..."
At last, I had a gimmick. And it was one hell of a gimmick. Perhaps I wasn't the only person to have thought of it, but it certainly felt pretty dayum original to me at the time. In a way, it was re-using the XME fic "Between the Walls", only now the replacement for Shion Komine was rendered a ghost toknowledge, rather than a literal unseen eidolon. And what more horrifying curse is there than for all of your efforts and accomplishments to be blatantly forgotten and ignored, no matter how much you attempt to scream and holler your identity into the corporeal world around you?
By the time I was stepping out and drying off, I was already trying to figure out how the mechanical rules of the fic would work.
What could allow for this story to stick to one particular setting?
Lyra would have been rendered "forgettable" by a curse. That exposure to the curse happened while she was in Ponyville. This caused it to be localized to that one town. Lyra can't leave the city limits, much like Shion Komine couldn't abandon his anchor to the mutants of Xavier's school.
How can I tie-in Lyra's image and portrayal--especially her cutie mark--to her situation so as to make the choice of the mint-green unicorn more sincere?
The curse is music-based. She's got a lyre on her butt; she's a musician. She tackles her situation creatively. Creativity, expression, and the personification of herself are her greatest tools. Ironically--given her situation--these traits are exactly the kind of elements that the curse diffuses.
Why should anypony in Ponyville care about Lyra? A perfect stranger rendered "forgettable" is redundant. Why should the readers care about Lyra?
Because Twilight Sparkle lives there. Remember Season 1, Episode 1? Lyra Heartstrings was in Canterlot, waving to her. Following Brony-Logic, Lyra and Twilight were foalhood friends. There's also potential connections with Moondancer. Hell, she could come and visit the town later, leading to newer and more dramatic revelations. Lyra's in the potential company of acquaintances that she's known all her life, but now they don't know her. They can't know her. The readers will feel for her because that totally friggin' sucks.
How can I get Lyra to wear an adorable hoodie?
Duh. A side-effect of the curse is that she's cold all the time--and she gets colder the further she distances herself from the heart of Ponyville, where the curse initially happened. Also, throwing in shivers and unrequited hoodie-snuggles will ramp the pathos up to eleven.
Soooooooooo what sort of event happened in Ponyville to cause this "curse?"
Nightmare Moon. Her arrival brought with it the curse upon landing. But only Lyra was affected (as far as we know). That means that Nightmare Moon and her actions during and before S1 of MLP:FiM are directly related to this curse, which requires a new degree of forced fanon exposition.
In truth, this wasn't very atypical a device for mesa. End of Ponies--for example--is rife with god-like alicorns who commit huge-ass mistakes and yet are bound by their own thematic essences. Luna could be such a victim/failure... or perhaps there's yet another deity behind the scenes who's responsible for the curse. Luna was just a peripheral manifestation... the Sorceress Edea to a Sorceress Adel. And then somewhere--waiting in the wings, perhaps even in some forsaken realm---there's a brooding Sorceress Ultimecia who's responsible for it all.
Layers and layers of unknown horrors, and there's poor Lyra shivering in the glass onion center of it all, naive enough to think that this was going to be a slice-of-life fic. Given her circumstances, it's perfectly natural for her to be angsty and bitter and irascible all the time...
But wait...
...that's not the Lyra we all know, is it?
What could be more inspiring... more poignant... more gripping than putting a tragic character into a horrible existential nightmare situation...
...and yet she strives to be optimistic, pleasant, and altruistic in every little thing she does? Even though she knows... she knows that nothing she can do will ever be remembered. Her actions--heroic and gracious and generous--will forever be unsung. She could be the absolute model of a good pony, something we're all inspired to be... righteous and selfless and loving and kind... and the only substance to her actions are the actions themselves. The only pony who could ever be satisfied with her accomplishments is the one pony who remembers them. And yet--while every hoofprint around her vanishes into oblivion--she still persists, even if it means sacrificing her attempts at freeing herself from this unfair cosmic limbo that has singled her out and singled her out alone.
Between high school and college, something happened to me.
I started waking up spontaneously in the dead thick of the night, heart beating and lungs palpitating.
Panic attacks? Why was I having panic attacks?
You see, from age eighteen and on, I had finally backslidden so much from Christianity that I essentially considered myself secular. Then, as I grew even older, I sorta cool-guy'd my identity into "atheissssst." The concept was quite liberating, to say the least. If there's no God, then there's no divine benchmark for morality. In essence, there's nothing to feel guilty about. Years and years and years of hating myself over conservative no-no's had vanished like a puff of smoke, and I felt free to think about... well... anything.
