The Long Blog of Murphy's Law · 6:56am Jun 26th, 2019
After eight years, I can finally say I've finished a multi-chapter story with an uneven publication history.
Just not, you know, the one people care about.
Murphy's Law is an interesting, and unusual, part of my collection.
First, it's remarkable to me that it even exists at all. When I first started writing horsewords, I didn't plan to produce anything besides PGS. Jelly God and My Little Immortal were my only other forays into writing horse-related literature, and even when I came back three years ago, I only intended to finish the latter, and PGS. I was as surprised as anyone else to find out that I had at least a couple more in me that had nothing to do with any of those three, and still more surprised to find that one of those would be a romance, a genre I had virtually no experience writing.
I think it was important for me to tackle it, though, to challenge myself and to step outside of the comfortable niche I'd fallen into with my other stories. Before, the only MLP character whose point of view I lingered on for anything longer than a chapter or two was Twilight Sparkle (Ebony doesn't count). Spike and Rarity had been background players in my other work before this one, but I'd never spent a lot of time in either character's head, and I'd never written from Rarity's POV, in particular (looking back, I wish I had, because Rarity is a joy to write, all around).
So, approaching this story was important to my development as a horsewords writer, and as a writer in general. Approaching a genre I'd never spent much time in, from a POV I'd never written before, showed me the creative possibilities that writing for this fandom had to offer. And it helped open me up to writing an interconnected series of stories (Teach Me Goodness got a last-second continuity tie-in with this story, with its final chapter taking place on the same day as Rarity's date), an addiction to which I've never fully recovered.
Me, explaining the continuity between my stories
The content of the story changed remarkably little from the initial outline that I laid out for myself. I knew, from the start, that I wanted it to be a Sparity story, although I hadn't quite determined the direction that would take (more on that later). And I knew that I wanted to pack as many romance movie cliches into the story as I possibly could, and completely subvert all of them. The lone idea that I decided to play straight was the ferris wheel sequence, which was a scene that'd been kicking around in my head for years before I decided to write it into this story.
The germ of the idea was "write a romance story where the romance goes nowhere." From there, the next idea that followed was "write a Sparity story where Spike and Rarity not only fail to end up together, but resolve to not get together." In short, torpedo the ship, but gently. Oh, so gently.
...Which it, admittedly, took me a while to fully commit to.
It's really... not.
When I first popped into the fandom, oh so long ago, one of the things that drew me into it was Spike's childish, yet incredibly endearing, crush on Rarity. Secret of My Excess, one of my all-time favorite episodes, sealed that ship as something which, while I didn't quite ship myself, I would at least root for. I subscribed to the theory that Spike was, physiology aside, old enough and mature enough for his feelings to be taken seriously, and for him to be taken seriously as an adult (if you can work as an indentured servant for a member of the ruling class, then you should be old enough to buy Rarity some fucking ice cream). Works like Paleowriter's excellent How to Woo Your Lady in Nine Easy Steps and Of Age (the latter of which deals with the more uncomfortable overtones of the relationship directly, and the former of which was a direct influence on Murphy's Law) cemented this perspective for me, and I started teasing the ship in my earlier stories. Jelly God, in particular, but in one draft of PGS's tenth chapter, Rarity implied to Twilight that she reciprocated Spike's feelings for her.
Put simply, it's hard not to look at Spike as a lovable underdog fighting a losing battle to win the heart of someone completely out of his league. It's hard not to cheer him on when you think about him that way. And even as late as Murphy's Law's first chapter, I hadn't fully decided whether or not to pair Spike and Rarity at the end of the story. Or, rather, if I'd leave it open-ended enough that they could end up together.
I mean, damn, man, look at that...
But the more I wrote, and planned ahead, the more I found that I emphasized Spike's emotional immaturity. And once I started leaning into that, exploring his ideas of entitlement, and how completely he bought into the romantic cliche of taking the spurned woman out to cheer her up, the more I realized that I couldn't pair him and Rarity.
Spike has been alive long enough that I don't think he could be legally considered a child anymore, and he's probably closer to Rarity and the Mane Six in terms of maturity than he is to, say, the CMC, for example. He's smart, well-read, witty, and he generally has his shit together. But counterbalancing those more mature qualities is an inherent childishness that he's never progressed past in the show, and that he probably won't grow out of until long after the series' timeframe. The more I wrote, the more I accepted that Spike and Rarity could never be in a relationship. Not simply because Spike is a babby boy; he's probably old enough to be considered an adult by Equestrian standards. It's not simply physical, either. Emotionally and intellectually, he is not as mature as Rarity. It would not be a partnership of equals, and Rarity, at least the Rarity I write, could never approach such a relationship with him -- or even fathom it.
