2012: The Lemuracolypse - Part Six: Foreground Lemur · 3:09am Jan 19th, 2018
2012: The Lemuracolypse
Part Six of Twelve - Foreground Lemur
Art by Ponykillerx
So here we are at the very start of April. I believe I ended up sitting down to write Chapter One of Background Pony the very next day after drumming up the idea in the shower. Immediately, as my fingers hit the keyboard, I knew that the whole "musical" aspect would play a large part in the narrative. Thankfully, I had a pretty smexxy history of exposure to magical musical bullshiet. People have stated that I must "know so much" about music to have ambled on so poetically about the matter in stories like Background Pony. Truth is, I don't understand the art at all. I simply enjoy it. For Lyra, music is a very special passion... so I've done my best to embellish on the topic whenever she thinks about it. I think there's a sizable audience out there who can really dig a passionate lurve for music in all its shapes and forms. It's not difficult a thing to capture, really.
I had a very vague outline for how the plot of Background Pony would initially go:
-Introduce Lyra and her plight
-Establish Twilight and others as foalhood friends
-Show that Lyra is on a quest to discover multiple pieces of a mysterious symphony
-Lead up to a freakish moment where Lyra tries to perform an instrumental but collapses
-Provide a flashback to the first curse
-Proceed to next freakish performance, and then explore the nature of the curse from there
A lot of stuff was hazy during the first chapter of writing. There was no "Alabaster Comethoof" yet--he would be imagined later. I had decided that there would be "ten movements" to this "cursed symphony" that Lyra was seeking to uncover, and that would act as the threadbare "map" for the course and length of the fic. In the back of my head, I knew that there would be some mysterious "ghostly alicorn figure" responsible for the shiet that happened to Lyra. One of my earliest mental concoctions was Lyra talking to Snips outside the school playground when all of a sudden she looks across the field and sees this Ju-on-esque phantom filly staring back at her from the treeline, but Lyra's the only one who can see the pony. So she takes off after it and it leads to a trippy, paranormal sequence... or something (that single mental image alone was the entire impetus for all of Chapter XVI).
I had it in my head that the "cold" and "bitter chill" that Lyra was experiencing would ultimately manifest itself in a frigid "alternate ghost reality" that was the source of both the curse and her frosted afflictions. Performing one of the movements of the symphony would take her there. As that idea evolved, I realized that the "alternate ghost reality" wasn't freaky enough... and so I went full Silent Hill and crafted the Unsung Realm. Sh00r, this more or less wiped its ass on the "Slice of Life" tag, but Background Pony at its roots was always bound to be a melodramatic stage play with a melancholic mint unicorn in the thespian spotlight. Besides, I was more than prepared to blow marsupials' minds.
Impatient as ever, I uploaded the first chapter of the story on April 5th, 2012... a day before my 29th birthday. In so doing, I hadn't chosen very inspiring cover art. If I recall, Background Pony frolicked across Fimfiction for a day or two with a very simple Lyra vector as its cover. I swiftly realized that it needed a more-deserving cover.
Lo and behold, Spotlight--awesome guy extraordinaire--was just putting the finishing touches on my Lyra/huumahn commission. "Hey! Spotlight! Here's a few extra simoleons. Could you be a dear and cut out Lyra, change her expression, and toss her--floating--into indefinable limbo as a separate pic?" "Sure, whatever."
Art by InsomniacOvrLrd
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Art by WitchTaunter
Next, I just had to wait and see if the marsupial alumni lurved reading the story nearly as much as I lurved writing it. Perhaps, deep in my chest vacuole, I yearned for a positive reaction. I hope and desire that with every upload I do--even the shitposts.
But nothing could have possibly... conceivably prepared me...
April 6, 2012
I log in and catch up with the last twenty-four hours of comments...
Let's put things into a bit of perspective really quick.
These days, a single chapter of an Austraeoh book might get 30 - 50 comments within the span of twelve hours. When SS&E puts up a Oneshot, due to my subscriber count it's more than likely to get featured and receive a hearty amount of feedback.
In early 2012, I was still melancholically shrugging my shoulders from the relatively lackluster reaction to End of Ponies via EqD. It wasn't until March or so that I finally understood how the notification system on Fimfic worked. At my best, a full week would yield maybe twelve or fifteen red exclamation points in my inbox.
Suddenly, I was juggling over one hundred notifications in a single day. Background Pony got instantly featured... and it stayed in the feature box for the entire course of a week. It didn't receive a single downvote for over forty-eight hours, and the first person who did so was a troll who boasted about it. But nothing mattered by then.
I was flabbergasted. I was in awe. You know that thing you always dream that could happen to you and yet you know it never would? Like winning the lottery? Or shaking pinkie fingers with the Pope? Or being pounced on by a harem full of ballgowns? (Well, to each their own, f'naaaa).
