2012: The Lemuracolypse - Part Eight: The Summer Shuffle · 8:13pm Jan 20th, 2018
2012: The Lemuracolypse
Part Eight of Twelve - The Summer Shuffle
Between Background Pony and Austraeoh, I had a real train going. It may have been destined for train wrecks, but the wheels were grinding nonetheless.
And I was very clearly enjoying myself. If you look back at my blarghs (or lack of them), you'll notice that the public post-its exploded around late Spring of '12. I was receiving loads of attention and I soaked it up. Since college, I've had this manic douchebag inner voice that lurves to cavort across the digipages with copious amounts of links and picture spam.
See?
When it came to SS&E blogs on Fimfiction, I projected all of my endorphins to the marsupial alumni. It was a heck of a lot easier to do back then. Not so much now. When I wasn't enthused enough to chat about anything or ramble about the latest/incoming Background Pony chapter, I was just picture-spamming for picture-spamming's sake. It made for a somewhat discernible pattern in all things Skirtsian.
I like to think that--for the most part--I've kept who I am relatively secret and close to the chest. Blarghs like this contradict that, of course, but for a long while I refused to open up. About anything. Yes, even those things.
Somehow, I managed to be really insanely talkative about... nothing in particular. Just Skirts stuff, I guess. I mean, I was producing content, so it's not like it was all hot air. Plus, I was enjoying myself. So who the fuq cares.
But between the manic blargh posts and the late-night ramblings with Spotlight and the amiable editing with Propmaster and company, I still couldn't shake the numbing thought that--with each subsequent chapter--I was starting to fall in love with Background Pony less and less.
The story itself wasn't the problem. I more or less knew the twenty-chapter outline in my brain. Yes, there were bits to "fill up" here and there, but it should have otherwise been a straight line to the finish. But something about the fanfic... put me on edge, and as time went on I found that writing, proofreading, and uploading a chapter felt like pulling teeth. Maybe it was that I fully-expected marsupials to be disappointed by the ending, and I wasn't certain if I had the strength or fortitude to pull it off like I dreamt I could. Or... maybe... I absolutely dreaded the fact that I would soon have to be writing a Pinkie Pie chapter...
I've heard it stated that the Pinkie Pie chapter is when people finally decided to stop reading the fic (I've also heard it stated that people forced themselves to read most of Background Pony "in spite of the writing," but now I'm just going on a tangent). While a lot of this can be attributed to incorrectly-placed mane six favoritism (f'naaaaaa), let's just be real. Chapter Ten of Background Pony is a mother fucking abomination. There's no way of excusing it. I didn't want to write the chapter. My heart wasn't in the dayum process. At all. For some reason, I chose to fill Pinkie's dialogue with loads of references to every currently-existing-popular-Lyra fic of the time. What's more, after 18k words of faffing about with an annoying caricature of the party pony and a noticeably irascible bastardization of everyone's favorite existential heroine, the only good the chapter did for the plot was reference the previous chapter's run-in with Bon Bon and foreshadow the unknown epic-ness of the forthcoming Chapter XI.
In other words, it was the chapter that should not have existed. And yet it did.
What a way to end the first half of my Magnum Opus. Not with a bang, but a whimper. I loathed that chapter. The only thing good about it was that it was over... but that didn't change the fact that I had soured the overall Background Pony experience and--even though I knew I was capable of delivering better before the fic's culmination, I had little to no energy for going back to the project anytime soon.
So things started to drag. While--yes--it was good to busy myself with Austraeoh on an alt account, I felt some sort of crazy obligation to continue supplying shiet via SS&E. I may not have been quite as "prolific" in 2012 as I would become in later years, but the idea of doing one-shots and mini-fics was becoming more and more appealing.
