Whatever Happened to "From Far Beyond" · 12:52am Nov 1st, 2020
When I started writing From Far Beyond I expected it to be my magnum opus on this site. By the time I cancelled it in July early this year I'd come to...well, not hate it, but I was pretty disappointed in how it was going to turn out, plus a lack of motivation to continue it.
But I did promise an explanation of why I cancelled it and what would have happened next as compensation, so here it goes.
Picking up from Chapter 5, Eric would have eventually been found by Twilight and Tempest. There would be the usual trappings of a Human turned pony in Equestria story, and then they would have figured out that TechnoCorp is behind the missing ponies.
A little backstory: the company developed a device called the "Spatial Oscillator", essentially a wormhole generator, to be used to find natural resources on other planets. They hopped around space for a while with it before stumbling across Equestria by pure accident. Upon discovering ponykind's proficiency with magic, company President Charles Brant decided that if human beings could harness magic for ourselves, we might be able to solve a great many of our own problems on Earth. The company initiated "Project: Amalthea", basically abducting a few ponies at a time, and bringing them to a research facility on the fictitious Midnight Island (a little reference to the G1 pilot's Midnight Castle), for study and genetic research, with the ultimate goal of developing a gene that could be inserted into the human DNA sequence to grant magical properties.
Amalthea proved controversial amongst TechnoCorp's higher-ups, most notably Vice-President Thomas Avens. Despite being best friends with Brant since the company's beginnings, Mr. Avens did not support the Amalthea project, and when appeals to Brant failed, he began looking for a way to sabotage the project. He found it in Eric's father Jonathan, a computer specialist at TechnoCorp who'd stumbled upon the files for Project: Amalthea by accident during a firewall test, and also helped work on the targeting systems for the Spatial Oscillator. The two devised a plan for Mr. Colby to return to the mainland, where Avens would send him parts of a prototype man-sized oscillator and an outdated test version of the Amalthea formula, with the intent of presenting these to the FBI or the CIA or whomever as evidence. Somewhere along the way, though, Jonathan decided to assemble the Oscillator and warn the Equestrians himself, leading to the events of Chapter 4.
So there you have it. Then Eric, the M6, Tempest, the Royal Guard, and the Royal Sisters all go through one of the portals to Midnight Island and fight TechnoCorp. The Amalthea labs are destroyed, Brant dies trying to save his work, even injecting himself with the still uncompleted formula in an effort to salvage it, and Avens assumes control of TechnoCorp while Eric remains in Equestria because now they're trying to cover it up so nobody else can try it again and him coming back to Earth as a pony (his mutation is irreversible) would blow the whole thing open.
Alrighty. Now we get on to why I cancelled it.
Eric Colby is a bland character. And more to the point, he's a straight-up self-insert. Now I'm of the opinion that self-inserts can be done right, but it's one of those Sturgeon's Law things, and I fell right into the 90%. Other than his terror of being plunged into a new world and body, plus being hunted down by a morally gray corporation with good publicity, he didn't really have much going for him as a character.
My second big problem is Tempest Shadow's involvement. I recently said that I feel like Tempest hasn't quite escaped the shadow (you will never know if that pun was intended or not) of her dark past, but I went with it full force in my story. She was a depressed sob-story who only starts to get better when she has a fellow outcast–Eric–to cry to. There was even going to be one scene where she locks up when confronted by an Ursa Minor and Eric saves her, then the comics actually went and did that.
Plus, there was this weird relationship between her and Eric where they were clearly getting close, but not in love. This point would have been emphasized so much that I almost feel like it would have been denial.
So yeah. I consider the backstory more interesting than the actual narrative, and that's the big reason why I decided that I simply could not deliver a good product with what I was doing.
Oh, and Eric's girlfriend Megan Williams was less a reference to Megan and more to Sunset Shimmer, because EQG wasn't canon to this continuity for obvious reasons.
So here we are.
The above being said, there are still elements of the story that I am happy with, and that I hope to reuse in future works. TechnoCorp is kind of my general megacorporation. The idea has always been that they're not straight-up evil, but they do some things that may or may not be morally questionable, like the Amalthea project.
Charles Brant is my favorite character of the thing. Despite being essentially the main antagonist, he was never meant to be a straight-up bad guy. He's a wealthy philanthropist who brought himself up from almost nothing, and uses the vast amounts of wealth and resources of TechnoCorp to help the world however he can. But he's come to the realization that all that money and power will not solve all of the world's problems; just delay them for a time. His attempts to harness pony magic is his desperate scramble to give humanity a chance to overcome at least some of our problems. Deep down he knows it's wrong, but he feels that at this point he cannot back out with all the time and effort that has been put into the project. Brant was meant to be a somewhat tragic figure. He so desperately wanted to help people–his last words even being "I just wanted to help...why couldn't you let me help?"–but he went about it the completely wrong way.
Another character I might reuse someday is Dr. Dathan Eckhardt (originally David Eckhardt), TechnoCorp's chief of Research and Development, and the only one of their ranks who truly falls into "evil" category. He was essentially a repressed mad scientist, believing that morality is merely the product of a race that has deluded itself into thinking we are more than just meaningless clumps of matter in a dying universe, and who's idea of a perfect world is a strictly survival-of-the-fittest based system. Brant himself was aware of just how unhinged he truly was, but kept him employed and under his control because he was more scared of what Eckhardt might do if left free-roam. Eckhardt would have survived the events of the story and would be imprisoned in Tartarus, setting him up to be a villain in a future sequel (and yes, I did have a few planned), now completely unfettered by either Brant or TechnoCorp.
All this to say, this is what happened with From Far Beyond, and to give you an idea of what the rest of it might have been like.
For those of who reading, thank you for taking time to do so, and I'm sorry that I couldn't deliver a more successful product.
Maybe someday I'll pull off a decent long-fic...
Huh. Interesting... I never read the original fic you're talking about here, but I must say it's definitely brave of you to step forth and offer this overview and assessment of your story, its failings or your regrets about it, and what you'd like to try and reuse someday. Speaking as someone who goes through a LOT of ideas, that kind of self-assessment takes a lot, and I applaud you for doing that.
Why don't you do a Bionicle G1 crossover story that combines Humans, Ponies, and a Toa team. I would pick the Toa Inika led by Jala.