I Know... I Know I've Let You Down · 1:29pm Sep 18th, 2020
I published a new story back in January. The one before it (Constrictive Criticism) was unimportant. The one since (Like You) wasn't important either. But the one in between, with Maud on the cover, that was a big deal to me.
I don't really know why. Quite a few of the stories I've written have been pretty stupid, and in many ways that one's the stupidest of the lot. It came out three times longer than expected, some scenes didn't end up how I'd imagined, the pacing is bizarre, and the setup is a crossover of two things which should not be able to coexist.
But I like it. I like it more than most other things I've written. Top of that list is Mine for the Taking, and the best-received chapter there is the dreamy, surreal one, despite being under 200 words long. And this story is, in a way, my second attempt at something surreal, but this one is 50 times longer.
Plus it's Spitfire, Limestone and Maud, stuck in the middle of nowhere, and the end of the world, which in my book isn't far off the perfect template for a story, outside of those involving sirens.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a bit weird and complex. Not so much that you can't enjoy it or follow what's going on, but to really understand everything being said or the reasons some things are done takes a bit of research. It begins with them throwing all sorts of things at you without explanation, so if you can take those in stride and just keep up with that habit then the rest of it shouldn't give you any new problems.
But it's this strange mix of Biblical apocalyptic terror and domestic bliss, where pseudo-mum shotguns beer for breakfast and then goes off to work commanding planet-saving military missions, and damaged teenager 2 spends her life flirting with her adult guardian or screaming at damaged teenager 3 to stop whining about needing to pilot a giant robot because the alternative is humanity being wiped out.
Parental abandonment is universal. Waifu material is a screaming octahedron. The sweetest moments come from two old college friends with little in common, who happen to pretty much run the world's defence together. And then there's Rei Ayanami, and no one really knows what's going on there (or cares - the director literally forgot she wasn't in one of the episodes), but everyone remembers that time she smiled.
On first watch it kind of reads like a dream. Things happen, and they're connected by this internal logic that makes sense but also objectively seems ridiculous.
Like a story being told by Pinkie Pie.
It does make sense, of course. The more you read, the more you research online, the more you see there are things you missed that do tie it together. My impression, both on viewing and on finishing the series, was not ‘this is nuts,’ but ‘this is quite the experience.’ And a compelling one at that.
I say that so as to make clear that I’m not saying it’s crazy randomness. Indeed, there isn’t much about the series I’d change if given the chance to rewrite it. It is a very emotional journey, and, the more times you watch it, the more that becomes the focus.
But I think there is something to be said for batshit insane surrealism. There’s a kind of humour and enjoyment to be found in not knowing what the hell is going on but eagerly awaiting whatever happens next.
So I wrote a story with that in mind. A crossover where some parallels fit surprisingly well and others are best not scrutinised too closely. Something Pinkie might have been making up as she went along. A strange narrative where the underlying meanings of things are largely bullshit, and most deeper significance comes from your own imagination.
Not so much a cruel angel’s thesis as a cruel angel’s faeces.
I think that title was probably responsible for a fair portion of the downvotes, which rolled in thick and fast. I wouldn’t have changed it, though. If not for the title, I wouldn’t have written the story at all.
Putting all the warning tags on it was a mistake, too. I thought it’d be fun to include every single warning tag (alas, ‘fetish’ was the only one the story didn’t really qualify for). But of course that just makes it look like the product of an edgelord, and so people treat it accordingly. I took most of the warnings off again, and I think it looks fine now.
I had a vague idea in my head of how the setup would go, and then what would be the climax and the denouement. Some things, like Spitfire and Marble leaving the farm, needed improvising as I went along, but the specifics didn’t make too much difference.
Something that did change more was the scale and level of focus. As the story reached its big scene, it grew closer and closer to the source material, and played back each moment rather than describing in broad strokes. Some bits of this worked better than others, I think.
The cast grew, too, and did so in an organic manner that was wonderfully rewarding to write. There was no plan to include Celestia, but when the scene required it she was all ready to go, having been set up and referenced several times previously. It managed that very Evangelion thing of showing how a wide variety of characters that you’d seen from a distance before were actually all going through the same thing once you looked close enough.
I don’t remember what prompted it exactly, but around the time the Celestia appeared, so did a third crossover element. The more I thought about it, the more Evangelion’s themes of interconnectedness fitted with those from Cloud Atlas. Once I had that thought, I couldn’t not bridge that gap.
Cloud Atlas is probably the most incredible film ever made. The book is great, but in this one instance I will suggest that the film is even better. Like Lord of the Rings, the film rearranges the structure of the book, intercutting between narratives rather than separating them into isolated books. This makes the impact of each decision immediately apparent.
The only comparison I can really think of is with Inception. Many films intercut between different action sequences in their climaxes to heighten the excitement. What took Inception to a much higher level with that adrenaline was that the same characters were experiencing each of those sequences simultaneously. Leonardo DiCaprio was skiing around a Bond villain lair at the same time he was in a van falling off a bridge and weightless in a hotel suite.
Cloud Atlas does something similar, but with characters reincarnated across different time periods. What happens to those characters in the past shapes their future. The decisions they make in one time influences those in the next.