That thing happened to me in 2012, and on my birthday no less. The Fates couldn't have timed it better if they tried. Everything I had secretly desired for Background Pony but only half-suspected actually came true. In 2018, it's easy to sorta shrug off the whole notion of "becoming horsefamous" and "getting tons of views." It's hard to explain just how starving for attention I was in the days preceding Spring of '12. I had fought and struggled for so long, hoping to become a household brony name, and suddenly I had produced something--on a whim and without editors, no less--that catapulted itself into the collective equine spotlight.
Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the fanfic's title and it's simple, succulent synopsis. Maybe it was the use of color to set apart Lyra from the rest of the cast (an Idea I stole from Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves). Maybe it was the emphasis on music or the purple-yet-poetic ramblings of the narrator or the inclusion of Derpy and Dinky or the bit with Twilight towards the end of the first Chapter... whatever.
Something worked. Something clicked. Something about Background Pony accomplished more for others than I had ever expected it to. Yes, this blargh goes into a great deal of pretentious anatomy and breakdown and glorious self-fappery, but that doesn't change the fact that the story was as much a crapshoot as any other upload I've ever slathered across the nethers of Fimfiction.net. That comment above where someone stated "This will become the next classic of mlp" resonated with me... because as the replies and favorites and other notifications kept rolling in nonstop, I had no choice but to believe it. And it floored me.
Then the fate of Background Pony was solidified when the knight in shining armor himself added:
Whelp, there you have it. Course laid in, Cap'n.
I do believe I recall e-mailing Vimbert or messaging him in Google Talk (gawd) in which I facetiously asked: "Should I really continue Background Pony?" And his response was akin to "Hell yes!" There was no denying the fact that the public wanted to read a continuation as much as I wanted to write it. Everything I had ever wanted out of the fandom was happening all at once. There's virtually nothing to compare to it that's happened since.
I was on top of the world. This affected me in more areas of my life than anyone could imagine.
At the time--where I worked--I was surrounded by some pretty chill co-workers. Our retail location was in a plaza that got very little traffic, so--especially during evening shifts--we found ourselves twiddling our thumbs and rambling about random shiet to pass the time. One co-worker in particular was a really awesome badass from Philadelphia. I opened up about bronydom and a lot of other weird shiet during those evening shift conversations. Despite this fact, he came to respect and admire me... even making me the best man at his wedding--one of the most proud and honorable moments of my life. Gradually, one by one, he and the other people at my job fell casually in lurve with my treasured poni poni poni antics. Another co-worker, a charismatic pinkie-pie-esque soul who would occasionally bake me and the other co-workers banana bread, even adorned the workplace bathroom with a pony sign.
When Background Pony exploded, I simply couldn't contained myself. I shared the fruits of its success, as if it somehow legitimized the occasional ponified ramblings I'd subjected my co-workers to before. In the end, I think they were just happy to see that I was happy. In later conversations, my former boss would tell me how "meh" and "brooding" I was when I first started working for her, but then my countenance changed for the cheerier as the years rolled past early 2012. It's a wondrous thing to be so lovingly supported, and for a few months I had that both on and offline. I was just brimming with joy and excitement and everyone I worked around saw it.
Spring of 2012 was--without a shadow of a doubt--one of the happiest times of my life. And I could tell that--with the demand for Background Pony Chapter Two bursting at the seams--the Age of Endorphins was just beginning.
But how was I to continue from where I left off... now that the success had been so immense? I had never had a legitimate reason to feel so intimidated by the reaction to my own work before...
So I went for a walk.
And in so doing, I came up with a rough outline for what Background Pony needed in terms of plot.
In truth, brainstorming wasn't all that hard. The story's concept itself was unbelievably exploitable, especially given the fact that Lyra had supposed history before the curse set in. So many things more or less write themselves:
-Lyra's and Twilight's best friend, Moondancer, should show up for a bittersweet turn of events
-Bon Bon should have a cameo at some point as a good samaritan
-Lyra would have to do something epically heroic and yet the praise goes somewhere else entirely
-We should have a chapter where Lyra meets her father, but she can't bring herself to confess who she
-Could Lyra fall in love? Maybe there'd be a chapter where she attempts having a coltfriend
-Or what about a pet?
-What about a house? What mechanics--given the curse--would help her build a home?
-With her curse, could Lyra do the unthinkable and harm a nasty pony who deserved it?
All of these were ideas that I developed early on, and I knew that I needed to do them. I soon realized that--to cover every scenario--the forward-moving plot of the story would have to take a backseat to theme. I was now looking at a series of vignettes more so than a continuous story thread. Well, why not embrace that? This was a story written in "first-person," after all.
