Audience of One and The Trans Youth Experience in 2021 America · 5:07am May 2nd, 2021
It's done! It's done and I am free!
Free to ramble about it a bunch, that is.
If you’re not interested in my whining about myself (I do not blame you) and just want a breakdown of Audience of One, look for the second divider line; I actually wrote most of this post in advance of finishing the story, in the hopes of having more considered things to say about it than my last one. So hopefully it’ll be an interesting read! Make sure to actually read the story first, otherwise this will be a strange, spoilery experience on its own.
If you’re trans and American, you already know what we’ve had to deal with so far this year. If not, first off: hello! Glad to have you! But more to the point, there are, at the time of writing (which by posting time may well have been a full two weeks ago so who knows how these numbers have changed), 50 drafted bills in over 30 states simultaneously assaulting the meager rights we already have, and more explicitly denying us those that we don’t, with particular emphasis on segregating children by assigned gender.
Would you believe me if I said this wasn’t the reason I chose to write Audience of One? Because it honestly was not. This struggle worldwide is such a constant presence in my life, as I have chosen to follow and be aware of dozens of trans activists on Twitter. This stuff is hardly even a blip on my radar at this point; I literally just had a brainworm for a CMC story one day where Applebloom got beat up by a tree and Sweetie Belle was her goth girlfriend.
I can just serendipitously do something like this because I’m comparatively lucky. I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, a city and state that, deservedly or not, has prided itself on being a “liberal wonderland” for the past few decades, and for all its problems, queer acceptance isn’t one of them. Portland is a town that does not believe the cruel lie of the heteronormative world, and my heart will always belong to it, for that reason and many others.
It doesn’t hurt that I’m also white as a ghost, currently male-passing, and just generally very shy. Less people know I exist than usual, and it’s a good way to stay out of bad situations. When I eventually get vaccinated and finally start my hormonal transition that may change, but I will still be white, and I will still have that immense amount of default privilege working in my favor.
I am lucky.
I might have never slit my wrists, or relied on medication to get through/escape the day, but I did attempt to strangle myself several times when I was younger, and many times in the past, I have contemplated throwing myself in front of the train. I spent the entirety of my years as a minor utterly lost and confused, because I did not have the language to describe my existential wrongness -- in no small part because the official scientific language was still lacking for seventeen of those years. And even once that language was in front of my eyes in all its various Tumblr-tinged permutations come 2012, it still took me four years to see (and accept) that I could find myself within it.
I am lucky.
Even if I had been granted the words to define myself at a younger age, I still cannot envision a childhood where I was not fundamentally miserable, for this was still the age of South Park; a cultural zeitgeist that was snidely dismissive of everything at best, ruthlessly mockish more often than not. I can’t imagine going to middle and high school, in that time, in that place, and knowingly being trans. Some kids did, and if they are still alive, they are stronger than me. I can’t see my family being in a place where they were ready to accept that their eldest son... wasn’t. It was hard enough to get them okay with me being gay, when I thought that was the end-all be-all of my self-discovery (and I sure as sugar ain’t simply gay, either.) I personally know someone who tried, and his situation makes me miserable to think about, utterly unable to help him as I am.
I am lucky.
All the aforementioned legislation? It would see my experience become the best possible experience you can have as a transgender minor. Wholly ignorant, and full of a self-grief you cannot understand. It hollows me to think about that outcome. I don’t want it, and there’s no real action I can take against it, from where I’m at. So I kept writing Audience of One, having realized the gravity of what I was doing, and taking far more care with each subsequent chapter, because all I can really do? What I think I can do best? It is this. Imagining a better reality than the one we live in, where we choose to support and love each other. One where, if they want, teenagers can opt for puberty blockers, or even full-on hormone replacement! When they turn 18, they can choose to have affirming surgery, if they need it. A reality where their families won’t toss them out in disgust.
I will never stop writing these unabashedly queer stories, and I will absolutely keep writing ones that center trans characters and their struggles. I hope they can change someone’s mind, show them that they have been closing their heart off to a group of people who need their kindness more than many. I hope they become part of a space where a rallying cry can happen, and we can endeavor together to make that future they speak of a reality. I will write with the hope for these things, against the fear that they will never happen.
Trans rights are human rights. Trans people are beautiful. Trans people should be proud to be who they are. You and I: we deserve these things, and we will earn them for ourselves and everyone who walks this earth after us.
Anyway...
