Corrigenda: A List of Corrections

As I mentioned in some comments to Corrigenda, I wanted to write a blog post after I’d had some time away from the story to think about it. This post addresses the ideas behind two of the elements that I have to admit I’m not quite sure about. Overall, I think they were interesting, but I could have done something different with them. This post also talks about the influences besides MLP and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

After I wrote all of that, I started to doubt if anyone would be interested in reading it, so I shelved it and moved onto other projects. It turns out at least one person is interested. Thank you to the reader who PM’d me Friday asking specifically about this post: without that prompt, this would have stayed on my laptop’s hard drive until some catastrophic data loss erased it.

Major spoilers for Corrigenda after the break.

(Image credit: GingerFoxy—Pony Comic Generator 1.01)

Plot and Ending

I made three conscious decisions about the plot when I decided to write Corrigenda. First, I would adapt the plot of Madoka to the MLP universe. The plot of Madoka is great, and honestly a big part of the decision was I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with something nearly as good on my own. That said, I did see a couple of opportunities to add MLP elements to the story in an interesting way. For example, since Twilight was going to be the Homura expy (more on that later), and alicorns are established to live thousands of years in MLP, I could have her rewind time over millennia rather than a few months like in Madoka. That led to the entire alternate history idea, which opened up a lot of opportunities to play around with other parts of the MLP universe.

The second conscious decision was to not rewatch Madoka before writing Corrigenda. I worried I’d get lazy adapting Madoka’s plot, so relying on memory at least forced me to be inventive when I forgot what happened next in the story. This had some mixed results. On the one hand, I forgot the role that characters like Kyosuke and Hitomi played, so I ended up replacing them with more elements from MLP. I think that made Corrigenda more of a true crossover rather than Madoka with expies. On the other hand, I forgot a lot about how witches work in Madoka. Wishes affecting a magical girl’s skills, familiars growing into witches, and psychic energy accumulating over multiple timelines went away, while I added stuff like Kyubey needing a few weeks to regenerate. I do worry that Madoka fans got frustrated having to learn the rules I invented while reading through Corrigenda.

One change in the rules a couple of folks mentioned was hunters losing their special talent. That actually came about when I had to fix a plot hole. I knew early on that the story would end with Princess Twilight Sparkle, the Element of Magic, personal student of Princess Celestia Herself, going into labyrinths and fighting witches. If she could keep all her magical talents and get all the resources a magical girl/hunter got, it’d be hard to explain why she didn’t steamroll through everything or use some spell to resolve the central conflict. So I decided to nerf her. For the sake of narrative efficiency, it made sense she’d lose her magical talent when she became a hunter, and therefore everyone else would need to as well. It was only after I’d sorted out the plot hole that I realized the potential to amp up the drama when Rainbow discovers what being a hunter meant.

Lastly, I decided to adapt the Rebellion ending instead of the Madoka ending. This was partly because Rebellion’s ending still puzzles me, and I wanted to try my own take on it to see if that helped me understand it.  However, it’s also a result of the influence from The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Denial basically argues that most of what people do individually and societally can be explained as attempts to reconcile the fear of death with inevitable mortality. This often leads people to seek metaphorical immortality (also called an “immortality project”) through heroism. According to Denial, a lot of self-destructive behavior can be explained as attempts at heroism, and a lot of conflict is the interaction of contradictory immortality projects. I tried to make this the theme of Corrigenda by establishing death as “all wrong” throughout the story, fixing death at the end, and then asking if the consequences are really “all right.”

After all that, I’m still not sure how I feel about Corrigenda’s or Rebellion’s ending. I do appreciate Rebellion more, but I catch myself wishing I’d gone with a more bittersweet ending in Corrigenda. I’m just not sure what that ending would be like.

Characters (including The Stranger)

For those unaware, an “expy” is a character in a new story or series who’s intentionally based on another character from an unrelated story or series. For example, Daring Do began as an expy of Indiana Jones. Since Corrigenda deliberately adapts the storyline in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, I relied on expies.

Since Corrigenda adapts the Madoka plot, I had to have expies for the Madoka characters. My choices were kinda predictable, which created an apparent problem with Homura/Twilight. When we meet Homura in Madoka, we really don’t know much about her for the first two-thirds of the series, so I thought she was mostly there to build intrigue. However, we know tons about Twilight, so she can’t really be an intrigue character. My solution was to have Twilight first appear in disguise.

FWIW, I based “the stranger” name on the aliens in Dark City and the god/aspect of death in A Song of Ice and Fire. It also made my story notes easier since I could use “TS” for both the stranger and Twilight Sparkle. There may be a few other unintentional allusions.

As clever as it felt at the time, “the stranger” required a lot of red herrings to attempt to keep the mystery. For example, her cloak and hat are supposed to look like Star Swirl’s gear, and the theme of transformation often comes up with her to suggest she might be a changeling. As far as I can tell, these red herrings didn’t fool anyone. In some cases they added confusion to other reveals, such as at the start of Friendship (Chapter 10) where, except for a title drop 700 words in, the first two scenes appear to be from a totally different story.