People have made the understandable criticisms that Lyra's "journal entries" are far too detailed and voluminous to be actual entries. And, well, duh. You're right. But the thing to understand is that the entire chapters aren't "whole journal entries." Each installment starts with a journal entry, but then there's a visual break. What follows after the break is Lyra's first-person narrative paraphrasing the events of the recollection. It doesn't implicitly state that there's a difference between one form of narration or the other because I didn't feel like I friggin' had to. It's vague for the sake of an applicable device, to transition readers out of contemplation into exposition and then allow for lazy flourishes of poetic nuance in between. Also, it's horse fiction. F'naaaaaaaa.
So, if I was moving full-force into a vignette-centric structure, then I should see what I could do about giving each member of the Mane 6 an obligatory moment in the spotlight. This turned out to be a far more natural process than with EoP (the exception perhaps being Pinkie Pie, lulz). Sure enough, I found ways to tie each of the main characters into the separate themes explored in their relevant chapters. Applejack got to help Lyra set up a house. Rainbow Dash had a part to play when Lyra needed to rescue Scootaloo. Fluttershy helped Lyra with her pet. Rarity had her own goddamn chapter. Pinkie Pie made a bunch of stupid references. And, of course, Twilight had a lot of priceless moments to share. Hell, even Spike more or less got a "chapter" of his own.
To make things simple for myself, I pictured Background Pony to be comparable to a mini-series... or, more appropriately, an anime. Two short seasons, ten "episodes" each. There was a focus on slice-of-life, but every now and then the overall plot would progress itself... but only whenever it felt like it.
In fact, I specifically thought to myself that I was modeling it after Cowboy Bebop. If you watch that show out of order, it can almost make as much sense as if you watched it in sequence from start to finish. Yes, there's an integral story arc about Spike Spiegel and the dark past that catches up to him, but the series fritters around with other random stories and characters in between major revelations of the central protagonist... and all the while it makes things friggin' interesting.
Lyra had a major story arc to accomplish. She had a rich and detailed past--some of it shared with other characters in the fanfic. But, on top of that, she had a mysterious Symphony to complete. But I wasn't gonna hurry in getting to the heart of the curse that encumbered her. Following the mantra of "one step forward; two steps back," I was gonna tease the main storyline... dishing it out to the readers in teaspoons... all the while utilizing the concept of Background Pony for what it was actually good for: emotional and philosophical ponderings.
So, in modeling my story after stuff infinitely better than it, I made a concrete decision: It would be twenty chapters long. No less. No more. That was the one and only biblical measurement of Background Pony in its inception. "Get that shiet done in twenty chapters."
I had a long road ahead of me. I just didn't know how long that road was going to be... or how much it was going to take out of me.
Instead, my mind instantly seized on one very important thing... something I had to decide upon before I set forth on Chapter Two, much less the rest of the story.
How was this all going to end?
Art by raikoh
Those of you who have listened to me ramble about Background Pony before know that I had some pretty wyrd ideas rolling around at the beginning. One such plan early on was to actually have Trixie play a huge role in the story. There'd be some weird loophole in the plot where she'd be the only one to remember Lyra while all the other ponies didn't, and she would go about helping Lyra complete the rest of the symphony. I even had an idea where Lyra freed herself from the curse, but then forgot everything she ever learned--reverting to a rich Canterlot douchebag. But Trixie would remember and she would be burdened with shouldering the unsung lesson and attempting to preach it to deaf ears.
This holocaustal concept in the making was a hold-over from I Remember Rainbow Dash. In that story, Rainbow Dash's connections with her friends via her first Sonic Rainboom are being erased from history one by one (again, playing with magically-selective-amnesia). Trixie, through some magical bullshiet, is the only pony who can help her... and somehow she's immune to the alterations within that universe. At the end of the story, Rainbow undoes the damage to time... but in so doing she sacrifices herself so that her friends enjoy their canonical standings within the MLP:FiM continuum, but Rainbow Dash no longer exists. However, Trixie remembers her... and once she's able to trigger the same memory within Scootaloo, Rainbow is finally, triumphantly brought back to the land of the living (yaaaaaaaaaay Disney).
In short, I was needlessly obsessed with Trixie in the early-early brony days. It's mostly because she's such an adorable, cuddly little shit-stain. So, it was only natural that whenever I stumbled upon a new and promising story concept, I thought to myself "Great! How can I fit Trixie in?!" The joke, of course, is that every time I put Trixie into a story, the entire project bombs.
Thankfully, I was wise enough to crawl myself through the endorphin rush and trash that idea altogether. Still, I pondered over how I would go about fixing Lyra's curse... and what would it mean for the story's theme if I did so? What made Chapter One: Melodious so successful was precisely its bittersweet bleakness... and Lyra's optimistic altruism in the face of it all. It was relateable because we can easily see ourselves facing insurmountable odds. It makes for the very definition of courage to persist against that which is unwinnable.
