Duelists of the Friendship Cup - Author's Notes · 12:19pm Dec 20th, 2019
Well, so ends another Yugioh crossover fic. The first one, most of the time was spent coming up with well-designed cards for Twilight and Sunset while the plot unfolded identically to Equestria Girls.
This time was pretty much the opposite. And a lot more frustrating in that regard.
I never intended to adapt Rainbow Rocks, I did a blog saying so. The reasons are simple - it would rehash too many elements of the first fic, and the team format wouldn't work with the three Dazzlings vs the seven Rainbooms. But Friendship Games? Hmmm, that could work, Wondercolts vs Shadowbolts is a no-brainer. I spent a few months playing with the idea, assigning decks to folks - Indigo Zap's F.A.s were too perfect to be anything else. A new booster brought out the Twilghtsworn series and oh there was no question what deck Sci-Twi would have. That climax writes itself, Twilight is turned into Midnight Sparkle and her Lightsworns are corrupted into Twilightsworn. Perfect.
What stalled me is how to make Cinch and the magic absorption plot work in this AU. Cinch was always kinda lame and what deck really works for her? I considered Infernoids, Quilphort, Zefra, but none of them really fit. And the magic stuff, how do I work that in? Is Twilight gonna have this device that absorbs magic, but the Rainbooms don't have magic yet because no Rainbow Rocks, so that makes no sense, and how would Twilight know about magic since I've established magic affects memories so hmmm... I just couldn't come up with a way to make these elements work.
The Shadowbolts were what kept me thinking about this fic during development. I could do the rivalries Friendship Games promised us and do them proper justice. The Crystal Prep setting and Expert Ruleset would be a good way to justify bringing Synchro and Xyz into things, which satisfies my Arc-V fan boner almost as much as making Pendulum cards a major plot point in how they don't exist and Twilight is researching them.
Have I mentioned lately how amazing Arc-V is and how much of it I ripped off for these fics? Sunset's dark turn in her duel was blatantly copied from Yuya going berserk for the first time.
The Shadowbolts and Pendulums kept the embers of inspiration burning, but we weren't yet up to a flame and I was just batting ideas around and not really thinking of a proper sequel as something I wanted to do.
When I had the idea to make Sombra the head of Crystal Prep, everything clicked into place. D/D/D is as perfect a deck for Sombra as Twilightsworn is for Midnight Sparkle. He brought with him the idea to expand on what the original story hinted - magic does exist in this world, and some folks have it. I began to flesh out Sombra as an administrator who seeks out duelists with magic and teaches them to hone their skills to further their dueling, allowing them to get into positions of power in the dueling world and granting Sombra a network of contacts and allies he can use to gain power for himself. Sombra in my story is what Cinch wishes she was.
With Sombra here, Twilight's role in the story came into focus. Her latent magic would justify how she could be aware of Sunset's Pendulum cards and would serve as the catalyst for her transformation into Midnight Sparkle. She became more antagonistic, a true product of Crystal Prep's environment. Sombra became Cinch if Cinch was better written, manipulating Twilight and Sunset into doing what he wants and then waiting in the background, watching these two build up to their confrontation eager to see what will happen. But the decision to use Sombra and make Twilight a more direct antagonist brought challenges. Sombra is such a blank slate in canon I had to create a new personality for him wholecloth, and Twilight was so different she might as well be a new character.
Sombra was actually fun to write. My proofers and I went over his first scene very carefully to make sure I could sell this depiction of him well, a charismatic and calculating schemer who hides his true motives and operates in subtle ways. I knew people would immediately peg Sombra as the Big Bad, but having him be nice and polite and respectful while Twilight is more openly antagonistic to Sunset threw off suspicion. Having Radiant Hope here was because Cadance as his right-hand doesn't work, but people also picked up on Hope's presence as another sign this Sombra may not be evil - not my intent but it worked to my favor. Plotting out his motivations and intentions well in advance allowed me to pen his dialogue with that layer of subtext, that if you know what he knows and what he wants, you can see him playing the angles.
