A Reflection on the Impact of Fanfiction · 5:24am Feb 6th, 2021
As I am writing this, I am sitting here watching the pale yellow brilliance of the sun arc slowly to the edge of the western horizon. In a moment, that warm orb of luminescence will sink beneath the atmospheric haze of the distant plains, gone from my view. Gone, too, will be the light it brought with it, as well as its warmth and the way it colored the sky and landscape in a harmonious spectrum of blue and green and yellow and red hues. In its place, night will come, the warmth replaced with coolness and the exuberant radiance with silent reflection. But at what point does day become night?
Perhaps I should elaborate by explaining how I arrived at my current perch, gazing over the land as I watch the day come to a close. You see, I arrived here just shortly, choosing this spot as a place to rest and to reflect. Behind me, a thousand miles separate me from where I started; a thick coat of grime on my cart and long lines on my map are evidence enough of my journey’s progress. But to ask a question in the same vein as before, at what point do we stop leaving where we started and start going to where we are destined?
Today I traveled. Yes, I completed many miles, I traversed many roads that took me to places I had never been and could only have imagined before. I traveled through small, idyllic towns that bathed lazily under that sun that rose over the heartland. I traveled through big cities, bustling with activity and energy as that same sun glistened above their shiny towers.
Today I traveled, but I do not count my real journey in terms of miles. Instead I count it in words. I count it in the ideas and feelings that those words carried to me. I measure it by how deep the rays of those words warmed me and left me thinking what it was and why it was. In short, I listened to a story, and it made me think about my own. This blog is merely my feeble attempt to capture, to somehow immortalize, that feeling which I fear may never bless me again once it is lost with setting sun.
"Lyra" by Lurarin
The story in question is no doubt familiar; Background Pony is a sort of classic among My Little Pony fanfiction. I have been reading/listening to the book for some time and while every chapter is a remarkable experience, today’s chapter struck me in a way I was not expecting.
Everypony is made to be loved. This is the title of the chapter and the message that stayed with me through all the miles I traveled today. In summary, the protagonist Lyra catches the eye of a special pony named Morning Dew and she forms an intense attraction to him. If you are familiar with the primary conflict of Background Pony and the curse that affects Lyra, then you know all too well the severe irony that hangs over this. But in a way, that element of the story illuminates and perhaps even elevates the delicate, lovely emotional aura that exudes from this simple notion that everypony is made to be loved.
For the far too many of us that are far too lonely in this life, this message might strike a particularly poignant chord in our hearts. Today, as I crossed those seldom-trod paths weathering away in the lonely heart of the country, I was perhaps the loneliest physically I had ever been; the home I had grown up in lay a thousand miles to the east, and the home I was starting lay a thousand miles to my north. But I was not truly alone, for I had the words of the author that brought me to be with Lyra’s story, and I had the memories of my own story to connect me to a world beyond the lonely plains.
"Bright Mac and Pear Butter" by Mirroredsea
Both stories have to do with this curious thing called love; it is perhaps the most perplexing of emotions. I could not help but be entranced by Lyra’s rendezvous with this most fickle of aspect of the pony experience, to feel alongside her the sheepish gaiety of cherishing a crush, the lofty, energetic happiness of realizing the potential of a romance, the deep, poignant joy of knowing that you’ve shared a moment with your true special somepony, and, sadly, the sharp pain of realizing that it wasn’t and never could be so. I could not help to feel these things alongside the character, mostly due to the skill of the author, but also because my own life has blessed me with these experiences.
I am undoubtedly a romantic, but I am not a lover. My relationships have been few and far in between, yet each has left me with a greater understanding of what it means to love and to be loved. There is at first, and perhaps more persistent the older we get, the search for that precious connection; in many ways, the character of Morning Dew is the embodiment of that search. I, like Morning Dew, found myself searching. I thought I might find it in the many schoolyard crushes I formed, but also like Morning Dew, what I thought was it appeared as unexpectedly as Ms. Heartstrings.