But then something happened that my young self wasn't exactly counting on. In the absence of God in my life, there was suddenly an absence of... everything. It took me a few years for the half-baked illusion of soulful permanence that I had inherited in my youth to vanish. I gradually came to realize that... upon dying... after the end of the road...
...there is nothing.
Absolutely... unequivocally...
Nothing.
There is no thinking.
There is no dreaming.
There is no hope nor fear nor desire nor despair.
There simply isn't.
And if you choose to believe that there is something beyond death, feel free to do so.
But you have no proof. And you never will have proof. None of us ever do or will.
We can have faith, for sure, but faith isn't enough for some of us. It certainly isn't enough for me.
Unless, of course, you take the stance that atheism (or nihilism) in itself is a faith. A faith that every other belief is wrong and I am right--a righteousness that ironically yields nothing, for that is where we all come from and where we're all headed, perceivably.
And let's assume for the moment that there is indeed something qualitative (or even quantitative) beyond the impermeable veil of ontological certainty. With all the devices that we have or haven't been given to ascertain meaning in this inescapably physical world, we have no choice but to expect nothing, even if we do have faith in something, everything, anything but that.
So what moral imperative remains? Simple--and I think it's one we can all agree on. Treat others as you would like yourself to be treated. The Golden Rule, dude. It applies to everything.
And while such a rosey-tinged concept might be felicitous enough to embrace with something almost resembling a smile, there comes the undeniable acceptance of how much that shit sucks. Because if we human beings are so claustrophobically bound by the unknowable, then what greater chances do the traces of our existence have in the long run?
I had to swallow a very bitter pill at some point in my young life. Coming into adulthood, I firmly agreed that my greatest and most heartfelt passion in life was to write and to spread creative ideas. After all, if we're only mortal and we'll never hope to last even a smidgen of the earth's total lifespan, then our best bets at achieving immortality is to spread information... to lay our epithets into the collective consciousness of humanity.
But therein lies the problem. If humans are finite... then humanity is as well... and so is everything we ever do or accomplish or erect in our image.
Everything is temporary. Immortality is nothing more than a word. Whether it's due to a shift in Internet memes, a fickle wave of attitude on social media, a bad romantic breakup, an uncontrollable housefire, a hurricane, a civil war, a nuclear holocaust, an asteroid impact, a gamma ray burst, a galactic collision, or a false vacuum metastability event...
...even the seemingly most-concrete of accomplishments will return to stardust, only to vanish with the entropy of time.
What, then, was the point in even wanting to write? For all my young life, I cultivated this lurve and desire for storytelling. And yet--at the same time--I had to remind myself that I barely gave a shiet for even a fraction of the novels and books and short stories written by people before my time. What happened to me ten hours ago is infinitely more important that what happened to me ten years ago. Every day, I tread over the lands that belonged to long-dead indigenous people, and I don't give two shits about them because it's convenient for me in the now. I can't even tell you the name of my great-grandmother, and I can't even pretend to know anything about the generation before her... or the generation before her great-grandmother.
We live in a world of amnesiacs. Yes, we have written history, but ultimately what good has that ever done to steer us right? There is more than one death, thanks to entropy. But--thanks to apathy--there's even a third and fourth and so on. I'd call it a "tragedy," but that would be unfair to all of the countless tragedies that have unfolded--day by day--in our past... but we simply haven't the capacity nor the will to remember them.
And I'm not saying we should actively ignore history or avoid working with each other on a consistent basis to improve the world--and ourselves--in spite of these circumstances. In fact, that's the challenge... the crux of existence. It's more than about finding your essence. It's accepting the fact that your "true" essence will never be found. And since all of us will be devoured by oblivion eventually, our only option is to do what we can in the moment to assure a peaceful and prosperous existence to take it all in... whatever "all" may be... while we have the happenstance to do so.
Art by WitchTaunter
And so here I had arrived--full circle--stepping out of the shower and dripping with water (I was gonna say "excitement," but ... ew). My young adult mind was used to contemplating these nihilistic themes in the moist dark of night, only now the psuedo-philosophical-pretentiousness had collided with this potentially perfect fanfictional allegory of the existential experience... in tiny pastel horse form. Here I had a protagonist stuck in a nightmarish bubble of zero agency... and yet that gave her lease for unlimited agency. For what nobler a function could you do in the wake of oblivion than everything you could ever aspire to do whatsoever?