A recurring motif I assigned Sombra was the eyes. Looking someone in the eyes when you talk to them is a show of respect, but can also be seen as a challenge, and if you've ever had a conversation where someone keeps looking right at you the whole time they're talking, it can make you uncomfortable after a while. And of course, the eye motif was something the pony Sombra had too, so having Sombra constantly look people in the eye was a good trait for him all-around. I kept emphasizing that just having Sombra look at someone can change their entire demeanor and put them on edge. I purposefully left it ambiguous if there's some sort of magic to Sombra's gaze that lets him influence others, or if he's just an intimidating presence that has that effect on people. A few scenes mention his eyes look like they're glowing - maybe it's magic, or maybe he just has striking eyes and the light is hitting them just right.
By the way, in his duel with Celestia, "D/D Level Modulation" isn't a real card. I slipped it in to hint to Sombra's nature, that he has a card that doesn't exist becaue he has magic. Not sure if anyone caught it or not.
Twilight though had problems, as I'm sure people know. I knew she would be a hard sell, I wanted her as an elitist and arrogant know-it-all, totally different from the canonical Sci-Twi. I based her personality on pony Moondancer, as that seemed a logical depiction given their similarities, and then I filtered Twilight through the arrogance and elitism of Crystal Prep. She's all formulas and analytics and statistics, in a world where a game defines one's future prospects and social status. I described Twilight to friends as "the kind of person who takes tier lists literally." Then along comes Sunset Shimmer with her magic cards no one has ever seen, and Twilight zeroes in on her, viewing these cards she can't understand like a personal insult and a problem to be solved.
Yeah, that didn't go over well. Everyone hated Twilight and the more they saw of her the more they hated what I was doing with her. I've commented to defend her, because I did try to ground her in canon somewhat. If you look back at Twilight in the earlier seasons, she could be very dismissive and rude, especially when dealing with things she doesn't understand or doesn't care about, and of course her need to do things by-the-book is a fault that has persisted throughout the show. Episodes like "Bridle Gossip", "Feeling Pinkie Keen", and "It's About Time" were where my Twilight took her inspiration.
That said, there were problems going into this fic, and problems arose as it kept going on. I admit it openly, I did not plan this fic as well as I should have and did not recognize the challenges I'd have to write around. The first fic had a loose structure in-universe with how Twilight faced opponents, which gave it a nice episodic nature where we can duel, then we can spend a chapter talking and building story and character, then we can duel again, and so on.
The Friendship Cup, as I ended up going with it, was back-to-back dueling with the occasional break. I could have put breaks in between every duel, but then comes the second problem. The first story was focused solely on Twilight and Sunset, and Twilight was in almost every duel. The decision to make Friendship Cup an ensemble cast with the Wondercolts vs the Shadowbolts meant that Sunset and Twilight spent a lot of time watching duels and not having anything to do. This also meant we saw less of their decks and had less understanding of how they worked compared to Twilight in the first fic.
Then of course there is the problem that I am adapting Friendship Games as a direct sequel to the first Equestria Girls movie. Which means a lot of Sunset's character growth between the two had to be meshed together with the grace and efficiency of a car crash. She's confident but also doubting herself, and she's the leader of the group now but still an outsider, and she's the school's best duelist who wants to represent them but they still hate her.
Finally, I did not want to bring Equestria into this, it was a huge can of worms I did not want to open. I considered having Sombra learn about it and want to go to Equestria for its magic, but like, he's a school principal, not a supervillain, I didn't think that'd work. So I had to consciously make sure none of the cast spilled the beans about Equestria and Princess Twilight, even though the logical conclusion of Twilight and Sombra's arcs were to learn about them.
So, to sum it up - I got really excited for this fic because of the cool match-ups I could do between the Shadowbolts and Wondercolts, and could have Midnight Sparkle playing Twilightsworns and Sombra playing D/D/D monsters, and adapt some thematic elements of Arc-V for Sunset's Pendulum monsters. On the other hand, I'm going with a story structure that means more action scenes and less character scenes, the main protagonists have more complicated character arcs and less screen time to progress through them in, and I'm treating the topic of Equestria like an active land mine I have to drive past and not hit.