She was a special mare, coming as she did at the right time in my life and with the right warmth and acceptance to make me think about a form of love that existed beyond the superficiality of a crush. We never spoke much, but we did not have to; our time was often spent lazing in warm summer afternoons, sharing breath and still moments together as we watched the thunderstorms float far away in the sky. But sadly, this story, like that of Lyra and Morning Dew, could never be.
My love was gone, and for a long time I no longer searched. How could I? I was perhaps so oblivious that when love once again decided to appear before me, I refused it; I would later, in a cruel irony, find myself on the opposite side of this. Like Lyra, I became infatuated with a special pony that consumed me and brought out in me a certain feeling that even to this day I lack the words to adequately describe. I became, like Lyra, even more filled with the ecstatic energy that accompanied dreams of fantasy once I suspected that this special pony might fancy me, too. I let myself, like Lyra, get carried away by the idea of a relationship, by the idea that I had found my special somepony and rediscovered that same security that I had lost. But what happens next in Lyra’s fictional story is all too real as it occurred in mine, for what I had built up and cherished and smiled over for so long was, with the simple act of turning away, gone. It could never be more than a moment and a dream, destined to melt away.
Perhaps my desire to see Lyra find love and happiness is a manifestation of the fact that I desire a part of her story to be my story. Everypony is made to be loved; our desire to love somepony else is only slightly more powerful than our desire to be loved by them. Indeed, the very emotion of loneliness is not characterized so much by the physical absence of souls around us but rather by a consuming existential fear that we are not loved and may continue to be so. We seek happiness and the secure consolation of knowing that we mean something, that we are something worthy of being loved and held and cherished by the only other pony that matters in our world.
“Sketch #38: Pastoral” by Hunternif
But I do not consider myself lonely, nor do I write this as the desperate plea of a hopeless romantic. My purpose is not to garner sympathy for my life, nor is it necessarily to praise the work of another. Instead, the reason this blog exists is to capture and immortalize a feeling, so poignantly real yet intangible, that would never have come to me but for the story of Lyra that took me beyond the road I was on.
Today reminded me of many things. It reminded me of where I had come from, of not just the miles but the ponies and memories that lived there. It reminded me of a beauty I had placed aside in pursuit of ever-looming duties. It reminded me that everypony is made to be loved, perhaps even me and you. And it reminded me of a dream and place where that dream might exist. But even now, as the sun has long set, I long to go back to that place I journeyed to today. Can I not, just once more, lose myself in that place, to seek out again that feeling I so long to understand?
But alas, I can’t raise the sun out of the west. I can only remember what it’s light showed me today and prepare myself for what it might shine on tomorrow when it rises from the east. It is only when I let go of today’s light that the day is truly over and the night can usher in tomorrow.
Is it foolish to take this much out of a story, especially a work of pony fanfiction? Perhaps, but if we are observant, we can begin to see the intersections of reality and fiction where ever they may appear. Art, including the art of storytelling, is really just a means for expressing those abstract, poignant bits of life that define our experience and help us understand what it is to be us. Our lives are stories, and sometimes, when we collide with the expression of another’s story whether in art or life, we can see more clearly just what our story is trying to say. While no work of fiction will ever come close to matching the depth of a real pony’s story, it can serve as a place to dive from.
I know that what I read to today was not real, and to some, not even a serious work of art. How can a fanfiction on the internet about talking ponies have any real weight when compared to the great works of Tolstoy, Van Gogh, or even Bach? Sure, this fanfiction and many others like it may never reach the same level of renown, may never be hailed by so many throughout the world and throughout history. But I listened to Bach today, and I can tell you that this fanfiction, this story of a pony named Lyra and her feelings that existed only in the words of some smuck on the internet reached far deeper into my being than the harmonies of Bach. Perhaps if this story had existed in any other place, in any other form, it may never have reached me as it did.
I bring us back to a question I asked at the beginning of this blog: in our journey, at what point do we stop leaving where we started and start going to where we are destined? For many of us, we measure our stories by the pages we have already read. For some, the pages behind us provide a reassurance, a security that we can flip back to and feel satisfied that we’ve come this far. For others, those pages behind us are so painful that our security comes from know that each new page we run to is another between us and that past. At what point, then, do we stop running away?
