Aftersound ‘Behind the Scenes’ · 7:19am Dec 21st, 2019
This blog consists mostly of two things: spoilers for Aftersound and my ramblings, so proceed at your own risk.
I’m writing this about two months after writing the last line of the epilogue and I still feel a bit tired. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed writing Aftersound a lot, but it was hard and it was taking up all my time to the point that my life consisted of either writing or working. Which leads me to both good and bad news.
I’m not sure if I am going to write a sequel for Aftersound and if it were going to happen, it won’t be anytime soon. That’s the bad news, by the way.
Aftersound is a massive project. The amount of things that were thought of, but didn’t make it into the story is staggering. There is enough material for a prequel about Trixie, roughly the size of the original story, if not longer. I have a plan for a story about Sunset Shimmer (a large one). A medium sized story about Raven Inkwell, Fluttershy, and the Pink Butterflies. Many small ideas that can be developed into side stories.
However, I don’t have that much time available, because Geka and I have another, even bigger project in our minds based on Aftersound (that’s the good news, but I will tell you about that project a bit later).
Now comes the part where you have to bear with me.
I don’t really want to start working on an Aftersound sequel because I kinda need to write it first before posting. Why the change in my approach? Let me tell the story of how Aftersound started.
If you remember there was a massive leak of information about MLP back at the end of 2017. Basically, it announced that ‘Friendship is Magic’ would be ending eventually, and that part was what Geka and I were discussing. My claim was that the fanfiction part of the fandom would outlive the show by many years, since there had been many great stories in the years leading up (The Mare That Lives On The Moon was finished that year, for example), not to mention many great stories that were already being written. And so Geka asked me about any good cyberpunk stories. I readily named Twilight’s Monster, but Geka stopped me. “I mean cyberpunk cyberpunk. Something like ‘GitS’.”
“Oh. Umm… there was one… but I keep forgetting its name and it’s not like it was that great. Yeah, there are either no top-tier cyberpunk MLP stories or I just don’t know of one.”
So the next thing Geka suggested was to make an MLP cyberpunk game. I promptly stopped him, since neither of us had any idea how to make games (remember this part, we are gonna return to it). Out of the two of us, he could draw, I could do absolutely nothing, but we still wanted to do something together.
We decided to write a story, because neither of us knew how to write and had basically never tried. Solid logic.
The very first concept of Aftersound was about one of the alternative universes created by Starlight Glimmer in season five, the one with the Crystal War. Twilight knows not about the Elements, but she is still Celestia’s pupil and deals with the threats, though in a very gruesome fashion (kills Discord). Twilight ends up in the future at some point and found herself in a city of the future ruled malevolently by… herself. In retrospect, it is possible to make that idea work, but back then we decided that there was no contrast between Twilight-murderer and Twilight-tyrant, so we kinda scrapped the idea.
The next one had the ‘Twilight’ you know as an equinoid made by an orphan filly at the city’s junkyard. My idea was a rip-off of Equine, All Too Equine, in which Twilight finds the new Bearers and fixes everything. I distinctly remember those Bearers being Tin Flower, Red Wire, Pepper Mercury (who was initially supposed to be the ‘Scootaloo’ of the trio), Rarity’s noble descendant (a young charming stallion) from the corrupted government and Pinkie Pie (who was initially planned to be one of the many popular Pinkie Pie holograms around the city; all of them are copies, but she is the real Pinkie, hopping between the projectors, entertaining the city for centuries). The entire idea was scrapped because it was dumb for obvious reasons.
The next iteration was what you know now: with changelings behind everything. However, was there a huge difference. The story was supposed to end with Luna storming the Palace (with the help of the Pink Butterflies, ha, (who were insane only because of the remains of Nightmare Moon’s armor - hello, Past Sins!)) and killing Chrysalis. Then there was supposed to be a sequel about the exodus from the city.
While writing chapter three I decided to take a look (right on time!) at literature about how to write. And I realized how lame the planned ending would be, with Twilight having almost no growth or real participation in the plot. So the decision to merge the original with the sequel was made.
As I was writing chapter eight I realized that the equinoids were basically going to get shafted and the entire ‘the Machine Goddess subplot’ was kinda useless. So, at that point the decision to make the story about them and Twilight was made, ultimately shifting the entire plot in a different direction.
Then there was a huge mess of ideas, which led to the very misanthropic idea of ‘Organic life is inferior, Twilight abandons them’. It also included Tin Flower dying and thus severing the last connection Twi had to the Ponydom.
As you can see the ending is quite different, though still bordering that concept.
Now, why did I have you read all that crap? I want you to understand that we had a plan for the story which looked good in theory, but as the story went on with the characters and the events solidifying with each chapter, things began to look differently, so the plan had to be changed for the story to follow reason and be satisfying. Thus, there are many things which aren’t as good as they could be, but more about that a bit later.
My point is, that if I were to write the entire story first and then post it, it would have been so much better. And though I wasn’t inventing things on the fly, I was posting the chapters as I wrote them, one at a time, with no chance to return and rework them.
An Aftersound sequel (if we choose to write one) is going to be a much more complex story with more characters and arcs developing at the same time. I’d like to avoid the issues I had with the original story, so it isn’t going to be posted as it is being written.
Also, like, half of the issues in Aftersound stem from that one huge problem.
For starters, there were a lot of factions introduced in the early chapters, mainly purists, but they had almost no participation in the story. Initially it was planned that Luna/Twi would interact with them during the ‘exodus sequel’, but since the story became focused on the Machine Goddess, there was no place left for them. That is just one example.
This doesn't mean that I have completely given up on the idea of an Afteround sequel. However, there is a huge project in plan, which is likely going to take up all my time once again.