I bet a lot of things are starting to make sense to you guys, huh?
I hate this story. The plot is a mess with its themes and morals all over the place. I don't want to say I was making it up as I went along, but I feel that way looking back. And in some ways I was improvising, or at least I was trying to go for things I had not properly built up previously. Not to mention some story things that ended up going nowhere because I didn't find a way to organically resolve whatever plot I was trying to tell.
As for feedback, honestly, I have never gotten on any previous story, the level of contempt and disapproval I got with this one. And I don't say that to insult my readers, comments are a gift that you guys take the time to type out and enter because you care enough to let me know your thoughts, and I appreciate that endlessly. But still, things got to a point where I dreaded posting new chapters because as enthused as I was about things at the start, no one else was, and it became increasingly apparent to me that you guys were right. I would not say this fic sucks, but it is not good.
Okay, let's get to the actual fic in progress and now it developed.
I had plans to have Sunset duel Fluttershy, to parallel the first fic and show off her Harmony Guardians before her duel in the tournament. But I left that out because I already had a duel with Starlight early on and didn't want to pad the lead-up to the tournament any more than I already did. I included Starlight simply because Twilight needed an opponent, preferably one that can use Xyzs as Twilight uses Synchros and I can show off those new summon types at once. She was a one-off cameo and it worked for what it was.
The Fluttershy vs Sour Sweet duel was enjoyable to write, she plays off Fluttershy so well in personality and dueling style, and Fluttershy's diverse deck theme gave me a lot of potential cards she could use. I never felt like I had written myself into a corner or didn't know where to take the duel.
The Sugarcoat vs Applejack duel... was not enjoyable to write. At all. In hindsight I really, really regret giving Applejack Predaplants, because they're not a very big archetype and honestly, not very good anyway, and this chapter predated the recent support they got in Japan to improve them, adding insult to injury. Half of the Predaplants rely on supporting Fusion Summons when there's only two Predaplant Fusions, and one of them needs another Fusion Monster as one of its Fusion Materials. Not to mention they actually rather suck at distributing Predator Counters, the mechanic the archetype is based around. Then on Sugarcoat's side, the Magnet Warriors are a very complex archetype with a lot of cards cycling through the deck and field and Graveyard, and it made it hard to follow and also hard to balance, because realistically Sugarcoat could have overwhelmed Applejack with ease.
Many thanks to Blazeblast4 for the idea to have AJ use Bamboo Scrap to lock up Sugarcoat's field and stop her Berserkion summon loop, I was stumped on how to proceed with the duel from there and he loosened the gears for me to write the rest of the duel with only one or two hiccups. I wasn't sure about AJ using Starving Venom and Greedy Venom, since they stray from the Predaplant theme, but there was no other reason not to and having her bring them out for the final turns to counter Sugarcoat's stronger monsters was a great climax. And then after posting another commenter pointed out an oversight where Delta the Magnet Warrior should not have been destroyed by the effect of Sarracient. So I had to rewrite that part of the duel. Grrr...
The Pinkie vs Lemon Zest duel, I made the decision to make it a single chapter out of my own frustrations - we needed to get to Sunset vs Twilight already! Pinkie was going to have Madolches, but they're another complex archetype that I actually don't know much about, never seen much of them. And Toons are a favorite series of mine, no matter how impractical they are. Between not trusting myself to use Madolches and wanting to get to the SvT duel, the decision was made for Pinkie's duel to last one chapter. It worked for her, I could give her Toons back since they're a fast-hitting series that can sustain action for a single chapter just fine, and it makes sense she'd be the kind to use the fun deck or the competitive deck and lose with it, she's Pinkie.
Lemon Zest was "always" planned to use Morphtronics. I use quotation marks there because that was my pick for her early on, but only because nothing else fit her - most Yugioh musical archetypes focus on singing, not instruments. I was going to give her Symphonic Warriors at first, but they're a very small archetype more for supporting other deck themes than being one themselves. The Orcust archetype caught my eye when those cards came out, but they were a dedicated Link Summoning archetype and that immediately ruled them out. In lieu of a dedicated instrumental music theme deck for her, Morphtronics worked well in their own way, and I got to give her Martial Metal Marcher for at least one good musical card. I kept saying to myself "if a new booster brings in a good archetype for her before I get to her duel, I'll use it", but that didn't happen.