That point comes when we decide to move forward, when we find what it is we are looking for and what it is we want our story to be. And sometimes, it takes a work of fanfiction, the right story at the right time, to make us realize it’s time to make that decision, or to at least guide us to start that conversation with ourselves.
This is why I have come to love fanfiction, because while it may be dismissed by most and hidden to others by the veil of fandom, it is justified by one simple fact – it had an impact on me. And this is why I pay attention to the stories around me, why I have devoted so much time and effort into learning how to tell stories and into writing them. I do these things so that one day, just maybe, I might share something I’ve learned through my words and add a little piece to someone else’s story just as a piece was added to mine today.
It was a similar experience for me, thought a more lengthy one in time. when I was studying in Belgium I had limited means of entertainment and I had just gotten interested in MLP the year before, I first got interested in it because of the fan animation episode of Doctor Hooves, What fascinated me in discovering this was that there WERE people actually wiling and able to do their own content and it was good. Then I go into the radio play them, then, because I had watched all of them I discovered a Fallout Equestria reading and I was amazed at the depth of emotion that the story got into and explored unfiltered subjects that I wasn't familiar with that I struggled to handled and understand but it did made me feel emotions/feeling that were long suppress/dormant/stunted/denied for years because I couldn't handle them before, but FoE explored and helped me to better understand these raw feeling of pain and joy in a cathartic manner that helped me to awake and to better empathies with where as before I couldn't. What was even better was it awaken within me a love in writing that I never have before, where it was all but my nemesis, where I couldn't string two words correctly without using a spell checker, that I had struggle to grapple with all my life and for the first time even back then I wanted to near to write my own stories, not just illustrate then as before, and this was a very powerful thing for me to feel and had massively helped to improve to impossible level in my mind back then. Reading Fimfiction got me to want to draw fan art and had helped me in actually finish an art piece for start to finish, where I never did before, but had gotten me to want to push my work on and on, wanting to improve my work come up with my own scenes my own ideas, and to show them off on DA and eventually on youtube. FimFiction had really helped me in becoming a better person in my life and have helped me open doors of possibilities that I didn't thought I was capable of, it had helped to better appreciate writing, improve in what I was the weakest at in school, got me to interact with people in postings on the side, made me want to improve in my social skill, made so many friends, reaching almost professional illustrations and even make a modest career in taking commissions and in doing cover art for so many great stories. And it is all large part thanks to Fimfiction for awakening something within me.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about fanfiction as an idea is that, sometimes, given enough numbers, statistical probability, and a determination to succeed, it can be good.
Pony-fics are one example, though there are others out there just as good as the best things on this site, if not more so. It turns out, despite the cynic perhaps disagreeing, art and form are not inherent to a person's condition, or the place upon which they are written. Notable works need not be literary, need not be original in everything - I believe the heart of such things is only if they can convey an authentic experience to the reader, and that means it doesn't matter if a work is fanfiction or not.
I suppose that in this day and age of electronic media, the prevalence of fanfiction has created a subset of literary genre, such that previously held notions of where writing best originates are made obsolete. I cannot say, to paragraphs Ralph Waldo Emerson, what fanfiction works I have read, to what extent I have read them, but indeed, they have still made up who I am, just as any book, any story.
It's almost as if art, at its purest form, isn't elitist, classist, or discriminatory. It is simple in what it does, and therefore many things can do it. Fanfiction happens, perhaps, to be one of its most modern examples.
I'm glad you found something meaningful in that experience.
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I like your idea of fanfiction as "a subset of literary genre" and one of the examples of modern art that exists in electronic media. The place of fanfiction and other fan-inspired works in the greater scope of modern art would be an interesting conversation to see; I wonder if the preexisting connection fanfiction is able to establish with its reader before they ever read the first word is a factor in defining this subset as an evolution of literature suitable for today's media franchise saturated culture. But I best stop there before I write another essay in the comments.
Thanks for taking the time to read my ramble! It was written to capture a muse; my reason for this approach is perhaps best described in the words of Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing:
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I agree. Sometimes just a little, simple thing can start us down a different path and help us grow and learn. I always love hearing stories like yours.