Writer's Recap: The Other Stranger

I actually had a pretty easy time with this one. The only real challenge I had was trying to find the right flow and the appropriate content. Once I had that, the words more or less fell into place without too much struggle on my part.

I knew I needed at least one more changeling in Ponyville. I also really like the way Golden Harvest/Carrot Top is portrayed in the Lunaverse, and also in PaulAsaran’s the Weed, so she felt like a natural choice, and the rest flowed from there.

Although that’s important information, again, it’s Twilight’s story, so what needed to come out of this was something she could understand. She definitely understands an older sibling looking out for the younger; she has Shining Armor, after all. She also knows that Lyra can be flighty and not think things through all the way before doing them, so she understands keeping an eye on a younger sibling because she did (and still does at times) that with Spike.

By this point, Driftwood’s main purpose in the story is to help Twilight along her journey, which is why he doesn’t do much more than supply small bits of information, engage in dialectics with her, and otherwise provide scaffolding so that she can build up her own understanding of the situation.

Mukashi mukashi, I was an assistant for a distance learning program that covered a variety of subjects, but one of the more common classes was the psychology of child development, and you can’t supervise the narrowcasting of the material without learning something from it. As such, I became pretty familiar with the concept of scaffolding; familiar enough that I began to see how it applied beyond child rearing, and how it would be an important tool when interacting with adults, especially insofar as helping them to understand new experiences and ideas. Any time anyone tries to assimilate new knowledge into what they already know, they’re going to stagger and stumble because the new information will invariably clash with what they already know, and only the degree of clashing will be different. Without proper scaffolding, they’ll just chop up and discard parts of the new information until it fits into their present knowledge because they don’t feel they have the room to make mistakes, especially if the new information makes them uncomfortable. Having someone there to tell them that it’s ok to stumble and that stumbling doesn’t make them defective makes it easier to adjust what they know to make room for that new knowledge.

Given what Driftwood did for others (and will likely continue to do), it made sense that he would understand this, which made it easier to fold what I know into the story. It might also help that, much like me, he genuinely wants others to succeed and actualize their goals and potential.