Rage of a Queen, Wrath of a mother is done, Afterthought blog

So Rage is finally finished and boy do I have a few things to say about that, especially the massive amount of rewrites I ended up having to do.

Be warned that if you haven’t read the last chapter of Rage, this contains some spoilers. I posted the last two chapters today, because I don't know yet if I will have internet tomorrow and on Friday.

I’m not unhappy with this story, actually, I am very happy with the finished product. But my did I almost become really frustrated with it.

As I mentioned sometime during the summer. I announced that I needed to rewrite the second half of the story before I could send it to the editor. That process took most of the summer and I really didn’t have good, completed chapters ready until the end of October. So, what happened? What did I need to rewrite?

Well basically, the story was slowly turning into The Last of the Dark Ponies 2.0. You can actually see some minor hints of it in the first half of the story, I was basically beginning to tread the same ground and I had in the Last of the Dark Ponies, touching on the same subjects. And frankly, I felt those subjects had already been resolved in the last story and didn’t need further dwelling on.

Also, I was getting a little tired of writing Private and Sombra interacting in this manner because it was just getting so predictable. The story was moving at a snail’s pace and it was just stuck in that damn house Private and his friends live in. I needed to get Sombra out of the house, I needed to focus on what the story was about, stopping Queen Rabia. For that, I honestly barely needed Private and his friends, they were a good starting point to get Sombra out of Tartarus but as you may have noticed there in the second half of the story, I seriously only needed them in minor roles not to be part of the central focus. They certainly weren’t going to go off and face Rabia.

This wasn’t a reformation story; the focus wasn’t reforming Sombra and quite honestly the story kept veering into that direction as well. However, and you may have noticed, that I was definitely laying the groundwork for something happening with King Sombra and who knows, maybe even Queen Rabia herself.

So yeah I just took a hatched to chapter 12 onward and just rewrote everything, focusing more on King Sombra and Rabia and the effort to stop her. That and Sombra’s escape from captivity were the only end goals of mine for this story.

Other than the rewrite, there were some other minor cuts and changes.

I was always going to reveal who Sombra’s father was, but it was originally done differently. Rabia was supposed to be ranting about him with Queen Chrysalis. But I didn’t really think that was something Rabia would tell Chrysalis, and our favorite bug queen certainly wouldn’t care at all who that dude was. Then as I did the rewriting, I just found it so funny that Foxy would just actually ask Rabia about Sombra’s father since she is the one who brought the topic up in the first place and then Rabia just completely deadpan revealing that it was Captain Vago who killed her. That somehow just fit Rabia so much better, and Foxy too.

Another thing that was cut in the early development was that yes this was supposed to be Sombra reforms story. But as I continued writing part 1, I just didn’t like how it was going. I wanted to be more uh, unique? I suppose that’s the word, plus it just didn’t fit with the actual goal of the story as I mentioned above, plus this just added another complexity to the story and I didn’t want this story to be too complex.

Sky Dive was going to have more of a role, butting heads with Sombra. But in the end, I didn’t really need her, we didn’t need yet another character complaining about Sombra being out of Tartarus, so she only got a quick cameo, just to show Dew and Foxy’s mother. I mean it makes sense that she at least drops by to make sure her daughters are okay. I already implied in Possession in the Crystal Empire that she is protective of her daughters when Dew tells Cadance about her.

Poor Queen Chrysalis also got her role severely reduced. She was supposed to be a bit more prominent, but once Rabia had Sombra’s location, Rabia didn’t need her anymore, so Chrysalis got captured again and was basically the catalyst of the others knowing where to go to look for Rabia. I considered having her and Rabia bicker at the end in two different cells. But I much rather have the queen have some final words with her son than the two queens sniping at each other.

Nothing changed with Starswirl the Bearded, I specifically had Celestia mention him because I did intend to use him at the end to help trap Queen Rabia, he was also needed to provide some additional insight on the dark ponies and why Queen Rabia was considered so dangerous and tricky to deal with, unlike Sombra, he would be much more forthcoming about it.

If you feel the capture of Queen Rabia was a bit of an anticlimax… well I can’t help you there sadly. That one was always intended to be that way, Ira’s portrait freezing her long enough that the moment Rabia sensed the trap, she realized she was just out of energy, having spent so much of it, fighting Sombra, traveling to Saddle Arabia, causing property damage and then wasting the time she did looking for him in the museum. The Elements of Harmony being used didn’t do her any favors either.

Ah yes, the Elements of Harmony. I confess I may have nerfed them a bit, then again I based it a lot on how I saw them being used, and what I saw was the villain always stupidly just standing still and let them hit them. It was never shown what would happen if say they moved out of the way? Also, the season 9 opener, showed that King Sombra could actually survive the Elements, there he faked being banished by them only to return later at the tree to destroy it. Keeping that in mind, I figured Rabia could survive them as well, but still a little weaker since it would take effort to escape the blast.

Then when she’s captured, I didn’t think it fit Rabia to go nuts as Chrysalis did. Rabia was always meant to be a somewhat dignified person, even in defeat. The moment she realized that she couldn’t win, she stood down, knowing it was futile to struggle. It did serve a nice contrast between the two Queens. (One of the reasons why I put them together in the same story.)

One thing though that I wasn’t sure came out effectively were the hints that Rabia may not have done everything she did if in a more correct state of mind. I mean if she could do all that already for one, why hadn’t she just already wiped out Saddle Arabia? She certainly seemed capable of it. My thought was always that, as cruel Rabia could be, she always knew that her only enemy was the king of Saddle Arabia. Celestia was not far off that Rabia was right now in a grief-stricken madness, as a spirit she had heard the invasion, the butchering of her citizen and her daughter. Rabia in a strange way does actually love both her children, she is just a product of her time and just never understood that her methods were bad.

My goal with Rabia was always that, yes in many ways she is worse than Sombra, but in other ways she is actually better. She can become your absolute worst nightmare if you give her a reason to, but if she has no quarrel with you, Rabia will be happy to ignore you. She is not a conqueror, all she wanted was revenge but even so, she is even more pragmatic than Sombra, definitely knows when she’s been beaten.

We also finally got to see modern Saddle Arabia in the Equestria Tales. Been talked about since Possession in the Crystal Empire. Due to the obvious middle east implication of the name, I naturally decided to have the ruler to be an emir. Though I did have the original ruler be a king. I even partly based the Saddle Arabian peninsula on the actual Arabian peninsula, just a slightly less desert and may have moved a few mountains around and added a river.

I mentioned it in an author’s note but just want to say it again, damn it was tricky to figure out a name for Regent Manemin, I didn’t want to use the “far” at the end since I figured that was a masculine ending of a name. So I ended up just picking Jasmin and put Mane in there. But that wasn’t the end of it, for most of her appearance, I kept calling her Manemir, I have no idea how I managed to mix that up. This wasn’t even a slip of a finger typo, since the R and the N are not even close enough on the keyboard for that. Thankfully, those errors were caught before publication.

Well that should just about cover most of it. So what’s next? Well the hints were laid in the latter half of Rage, but I can’t say much more without spoiling things too much.

Until later.