While searching for some sort of short-storyesque way of expressing myself, I scoured the recesses of my mind just like I had for the formulation of Background Pony. I searched for something pathos-driven, and it was then that I remembered a pretty lofty sci-fi story of mine. In it, planet earth had been "annexed" by a large galactic nation--probably because some long-enacted legislature of natural preservation expired or something. Whatever. Long story short, a multi-racial alien corporation runs this part of the galaxy, claiming planets and stripping them of all resources in order to further their industrial gains. Once Earth gets the big green "OKAY" to be bulldozed, humanity is driven from their homes reduced to vermin. Literally. As it turns out, homo sapiens are remarkably tiny on the physical spectrum of functioning sapient creatures, and the only thing they're good for in the giant floating arcologies of colonized space (besides food or aphrodesiacs) is to shimmy into hard-to-reach areas and perform maintenance on grimy, complex mechanisms.
The short story focuses on one human being trying to eke out a living among giant sapient lobsters and plasmodiums and other gross alien entities who live waaaaay above him on the galactic caste system. After a lengthy bit of prose describing just how icky and bleak his existence is, he comes across another human just passing through on some trade barge. At the tail end of the story, the two humans share a wordless embrace, relishing the warmth and scent of each other--lost in the nucleus of filth, apathy, and the threat of inevitable extinction.
I liked the idea of having both characters be the same gender--so as to eliminate most assumptions that the "embrace" is anything beyond platonic. They're making an evolutionary connection... simply enraptured to be in the company of someone of the same species, fully-knowing that--if things keep going the way they are--then they'll never run into another human being again. It was meant to be an exercise in pathos. After the bulk of the story just drenches the reader with depressing and grotesque imagery, there's this picture perfect slice of sweetness at the very end, and then it's over with as quickly as it appeared. Like a candle being lit and snuffed out within a breath.
Soooooo... I thought of how I could apply this to ponies. And... friggin' duh... I could. In a lot of ways, it fit into something like the EoP-verse, since it would necessitate something apocalyptic or dystopian to have thrown Equestrian culture into such disarray. But, remember, this was 2012... and the canonical universe of MLP:FiM was still throwing shiet at us to make use out of. Including this:
Hey.
Remember that goofy episode of S2 where the show just flippantly announces the existence of Tartarus? Cuz I fucking do. Here's a thing that I really really wish fanfics exploited more... along with the Holodeck-flavored magic interactive comic books shiet introduced in S4. The show pretty much said "Hey! We know how you weird neckbearded adults love shoving grimdark crud into our narrative, so here's more fuel for just that!"
Almost immediately, my head flew into overdrive when "Tartarus" was name-dropped. Like... is it hell? Is it just a prison for titans? Do entire civilizations of monsters live there in chains? How many monsters dwell beneath the surface of Equestria? A lot of this thinking would fuel a buttload of fanfic ideas... most of them unwritten.
But in 2012, the idea of Tartarus became the backbone for me creating the most unpleasant story of that time. For better or for worse, it was going to contribute to the stigma of SS&E being a "purple prose grimdark melancholic author," but whatever. The idea had the potential for enormous emotional butt chugging... so I went through with it:
The Last Tears in Tartarus is a fic that I'm immensely proud of. Even to this day, I've almost always featured it on SS&E's user page. It accomplishes just about everything that the original sci-fi story idea was purposed to do, and most editors and readers who've had the generosity to give it a page-turn have said really good things about it.
It was my first Rated-M story... which is something I did in order to "play it safe." The story really... really gravitates towards the "grim" half of "grimdark." This is due mostly to the tone of the story, but it's just... really grotesque and unpleasant at parts. Sh00r, it's kind of an edgelord fic, but the whole point of the story becomes clear by its final act... which remains pretty emotionally devastating to this day. It furthered the theme of "finding beauty and purpose in annihilation," which... kinda prophesies the direction Background Pony would go... come to think of it.
My one major regret is that I believe the "M" rating worked against the fic. There's no "clop" or excessive viscera in the story. It's just very bleak and unpleasant and kinda icky at parts. Nevertheless, I think this has caused most marsupials to glance over it... and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of readers simply don't know that it exists. F'naaaaaaa. Oh well.
Something else happened in mid-2012. I took part in my first brony literary competition... which began a long line of failuuuuuuuuuuuure.