Lyra is incapable of achieving permanence with her creative abilities... just like I had horrifyingly woken to realize and understand in my own life. But then Lyra sets out to do something I could only envy her for: she expresses herself creatively anyways. And--Hell--if she was brave enough to do something so absurd, then I might as well follow her wherever she went.
Because the goal in life--I believe--is not simply in finding a way to ignore or somehow surpass the insurmountable reality of death. But--rather--to embrace it. And in dealing face-to-face with that abysmally dreadful reality... you achieve purpose and meaning in what you choose to do with yourself and with others in spite of it.
But for this to manifest itself into a digestible story, I had to keep Lyra affirmative--unlike the edgy lemur bastard concocting this blargh. In her positivism and altruism and generosity, she places her Sisyphean journey into a positive light. It forces the readers to emotionally invest in her through hope, just like we all--in futility, yes--invest hope in ourselves and in human existence as well. Here I had a story that could teach something--not just to readers, but to myself. I had the opportunity to exorcise personal, emotional, psychological, and philosophical concepts that had been plaguing me for a while... that I had tried to funnel through End of Ponies.
But Scootaloo's/Harmony's plight was always a very specific one. Lyra was ultimately more relateable--at least to me. Plus, there was something about Lyra being literally surrounded by ponies whom she couldn't 100% reach out to, whereas Scootaloo was separated by time travel. I'd figure--where Lyra was concerned--it was greater torture. And the more torture you can put a protagonist through, the more provocative the material. Funnel it through a thick, purple first person narrative and hory shiet you've got a slobberknocker in the making.
All that was left was to cinch it... to slap on one final touch that could take the already irresistible story concept and solidify it as feature box material. Mmmmmmmmmm... if only Lyra Heartstrings qualified as something that was ingrained deeply into the collective brony vocabulary--
Boom. Winner.
Slap it. Print it. Shove it.
It's both chic and metaphorically relevant. I swear... Legolas must have ridden a hoverboard into my bathroom and fired a quiver of inspiration into my brain bone, cuz right then and there it was sealed tightly in volcanic glass and done up in ribbon.
It wasn't just a story--it was the seedling for a grand forest of ideas, full of multitudinous angles by which to approach the priceless premise alone. There was no way in Hell it would be a oneshot. It couldn't have been a oneshot. To this day, some people claim that Background Pony should have only been one chapter. Well, some people can stick their dicks into an electrical socket. Making Background Pony a oneshot would have been the absolute worst thing I could have done with the concept. Yes, in a lot of ways, the first chapter stands on its own, but I did that on purpose for the very realistic off-chance that the story would not succeed... y'know... like a smart writer plans ahead. In truth, I immediately knew that this was something that I wanted to do in multiple installments. I had to do it in multiple installments. The initial plan was hollow and incomplete, but that was okay. There was suddenly so much to explore... just like Lyra had to explore.
Bubbling on the inside, I threw clothes onto my still-damp body and hobbled back to the computer... where Spotlight was still lingering in a forsaken Skype window from ten minutes prior. With shaky fingers, I proceeded to regale him with this majestic story idea about Lyra and an amnesia-curse that promised bittersweet emotion and a platform for philosophical pontificating and the means of finally deflating the nihilistic thoughts piling up in the hollow vacuole of my chest.
"Whatever, maaaaaaaaaan. So when are you going back to End of Ponies?"
To be Continued in Part Six: Foreground Lemur
Hm, that's weird. Most of this blog post is empty.
If life is inherently unfair and unfeeling, then we would not be able to imagine the mere concept of fairness. A lioness does not consider it "unfair" when a lion slaughters her cubs and she has to then mate with that lion to make new ones. It simply goes ahead with the actions destined for it in nature. Yet humans look at that and rage against it, and if it happened to us, we'd consider it the greatest injustice that could befall a human being... unless of course, we act more like the lion, and dehumanize the people around us. We have to lower ourselves and our own self-worth in order to reach the level the natural world around us exists in. The mere fact that we realize this puts us a level above it, and means we don't necessarily have to accept everything at first blush.