This story has been a unique ordeal for me. I haven't written a work of fiction that's been so emotionally compromising for me before, and honestly? Not planning to do it again. That third chapter absolutely sucked to work on.
For the entire time I was writing this I had Rise Against’s Audience Of One playing on loop in my head, which was aggravating for several reasons. Not the least of which being that it is wholly inapplicable to the story in any way. Had I expected this to happen, I might have come up with a different title. Something more concise, maybe. But I do still like it as-is; it plays well with the double-meaning of Sweetie Belle’s name and that was the deciding factor in picking it.
On the more technical side of things, part of the reason I wrote Audience of One was to demonstrate/improve my ability to write dialogue, since Testi d’Amore is more introspective in its focus, so there isn’t much traditional dialogue in there. In the past, I’ve been fairly good at creating Joss Whedon-style quipfests, but while those can be fun, they can also get grating, and they aren’t a satisfactory substitute for meaningful conversations. I don’t know how successful I was at this; I don’t have an editor, and my only proofreader isn’t an author, so it’s up to the reader to let me know when I fall short in prose.
For that matter, it is a deliberate choice between Testi d’Amore and Audience of One to be light on descriptions of characters and locations, in part from a desire for efficiency and in part because I have always struggled with making them read in an engaging fashion. I understand they serve multiple purposes in storytelling, and normally you can’t really get away with not using them. But, seeing as we are all here on FiMFiction, reading and writing stories centered around Friendship is Magic -- something we ostensibly are all familiar with -- I think it’s a safe assumption that I can just write “Applejack walked in” and you already have a good idea of what she looks like. This won’t be a consistent thing with my writing going forward, if it bothers you. I value a lushly illustrated image only painted with words myself, and dang if some of the ideas I have wouldn’t be enriched by that.
It’s worth saying that I consider it good practice to include tailored content-warnings up-front for any creative work, no matter how good the platform’s own generalized tagging system may be (and FiMFiction’s is good. I have always loved it.) There are simply varying degrees to all the Nine Deadly Reds, and putting them on is good for search engine optimization, but not the best at conveying the severity of the content within, nor the specifics. Everyone’s boundaries are different, and I’d rather readers know exactly what they’re getting into, if they need it.
On the more typical tags: Drama was an easy one, Dark was the nebulous one I threw in just to be safe in regards to preparing the reader, and I waffled throughout the whole process about adding Romance, despite the initial impetus of this entire story being a silly doodle I did of Applebloom in a wheelchair and Sweetie Belle in full goth attire, holding hands. It’s just not something I feel 100% comfortable broaching, despite fully being aware that yes, you can feel at least some kind of romantic affection for other people when you’re a kid. I went ahead and added it because it felt disingenuous not to. The whole point at the start was to elaborate on the idea that they were girlfriends, after all, and by the third chapter I could not stop myself from just outright making it a part of the text, rather than subtext.
I just want the horsies to kiss.
Going into the first chapter I had absolutely no clue what Sweetie Belle would have done to get herself in the hospital; as I said above, this coinciding with real-world happenings was not intentional at all; I literally just made her trans because I felt like making more of the transphobes mad. I also envisioned the Crusaders to be at least ten years old in the first three chapters, so the more stereotypical methods of attempted suicide were out, and I legitimately had to do a little research on benzodiazepine overdose (aka look up stuff on Wikipedia until I found something plausible) to make sure it didn’t come across as hackneyed.
So yeah. I started writing without even knowing what the real purpose of the story was. Sometimes you just have to do that, I guess.
It also crossed my mind that there may be some people who read Audience of One that wouldn’t understand how Sweetie Belle would know taking too many pills could cause your own death. Nobody said anything, so maybe this is finally more widespread knowledge, but just in case; it is fully legal to air advertisements for over-the-counter medication on network television in the United States, provided you stuff said ads with a myriad of warnings about all the known potential side-effects. To a one, all these ads list death among them, and these things run everywhere all the time. By the time I was in third grade, I understood that medication was potentially dangerous and needed to be taken with care. Knowing that, it is not unreasonable to assume someone so young would identify overdose as a method of suicide, thanks to this internalized information. In fact, I’m almost completely certain you could google it, and find information that corroborates my empirical understanding. For sensitivity reasons, I did not do this myself, as I didn’t want to merely lift somebody else’s suffering and make it part of my My Little Pony fanfiction.
Once all that was figured out, I knew Applejack had to be an important part of this story, as -- per the universe this story is a part of -- I had already made her a trans mare/trans woman, and that will be very relevant for the big long opus that is the cornerstone of all this. More on that later. It also made writing Applebloom as empathetic and understanding much easier. She already knew about all this personally, so of course she’d be supportive!