Ponychan's /lit/ decided to have a short story contest. What's more, the chief challenge of the competition was that of a time constraint. They'd do some sort of random draw from a hat of story prompts, and then writers would have a limited window of opportunity to produce something.
I faintly recall stumbling upon the contest thread relatively late into the process. Nevertheless, my ego was bloated and my palms were sweaty. Here I Had a chance to wave my prosaic phallus around metaphorically?.
The prompt ended up being "cutting ties." And that was it.
Soooooooooo me and whoever else had an interest in competing for this thing had to come up with a game-winning story idea based on that phrase alone. I recall pacing around the house past midnight for the better part of an hour, tracing circles in the dark, brainstorming. My first idea went to an anti-Celestia fic where the Mane 6 discover that--in being the Elements of Harmony--they are divinely bound to serving the defense of Equestria for the extent of their lives, to the point that they have to unwillingly part ways with their friends and families in order to become faithful agents of Princess Celestia. It was meant to be a pretentious analysis of what it means to be an "Element of Harmony" and the potential drawbacks of being more than an on-the-call guardian.
Does this idea sound sucky to you? Good. 'Cuz it was. And I had no energy whatsoever to tackle it. Especially since it was going to necessitate some outright vilifying of Princess Celestia... which I didn't have the motivation nor energy to do.
So what else could I do with "cutting ties?" Or... better yet... what else could existential depression-simulating Skirts do with "cutting ties?" Keeping Celestia in the picture... precisely why does she seem to not have any friends outside of business, apprenticeship, or royal relations? And then I figured: Cuz she's immortal. And immortality sucks for friend-making.
Remember, this was 2012... long before Twilight was given wings. "Immortality Blues" fanfiction was still a novel and mostly un-tapped concept. It was the centerpiece of Ponymonium... which I never ended up writing and now probably never will. But here, I had the opportunity to explore why--potentially--an alicorn like Princess Celestia would choose to remain solitary and aloof. And what better way to address time's strain on emotions than with an experimental usage of chronological storytelling?
So, I finished pacing around the house and I sat down to Sedna. I think the time constraints of the contest gave us thirty-six hours. I ended up writing my installment in about nine. One sitting.
And that's how we got Never. For a story about a big white horse, it's pretty dayum purple. The story amounts to a goddamn gauntlet of melancholic death scenes... from beginning to finish. And while it lays it on pretty friggin' thick, I still think there are gorgeous moments to be had in it. The climactic scene between Celestia and Twilight at the end particularly gets to me. I'm also proud of the fact that the time-jumps make the reader think that Twilight has been long-dead, when in fact she's still relevant to the "present" timeline of the story, as we find out by the trip to Ponyville before the fic's culmination.
Did it win the contest? Hell no. The award went to an author who... doesn't seem to be doing the horse race anymore, despite how friggin' awesome his account name is. At the time, I wasn't particularly shocked at the contest results, but my ego-stroked self sorta dicaprio'd at how it all went down. All in all, it felt as though the reviews of my fic amounted to: "Well, it's epic, it's dense, it's emotional, it covers all grounds, it tugs at the heart strings... buttttttttt it's still a shortskirtsandexplosions fic so SECOND PLACE."
Thus began a devastating trend. I have yet to win first-place in any brony contest. Ever. This can be entirely attributed to the fact that--for all of the millions of words I can toss at a canvas--I really really suck at being simple, brief, and poignant. Doesn't change the fact that--in my head--I picture a film critic sitting down in a movie theatre and being treated to a huge three hour cinematic extravaganza full of CGI effects and heart-thumping orchestral symphonies and dramatic explosions a'plenty... and then when the credits roll he nods and says to himself: "Well, not bad, but the director's still Roland Emmerich... sooooooooooo let's just give the award to this boring Roman Polanksi film instead."
F'naaaaaaaaaa. Can't please them all.
Render by Argodaemon
Hmmm?
Oh. I had this other little thingy that I was working on, didn't I? Well, it wasn't gaining any traction yet... but I didn't mind too much. The lovely thing about Austraeoh--especially in the early days--was how friggin' stress-free it was. Back then, I knew it was going to be a long fic... I just didn't know how long. Even the allotted 200 chapters per book was something that hadn't entirely formulated in my brain bone.