If the universe is pointlessly unhappy, then we should not even be able to feel "happiness" and wonder why we feel it, and whether it comes from somewhere beyond the simple chemical reward of the brain. It's patently absurd to think that creativity came out of a non-creative tapestry--it's just not scientific or plausible or anything. We're just taking a closed loop of "nothing means nothing, and wondering why it means nothing also means nothing" and accepting how ludicrous that sounds at face value. We're watching the boulder roll back down the hill like Sisyphus, and instead of just dropping the damn thing and continuing to walk up to the top, we willingly go back down and take up that burden of a pointless activity while insanely concluding that since we close that loop ourselves, it must mean there's nothing outside it. Because you choose to decide life is pointless, it means life is pointless in general? Come awwwwnnn.
I disliked Background Pony for a variety of reasons, but hearing it was some kind of justification for a nihilistic worldview impressed on a show that outright rejects unfairness at a metaphysical level (or there wouldn't be rainbows that conveniently blast the world back into an orderly and safe place to be) just makes me shrug even harder at it. I hope you at least found some catharsis and put away the feelings expressed in this blog after the story was done.
Background Pony was one of my favorite stories I've ever read on this site and I consider it one of the best works in the fandom even if I absolutely hated the ending.
Holy shit. BP has been my favourite piece of literature ever since I read it, but holy shit I'm only just now learning how hard you had to work to earn it.
I miss long showers. I was tired of Winter from the day it began.
4775964
The basis of your entire argument is flawed; you completely ignore the possibility that meaning and fairness and happiness can be subjective. We can perceive and decide fairness, but the universe at large doesn't, which is why we have to act on our perceptions and the universe doesn't.
I'm actually getting more and more excited to start BGP. Seems like an understatement to say it's one of your best fics, if the views and comments don't lie!
Then... why am I getting so nervous?
/
4776009
Well, it's one of the straight up saddest stories I've ever experienced, and it's huge, so there is reason to be nervous, but it's worth it.
4776005
Happiness, fairness, and meaning are only subjective in that happiness is nothing more than a fleeting, fickle thing that is a waste to chase after. You chase after it, you never gain it. Oftentimes, happiness is based off choices you make. Same goes for meaning. Life has whatever meaning you realize/choose based off realizations of perspective. Like in MLP: FiM, when gaining a cutie mark. Least, that’s always been my interpretation. The argument redsquirrel made didn’t address “subjectivity” simply because subjectivity doesn’t fall within that argument. Subjectivity is a given perception.
4775964
As has already been said, your argument doesn't make much sense. I've been in enough circles of people that admire you to know that you're an interesting and intelligent person. It seems here that you're being a bit hypocritical, stuck in your own logic loop while accusing others of precisely the same folly.
If that's unduly harsh, I apologize. I don't mean to come across as unthoughtful or rude. I agree that to know anything we must also know it's opposite, but I completely disagree that that implies that we are somehow above nature. "Fairness" is not humanity's exalting feature; it is its invention. Our intelligence and creativity are not proof that we were intelligently created; they're more like brightside-curses themselves, really. Is the life of the lioness not simpler and in many ways more noble than that of the 21st century student drowning in debt while rich men rule? We're too smart for our own good, fighting between logic and natural instincts that over years we labeled "evil".
I'm not saying that logic and rational thought are wrong. They allow us to seek out a more comfortable way of living. But, as Skirts so deftly pointed out, we've never really found it. For all of our progress in so many areas, we are still little more than animals with tools, making, on the whole, the same impulsive mistakes and judgments as our ancestors and other creatures.
Background Pony is a terrific story. It is not without its faults, but its narrative rings true. It is powerful and emotional and intentionally relatable. If you did not see yourself in Lyra and find ways to appreciate her plight, I have to wonder what kind of life you perceive yourself living, for it is far from human.
No one has to like the story. It's okay that you didn't. But criticizing Skirts and others who have come to the same conclusion about the vast emptiness of reality is unfair. Questions like "Because you choose to decide life is pointless, it means life is pointless in general?" work in exactly the opposite direction, funnily enough. You seem to be thinking more along the lines of "All that is certain is the choice to be certain."
And Lyra said that.
Look up "chaos theory" and the "butterfly effect". Our actions now will create initial conditions that will unpredictably domino into events millions of years after every last Human is dead. That is the absolute power of causality.
This is beautiful.
[existential horse noises]
Maybe a future where CelestAI converts the universe into computronium to simulate an endless array of
paperclipsponies would be the good ending."Without hope, without witness, without reward", as they put it last year on Doctor Who.
I read Background Pony a few years ago with my husband (then just friend). We spent hours talking through messenger and Google docs after each chapter. We talked about what we liked/were upset over and kept trying to analyze everything for meaning. We bounced predictions off each other about what would happen in the next chapter. I related hardcore to Lyra during the Morning Dew phase and the book was something that brought us even closer together.