There is something about a payoff characters have waited a long time for. Something I find enormously emotionally rewarding. I don’t know if others do too, or if that’s just me. And that makes sense, something happening after a long time of waiting. But, strangely enough, I find it happens even when I, the audience, haven’t had to wait for it. Sometimes, absolutely that helps, sure. After four seasons of Rarity dreaming, working and clawing at scraps, we get an episode called Canterlot Boutique. That’s huge. And in the same season the CMCs get their cutie marks.
But on the other side of it, I was rereading a story on fimfiction a few days ago and shed a few tears of joy. This story. I’m not remotely attached to the characters, or the writing, anything like that. There’s just something great about seeing the date tags on the chapters, that after so long waiting she got what she was after. But here’s the thing, I only read the story when the last chapter came out. I hadn’t been waiting for it, because I didn’t know it existed. I came late to the fact and saw the waiting that had been done, and that was enough.
Cloud Atlas understands that, I think. A few minutes into the film, Tom Hanks and Halle Berry might be meeting for the first time in a post-apocalyptic 23rd century, but, a minute before, she smiled at him across a bar in 2012. There really is no other film like it.
There is a sequence about ⅔ of the way through Cloud Atlas which is perfect. A character makes a speech, narrated over a montage of character interactions across different time periods. It is a composer speaking, in the middle of composing his master work, and he says:
“I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended.”
This is relevant. At the end of the most recent chapter of Fairy Gothmother, Twilight is given a copy of The Downward Spiral. The album that, in my book, is the most important statement on transcending that boundary. Examining, questioning, subverting and transcending binary boundaries between opposites has been one of my main focuses on fimfiction, chiefly the line between hero and villain.
In this scene in the story, Celestia looks up at the moon containing the sister she imprisoned a thousand years before, and comes to understand that the boundaries between night and day are only conventions.
I don’t think many story lessons are more poignant, or more important, than the one Cloud Atlas arrives at here. “One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.”
So I like that bit. And I like how the rest of that scene turned out in the story as well, not just the Celestia bits heavily influenced from elsewhere. The idea of Maud appearing to people as she does there was what first gave me the thought that the story could be something more than a silly random comedy, and it’s the part of the story I’m happiest with. I reread it frequently, and it has yet to fail to bring a tear to the eye.
Maybe that’s just me reading more into it than is there, borrowing emotions from the influences I know are behind it. I’m not sure. But I can’t say the same for anything else I’ve written. That scene, buried near the end of a bizarre crossover that few read and many downvoted, is the most moving scene I’ve written.
It’s funny how these things turn out.
I wrote all this with the vague thought of perhaps dredging up some renewed interest in the story, from people who didn’t read it when it came out. I don’t know if I’d say the cover presentation mis-sold it, because the title, description etc aren’t exactly inaccurate. It’s perhaps more than it seems to be.
And I think I hadn’t really appreciated how tricky it is for crossovers to hit their niche market. I haven’t written any more of the South Park crossover I mentioned since this one bombed, and it’s reinforced that there’s absolutely zero market for a Drag Race crossover. A shame, as that one was going to revisit Celestia and Chrysalis.
Not that a small audience intersection is the main culprit for the reception here. I wouldn’t mean to blame my own failings on that. Other Evangelion crossovers have achieved much more success. Ones that I looked at and thought I could easily do better than.
And, fuck it, I’ll hold to that. This story is how you do an MLP/NGE crossover. Many people may hate it and disagree, but I still believe it.
And the title still makes me smile every time!
It all returns to nothing.
It all comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down.
I am glad you keep the spirits up even if the story doesn’t get a fair enough shake because of the title. I had a laugh when the first... ‘’angel’ attack started up. The tie in with the human instrumentality / starlight’s equality philosophy / longinus+tree of harmony=tree of life. was pretty brilliant too.
If I can add another story of yours that need more eyeballs on it I still say your Haunted Wasteland is stellar writing. I like it the best because of all the raw emotion work in it. It’s my personal favorite!
I'm glad to hear that your impression of the story remains fairly high. It does make me a bit sad to see that it's diminished the appeal of other crossovers, but as much as I do think you should be writing for the story's sake more than popularity's, there's definitely an argument to be made for prioritizing things more people are going to read, if the intent is to eventually post them publically.
5358574 Yeah, I can't fault people for liking what they like, and it was also entirely predictable that it would garner some negative attention from that title. The title was just one of those things that had to be done, and couldn't not be done, however bad an idea it was sure to be. Thanks! That, and the title, were what made me want to write it, there was just enough similarity there for it to work and then be intriguing what happens when Tree and Staff collide.
Thanks, I'm happy to hear it's someone's favourite
I really need to finish that one someday. It outgrew the ending I had planned, and now I'm a bit stuck on how it should finish it. I was sad it didn't reach that many people, but it's got its work cut out for it. Very hard to describe or explain, or even to fit into a genre tag. And the first chapter isn't the strongest hook. The second movement is definitely stronger than the first, too.
I am learning, as time goes on, how much difference character popularity makes. It sounds obvious when you say it, but a story about one of the mane six will do so much better than one about a side character, all else being equal, because so many more people are interested in reading about them. Which wouldn't be so bad, if I were at all interested in writing about them.
5358995 I agree. It wasn't like 'Nope, never writing a crossover again!' and throwing all my toys out of the pram, but just that it organically felt less of a priority. Other fics swam to the forefront instead.
I think length probably comes into it, and how long it'll take you. If you can bash it out quickly, go for it, at least it's done and out there. If it's something that'll take a while, then yeah, considering a return for your investment isn't unwise.