But one thing was for certain... it was no Background Pony. That meant--for a while there--I had practically nobody to impress. The story could be as carefree and impulsive as the protagonist Rainbow Dash was... which is oddly fitting. Cuz hory shiet does that first book go places.
Geographically speaking, more ground is covered in Book One than most of the installments to follow. A good reason for this, I think, was the carefree way in which I wrote Austraeoh at the beginning. I was a lot like Rainbow Dash in a way. Alone. Experimenting. Exploring. The anthology started gaining followers right around the same time that Rainbow Dash did. Now, I had always harbored plans for Rainbow gaining a party of OC characters and dealing with the local factions plaguing the landscape... but I found that as the culture of the fic gained weight, so did the substance of the narrative itself. It's a strangely organic thing, Austraeoh, but in mid 2012 it was still in its infancy.
That sort of carefree innocence and weightlessness made for an ideal mindset... from which I crafted multiple vignettes and snapshots of a swiftly-passing landscape. A lot of people (especially on the chans) lambast the later Austraeoh books, pining for the looseness and disconnected scenery pr0n of the first installment, but I think the fact of the matter is that I simply can't return Rainbow Dash to that kind of a narrative... not unless it means something new and special. So, in 2012, Austraeoh will forever remain that one delightful little fluke where SS&E wrote stuff loosely, quickly, and easily... without the usual purple density that would come to infect every other dayum thang I sent my tentacles to. F'naaaaa.
It was the middle of 2012 and I had already humored myself with two one-shots and a never ending experiment fic on an alt... but I still felt the need to distract myself.
For anyone who's ever said that SS&E is a "horse writing machine," you know nothing, good madame. I am forever prone to distraction, and I find it super hard to get into the mood for writing, most of the time. I've just had slightly fewer "STOP/CEASE/DESIST" glands than the average poni poni poni writer. As a result, I've defecated seven million words into the digital ether these past few years. Those of us with talent know how to properly space themselves out.
Where I suck in execution, I think I'm pretty dayum good in idea breeding. In 2012, between a boring job and the darkness of Sedna, I had plenty of opportunities to day-dream the moments away. And I kept getting more and more and more ideas... and they would consume me and make me wanna scream under the already building pressure of two previously-existing pseudonyms.
Sometimes, when you're me, you've just got to vegetate... if nothing else than to release the mental pressure building up in your brain bone. Thankfully, due to past prowls, I knew exactly where to do that.
Second Life was my haunt in early 2011... and a typically moist one at that. My visits there dwindled off almost one hundred percent when I discovered bronyism. I went back once in fall--and it broke my laptop at the time (lulz). Perhaps now is a good time to mention that I had purchased a replacement computer in November of '11 and it was my prime hub for digipurpose until early '15. Every once in a while I would go back to check on dystopian cyber space, but the "thrill" was gone, so to speak. Which is a good thing, cuz it convinced me to do some legit exploration for once.
One afternoon, as I was vegetating away, I happened upon a pair of sims (simulated worlds) within the game. I waltzed in on virtual feet, not expecting anything. Little did I know that I was about to have my mind blown.
Now, objectively speaking, those screenshots might look like rabbit turds. But trust me--by SL standards--the content there is pretty dayum amazing. Turns out a group of cool online peops put their heads together to make a loving tribute to both Disneyland and Epcot. All in-game. With the mechanics of Second Life, you can play specific .mp3 files for various in-game "zones," thereby accomplishing the "theming" of an actual Disney park. This, combined with video embeds, leads to a nuanced but almost realistic experience.
I realized this the moment my avi walked into Star Tours... and they were playing not just the audio from the old 80s/90s line queue, but the exact opening instructional video as well. It was kinda ghetto in presentation, but the heart was there. Afterwards, I was able to walk into a virtual in-game ride car and experience a quicktime recording of the old movie ride... all from start to finish, complete with boarding and exiting muzak.