At the end, there was a literal puddle of tears on my kitchen table when I finished reading. It is one of my favorite stories of all time.... At least until I finish the Austraeoh series, and that takes it's place.
4775964
4776071
Obviously, spoilers for the end of Background Pony, but if you are here, you've probably read it.
The whole point of the ending is that while Lyra's existence is "meaningless", her impact is not, and even though it ends poorly for her, she finds peace in embracing her place and her role in everything, even if it is to be "unsung". She finds happiness intrinsically, and she is intrinsically happy at the end, reaching out and telling us how she feels and her love for everything, even in the face of a "meaningless" end. Even if we, the readers, are unhappy about her ending... she isn't. Lyra is at peace in the end, her final moment of lucidity given to us to show the triumph of her spirit over the curse. She reaches out and addresses the reader in the final lucid moment in the story, prior to her falling apart once more, and she expresses her feelings and thoughts and her peace and love. In fact, it is not only the triumph of her spirit and character, but the triumph of her creativity, returning in the end, with her desire to write a song.
It's tragic that she has suffered, that goes without saying, and you feeling upset by her suffering is rational and human and good... but her victory is one intrinsic to her character, not to the reader. Her character is satisfied at the end of everything, and that's what is important, isn't it? That she is happy?
That's my interpretation of the end, at any rate.
I've said it before but...
BGP gave me a minor mental breakdown. I literally finished the book, pulled a childhood stuffed animal out of a box and cried myself to sleep.
I read it at the right time for full impact and it hit on one of my deepest fears at the time.
To die alone and forgotten.
I've since gotten comfortable... or at least tolerant of the idea but when I read it... It hurt. In the end it gave me the chance to let all my pain out and heal. A true cathartic experience and one I had no clue I needed so badly.
That was my experience of Background Pony.
4776071
Theres nothing noble about a lion. A lion doesn't think its noble, it has no concept of "noble". It kills, it eats, it fucks, it makes babies, and then it dies.
Humans are the only creatures that can even look at an animal or anything else and think its noble or not noble. I'm pretty sure that makes us a cut above animals and that's just one example of that.
4776071
Dude did you seriously just say to someone "If you didn't see yourself in some fucking horse fic you aren't human."?
Somebody in this comment section has serious issues...and trust me it isn't Red.
4776149
Well said.
4776236
Yeah, as good as a lot of Ponky's comment is, that really had me shaking my head.
4776071
Ponky, you strike me as a very intelligent and nice person so it pains me to disagree so vehemently, but I do. An animal's life is not noble. It's simple, but that's all it is. It is life at the most basic level of growing and eating and spreading and dying. But I feel like people aren't quite getting at what I mean.
I say that just the fact that we're here, arguing over whether an animal's life has some intrinsic "nobility" to it means that we, ourselves, are more noble than the raging void we're stuck in, or were made to aspire to nobility. That we fall short of whatever goals we have is absolutely without a doubt, but to say that we ourselves are animals, that we are stuck in the same grind of eating and dying, is wrong, by simple virtue of the fact that some of us think we aren't.
Just look at what people do all the time. They personify a universe that has no person. It's not an entity, or a thinking creature wondering why it's here. We are doing that.
If you personally ascribe meaning to your meaninglessness, that elevates your life above some kind of baseline, correct? I'm saying that just because we can do that, that we can even look at ourselves and wonder "Gee, am I an animal or not? Am I better than people around me? Am I better not because I collected more resources or had more kids, but because I fulfilled some deeper purpose that even the infinity of the universe's indifference cannot take away from me?" is proof positive that yes, at the very least, we have something that goes beyond the universe itself, which has absolutely no capacity to "do" anything whatsoever. It just "is." If our reality is somehow conscious of itself outside of our own minds, if the ability to be good and virtuous and inventive were true across the entire universe in all of its infinite vastness for the fourteen billion years it's been here, then I think we'd have seen evidence of it by now. We can recognize invention, we can recognize empathy, and we can recognize all these other things... but only in other people. We don't feel it when we look at the world outside, at things we haven't even seen or touched, and if we do, we say that it's God. Not necessarily the Christian God, but a force more powerful than nature itself. It doesn't matter whether you name it God, or Allah, or Nothing, or Randomness, because skirts brought up the very good point that just like we have to have faith there is Nothing, we also have faith there is Something. We hold it up and call it the driving force of reality. And there's an inherent irrationality in saying the force that animates and pushes us is... "Nothing."