Remember when I said that it was Aftersound related and I also asked you to remember that Geka wanted Afteround to be a game? You can probably see where this is going.
The size of the headcanon created for Aftersound is so huge that it can exist separately at this point. Also, now that the story is finished, I am able to see its weak points and fix them (this doesn’t mean a re-write, just the adaptation being different).
Now, don’t get too hyped. First of all, there are two of us, so it could take up to a decade before you see the final product. The game is also going to have no ponies at all, obviously, unless we want to get spanked by Hasbro.
That said, when there is any news about the game, I will inform you first.
While I am talking about future plans here are some more.
My next story is going to be a romance focused on Starlight Glimmer and Twilight Sparkle. It is a gift for my dear friend and also a chance to try my hand at writing something not dark and depressing. I also want to try a new style, with, uh, less words so to speak. ‘Show, don’t tell’, something at which Aftersound failed a lot.
I have to finish that Fluttershy/Big Mac clop story. I also still want to write a clop story about Fluttershy and Gina/Clementine (that giraffe). I am absolutely writing Celestia/Luna shipping with the aim for quality. I also have a few little ideas for Aftersound side stories, and just some short things in general.
I think all the important stuff I wanted to say has now been said, so I will just tell you a few interesting facts about Aftersound.
The Souleater was part of the early plan, however, I didn’t want it to be Spike, because it would be too cruel and Twilight had already suffered too much. Nervous laughter.
I wanted the Buffalo to be good guys, meeting the entire party right after Dodge City, healing Flower and showing them the way to Luna. But Geka talked me out of it. Nervous laughter intensifies.
I wanted Moondancer to be a Former One serving Chrysalis, but I was talked out of this too. I also wanted her to the Thirteenth, but I was forbidden from returning Moondancer back into the story in any form (the hologram was allowed).
Pepper Mercury wasn’t supposed to be crazy, we changed that at the last moment.
There was supposed to be a pseudo-religious organization curated by the TCE for the equinoids on the surface to oppose the Church of the Machine Goddess. Something about a new dawn/day.
I hate the fact that I had to kill Celestia and let Fluttershy die ‘off-screen’ without much of an impact on the world.
Tin Flower and Red Wire started as names created by Geka, I created their appearances based on that.
Clandestine Delight was a character I created (on my own) before I realized that Chrysalis must be left alive, but eventually replaced. Though I hesitated including her in the story first, she fit that role perfectly, so I eagerly started to write her.
Chapter 13 wasn’t supposed to be that long, I actually planned for it to be just an average part of chapter 12. The same could be applied to so many chapters/sections - they weren’t supposed to be so long. And the entire story was planned to be only 100k words, ha-ha.
Speaking of chapters, I really dislike chapters four (the second half of it), twelve and fourteen. I feel like I could have written them much better, but I have no idea how. Chapter eight is my favourite and was the most fun to write. Overall, I am content with most of the chapters, though I was told a few times that chapter six (which I like a lot too) was way too heavy on exposition.
Overall, Aftersound is far from perfect and the reason for that is not only in planning failure. It was the first story I wrote, so my inexperience played its role.
For example, Rainbow Dash’s character arc is the least fan favourite from what I can tell (half of the dislikes the story has is because of her depiction in chapter 16). I don’t want to go back and change anything about her - she is what she was supposed to be in the story, a hero who sacrificed her humanity (equinity?) for the sake of the city. The problem is that the explanation came only in chapter 19 from Soarin, three chapters later. I should have included him in the travelling party, I can see that now.
I could go on and on about Aftersound, what I like and don’t like about, what I would fix and what I wish I knew how to fix, but you are likely to have better things to do. So, here we part, but not permanently - Aftersound is going to return in one form or another eventually and I have more stories to tell anyway.
Have Happy Holidays and see you next year!
Aftersound Project Discord server.
Pony Tales, a quite welcoming place dedicated to discussing and working on many great stories (now including Aftersound). I think you may also find it interesting.
If you haven’t checked already - here’s the blog dedicated to illustrations for Aftersound.
This blog was edited by Jay Tarrant.
Thanks for reading.
Stay Awesome,
Oneimare
Your first story?
That's REALLY impressive.
5172933
Thanks! Though it is very far from being perfect, it has so many flaws.
5172971
Honestly, the biggest issue I spotted was your pacing. Sometimes it felt like you were unsure of how to deal with an issue or just wanted to be done with it so you would hastily gloss over it. The first example of this was Wire and Flower's acceptance of Twilight's sapience. But even with with that one complaint, in my opinion, the story was amazing. Your world was incredibly well built, there were few if any "where did this come from?" moments, dialogue was well written and dont even get me started on how well your characters were implemented. You successfully made each characters' development believable, especially Twight, so that I truly enjoyed how they interacted. Finally, your writing style. That is what truly drew me in. It was not choppy and didn't drag. Instead it flowed from one sentence to another. You have real writer's talent.
All in all, I loved Aftersound and am eagerly looking forward to your future releases!
5173330
Thank you very much, I really appreciate that. However, there is something I want to object which is relevant to your claim about my pace.
I absolutely agree with it and the reason why I had that issue is in the speed of the story I set for myself with the earlier chapters (in which I wasn’t quite sure about what I was doing). The story is very slow, following each step of the protagonist and I often struggled with describing events which are supposed to take a long time in a way that wouldn’t claim the entire chapter. So I did drag sometimes, I believe.
No comments here, it was just my bad. And I know it isn’t the only instance when I chose to gloss over something, there are a few things in the story which shouldn’t really work.
Thank you again. There was a huge amount of effort that went into the worldbuilding. Though I do wonder, which moments gave you pause.
And I loved working on it, creating that grim and intricate world with deep lore full of dark secrets and history that spans other centuries. It is certainly not the last time you see it, in one form or another.