A Hearth's Warming present: "A Matter of Principals" · 8:38am Dec 25th, 2019
Happy holidays! Hope the season is going well for you. I'm working a double shift tomorrow on Hearth's Warming — but I can still celebrate, by giving everyone a present!
A recent discussion about the relative endings of MLP and Equestria Girls reminded me that I never properly talked about my biggest Bronycon highlight: On Saturday afternoon, the show's voice actors assembled on the main stage and did a live dramatic reading of a script I wrote (with contributions from Monochromatic and Skywriter and editing help from Aquaman). For legal reasons it couldn't be recorded, but if you weren't at the convention I can still pass on the script!
The reason the conversation reminded me of it is that the script centers around Canterlot High School's graduation — and, when the two world's Celestias switch places, Sunset Shimmer struggles to find some closure she never knew she needed. Her friends, on the other hand…:
There's an extended discussion in the final scene that was definitely written with the show's then-impending ending in mind. A meditation on what we do after the show ends, and how we carry forward what made MLP special. Oh, and also, Cthulhu invades Equestria, and only Principal Celestia stands in the way.
It's called A Matter of Principals, and it was an experience.
Anyway, here's a PDF of the script. Not the same as hearing it from the show's voices (and participating in the big audience chant at the end), but it's something I'm proud of.
As the tags note, someone paid $1200 for a signed copy of the script. Not the VA signatures. MY signature (and Sky's, and Mono's). That still turns my mind into a pile of melted slag.
I've edited the public posted version slightly so that the ones the VAs read from at Bronycon are unique. I wouldn't want to devalue the Bronycon shopper's purchase.
Happy appropriate holiday(s) to you too! :)
And good luck with that double shift!
Thanks for sharing!
And congratulations on that auction result!
YEEEEEEES
Merry Christmas and/or other holidays, Horizon. This is one heck of a gift.
That whole panel was a fucking ride. I'm glad to have experienced it first-hand.
Dammit... I should have been there... Ah well, at least we have the script! Thank you!
What an incredible present. Merry Christmas, man!
I really enjoyed that! I think you let Celestia's line about, "I can't fail you again" kinda slip by without paying it the attention it deserved, but it overall felt like something the show could have done!
Merry Christmas!
I couldn't make it to Bronycon and never thought I'd get a chance to see this .... I just read it, oh my giggles, this is incredible. Thank you for sharing this, and Happy Hearth's Warming to you.
"It is now, because I just used it! Ha, checkmate! And also maybe bingo! Possibly Yahtzee?" Oh my gosh.
Now THAT is a gift! I've been curious about this ever since I heard of it, now now I finally know!
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That gag was Skywriter's! It's doubly funny when you realize that except for chess all the games cited in that section are Hasbro games. :D
Aw, that was *amazing*
Thank you so much for sharing this with us, especially those of us who weren't able to attend. It means a lot, and this was something truly special.
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Buy some apples!
What an honor to have the VAs read your script! I'll have to read it as soon as I have time. Merry Christmas!
I take it from Sci-Twi's absence that Tara Strong wasn't there?
Thanks for sharing, it's sweet and cool that you got the VAs to do a reading of that.
Happy holidays!
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)
(To be fair, the first draft had competing toy company games in the list and it was made Hasbro-only compliant after Aquaman called me out on it.
This was an amazing experience, thanks to all the writers involved, especially Dexanth/Morning Sun who organized the thing. Glad others who weren't in attendance can see it.
I just read the script and loved it. Oddly enough, I had a similar idea for the conclusion to the EG series, only in my version, Principal Celestia had a larger version of the Time Twirler and wanted to keep Sunset and her friends in high school forever because she enjoyed the magical adventures and didn't want to go back to dealing with only failing grades and fights between students. It would have been a metatextual way to explain why Sunset and the original 5 feel like they've been in the same grade or two for 5 years.
Ugh, im not a fan of eqg at all, probably watched about an hour of it total, but i wished there was some conclusion like this, or an explanation of where the human SS is. This performance with the VAs is the perfect tv tropes definition of elevated half-canon imo.
That was really sweet and fun. Thanks for sharing it for those of us who couldn't be there, and congrats on people paying lots of money for a thing you wrote
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Seconded!
Oh, that's wonderful! So much fun throughout, and also really rather sweet in its sentiments. I'd got it into my head somehow that you were barred from releasing this in public at all, so I'm very pleased to discover I was wrong about that. Okay, it's never going to be quite the same this way, but this is a lovely gift for the 99.9% of the fandom who'll never get a chance to attend one of these things in person. Thank you so much!
And thank you also to hawthornbunny for pointing me at this.
This is really good! I wish I could have seen it.