And then, the big one - Sunset vs Twilight.
I had once posted Sunset's "Harmony Guardian" cards, but that was before I intended to actually use them in a story, when they were an off-shoot of the Harmony Spirits in terms of mechanics. They had to be redesigned to be their own theme and functional within it. The core design elements are the same - they're variants of the Harmony Spirits with effects similar to their S/T support built into them as their Pendulum effects. Sunset's card in the series, Compassio, was designed to have effects contrary to the rest but still synergizing with them, reflecting her status in the group dynamic.
And then came her Extra Deck cards and their supports. Naturally, they were based on the Dazzlings, Gloriosa Daisy, Juniper Montage, and Wallflower Blush, the six EqG villains aside from Sunset and Twilight ("What about Vignette?" What about Vignette?). They were based on EqG villains to thematically parallel Sunset's old Infernal Spirits which were based on the early-season MLP villains, and they were made Dark-attribute and given the "Infernal" moniker for the same purpose. Bellis was Gloriosa, Juniperus was obviously Juniper, and Erysimum was Wallflower, taking their names from the genus of the plants. Ariette, Sonare, and Adagium derived their names from Latin words related to the roots of Aria, Sonata, and Adagio.
In terms of the card stats, they were based on the signature cards of the spin-off protagonists - Gloriosa, Juniper, and Wallflower have the stats of E-Hero Avian, Junk Synchron, and Gagaga Magician, Adagio has the stats and effects of Flame Wingman and Winged Kuriboh, Aria is based on Junk Warrior and Stardust Dragon, and Sonata is based on Number 39 Utopia and Gagaga Cowboy. In an earlier draft, Sonare was the Fusion card and Adagium was the Xyz, but this was switched so Sonare had the defensive support effect and stats, and Adagium had the offensive effect and stats, which was more fitting.
Sunset vs Twilight was where the story's plot actually got going and the central conflicts both external and internal came up. I really regret making this duel the midpoint of the story - if they had dueled earlier and netted CHS a win early on, it would have made the tension from duels much stronger because now it's not a certain who will win or lose, and it would let me build up the magic plot stronger while giving all of the Humane Five magic cards if I needed it or wanted to.
Next, Rarity vs Sunny. I gave Sunny the Hazy Flames because I like their playstyle and aesthetic, and as mythological beasts they work as a good parallel to Crystal Beasts. Rainbow vs Indigo, as I said before, there was never any doubt that Indigo would play F.A. to contrast Rainbow's U.A. Keeping track of all their level effects was a headache though. I also found these duels a bit easy to write by nature of the involved parties being show-offs in their own ways, so plenty of chances for fancing posing, trash talk, and banter.
And then the 7th duel. I included Flash and Shining Armor for the sake of the Friendship Cup being a 7-on-7 tournament, logical for a best-of-set structure. That ended up being a bad idea because they were plain a drag on the story, they had no involvement in the main plotlines and I had no intent or means to get them involved. I regret doing this and should have kept things to 6-on-6.
I really wanted to refer to Twilight as Midnight Sparkle in the finale, but wasn't sure how to work the name into things, or maybe I could just include it in the chapter title? Whatever, everyone understood what I was going for. Again, thank you Konami for giftwrapping the Twilisworn symbolism for me.
The emotional height of the story was Sunset's duel with Twilight, losing her memories, having to use her Infernal cards, and ultimately realizing what her deck symbolizes about her. I am so glad I got to shoehorn in the "extremes of a Pendulum" analogy. Then came the actual final boss, the duel with Sombra.