In retrospect, I also think I misunderstood Homura. She’s not a total mystery because she acts blatantly out of character for a newly-transfered student in a magical girl series. In fact, she acts more like a twenty-something inured to empathy from having seen the person she loves die hundreds of times. Which, you know…

How could this have been adapted in Corrigenda? Suppose we knew who Twilight was when she first appeared. The story tags tell us that Corrigenda is set in an alternate universe. By Sacrifice (Chapter 3), we’ve seen Fluttershy, Rainbow, and Rarity, while Applejack and Pinkie Pie have been hinted at. None of them are so far out of the ordinary that they can’t be explained by the alternate history. So then Twilight appears: her physical description is totally different from the show, she’s acting wildly out of character, and her number one assistant is nowhere to be seen. A sharp-eyed reader might even notice she doesn’t use magic much. In this situation, Twilight would start new mysteries that eventually lead to discovering that the AU tag is deceptive, and therefore foreshadows the rest of the plot. This could have been a lot more engaging and would have cut down on the red herrings.

The Big Idea for Labyrinths

The idea for Corrigenda started when I first watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica and asked myself how to capture those labyrinth scenes in writing. The visual style in a labyrinth is starkly different from the normal world. That change is important not only because it’s changing, and not only because it’s cool to see, but because each labyrinth’s style is relevant to the story. Gertrud’s labyrinth (Madoka episodes 1 and 2) is dark and alien, reflecting how much of a shock Madoka and Sayaka are undergoing. Charlotte’s labyrinth (Madoka episode 3) is cute and sweet at its core, lulling the viewer into a false sense of security right before a shocking death. Oktavia’s (Madoka episode 9) is operatic and tragic since we understand what’s happening by then. To capture that in writing, not only does there have to be a radical change in the writing style, the change has to be relevant is the story.

My first idea was to write labyrinths in verse which (a) was hard, (b) didn’t offer a lot of variety, and (c) felt lighthearted to me. I did end up putting some verse into the Deceit (Chapter 5) labyrinth. I had planned to use it in other labyrinths (and actually tried to use a form of poetry called a sestina in the Trial (Chapter 7) labyrinth before the 2017 rewrite), but ultimately found alternatives.

A second idea I had came from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, a novel notable for its dizzying variety of layouts, fonts, and typographic styles. I adapted some of those ideas into labyrinths, but a bigger influence was the fact that House of Leaves is told from the perspective of multiple narrators often acting as commenters for each other on the same page. A good portion of the story is told by that interaction. As a reader, you start paying attention to who’s establishing each plot point and who’s getting the last word on it, effectively transforming these different narrators into characters. That gave me the idea of writing the labyrinth sections in different styles, and then presenting them in an unusual way, to establish the “character” of each labyrinth.

What made things click was reading N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, which is the first book of a trilogy about geomancers in a post apocalyptic fantasy world. Think Avatar’s earthbenders in Mad Max. It’s easily my favorite trilogy, and I highly recommend it (the other two books are The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky). Without spoiling anything about them, I’ll mention that part of the books are told in a second person POV, but not in a way that gets “you” as a character into the story. It’s a way for the narrative to show that “you” as a character are an active participant, but you as a reader are not in control. This idea develops over the course of the three books and eventually becomes central to the theme. This got me thinking that the witches and familiars should take control of the narrative and use that opportunity to try to convince you that they’re in the right. After the feedback I got from an EqD pre-reader in mid-2017, I went a step further and made the witches tell their sections in first person POV; they take control so completely that you have no choice but to see things through their eyes. Of course, in Sight (Chapter 9), the witch takes control by making “you” a hostage briefly, but that’s more for a fourth wall gag.

Coming up with ideas for each labyrinth was a lot of fun (although I kind of ran out of steam in the last few chapters), and I’m happy I got to share them.

Serial Writing

A.k.a. “write and post.”

One lesson I learned is I am not cut out for write and post. I thought it’d be enough to have an outline, but by the time I submitted this to Equestria Daily in June 2017, I already had plotlines that were going off the rails. Thankfully, the EqD pre-reader was incredibly helpful with feedback, and gave me additional advice when I had follow-up questions. I was able to rewrite the first seven chapters to get the rest of the story on a more solid footing from July through November 2017. However, there are still some plotlines in the final story that I would handle differently if I had written everything out at once, such as the stranger.

The other problem I ran into with write and post is that I write slowly. There was usually a two-month or more wait between chapters, and it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on in a story when there aren’t any updates for months at a time. For me at least, it’s better to write and edit the whole thing, and maybe release over a schedule as final edits get finished.

This is a lesson I applied immediately with Shadows Swarmed Below. While Shadows is a shorter and less complex story, it really helped to have the whole thing written out, at least as a first draft, before showing it to anyone. Simply put, when I’d written the ending exactly the way I wanted, I could edit the beginning to best set it up.

Thank Yous

Thank you to Cat Scratch Paper, who edited and provided cover art, and offered a ton of moral support over the past two years. <3

Also a big thank you to EqD’s Pre-reader 63.546 for all the feedback on the first version of Corrigenda. It was an absolute pleasure working with you.

To anyone who’s read all of Corrigenda and this far in the blog, you’ve indulged me for around ninety thousand words of experimentation and ruminating. The comments, favorites, and upvotes always made me giddy, but above all else I appreciate everyone who read through the whole trip with me. Thank you, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed it.

A Puzzle

So…one other influence from House of Leaves and The Fifth Season is that all the style/narrator gimmicks are also clues to puzzles that, when solved, cast a new light on the story. I tried to do that in Corrigenda, but as far as I can tell I didn’t do a good job of hinting about it. I’ve been debating letting that stay buried, but at this point it can’t hurt to leave a breadcrumb here:

In Corrigenda, we see a lot of MLP characters become hunters, but see only a few hunters turn into witches. Do you wonder what the others would be like transformed? For example, I bet Pinkie’s labyrinth would be a very strange sight.