But my point is we have to believe there is Nothing Out There. The universe doesn't owe it to us to mean Something, but it also doesn't owe it to us to mean Nothing.
Outside our little community, we only see black holes gobbling stars, rocks smashing randomly into other rocks, and things incomprehensibly big and small, but also ultimately pointless. So, does the fact that we can say "No, it all has meaning, I have meaning, and other people have meaning" not mean something in and of itself? Even if all that's certain in life is to be certain, isn't certainty such a weird and special thing in a totally uncertain world that must mean it came from somewhere other than here?
I don't think I'm inhuman for not connecting with the story. I'm just a different kind of human with a different kind of connection.
4776149
And if she truly is Unsung, and the all-devouring eldritch creature that shelters other Unsung was right, then inevitably her deeds and her impact on this world will also be forgotten. Eventually, Sisyphus won't be able to push his rock up the hill anymore, because the hill will die, he will die, and even the rock will die. Lyra is "at peace" because we believe she is. If she is dead, then she is neither at peace nor not at peace, but nothing and forgotten. If we don't read the story, then all her efforts are for nothing. If we do read the story, she's only as important as we think she is, which is to say, not important at all, because our own thoughts are still worth nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Except, as you say, it wasn't for nothing. I just don't see how everyone else doesn't see that "it was for nothing, but then it was also for something if we believe it was, yet that something also means nothing because that belief is for nothing too" is a crazy thing to say at best.
To torture the Sisyphus metaphor one more time... there can't be a top of the hill that also isn't the top of the hill.
I mean frankly, if we actually put Background Pony into MLP, inevitably the universe itself would conspire to have all the Princesses, including the forgotten one, brought back for at least some kind of emotional catharsis, and Lyra might be recognized for her efforts if not outright rescued. So right there, you can change the fabric of a story's universe from stoic, totally personal triumph to something else entirely. And if we can change the truth of a fanfiction story, which Background Pony is about doing, we can also change the story of the world around us. And if we do that then I believe the world itself means something, it's not just us raising our tiny fists and shouting at Nothingness in a vain attempt to comfort ourselves.
I never realized Background Pony was so delightfully Camusian. The Sisyphean struggle of finding a meaning to life, Lyra's admirable response to the Absurd - it's philosophically gorgeous.
To call it an evocation of nihilism would be absolutely false - it’s a rejection.
Background Pony has never been one of my favorite works that you authored, but if I ever get the chance to reread it in this mindset, I would wager this would change easily.
Also, may I ask if any of these thoughts and considerations affected your writing/thematic decisions in Soon I'm Going to Wake Up?
4776236
Just because a character is different than a human means nothing to connecting to a character. Plenty of people see themselves in non-human characters from fantasy/sci-fi novels, movies, and other such things. To paraphrase Mr. Numbers (I believe), "Stories about ponies are stories about people."
4776271
Ah, Red, I'm glad you elaborated. That makes a lot more sense. I think I was confused - and, in some ways, am still confused - about why you don't like the story, then. Aren't we all on the same page here? Like, let's forget about canon MLP for a second and whether the story ties into the show. Fanfictions don't really have to do that to be very good.
What is it that you don't like? Didn't Background Pony's message accomplish exactly the same thing that you're arguing for here? Isn't the true point of the story, like 4776149 said, that Lyra does choose to find meaning in an "unfair" world? And, waaay more importantly, isn't the final product that we learn something, the real people running around this special corner of the universe?
I don't know exactly what I believe in all of this, nor do I completely understand where you are coming from. Your first comment seemed to be an unnecessary attack on Skirts' philosophy as laid out in the blog, which, I might add, is a very different philosophy than the one presented in Background Pony. But I feel like we're all aiming at the same target here. Concepts like "fair" and "noble" and even "happy" are largely manmade, right? And are you saying that that's what makes us special, that we can contemplate and invent those types of things in an effort to understand our emotions, which are biologically far more complex than the other animals we see floating around space with us?
I'm genuinely curious, not perturbed or critical. I want to cut through the fat and fancy words and figure out what you didn't like about Background Pony, and what you find so offensive about Skirts' worldview as written above. Your first comment didn't make a lot of sense to me, as it seemed like you were trying to elevate human beings with faulty logic. I feel like Lyra's whole story is just a way for us to look deeper inside ourselves and our position in a universe that doesn't care about us, that, as you say, has no capacity to care at all. It's a way to measure our own feelings about loneliness, connection, and what it means to make a difference or be important. Aren't those the kinds of questions you want people to think about?
