Gracefully Afterthoughts

(Some slight spoilers for Gracefully, if you haven’t read it yet—which you should!)

It’s funny; I hadn’t expected to write another pony-fic any time soon. The last one I published hasn’t even been updated in months. I’ve been busy with college, and with the show having ended, my interest had begun to wane by that time.

This story, you might therefore say, came out of nowhere. Yet, once I started, I found that I could not stop. 

And that brings me to, well, today! And this blog post, this story, these afterthoughts of mine. There are some things that I want to talk about, here, and the reason for why I want to talk about them in the first place, is that this story has a special place in my heart. (All of my stories do, of course, but this being my first pony-fic in a while affords is some degree of treatment.) 

Originally this wasn’t even going to be a Rarity story. Yes, that’s right. The cover art and tags and, heck, the subject matter—those may now be reflective of the ever-graceful fashion pone herself, but when I started pooling ideas around, I thought this was going to be a story about Twilight coming to terms with her immortality. 

Now, I personally neither subscribe to nor refrain from the theory that Twilight is immortal; but I do believe that, as a storytelling device, it’s a theory well worth exploring, no matter how disheartening. I’ve read a couple of stories here that talk about Twilight’s immortality, and at the time of initial drafting, I thought: That’s the kind of story I want to write. Something that could be the reversal of, say, some of the themes found in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” yet still speak to many of the same things. 

The problem, however, was that I couldn’t get a good grasp of Twilight’s voice. Torn between the archaic diatribes reminiscent of Princess Luna and a much more hesitant, self-reflecting tone similar to Princess Celestia’s, I found myself unable to get many words in. The story threatened too closely to overly sentimental and melancholy in its initial stages, and this turned me away from continuing with that particular attempt. I suppose that’s more of a fault on my own end: my process for writing any story has always been to establish the “voice” of the narrator or main character, and if I can’t get that at all, then no story comes out. 

Ultimately I had to scrap that idea, and moreover, I realized it was a story that’s been done to death. I didn’t think I could do much more with it than what was already done. It would have to wait on the backburner, I reasoned to no small amount of dismay. 

Yet the idea persisted, and it so happened in early March that I was struck by a rather crisp image: somepony staring at the mirror, realizing that a strand of gray hair is now visible. What pony would care that much for something so natural yet also something that serves as an indelible reminder of age and time? Why, Rarity!—and, I remembered how she looked in the show’s finale—bags under her eyes, silver in her mane, yet still as poised and as elegant as ever. She had aged gracefully—and bam. There was the title. There was the theme. There was almost everything I needed to write this story, including a tiny nagging question that had been bugging me ever since the finale:

Why wasn’t Rarity worried about herself growing old?

Two drafts later, here we are.

Another thing that surprised me during the whole process was how long this story became. Originally I planned, and even attempted, to write it as a one-shot, but I found that the themes and ideas that I wanted to explore—indeed, the many things that Rarity specifically requested me to dive headlong into—required a lot more detail and, therefore, more words. What had begun as a planned, 3000-word, three-scene story, stretched to five chapters and many more scenes, incorporating more than a few headcanons here and there. The world of Gracefully had suddenly become fuller, but for one reason or another, this felt right. A shorter version would have cut down on the resonance, in the end. 

Now, I’m sure there are some questions about how the story progressed, and perhaps how it ended. For instance: why didn’t I include a chapter with Rarity revealing to Twilight her fears about her being immortal (or, as Discord hints, at her possibly aging much slower than the rest of the girls)? Or: why didn’t I have Rarity spend more time with the Mane Six, seeing how old they’d gotten and were getting?

The truth is, I wasn’t sure if any of those things were truly necessary to the story. Yes, they would scratch that particular itch, but they wouldn’t have added much more to it. The story stood as well as it could on its own without such details, and therefore I had to trust that the space I had been allotted would be enough. 

I’d like to believe that you think so, as well. 

Finally, here are a couple of easter eggs that I incorporated into the story, for my own enjoyment, which some readers might have discerned:

• The name of the optometrist that Rarity sees in Chapter Three is a direct reference to T. J. Eckleberg from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. There, the optometrist takes no form but that of a large advertisement on a billboard, but it plays a symbolic role as a stand-in for “God,” as many critics say. I don’t particularly subscribe to that notion; I believe Eckleberg is more-or-less a meta-example of the character, Nick Caroway, and his inability to see things for how they are. He may try to see the “good” in people before judging them, but he judges all the characters anyway—his vision is obscured no matter how much he’d believe—a motif that translates into the direct reversal in this story.
• The arrangement that Discord has his orchestra play in Chapter Four is a tongue-in-cheek reference to “Tank!” from Cowboy Bebop—another show which has dealt with the likes of growing old and disillusioned with age. Discord’s appearance as the conductor, with a dark-green afro replacing his hair, is a callback to Spike’s appearance. 
• Discord pulls out a leather couch, and changes his appearance to incorporate a full-beard, spectacles, and a cigar. He also plays the role of a psychologist. This was a reference to Sigmund Freud’s own appearance. The only thing I didn’t bring up were topics of incest, because that’d just be… well, wrong, for one, and two, a bit on the nose.
• Finally, the names of the chapters were derived from some quotes I found about aging, though obviously these ended up being excerpts rather than full quotes. For example: Chapter Four’s title comes from something Keanu Reeves said, answering how he deals with aging. 

I am older than I was when I first started watching the show, and it’s come to an end just as I near the cusp of adulthood. It seems fitting, now, that I should have ended up writing a story about growing up, coming to terms with aging, and moreover, remembering that it’s not the years that make life so amazing; it’s the experience between them.

This story employed a lot of what I’ve learned about writing over these past two years. Did I do a good job? I only hope I did the job that was at hand, and that I handled it, as Rarity handles the issue at the very end, quite gracefully.