So, once I settled on not pairing them up, the story took its final form. The twist with Spike knowing about Rarity being stood up before she did was added to the mix (somewhere around the Flim/Flam chapter, I think, was when I settled on writing that in), to represent just how immature and inconsiderate the boy could be. I leaned more heavily into the concepts of fate and karma; I don't think I ever really settled on whether or not fate was punishing Spike and Rarity for the former's presumption, but I did decide that Spike should be called out for making himself the center of the universe. The message of not chaining yourself to the illusion that you're not in control of your own bad decisions became the thing I wanted to hammer home by the end of the story.
And I realized that, torpedoed ship or no, it needed to end on a positive, hopeful note.
Originally, I wanted to have Spike and Rarity have that conversation directly, just have them talk through it. "I don't love you the way you want me to, but I still love you, and I always will." But I decided it would be too much of a retread, and so the final chapter took on its current form. It doesn't need to be said; it was already expressed in the previous chapter, and both characters know, deep down, where they stand with one another. Anything more than that would be gratuitous.
Spike knows Rarity doesn't love him, and he also knows that that's okay. At the end of the day, he's still friends with her, and if that's all that they ever are to one another, then he's still a very lucky dragon.
(Part of the reason this chapter took so long: That theme was something I explored in another, arguably better, story)
But Rarity's the POV character, and Rarity's the one I wanted readers to empathize with the most. So, what really matters is the lesson that she learns: Buying too deeply into preconceived notions about a person, falling in love with an ideal rather than the person behind that ideal, will only ever lead you to heartbreak.
Also, Rarity shouldn't trust her own taste in men.
I'm running out of steam for this blogpost, so I'm only going to make one final observation about this story: Being written over three years means that I can go back and track my evolution as a writer over that time. The first chapter was written at a time where I'd been out of both writing, and the fandom, for years; I was understandably rusty. The ones that followed came after I'd sort of found my groove again, but the difference in narration, and in quality, is especially evident in the last two chapters.
I know I haven't been writing as much lately, but I have been writing -- just not on here. The Writeoff Association, which I've been participating in regularly since 2016, has helped me stay sharp; I have a lot of unpublished material on there that I hope to start importing this summer.
Though I find myself again in the position of needing to shake off the rust and reacquaint myself with writing after two years of relatively sparse publication. Maybe I'll enter another contest and accidentally win it; that usually helps.
NBD
Anyway, if you read this far down, thank you. This was never my most popular story, but it's been a monkey on my back for long enough that finishing it now feels like a genuine accomplishment. Hope to see you again, before too long, with something a little more hotly anticipated.
'Til then.
Congratulations!
I know better than most what it's like to write a story with an… uneven (at best) publication history. Finishing one always feels like a weight off the back. That's actually been my own goal for this year -- work through the backlog and get 'em over with. I don't even care most of the time if they get any readers.
I haven't read this story at all, and sitting here now, I can't remember why not. On the list!
I don't know what I could say about the story here that I haven't already commented on the actual story. I will say though that I find your take interesting on Spike's age vs his maturity in the context of his feelings for Rarity. Like most of the fandom, I've always just seen Spike as "the kid" of the group, and never considered that he's been around long enough to only be a few years younger than the mane 6. Of course, that thought entails putting actual thought into the passage of time throughout the show, which I'm not sure the show's writers ever did.
I also find it neat that such a significant plot development as Spike's foreknowledge of the fate of Rarity's original date could come so late in the story's development and still make sense. I've seen authors throw in last minute plot twists that retroactively makes past events make less sense, but this one worked quite well.
I know this isn't your most popular story, but it certainly deserves more recognition for what it does. I guess the idea of an "anti-ship fic" isn't exactly what people come here for.
And on the note of that final line:
memepedia.ru/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/dont-give-me-hope-meme-3-768x409.jpg
5080418
Some people do color-coded timelines and get shit from me over it.
They'll also tell you that you're right, and the showrunners didn't think too much about the order of events in MLP.
It's been a while since I started this story, and I didn't have much of a concrete outline for it when I did start writing it, but I don't recall exactly how early/late in the process I decided to seed Spike's foreknowledge of Rarity getting stood up. I believe the original chapter without that in mind (I know that I justified him being in the area; I just don't remember what my pre-twist explanation was), then gone back and added it when I decided the story needed a twist to keep Spike and Rarity from hooking up (not that they would have, but, you know... to make it more plausible that they wouldn't).
I can't recall, honestly, what my train of thought was or when I decided to write it in. But I'm glad it didn't fuck up the narrative!
5080275 *buys you a burrito*
Gotta go finish reading that, now! Completing a multichapter story is actually pretty hard, at least, I think so.