Behind the Scenes on "New Horizons" - Vol 1 · 7:26am Dec 8th, 2019
So I'm trying something a little different with this post. As I write and develop my stories I have a tendency to write up a fair amount of documentation on the development process as a whole, the vast majority of which never gets seen. So I figured that sharing little snippets of that documentation every once in a while would be a productive way of getting it out there.
For volume 1 I'll be focusing on the larger theme behind New Horizons that has definitely gone over people's heads.
(Obviously there's some spoilers for both Departures and Desert Getaway below)
The (Mostly) "Main" Cast of New Horizons
The story of New Horizons starts all the way in the final chapters of Departures, a story that is pretty rough around the edges, but at least has some important threads that get picked up in both Desert Getaway and New Horizons. In this case, I'm referring to the scene where Silver decides to try and get help from a federally sponsored weather team with the full knowledge that it's incredibly illegal and could very well jeopardize his entire operation if anyone finds out about it. The initial idea wasn't to create a collaborative story with Lawra, but rather just include mention of her characters to tie back into the larger universe because it would have been a logical move for my characters to try and make. I don't remember the full detail of how the idea to make a collaborative story came up, but it presented an opportunity to immediately build off of a story thread and continue an arc across into a sequel, and therefore grew into a larger role in the story itself.
At the time, the only immediate payoff would have been the epilogue that implied the outcome before that whole arc was actually shown in Desert Getaway. The Departures epilogue in itself was always meant to be what ultimately led into a further sequel, but the scope of that sequel drastically changed as other stories developed. Originally it was meant to be a single entry set a month after "Monsters We Make" and would have focused on the group moving forward after facing a series of disheartening announcements. I had actually started writing this alongside Departures all the way back in February, though this very quickly got put on the back burner as it became clear that there just wasn't enough to build off of yet.
So flash forward to July 2019: Departures Wraps, a few weeks pass, and then we finally get to see what the ultimate outcome of the Weather Management Program's call actually was in the form of Desert Getaway. At first glance Desert Getaway comes off as a simple side story in my whole little saga of stories, a fun crossover between characters and stories that doesn't really have any immediate impact on the preceding work, but in a way it might be the most important story of the Oasis collection (so far).
Throughout the story we're introduced to a few abilities that hadn't been seen in any prior stories, two of which factored largely into New Horizons. The first is the concept of night ponies being able to (rarely) create a persistent dreamscape, the second was obviously Sapphire's incredible storm abilities. The dream abilities had the obvious consequence of giving Silver inspiration to start using them wisely in the form of wanting to help teach others around the world whereas Sapphire's ability has had a more subdued impact, but also arguably the largest on the story as a whole.
In the Epilogue we see Silver have a very restrained reaction to Sapphire almost wiping away his entire dream with a large storm. In multiple cases this was met with the observation that he should have (rightfully) been angrier and more aggressive in pursuing justice. That said, we discussed it quite a bit and felt that following a message that tied back into the whole "Friendship is Magic" concept was the better option to go with, because a pony forgives. At this point he had gone through dubiously legal means to solve a problem the easy way without having to put work into actually solving it himself, and as such had the option of forgiving and rebuilding with the pony that was just as much of a pawn as he was, or pursue legal action and likely lose everything in the process. This is where the whole idea of actions having larger consequences comes back into play.
I never made it blatantly clear to anyone, but at this point I had started to rework my ideas for a sequel. In the Departures Epilogue we saw that Silver had befriended Sapphire, and had even come to consider her a close family friend. That was initially the only real followup to Desert Getaway that I had planned, but I decided that continuing that theme of actions and consequences would lend itself nicely to a proper sequel that actually delves into the consequences for those actions in a more meaningful way.
New Horizons is ultimately a story about actions and their consequences. Actions in one entry can carry over into others in obvious and subtle ways, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, though it's not initially clear unless you really look into the background narrative. This is something that will ultimately be clearer in the future as more entries are added and you get a more complete picture. So far we've only seen the "for better" parts, but there's already threads that were laid out in prior stories that will come back down the line and lead to unforeseen consequences.
In a sense, New Horizons is a consequence in itself. When I started digging my plans for a sequel back up I realized that I had a good opportunity to explore a large gap of time that had only been briefly fleshed out in some of the Monsters We Make exposition, a large gap that I could use to showcase some of the larger consequences for the actions in both Departures and Desert Getaway. So as Halira's story moved along, I decided to write my next one with the mindset that none of the entries would have been possible if Silver had lashed out at Sapphire and ultimately lost everything. So now the small positive action of forgiving and befriending a character in a story that appears unimportant ultimately led to numerous incredibly positive outcomes for the characters that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
When you look at it as a whole, there's an arc that began at the end of one story, had some major establishing points in the second, and now we get to see the aftermath of those actions in the third. To close this whole thing off, here's a brief snippet from the next chapter that actually delves into this idea "in universe":
...Destiny is strange though, sometimes it comes at you in weird ways. The whole UMAD incident may have led to one of the biggest magical incidents on the West Coast at the time, but it also opened up my eyes to what’s really possible when you work together with the right ponies. I’m often asked why I was so… reserved about the Great Storm and its aftermath, and the answer is honestly very straightforward.
It’s two things really, for one, we simply had too much to lose by getting overly aggressive in our handling of the situation. I know I’m a night pony and that’s in my nature, but the fact of the matter is that we were both screwed over by UMAD’s rouge agents. Choosing to forgive and help rebuild together was strategically the best choice we could make at the time. Sapphire’s a great ally and friend to have, and hell, befriending her has led to more good than befriending Blessing has in the long run, not that we’re not grateful for everything the SPEC partnership’s done for this place, of course. But it’s different with Sapphire, in an ironic twist she’s actually become one of our closest family friends, something that might seem incredibly strange to any onlooker that’s familiar with what really happened.
Secondly, it introduced us to some… interesting ponies that were uniquely suited to helping with the cleanup. They have a tendency of keeping to the shadows, and it’s all off the record of course so you’ll be hard pressed to find evidence of them anywhere, but regardless of their true nature, they were able to help us fight off the litigation that we were facing, along with keeping word of the incident locked down to the valley. To most of the world outside the Oasis it was merely seen as some freak weather magic experiment gone wildly wrong, with the occasional crackpot theory about “The Pony of Storms”, an urban legend to the rest of the world, though one that a few bright individuals have managed to see through.
The whole point of this little talk is that destiny has a weird way of putting you on the right track, and almost everything that’s happened in the aftermath of the Great Storm wouldn’t have been possible if I had chosen to embrace my instincts and lash out at the very real Pony of Storms. The Seekers, the Oasis, even project foresight— they're all a part of this, even if I never actively realized it at the time.
This is the way.
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Friendship is magic after all