This is a major reason I'm coming off so harsh to this fic here - the final duel was a huge pain in the ass to write. I learned my lesson from the Applejack/Sugarcoat duel and started planning my duels ahead of time before writing them out, and I also did that here. But as I wrote I noticed numerous oversights that made me have to revise my plans and look up ways to do it. Life Points and cards were very tight, so typically when I found an error in my game play, it meant the duel completely fell apart from there-on out, unless I could find a fix for it with what I had already set up.
I debated giving Sombra a super boss-type monster like Z-arc, or having him use the Super Doom Kings. I decided against the former because that was gonna be Sunset's thing. The latter, the Super Dooms are just so powerful that if Sombra got them in play, he'd win. Also - I hate their English names, they sound like names a little kid would use in his fanfic. If I was gonna use them, I told pre-readers I was gonna rename them, maybe something like "Supreme Doom King Luminous/Abyssal/Obsidian Armageddon". But that would just confuse people. Besides, the real cool factor of the trio - their homage to the anime villains - is irrelevant here.
So, yeah, that's Duelists of the Friendship Cup - a confusing, underdeveloped plot and characters that mostly talk to fill up time between the really cool and fun action pieces. It's a Michael Bay movie in fanfic form.
Fortunately, my next fanfic is going to be way, way better. It has school, magic, shipping, astrology, history, and more than a few surprises. Come back in the new year for the launch of my next fic, Dreams' Horizon.
Word of warning if you decide to make a follow-up fic to Duelist of the Friendship Cup, brush up on Link Summoning and the upcoming Master Rule 5 if you can once early 2020 roles around (since it's been said Konami will be introducing a new Master Rule come 2020). Link Summoning's not all THAT hard to figure out how to work into the story but I recommend holding back for Master Rule 5's announcement as to not get complaints about the missing inclusion of the new Master Rule.
(I'm sure you had a fair amount of people complaining about Link Summoning missing from Duelist of the Friendship Cup enough as it is. -_-)
5172345
Not really any complaints, no. And I won't use Link Summoning because in a purely written narrative, it is asking a lot of readers to keep track of the physical locations of monster cards on the field, and I have to note each time a monster is summoned where it exists on the field.
5172347
Yeah not gonna lie, that's one of the things I still don't like about Link summoning. Konami screwed the pooch on the gameboard design with that one. Fingers crossed Master Rule 5 fixes that.
I still haven't read Friendship Cup
But now that's it's wrapped up, I can binge all the chapters.
Just want to say thank you for writing your Yu-Gi-Oh/MLP stories, they might not be perfect but few things are
(except rocky road ice cream, that shit is fucking delicious perfection in a tub)
Regardless of there faults, I enjoy reading the stories, just wanted to let that be known.
It sure was an undertaking, wasn't it? Still, lessons were learned that will make the next story all the better for it.
I felt way out of sorts going through these duels, so I hope the outsider perspective helped in some cases. I know I came off as a basic bitch with some of the questions I had.
5172384
Nah, I'm just grateful you stuck through it and read them to keep providing technical aid. Thanks very much for that again.
I understand the frustrations (now you know how I feel about Sunlight sometimes), but it wasn't all bad. Just think of this as your GX to the orginal series. Not as good but still enjoyable (I liked GX at least).
5172347 Yeah, not using Links was the right call... I don't use them for other reasons, but that makes sense to me.
I do want to say this isn't really that bad a fanfic. I've admittedly read better Yu-Gi-Oh fics, but this really wasn't that bad. I've certainly read stories that are more of a mess. I liked it at least.
I liked this story of yours, this two fics encouraged me to give another chance to the cards. Good luck to your new fic and have a happy and productive new year!
Wow...I honestly thought you did a pretty good job on Duelists of the Friendship Cup. Still do, in fact.
Alright, I can clearly see you are a little tired/embarrassed/frustrated and it's rude to ask, but my curiosity is better of me: Is there a possibility for the Third instalment of the EQG/Yugioh crossover?
I think it was obvious from the start that you weren't enjoying writing this fic as much you wanted and that the results were showing in your handling of the flood of criticism. Mind you I'm not acussing you of anything I simply think I understand where you are coming from. As an avid Yu-Gi-Oh! fan I would have loved to help you if not for me being extremely busy irl and stressed AF.