Oh, and I apologize to you and 4776236. I didn't mean for that "far from human" comment to be taken so harshly. I was trying to make a connection between Red's comment's focus on what's special about us and Lyra's search for the same.
4776305
I think that's Cold in Gardez. Great line, whoever wrote it.
4776308
At the end of the day, I believe that there is an intrinsic meaning to the universe that goes far beyond our ability to ascribe meaning to it, and outlasts any concepts we can come up with. Others seem to be saying no, any and all of our efforts are merely a facade, a curtain that we pull over the truth and hope the truth doesn't find us behind it. We either have ultimate, fundamental meaning, or we don't. We can't have our happy cake of believing we have meaning, and then a second dessert of there is absolutely no meaning regardless of our belief, a nothingness that devours all once our thinking brains fail and there is no one to believe anything anymore.
I remember Background Pony trying to make us believe Lyra's unfair, random situation was "okay" because she was at peace with it. No, it's not. She had to find peace with it, because reality itself warped any and all attempts to do otherwise. It forced her into a little box that removed fundamental agency, and all she's left with is whatever's in arm's reach. If I'm stuck in a box and I dull my mind to the point where I'm fine and dandy inside the box with its four corners and blank walls, especially after having lived in a world that's bigger and brighter than a box, that's not peace at all except maybe, well... the peace of a lioness whose cubs have all been eaten.
4776305
Wow how to totally miss the point. Fantasy/fictional characters aren't animals. They are created BY HUMAN IMAGINATION. Thus they are like human in virtually every way except they don't exist. Also to believe that everyone is supposed to feel the same way about Background Pony the way you do ,ie. Cry over it and pretend its the best story ever written, is some patent bullshit. Interpretations can very widely.
4776319
Gotcha.
I still disagree, but I'm glad you took the time to explain. I do think we can believe that there is nothing out there and find meaning at the same time, but I don't have nearly as clear a way of putting it as you have. Well said, and thanks for sticking it out until I understood.
Just as my closing thought, I saw a very different idea at the end of Background Pony, even from what Props said below. I found the ending to be extremely sacrificial. Lyra's agency boils down to one extremely poignant choice: Does she start over, go back to the moment the curse began, and let what happens happen with no memory of her unsung years? Does she reclaim her life, but lose all memory of what she learned and how she grew, not to mention the ponies she touched and helped and loved along the way? Or does she continue in her curse, allow the past to be as it has come to be, and sacrifice her own desire to reclaim her identity in favor of preserving the acts that she alone recognizes she has done?
That was very, very powerful to me, and became even more powerful when I experienced something eerily similar (but significantly less magical) in Italy for a couple of years. Now, I will say in spoilertext, that I really disliked a couple of caveats that came with the ending and made the sacrifice less meaningful to me. I don't like, for instance, that Discord would have essentially ended the world if Lyra wasn't unsung, in the right place at the right time. Like, sure, it's epic or whatever, but like you said, it kind of gets rid of her agency and makes the choice for her, because either way life's going to eventually suck for her. It would have been more of a sacrifice if the stakes weren't quite so high were she to start over from that fateful Summer Sun Celebration, and her choice was exclusively between her own identity and the impact she had had on others without reward. But still, the underlying message was clear enough to touch me very deeply.
Thanks for the interesting conversation. You're as well-worded as they say.
4776329
I misunderstood your issue with Ponky's comment, I thought you were saying that Ponky's insistence that you can connect with a "fucking pony fic" was wrong, not the intent of "Ponky is off base by calling Red's experience as invalid".
The ponies are barely ponies. They're anthropomorphic animals, meaning "with human qualities". What are you trying to say, here? I'm confused, are you trying to say that because the ponies are "animals", they don't count as being the same as fantasy/fictional characters? Because that's silly, the ponies are also "created by human imagination". You obviously mean something else.
I never said anything like that, so I assume you're saying this about Ponky? And I agree, interpretations can vary wildly. Red is allowed to dislike it because his particular world view doesn't seem to mesh with the story, which is totally fine.
4776342
Thanks, Props. You're so well-worded and cute.
Sorry for being so muddy in explaining my thoughts, 4776329. Didn't mean to rile you up. You're absolutely right, everyone is allowed to feel differently about Background Pony.