And what if... in the end--like life--Lyra's conflict simply was unwinnable?
What if all Lyra could do... or ever want to do... was the same selfless, unsung act that she did for Derpy and Dinky at the end of Chapter One? She does something nice for her fellow ponies, but can't achieve any victory for herself. Her kind-heartedness is as much a curse as the Nocturne of the Firmaments, but it's what makes her so lovable.
What if that became the mantra for the entire book? What if there is no happy ending... no forever-after...
Just like there's no eternity for the likes of all of us? Just like we all have to come to grips with the impassible, the unscaleable, and yet we must find some Sisyphusian inspiration to define ourselves in spite of it...
I couldn't just have her slam into a brick wall, reduce her to pulp, and roll credits. I had to make it worthwhile... but not in any explicit way. I would have to force the reader to look towards within, as Lyra does throughout the course of the fic. The catharsis would be there, but it wouldn't be easy. Not easy to find, just not easy to accept.
This... would be a great challenge indeed... and something that would define the fic as a whole as I ventured forth into writing it. How could I set up the most intense, epic, purposeful, dauntless 'unhappy ending' in the history of bronydom and yet make it work?
And for those of you contending that I achieved something that was "edgy" for "edgy's sake," let's look at a far greater sin: that of absolute appeasement.
At a risk of being a greater douchebag than I'm already coming across, I'm gonna call out an old story from 2011. I'm not mentioning this fic because I think it "sucks." Quite the opposite, really. I greatly enjoyed what I read of it and it still makes me pine for the old nostalgic days of early-early bronydom. It's just that the fic made a flagrant error in its culmination.
A while back, an author by the name of GanonFLCL wrote the mother of all Twixie fics: Of Mares and Magic. Contrary to appledashed beliefs, I shipped Twilight and Trixie before any other characters in the fandom. It was a source of toasty warm-fuzzies for me, and GanonFLCL's epic work embodied this to the nth degree.
The story was lengthy, meaty, and full of far more character interaction than I expected. The author was obviously an early-brony doing early-brony things with early-brony enthusiasm, and almost every Season One character had a cameo of some sort to play in what... kinda sorta amounted to a Veiled Self-Insertion fic starring Trixie. There was an especially snazzy arc towards the end where Trixie goes on an epic off-page journey of self-discovery, and over the course of a year she writes back to Twilight about her experiences and lessons. Toward the end of the fic, there was a climactic exercise in dramatic irony, complete with a spectacularly-arranged character reveal. At last, as the story came to a close, there was a romantic heart-to-heart. Be warned: there be some spoilers ahead.
To my surprise, Trixie at the end of the fic actually tells Twilight that she no longer desires a relationship with her. She's gained experience, become a better mare, and moved on. This, naturally, leaves Twilight in tears... but if that's how Trixie desired it then so be it. Then, in the very last scene, it's revealed that Trixie's lack of affection for Twilight is a complete lie... and in fact she broke up with the lavender unicorn because she believed whole-heartedly that she would only be a burden on the mare. This fabrication was Trixie's personal sacrifice to keep Twilight's life sane and stable. And while it was a bit melodramatic, I felt it was a pretty awesome twist and it sank with me far deeper than some predictably lovey-dovey conclusion ever could.
Still more spoilers... ... ...
I thought I had read the very last chapter. Everything wrapped itself up with a neat bow, even if it did so unhappily. But--upon refreshing and to my surprise--there was yet another chapter... one that was labeled as "Epilogue." What happened in this chapter, you ask? Whelp, the fanfic suddenly and inexplicably does a complete one-eighty and establishes that Twilight knew that Trixie was lying all along and that she had somehow deus-ex-machina'd an unfathomable amount of intuition beforehand to preemptively ascertain and reject Trixie's heartbreaking performance. Thus, the entire previous chapter--and all of the lengthy story's polynumerous themes that were collectively rivering into that moment--were completely and irrecoverably undone by an unprecedented seismic shift in the plot... just to make everything suddenly all sunshine and roses again. Trixie and Twilight were now smooching before the end credits, killing off the poignant sting of what could have otherwise been a very unique and emotionally provocative ending. Hell, it was the Ending. Where did this dayum "Epilogue" come from all of a sudden?
For those of you noble enough to have skipped those two large paragraphs, it would appear as though--at the time of my reading the fic--that the author had initially completed the story with a poignant "unhappy" ending. Then--shortly thereafter, and in direct response to a wave of negative feedback--the author decided to slap on a last-second epilogue that completely and utterly reversed the original ending that he had put into concrete. In other words, he caved in to the fans. And the end result is just... embarrassingly artificial. I mean, I know this is all poni poni poni fanfiction but come on. You had a great story going there, guy. Don't insult yourself, y'know? Exhibit confidence. Be unafraid to provoke and offend... so long as it means that there's only one sacred divinity at the end of the day: The Story.
