• Member Since 17th Sep, 2014
  • offline last seen Yesterday

Orbiting Kettle


I've roasted a wealth of exotic things, All torn to ribbons at the hands of kings. Polished copper how I proudly shone, stealin' the fire of the blazing sun.

More Blog Posts41

Jul
8th
2018

Confused Night Blogging: The Weight of History · 12:29am Jul 8th, 2018

This night the temperature is almost perfect. A clear sky in which I can see the stars, as the lights of the small city where I live don't drown them out, and a thin breeze that plays with pipe smoke make it ideal for some musings.

This post, as usual, is mostly unedited. Got a digital idiot looking at it to catch egregious mishandling of the language, but no other sapient, or depending on your opinion of me, no sapient at all, went over it before I consign it to the weirdly prolific fiction site about magical ponies where I dwell for an unhealthy amount of time.

I'm working on a new project, something silly, a palate cleanser between chapters of A Bug on a Stick. The place where the story is set is important, it should almost be a character on its own, and so I'm putting down what I consider important.


Tonight I read two interesting essays. They talk about quite different topics, and yet I feel they are just two spotlights shining on different aspects of the same issue. Maybe the only issue with which we are constantly confronted.

Take a wide enough view of the human condition and it seems to always converge to our place in the world anyway.

The first one is about the permanence of digital information. It's a long one, but it's well worth the time:
Digital Dust

The other one is shorter. it's haunting, and beautiful, and by Warren Ellis. I think I could read his grocery list and be blown away.
The Spirit of Places

Both essays talk about history, and how memory gets vague while it still maintains a certain force.

Now, how does this all relate to ponies?

Well, the point is, Equestria is old. It's really old, and I think it should be felt in the stories one writes, at least when the atmosphere of the place plays a role.

History carries a weight all of its own. It hasn't to be something spectacular to feel it, like the site of some great battle or a dead city. Mundanity too carries meanings and life and feelings.

Old alleys, the small streets between buildings that have been in ruin, rebuilt, burned down, rebuilt again, changed, love and hated. Houses that have been built by people so far away from us in time as to be almost aliens. Those alleys tend to keep traces of generations going through them. The stones have a smell of their own. They reek of piss and of blood and sex, and no amount of scrubbing will ever get completely ridden of it.

Plazas, where markets have been held for centuries, have a distinctive aura. In coastal cities, you can smell salt and fish under the faint aroma of gasoline and oil. Fortunes have been won and lost there.

The ruins of an old fort on the outskirt of a village. It looms out there, unmoving, a memento of times of turmoil and fear.

Canterlot is at least a thousand years old. Older, depending on headcanon. I suppose that, in the shadow of the Castle inhabited by a functionally immortal monarch, the alleys are full of stories. Depending on the tone they may not smell of piss, but they probably have a character of their own. There have been ponies and tales living there remembered for generations afterward.

The baker who doubled as wise-pony, making concoctions to heal stomach-ache out of the yeast he used for his bread. The last pegasus who knew how to tell your fortune by reading the wind. The old warehouse used once to store mana batteries and which exploded, the builders of the condo which rose in its place never being able to get rid of the burn-marks in plaster.

The things ponies find when building. Forgotten cellars being opened again, containing nothing more mysterious than a heap of rotten barrels, but which hint to some clandestine distillery only a couple of old hags remember.

Equestria is old, history has its weight, and sometimes it should be felt in writing.

Comments ( 5 )

certainf force

certain

Also, I'm trying to figure out what this all means to you. Like, do you want it to be felt in your writing? Is there a particular story or two you're thinking of as you're typing this? Or are you trying to incite some debate into speculative worldbuilding of Equestria?

4897031
Thanks for catching the typo.

As for what I intended to do, well, the answer to that is multiple things.

I wanted to share the essays, I think they are well worth reading even if decoupled from the context of the post.

I wanted to put some order in my thoughts. Writing them down helps.

I want to build a base to let the feeling of the place transpire through a story I'm preparing to write. At the moment I'm outlining and organizing ideas, but giving the setting a distinctive taste that transpires through the writing without telling it explicitly is an important part of it.

And, last but not least, I wanted to point the spotlight on the often forgotten fact that Equestria is old. It's a nation with millennia of history, and where the Capital has at least a thousand years. That means there are layers of lives lived on which the rest is built, and that is a feeling I rarely get from stories. I understand that it isn't always the focus, and I'm a fan of keeping the narration essential, but I also suspect that many don't think about this at all. I didn't until recently, for example.

4897163

Ah, so a mix of all the things I hypothesized. :pinkiesmile:

Login or register to comment