4776360
Ah, Background Pony. A fine story, although I clearly lack the right mindset to appreciate the ending.
The only thing I remember liking about the ending was the way it came full circle with the story's theme; Lyra was forgotten by everyone, including her own self.
I remember ForgetMeNot (isn't that funny?). So, when you were talking about some obscure character, I already went to the wikia about him, and looked at the bottom of the page, in Categories, I found the category "Imperceptibility" and there was a list of characters with that power.
I think I found your character. It seems to be Mary Zero, who I didn't know about but probably didn't end up like Lyra.
Fuck Nihilism. Your life has meaning because you matter to someone else. Even the homeless man on the street has someone who would be sad if they died.
Fuck Background Pony. The curse wore plot armor. The entire narrative conspired to keep Lyra in her position. And she just accepts it. Fight Till Death isn't just a song by Slayer.
Fuck mainstream evangelicals and their rules. They have created more atheists than Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could ever dream of. Christ gave Two Commandments: Love God, Love Each Other. Period. Full stop.
Fuck me. A good portion of my distaste for BGP is jealousy that I could never achieve popularity like that. I still think the story is kinda crap, but it's also my own pettiness.
Fuck SS&E. Skirts, bro, brah, brudder, Broseph Stalin, Brosideon God of the Brocean. Get this through your hairy, Princess-filled head: You. Are. Awesome. You're a great friend, a great writer of fan fiction, and an incredibly creative person. Stop being so damn down on yourself all the time.
Fuck this shit. I need a drink.
4776036
How is this not ignoring subjectivity?
4776422
That's an essential part of nihilism to a lot of people, though. The world has no meaning, so you get to give it one.
I just want to say that learning The Myth of Sisyphus (or rather the philosophy behind it) had played a part in building Background Pony fills me with contentment, assuming I'm interpreting everything correctly. That's pretty neat, and explains why I was drawn into the story in the past when I was dealing with my own existential angst, even if I didn't understand completely what I was going through at the time.
4776428
You're right. I need to reword that. Thanks!
4776426
Simple: that statement is inherently subjective. It’s subjective based upon a universal perception. If all you can perceive is unfair meaninglessness, How then, could perceive anything else? The only way perception is capable of changing is if an outside force acts upon it.
This all feels like a big 'im leaving ponies' thing. Also, I do like most of your works that I've read. I think I'll go and read background pony now, it sounds cool! I remember seeing it before but I don't think I even gave the description a chance. I was super hipster and didn't want to read about fanon fave characters. I have since changed, but yeah. It sounds neat.
4776422
Skirts, you should print this out, laminate it, and stick it on your wall (or the side of your computer).
...That is... I mean... if you want to...
4775964
Counter: If life is inherently fair and feeling, then we would not be able to imagine the mere concept of unfairness.
This is a nonsensical statement. Life is inherently unfair and unfeeling, we are capable of imagining things which are untrue, and the actual truth underlying reality is something that evades our faculties despite our desperation to seek it. Or, for many, the desperation we claim to seek it with, whilst shying away from it. Whilst still others imagine that underlying reality of everything is madness and the discovery thereof will destroy our minds and bring about ruin, f'naa.
Further, we are nothing but mammals (well, some of us are cannibals who cut other people open like cantelopes, but I digress). You don't know the mind of the lioness, of her nobility, happiness, lack of either, or much of anything. You like to imagine animals are unthinking, unfeeling beasts, but we as people are finding out daily that we're not so different as we liked to imagine in generations past. We are merely one of many evolved lifeforms on this rock, and we have many cousins who are different, not beneath us.
4776319
Watching Star Trek has revealed to my imagination a world much larger, grander, and satisfying than that of day to day reality. Mere modern Earth is but a tiny box with well-explored and visible corners. I have lived, in my dreams, realities far larger and grander than the dull waking world can offer.
I suppose I share the peace of the lioness, because I know of something bigger and brighter than that which I toil within and find some modicum of happiness and meaning within.
Where you attempt to erect some kind of barrier between your reality and the lioness's, some of us don't. Some of us are content to live in a harsh, meaningless world, find out own meaning to ascribe to it, dream of the stars, and work towards meaningful lives in career and family here on the ground.
That we are capable of imagining things is proof of nothing. Not of those things we imagine, nor of the lack of imagination of the lioness, nor is our imagination of ten seconds ago any more or less real than the fictional pony book. They exist only in the mind, just past the here and now moment.
4776422
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