I mean GanonFLCL no ill-will, and I overall enjoyed his work as a whole. But, more than anything, when I look back at that 2011 fic, I take to heart a very important lesson of what not to do to a passion project that you would like to call your own.
Do not give in to peer pressure.
Do not sacrifice the emotional sanctity and structural integrity of a story just to appease the audience.
Do what you want to do and do it without remorse, because storytelling is your own so long as you have the ability to possess it.
Since I read that fic, and even with stories like End of Ponies in mind, I told myself that I was never going to bend and shape a fanfic just because I felt that the altered outcome would somehow make marsupials happy. Go for cold. Go for brutal. If it makes for a good story... if it's something you think you'll be proud of... if you expect that it will make people think, then kick them puppies into the ground, maaaaaan. Drown those kittens. Murder Little Foot's mother slowly... and painfully... with a damn rainstorm growling overhead.
Art by hydoyezen
And that's when I realized that not only was I going to go for a perceivably "unhappy" ending with Background Pony, but I was gonna go full ham. Lyra would never break the curse. In fact, she would find out what fateful decision she was going to make in the second-to-last chapter. I was going to have my own goddamn epilogue... a long and painful and intimate evisceration of the eyeballs where Lyra sinks neck-deep into the necrotic waters of oblivion, succumbing to all of the elements she struggled so long to escape from... but ultimately surrendered herself to because she knew the act would be noble and just and beneficial to everypony else in its heroic nature... even if that nature would forever be forgotten.
And at the tail-end of all that--in the appendix to utter annihilation--there would be one final, last, spark of hope... hope that in the end she did not lose the most important aspect of herself... her love of creativity and her love of others.
But then, there would be the end... and nothing more. As there will be someday for all of us.
And so, my walk ended.
I finally had a plan to guide myself by. The "bible" that I needed.
And I sat down to the computer...
And I wrote Chapter Two... ...
... ... ...and it completely and utterly sucked.
There's no way to put this lightly. I was under enormous pressure to make the following chapter to Background Pony's beginning something that was worth the time and investment. After so many dayum comments and reviews and favorites, I felt that it was a monumental climb to create an installment of equal or greater quality to its predecessor. So, to some extent, I overperformed. The original Chapter Two of Background Pony was a thick purple mess of hot garbage.
Granted, right after finishing it, I was a bit too blinded by the euphoria of having written the chapter that I neglected to see the atrocity for what it was. Still, something gnawed at me. I had actually placed the second chapter upon Fimfic when I started getting second thoughts. So, panicking ever so slightly, I sent a PM out to those who had helped me work on End of Ponies.
Worsty responded. I spammed him with the force of lightning. "Dude! Could you read this really quick and tell me if it sucks?" He was down to clown, and so I sent a link to the rough draft his way. However, as he was reading it, I decided to go over the chapter myself... and I felt myself wincing harder and harder with each velvety purple paragraph. I had already made the executive decision by the time he had finished proofreading. "Uh... yeah... this is kinda dogshit, dude." (paraphrased)
I realized that in my intense determination and feeling the pressure of delivering awesome stuff, I had gone completely overboard. Thankfully, I chose to follow sanity at the last second. I discarded the rough draft entirely and just... decided to rewrite the entire dayum thing from start to finish a day later. Don't get me wrong, it's still kind of a sucky chapter, but it's loads better than the original product, and I owe it all to theworstwriter.
Long story short, this experience made me realize that I had the closest thing to a Skirtsian "magnum opus" at my tentacle-tips. Even though I had initially uploaded the story without utilizing proofreaders, it was clear to me now that I needed an editing team to assist me or else I would end up ruining this glorious work of horseliteraturefarts. I needed fellow lemurs to keep me in check, as it were.
And, thankfully, a good chunk of the End of Ponies crew were willing to hop on over. Theworstwriter came on board, obviously. I always appreciated his intuition into the mechanics of a kaizo writer's mindscape. When I did crazy shiet in a story, he usually played devil's advocate and helped others give the literary decisions the benefit of a doubt.
Then came Warden. He was a far less forgiving critic and he constantly put me on my toes for the littlest of things. His editorial work on Background Pony was exceptional, even if I wanted to break his eyelids at times. F'naaa.
Razgriz joined also. Raz had sort of a Daredevil sonar sense, and he'd catch up on stuff that even I couldn't even remotely see. There was something of a silly running gag where Raz would compliment me on some awesome story twist... and then I would do a double-take and go "Wait, really? That was totally by accident!" For example: I had no clue that tulips metaphorically stood for "hopeless love," and yet Raz noticed how blatantly I had used them for the "romance" between Lyra Heartstrings and Morning Dew. Without meaning to, Raz had the habit of making me feel like an accidental genius.