Ever been nostalgia-bombed so hard that it brightens up your entire world? I grew up with Disney--and not entirely in the naughty way. My household had extended family members who worked at Lake Buena Vista and could get all four of us in to the parks for a free day. This allowed us to go once--maybe twice a year... which was pretty dayum lucky for middle-income kids of the early 90s. So, the memories I have of those excursions were few but precious... and they were the highlight of my youth.
I took a stroll over to the Epcot sim on Second Life, and I discovered that they had (attempted to) recreate the extinct ride Horizons. I'm talking about the absolute best dark ride ever made in the history of theme parks. My computer wasn't capable of handling the awesomeness that the sim was trying to convey to me over the interwebs. But it was then that I remembered... duh... the INTERNET! This is the Age of Information! If Second Life couldn't feed me more nostalgia, then surely someplace like Youtube--
Sonuvabitch:
As it turns out--yes--there are bastards on the Internet more obsessed with Disney than me. Even cleanly.
Lo and behold, there were mother-humpers on the Web who seemed to possess the intuition of the Oracle of Delphi... because they captured copious amounts of VHS footage in the past almost if in full knowledge that someday they'd be able to share it all en masse via future social media.
This one guy--MartinsVidsDotNet--had an entire library of beautiful 80s and 90s wealth. I'm getting a thick memory boner just typing about it.
This was pure magic. Here were the highlights of my own childhood... captured perfectly in an artistic snapshot. Pouring through this stuff is one of the single-most enthralling binge sessions of my entire existence. Talk about slapping a smile on one's face.
Y'know, sometimes what you really need--every once in a while--is a real good nostalgia bomb. Hell, it's the reason why I'm writing this blargh. It's the reason why I wrote the blargh before it. I know that some people find waxing nostalgic to be depressing. And I'm sorry to hear that. Since 2011, for the most part, I've had a really good existence. And there were good chunks in my childhood that I remember fondly. That's an interesting thing about growing older, I feel. You find lots of good as well as lots of bad. It's like Rainbow Dash on her journey. You can look back and smile in confidence and pleasure.
Well, naturally, this literary lemur is wont to transform that nostalgic energy and turn it into a story of some sort... even if he's already working on two of them. One night--perhaps after one too many Disney binges and two too many bottles of Dr. Pepper--I giggled through a caffeine high and cartwheeled out the other end shouldering a really trippy-ass fic idea called It Ends With Them Cuddling aka The Cider Princess Lives. In it, Rainbow Dash was going to discover a literal magic goblet that--when drinking cider from it--allowed her to enter an alternate dimension left by the alicorns known as "Cider Space." Yes, it was just as stupid and cute as the name suggests. But ponies. So fuq you.
While under the effects of the magical goblet, Rainbow Dash would learn that this dreamscape was a place of leisure and raunch activities left behind by the now-extinct immortals. Basically, it was Second Life for Celestia's and Luna's extended family. Now, it was completely abandoned... save for one pocket of space that was being exploited and manipulated by an ebil mortal who had discovered Cider Space before Rainbow. At first, Rainbow wasn't about to dabble too much with this dimension... but then she discovers that Applejack took a sip from the goblet and--in so doing--was rendered comatose. As fate would have it, Applejack's soul-self was captured within the dreamscape and forced to personify a fugue state called the "Cider Princess" for the ebil pony's amusement. Suddenly, a rescue had to be mounted, and Neurodasher I mean Rainbow Dash was the only pony to do it.
What amounted to a save-the-damsel-in-distress-across-the-poni-poni-poni-matrix adventure started out with Rainbow Dash "getting trained" by the Experimental Pony Chaperone of Tomorrow, aka EPCOT. EPCOT was left there by the alicorns as an artificial intelligence construct, and she was pleased as a peach to help a "dreamer" like Rainbow Dash become a "doer" and save Applejack. But in order to accomplish this quest, Rainbow Dash had to throw herself through a Scott Pilgrim-esque boss rush of baddies, each themed round a different classic pavilion of the actual Epcot theme park (World of Motion, Living Seas, Journey Into Imagination, etc).
