Weekly Update · 3:58am Oct 1st, 2018
Getting much closer on finishing the chapter. At 13000 words now and while that won't be the end point, I have made it so there hopefully won't be another 13000 words until I'm done. And surprisingly that partially came from Starlight taking a strange turn and becoming emotionally drained and depressed at what happened to her town so the hype battle I was expecting to write a week ago turned into something shorter and different. Not that I'm complaining since the arc as a whole has had a ton of action setpieces but this chapter got dark and bloody instead so I guess that's something. Seriously though when I was writing this chapter I kept writing Starlight as this pony barely holding anything together by this point- the story showing her grandstanding attitude more as a facade of insecurity and anger issues below the surface so having her end the arc depressed and morally defeated is actually kind of apt- the destruction of the one thing she had spent so long creating in order to show something for it being destroyed in front of her eyes is mental anguish.
I was expecting to use Starlight much more in the chapter but she switching from an antagonist into something different so I feel like as I write it vaguely she shifted from a real goofy evil bad guy into something more complex.
Or I'm reading far too much into my writing and that didn't entirely get translated so it ended like an anticlimax.
Which I don't plan to do exactly since Starlight will be mentioned every once in a while but in passing.
But hey at least I can see the ending of the arc after about a year of writing it so that's exciting. And I planned on it being kind of a depressing thing but damn after this I need a break from it.
I almost feel like it's going to turn into a slight slice of life comedy like it was before for a bit cause my brain has made the story go to some messed up places so like I can see it saying you got through the season opener finally after like ten chapters. Let's be a bit more goofy and fun at points.
Cause the idea of everybody being depressed and sad in this chapter is kind of a thing right now and that's a lot of stuff. Good, slightly poetic stuff. But all the ideas that don't come out of this arc implicitly as a continuation are closer to the humor in the lighter chapters so get ready for something in the next month.
Cause unless my temp job gets extended even further somehow- which is a slight possibility- I don't see this story being released in November.
Possibly October cause 13k plus a lot of Tempest Shadow scenes which I haven't written yet but I was planning on ending on? Well that's it.
Tempest Shadow scenes, wrap up the town, go back to Ponyville horribly scarred and sad. There might be more scenes than that but those are the things I definitely need to hit now. If there's other stuff- I won't mention it cause the rest of the chapter pretty much falls into those three categories which is okay.
End of arc. That's it. Not exactly how I planned on ending it when Starlight first entered the story cause I was going to end it closer to the end of the actual episode- realize she has a fake cutie mark. But writing Starlight more recently, that felt cheap and too close to the original. And honestly once they entered Ironhoof- the story added a lot more elements of the MLP movie so that divergent ending I expected.
Plus I want to see the Crystal Empire at some point and all that since Sunburst is there and if I ended it closer to the original Starlight would have either ended up as a political prisoner- more likely- or dead- far less likely due to how the season ends and how she's critically relevant to the rest of the seasons of the show. Hard to kill a character when they become entwined with the show itself at that point. And since neither of those options are now on the table that's fine to mention now.
But yeah things are going to be less depressing soon.
It's almost like the show itself switches genres from slice of life sort of adventure to comedy to plot heavy episodes anyway. But I'm not planning on doing a nearly 100000 word arc for a long while. If at all again. And my brain has been giving me a lot of goofy comedic moments to make up for the weird dark stuff.
Though with how I ran into the arc, I could see the season openers and enders become this kind of thing- longform arc focused storytelling.
Like the show itself now.