TheBrianJ was also consistently there to help out with editing. He went on to write some awesome shiet himself, hitting the feature bar more than once. Plus he's a major wrestling fan, so that was always fun to connect with.
And then there came an editor from the furby fields of yonder who would become one of the greatest friends I've ever had--online or off:
Spoiler: he's the scout trooper in the dead center... unfortunately...
I think it was sometime in winter of late '11 that Warden--who was working on a complex End of Ponies audio project--shared with me clips of online voice actors who had volunteered sound clips of themselves doing impressions of the apocalyptic cast in question. Among them was a dude who could do both Brucie (resembling Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof) and goodly Brevis from Dredgemane (resembling a hybrid of Johnny Depp and Ed Wynn). Needless to say, he grabbed my ears by the brain bone, and when I found out he could edit as well, I welcomed him on board. I recall him leaving several flattering comments on Ponychan during the early inception of Background Pony.
As soon as Propmaster hopped on board the editing convoy, I knew I had a priceless addition. He carried with him a spiritual energy and a lurve for all things poni poni poni. He had a gift for understanding the emotional spectrum of both comedy and drama, and he could see where I was going when attempting certain literary sequences--or else help me steer in the proper direction when I was messing things up. As time went by, I found myself writing the chapters for him as much as for the actual readers. As fate would have it, if Propmaster was impressed with shiet, then I was most likely doing things right.
On the plus side, Props was totally and undeniably a BIG awesome bastard, with a joyous bag of nerdgasmic enthusiasm to be shared. I'm a few years older than him and yet he still comes across as the "big brother" to everyone he comes into fuzzy contact with.
Something curious and strange was happening as I embarked upon the writing and editorial process of Background Pony. I had first elected for these online mofos to join me, and yet with each installment that went up and every ritualistic pow-wow on Google Docs, I felt like I was forming a bond with them. Almost as if I was...
...making friends?
I like to think it was Propmaster who pushed it over the line. His genuine friendliness and sincerity made his online company hard to resist, and I felt as though the enthusiasm ran throughout the rest of the group as they collectively helped me move this Lyra Depression Train along, one week at a time. Eventually, I would create a group on Fimfic to encapsulate the whole of us: Spanish Announce Table Goes First. If Discord existed back in that time, SATGF would most definitely have been its own chat room. The group existed so I could honor those whom I considered best buds, not to mention awesometastical contributors to the poni poni poni lit. As the months went by, others would join our little cabal of wordsmithery Not Vimbert, though. I still held him on a lofty pedestal... and he gave up on Background Pony by Chapter V, lulz.
Art by Torcher999
At last, Spanish Announce Table Goes First was a-go. I had my backup crew of editors. The only thing to do was get Background Pony submitted to Equestria Daily... which we did. Now I had both the hits and the comments sections prime for setting ablaze. The engines roared, and the fic hissed along the tracks. My momentum at first was insane. With the help of SATGF, I was pumping out one chapter every week. It was a remarkable industry of creativity, vision, and literary ambition. I don't think I've had nearly as awesome and "professional" a writing session ever since those days with those swell lemurs.
And as the chapters of Background Pony rolled out, I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the thick of things... almost how Lyra herself was trapped... constrained by her daunting situation.
I felt that each chapter was a monumental thing. I put an insane amount of effort into each installment, and I strove to make every moment, word, phrase, paragraph, and piece of dialogue matter in the thematical scheme of things. Whether or not I was actually accomplishing my noble goal remains debatable, but the pressure got heavier and heavier with each upload.
And it's kinda haunting looking back at it all. You see, Background Pony is a story that deals with concepts of isolation, impermanence, invisibility, existentialism, and extending one's legacy into the unfeeling void. And yet--due in major part to Background Pony the fanfic--I was becoming the opposite of Lyra. Whether or not I was letting an ounce of it get to my head, there was no denying the fact that Background Pony put shortskirtsandexplosions on the map. If it wasn't for that fic, I wouldn't have nearly as many subscribers on Fimfic as I do today. I wouldn't have all of the fan art, the literary translations, the audio performances, or any of the other smextacular contributions that I had always dreamt of receiving from day one.
Background Pony made me popular. It was the fate Lyra could never ever hope to achieve. So how could I relate to her? In essence, I couldn't. While Lyra Heartstrings was experiencing anguish and emptiness, I was getting hundreds of notifications each week on the website while bonding with my new editor buds via Google Docs and Steam and Skype. In a lot of ways, it made me feel hypocritical.
Also, in some ways, becoming "horsefamous" made me feel like an even bigger douchebag than I was when I first entered the fandom. This weighed heavily on my brain bone... especially when I'd be having conversations with Spotlight.
