Chapter Two Part 8 Up! (December 22nd) · 12:11am Dec 23rd, 2020
Chapter Two Part 8 is now up! Quite the early post, I know, but for reasons I need to go to bed right after work tonight, so I wouldn't have been able to post it at the usual time. So here it is for you early. 
I’ll be going into plenty of detail below regarding this chapter, so keep in mind: lots of spoilers are ahead.
Firstly, the choice of victim and culprit. From the beginning in my notes, I had intended for Sweetie Belle to kill Apple Bloom at some point. Early on I decided upon a location that involved winning weapons as prizes (originally it was a casino, then restructured as the game corner we see in the story) and she was going to use said weapon to kill Apple Bloom. However, that’s where things started changing rapidly.
Initially, the weapon of choice was not a spear, but a halberd, because I wanted a connection to the original namesake of the Crusaders, that being the Crusades. It was also not intended to be a trap originally--in fact, the crime would’ve gone down a completely different path. Sweetie Belle would’ve tracked Apple Bloom down with the halberd, and would have slain her somewhere, such as a theater stage (at this time not all new locations had been determined yet.) Then, before she could do anything else, Rarity was supposed to stumble by, discover the crime, panic like crazy, and then offer to cover it up for Sweetie despite knowing that if Sweetie got away with it she’d be executed.
Sweetie and Rarity would then cover things up, perhaps by setting up Apple Bloom’s body to be discovered somewhere else hanging from rafters. (The details were in constant flux here.) Then during the trial, Sunset would eventually weazel everything out of Rarity, and Rarity would be the Argument Armament person. This would also set up a massive fight between Applejack and Rarity that would continue to rage, leading eventually to them either murdering each other or someone murdering them both while disguising it as them killing each other.
But I ran into a lot of problems with this plan, not the least of which was giving Sweetie Belle a reason to kill Apple Bloom. No matter what I did, how I changed up the story, what kind of motives I considered, I could not come up with a justification for her to do this. So, I set that aside altogether, and went ahead planning a different crime.
This crime would’ve featured Diamond Tiara as the victim, and Pinkie Pie as the blackened. Basically, Diamond Tiara would’ve acted exactly the way she proceeded to do during the chapter, but all as a setup for her to create her own trap. During the setup of this trap (which involved hanging swords and a couple of hanging ballast bags plus spikes under the stage for the person killed to fall into and be impaled on) Pinkie was supposed to stumble upon Tiara in mid setup and, without realizing it trigger the trap, while thinking Tiara had done so. She’d panic, go get help from others, then when she came back with Sunset and Adagio Tiara would be dead.
However this plan felt pretty shoddy, and I ended up not liking it very much, especially because I hadn’t realized how much I was going to do with Trixie at the time. Trixie’s magic show was sort of a spur of the moment thing (always intended to occur but not originally in Chapter Two), but it made so much sense that I had to roll with it. So that meant I had to nix the Tiara/Pinkie plot. When I settled upon the secrets for the motive, I realized I could finally do something of my original plan with Sweetie and Apple Bloom, but mix in the details from this as well, resulting in an accidental murder of the wrong target. Thus we got the hybrid case that you actually were able to read: Sweetie Belle, while trying to kill Sunset during the magic show, kills Apple Bloom by mistake. There was still a halberd involved in the trap at first, with it swinging down from the ceiling to stab Apple Bloom in the back, but after workshopping that with my husband(because it was kind of ludicrous, and I had issues with how it was timed anyway) I changed it around to be the spear instead, and then backfilled details to hint towards this.
However as you can see, this did disrupt some of the original plan after all, because instead of Rarity and Applejack ending up at odds with each other, they’re rekindling their friendship. This… disrupted everything else after this, as you can imagine, so I was scrambling to redo everything.
As a result… my plans going forward from here are not what they were originally intended to be at all. Survivors, blackeneds, victims, they’re all completely different from my original plans from here on out. I won’t say what those were, because there’d still be MAJOR spoilers if I did, but I had to reorganize things.
In the end I’m glad I did though, because of some of what I had planned I’d never been completely happy with anyway, so I ended up feeling a lot better by the end of all of it. Especially with this wonderful Chapter Two I produced as a result.
And if you’re worried about whether or not this means story progress is delayed…
Don’t be. 
(Yes I realized after taking that picture there was a typo in one of those titles. 
It's been fixed. )
Speaking of story progress, I’m working on the trial for Chapter Four right now, having managed to get back to it despite recent events in my life. I’m coping by remembering the good times, and writing helps me deal with the loss as well.
I never like accidental blackeneds; it always seems cheap, and it's the sort of thing that falls apart at the smallest scrutiny. If it's not who arranged the thing, but rather who most directly caused the death, then that makes almost everything a suicide. (Hey, it was Diamond Tiara's heart that pumped all that blood out her stab wounds.)
The noted exception, of course, is DR2's 5th trial, but that worked better because the accidental killing was part of the plan, and the way it utilized the victim's superpower was really clever. But I've never seen it work in a fangan.
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In general, I agree. There are ways, I feel, an accidental blackened can be used that's actually effective, but what I came up with here definitely wasn't one of those ways. If a story is going to have an accidental killing, it should serve a greater story purpose, bring particular levels of pathos to the characters, that sort of thing.
I just wanna say that I’m really loving your story.
It’s giving me something to look forward to each week during these hard times 
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I'm glad to hear that! I'll admit, I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks of it every time I upload too. It's definitely been helping me to stay sane, writing this story. As odd as it sounds, it's cathartic. I guess there's just something about brutally killing some of my favorite fictional characters that makes for good stress relief.
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Ha! Don’t worry, I get it.
ooh, fascinating look behind the scenes! always neat to see how many ideas a writer has to cycle through before it all settles. i see the appeal in the original plan of Rarity helping to cover up for Sweetie Belle, which would just be a very fascinating dynamic to explore, but yes, Sweetie Belle needing a reason to kill Apple Bloom does sound like a very, very difficult writing problem to solve! and agh, i've definitely been in a place where a story idea has just so many delicious emotional notes and reveals except that it all falls apart on the world or the character needing to be in a certain position that i can't find a way to get them to. it is always heartbreaking.
but this RariJack reconciliation is definitely another rich vein of drama to mine, exploring their grief in a different way. and the target not being Apple Bloom just adds another layer of tragic irony on both sides of the equation, which is always great!