If this idea sounds stupid, that's because it was. But I didn't care. I would have been writing solely for myself, and I was so insanely pumped to do it as well. I recall doing a lot of planning, coming up with genius ideas, designing the "structure" of the fic and trying to come up with an integral plotline. Did I end up writing it? Well, ultimately no. So I recycled it ever-so-flimsily as a narrative device in Bon^12... which was also never finished... and the less said about that the better.
At long last, I would manifest the storyline as an arc in a fic that nobody reads... but it had entirely lost its charm by then.
Still, pony-related or not, the nostalgia bombing blessed me inside and out. It was the Great Skirtsian Disney Revival of the 2010s, and it culminated in my finally buying annual passes in 2014... upon which I made more visits in the ensuing three years than in my entire youth. It's still the highpoint of my month whenever I choose to go... even with all of the extinct rides and overcrowding and loud annoyances that hamper the parks these days. I just lurve it, and Nietzsche-knows I tweet pictures about my trips to the point of vomit-inducement.
So, long story short, this gave a proverbial bump to my mood in the middle of Summer '12. Suddenly, I wasn't sweating so hard about Background Pony. In fact... I kinda sorta took a vacation from it. The second half of the fic's chapters were posted whenever I felt like them, instead of adhering to some strict schedule. It was as though I decided to put myself before the literature... which is probably the healthier way to go about things anyways.
As most of you know, I almost never respond to PMs. A good chunk of it is laziness, yes. But another part is that--despite the voluminous nature of blarghs like this--I'm really not all that chatty. Hell, I've got a Discord server and I lurve it but I barely peep a word compared to everyone else. Generally speaking, when it comes to social circles, I pick a few individuals whom I'm willing to call friends and then I spam the hell out of them with pictures'n'crap. Even fewer am I willing to open up with. Sooooooo... PMs and other comments largely get ignored.
But in mid 2012, I was a different kind of lemur. A happier one. A giddier one. I suddenly felt cheerful enough and confident enough to acknowledge or respond to just about anything. E-mails... user page pokes... even this one enthusiastic PM from some random kid in my Fimfic notification folder:
To be Continued in Part Nine: Marsupial Zero
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It's Ponky time!
Not only did I never read The Last Tears in Tartarus, but I didn't even have it in my Read Later. Well that second issue is getting amended now, and the first issue later.
As I've said before, I never had an issue with the Pinkie chapter. Considering the depression level of the story, the comic relief was actually a relief. Though I certainly am not a fan of the unhappiness it caused you.
Always up for some SkirtsxPonky goodness.
Last Tears for me is a weird story, in that I recognize it's well written, it does what it sets out to do, but...I tend to hate when such things are done in Equestria because, well, it's so...opposite everything in the world.
To me, that story shouldn't exist, I suppose, because in my head - the Equestria I believe in - they would always find a way to cancel the apocalypse before it could happen.
4778205
I agree. It kinda felt like an island of happy in the middle of a gripping and awesome but still depressing sea. Especially since immidiately after that island it takes a swan dive deeper into darkness than before. I basically binged the entire fic in one or two sittings, so it was a nice time to relax my shoulders for a bit and get more tissues.
Last Tears in Tartarus was sooooooooooooogooooooooooooooooood.
Dayum, I actually remember going on that ride a couple times. Talk about nostalgia-pr0n.
It's funny, you're here blogging about Background Pony and you just got a brand-new, super-awesome fan song for it:
Also, fuck Never, goddamn stupid horse fic I'm not crying you're crying ;_;
Neat coincidence I started The Sisters Doo last night.
Oh boy. Here we go...
....
4778207
Fanfiction.net would call it Skonky.
Never been to Disney. Never will, probably. Farthest I have been from my country is some cities that are just past the border.
...
...
...
It's been months since I last checked my Deviantart. Nice to see it still exists with all my shame.
The irony of being so memetically horsefamous you don't get awards because it'd be unfair is pretty hilarious.
Also I missed out on both Last Tears and Never; adding to my list.
Oh hi Ponky.