Art by insomniacovrlrd
Spotlight was no stranger to popularity... albeit in other online circles. When the brony scene lit up, he--like so many others--threw his creative talents into the pot. Insomniacovrlrd is one gifted motha too, with art that emulates and even surpasses the visual content of the show. Alas, despite such finesse, Spotlight never truly achieved the same fortune that so easily came to SamRose and--now--myself. And this was the case even though Spotlight was incorporating the same awesome talents that made him big elsewhere.
I couldn't help but feel bad about that. I started to wonder if maybe Background Pony only made it big through a sheer stroke of luck... even as I continued to write it and add chapters. What if "fame" was nothing more than selective happenstance? Did I have any legitimate reason to be proud? It's a sucky world where one person can make it big... meanwhile another who is utilizing the same degree of talents (if not better, superior skills) ends up being completely neglected by the potential audience.
I started seeing less of myself in Lyra, but more of Spotlight--figuratively speaking. We'd have several conversations during the time I wrote Background Pony, and I felt as though Spotlight was more or less throwing masterpieces into an unfeeling void... whereas I was employing lukewarm skills at best--yet still hitting all the high numbers. I didn't feel like any artist... but I still imagined I was seeing into the world of an artist. The struggle. The grind. The endless uphill battle against obscurity.
All of this I channeled super hardcore into Chapter V: Industry... which is both a love song to Spotlight and a love song to Rarity. I more or less see them both as the same in my eye, which is fitting cuz Rarity was "best pony" for insomniacovrlrd. It's also the chapter that Vimbert gave up on. The fic had switched from a cohesive plot-centric narrative and instead turned into something of a philosophical meta-statement on character. Also, Vimbert hated Rarity. He no longer read Background Pony after that... lulz.
And this was the beginning of a trend in a lot of Background Pony chapters. Like some famous musician who becomes popular for a one-hit wonder, every other thing I wrote afterwards became intensely self-conscious. I wasn't 100% certain if I deserved to "own the spotlight" for this fic that I was writing. For one, its success landed me in a place where I couldn't relate to Lyra. For another, I began to doubt everything I put to paragraph. SATGF was very useful to me... but between that and my friends and the constant barrage of mostly positive comments, I started to wonder...
...what if I absolutely sucked as a writer, but I didn't have the capacity to know it?
Naturally, when you become even remotely famous, you instantly launch your name to the top of the obligatory "I hate this because it's edgy and cool to do so" list. Considering that the brony phenomenon spawned on 4chan, that means there was a deep underlying carpet of hate just begging to flip towards the ceiling at any time. As self-deprecating lemurs are wont, I took teaspoons of hate with the volume of the Mediterranean Sea. I allowed literary failings and the fear of literary failings to consume me more than I should have. This made what should have been a walk-in-the-park slowly turn into twenty chapters of arsenic and regret.
Every once in a while, I would throw something else out there... just to show that I wasn't a one-trick-lemur with Lyra-flavored word farts.
Take for example this lovely piece of puppies-and-kittens. The Last Tears in Tartarus was more or less my attempt to exorcise the demons floating leftover from End of Ponies' perpetual limbo. And--guess what? While it's still a work that I'm immensely proud of, it still deals with apocalypse, suffering, and a thick sense of isolation.
And then there was this nugget. Entered into a contest and coming in second place, Never was another attempt to flex my muscles. However, it dealt with death and sorrow and the necessity for shouldering pain while moving on with one's existence. Jee, where have we heard that before?
It seemed that--no matter what I did--SS&E's account was destined to have super melancholic, pathos-driven, densely-diction'd stories with lots of existential and dystopian overtones. At this rate, I felt that I would forever be remembered for purple prose and sad fics... and it was true. I only had myself to blame for it. End of Ponies had done well, and now Background Pony had shot through the roof. It felt as though super pretentious soap operas was SS&E's expertise. After all--why not? I entered the fandom attempting something kaizo with I Remember Rainbow Dash, and--courtesy of Candlestick Head--it met a glorious, burning, righteous death.
But also--as it turns out--the experience forced me to write myself down this narrow channel of predictability. I had become the "sad writer." My works were rife with psuedo-philosophical ramblings and overtly-verbose paragraphs. This was the style of End of Ponies from the beginning, and it had spread to Background Pony through Lyra as a narrator. Also--while I had almost escaped the editorial process with Background Pony's first chapter, the "horsefamouse" situation necessitated that I revert back to EoP's multiple layers of proofreading. Don't get me wrong, this was the one and only thing maintaining Background Pony's quality... but a part of me yearned to be free... to be rebellious... to relive the old days of These Black Eyes where I uploaded a chapter every two days and simply did not give a single god damn.
Background Pony's twenty-enormous-chapters-with-heavy-themes-and-meta-content style was starting to constrain me... even depress me. As the year rolled into early summer, I found myself looking forward to the next installment less and less. And it really really sucks... y'know... when you're constrained to write something that you're famous for--something that everyone wants to read--but you're not actually enjoying it. And--don't get me wrong--I would find ways to appreciate the complete Background Experience as a whole, but it was starting to turn into a chore... more than a chore, as a matter of fact. It drained me. And even after all the effort that I and my editors put into it, I was starting to doubt myself so much that I wondered if any of the fic even mattered in the long run.
I needed to relax. I needed to have fun. I desperately required an escape... like some magical ability to grow wings, leap off the ground, and fly towards some random destination, detailing everything I saw along the way with no cause for fear, regret, or shame.
And, as it so happened... I had a potential archetype in the back of my head for delivering just that.
Art by AGypsyBard
To be Continued in Part Seven: Eastward
Dammit, this is all BGP. I have to skip this one.
I'm sure I'll be bawling my eyes out soon though.
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I loved the insight into this story, one of the first of my favorites and the one that haunted me for a long time.
Cool. You're really good at this.
Nice buildup. Can't wait for tomorrow.
The whole feeling of it being a pressure and a chore to write, I can relate. Persona EG turned into that for me to such a degree it completely burned me out at one point and I took a month hiatus from writing, then later on the story burned me out again and the update schedule has been in the toilet ever since.
This has been fun to read, a good mix of silly and serious like many of your works. Background Pony is what convinced me to dip my toe into fan-fiction in the first place, and it and The Things Tavi Says are still some of my favorite works. Hoping to hear about that story sometime in this 12 part epic.
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I HAVE A FEELING I'LL REALLY ENJOY THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF THIS BLOG
An unearned happy ending is no way to create happiness.
All interesting stuff, Skirts.
As much meaning as it held before, it holds so much more now.
I was one of those people that described you as "the master of depression fics."
It was never an insult from me. It was a statement that you did it very well and despite needing to get back on antidepressants once I got into your reading (only partially connected) I very much enjoyed reading your work.
As for not caving to fans? Well... It's gone both ways. Antipodes held the course and while the ending was what PK had planned from the very beginning it just didn't feel like it fit the story at the end.
Background Pony however would have felt cheapened by a "happy" ending.
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I have a feeling you've already prepared a [fun facts] and a [trivia] page in the wiki.
I saw harmony and decided I needed to see what was up, stayed to read despite learning that it wasn't an admission to the recontinuatuion of EOP.
I remember the pony IRC chat I was in exploding when Background Pony released. Big Four material, indeed.
I can’t lie, this was my favorite time period for your writing. They may not have been the sunniest days, but they elicited such a sense of wonder that I don’t think I really rediscovered until a ways into Austraeoh.
Well I’ll be. Looks like it’s almost East o’clock.
Also, I can’t deny it, Background Pony was my gateway drug into the fandom proper, and I’m eternally grateful for it’s melancholy existence.
All I understood is that Scootaloo looks badass as a soldier
Yeah, I love you too.
At least my bit isn't as ghei as someone's.
I always thought the ending really fit what the story was trying to do, and that people who thought the ending was bad or "edgy" just didn't understand what message the story was trying to send. It's pretty cool to see that this was planned just about from the start.
I haven't cried in long years (until last month when I watched Coco, but the 3d glasses covered my tears, and thinking about the fact that I was crying made me laugh loudly, so maybe no one noticed). But still I have been near that point some times over the years. The second to last chapter of Background Pony took me to that point. The last one I read out of pure masochism, to not leave anything unread. I knew what I would find in that chapter and was not happy that I was right.
Still you should be proud of making me feel about to cry. I tend to grow cold very fast when I notice a story is trying to make me feel things. The only other MLP fanfic I remember from back then that made me feel things only managed to do so because it was just a big reference to the Scrubs episode My Screw Up, and the feelings came mostly of making me remember that episode. Did I ever mention Brendan Fraser is up there in my list of famous people I want to bear hug near the level of Sir Patrick Steward?
Anyways...
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Nihilism.
See Background Pony.
Part of me wishes I hadn’t spent three years sizing up BP before diving through each of those hefty chapters over a 12 month period (Being There alone was 43k of the most prime+ poniwords), but better late to the melancholy party than never. I can’t think of any other stories off the top of my head that hold up just as well now as they did back in the fandom’s “halcyon days”, either.
Getting a glimpse of how things progressed and the shift in perspective relative to the character you created is especially intriguing. That goes for the escape plan too, of course.
>Harmony kissing Rainbow
Well would you look at that...
G'eh, I knew it. I knew it when I first read BP and I still know. I perfectly understood (and understand) why the story ended the way it did. Why it had to. It was simply what the story was about. I'm still annoyed though, at a pointless conclusion (even if the conclusion was in tune with the story). Let the world be unmade!
The truth is I can't handle well emotions that don't stand in logic.