Also contributing to Applebloom’s characterization was my decision to make Red (Scootaloo) autistic, which was not something I found a good opportunity to directly mention in the story itself, and I wish I had the experience to make that clear while not also feeling like a contrived aside. Even for someone who is “high-functioning” like me, it takes patience to befriend someone with more pronounced neurodivergence like his, and the patience Applebloom had developed learning how to communicate with someone like Red would have a lasting effect on her temperament. I’m unhappy with how I handled all this still, but I have to let myself leave it be, because at the end of the day this wasn’t a story about Red, and even though she was the operative voice for half the entire thing, it wasn’t even a story about Applebloom.
But how would Applebloom even make friends with him in the first place? Why, through the great communicator that is Pokemon, of course! I’m hard-pressed to think of a more universal icebreaker than that, especially when you’re a kid. Had I started my big rewatch of FiM with my partner a week earlier, I totally would have called my knock-off version Creature Catchers or some doofy abbreviation of that, in reference to the Season 1 episode The Stare Master. Maybe not. Idk, I like Bittybeasts as a name.
The Wonderbolts being professional wrestlers is a concept just lifted wholesale from Space Jazz’s The Sunlight Theory, because I loved the idea too much. I adore that story and its prequel, and I send my best wishes to Space Jazz whether they choose to finish the story or not. If you haven’t read it before, it is quality shipping nourishment, highly recommend, it gives my inner Sunset Shimmer stan life.
I felt so bad about the comment I got asking if Rarity was going to be transphobic, because there was no way around the answer being “yes”, no matter how unmalicious I made her or how quickly she made the choice not to be. Going in, I knew she was going to have been a more insidious source of dysphoria for Sweetie Belle, and all the cold comfort I had to offer was that it would be unwittingly so on her part. Frankly, that’s the kind that I consider worse to experience, but what sort of hack writer would I be if I didn’t make my characters and readers suffer?
My hands were tied. Pinkie Pie had to be in the story. I don’t make the rules. She does. Best pony best human.
I cannot stress enough how important it was to me that Applebloom be the one who came up with Sweetie Belle’s name. There simply is not a sentence I’m equipped to write that can properly convey how critical this was to my overall satisfaction with my work, no matter what else happened.
The original vision for Audience of One was three chapters -- a preamble, the Big Argument, and an epilogue -- that would get in and get out relatively efficiently. Then Granny Smith happened, and I realized how important it was to have a positive example of a supporting family to contrast with Sweetie Belle’s more nuclear, more isolated, more ignorant structure. As a result, I had to break the middle into two chapters to preserve some semblance of flow and avoid potentially fatiguing the reader (and for my own sake; as I said in the author’s note for chapter three, Audience of One kicked my ass emotionally to write. I needed to take at least a small break between each chapter.)
The perspective-switch to Sweetie Belle was not planned, either. At first I had meant for her entire arc to be observed from the outside by Applebloom, but I seriously struggled with it starting with the third chapter, and so made the decision to get inside the actual protagonist’s head, solely to keep me from stalling out. From sentence one, I knew this was the right decision, because now I was struggling to write it for far more emotional reasons.
One of them being having to take Rarity and her parents, and turn them into what is one of my worst nightmares. In writing characters like this, it’s important to remember that hate and bigotry that exists for hate and bigotry’s sake is plainly shallow and easily mocked or torn apart. Coming at a character with only this surface-level observation of prejudice will invariably result in having propped up a cardboard cutout that jumpscares you with the idea of bigots, and not an authentic reckoning with those sorts of people, and that’s just not something I want to do with most of my work.
Rarity and her parents shout and say hurtful things because they are afraid. They are afraid of losing Sweetie Belle to something they do not understand, and in a misguided sense of love, they pull back harshly on the rope. It’s their responsibility to protect her, after all, and all Hondo and Cookie see is their “boy” being led into something an ingrained cis mind has serious trouble comprehending.
Which just leaves Rarity. Easily the most fascinating main character in the official material, if you ask me. Obsessed with performative acts of expression, while simultaneously an astute judge of character when she dares to look beyond the surface. Openly vain and envious, yet the Element of Generosity, embodying that virtue in her work matching the outer beauty of ponies to their inner beauty. Shamelessly melodramatic, while possessing the analytical eye necessitated by her profession. Stereotypically feminine, and yet consistently shown to be one of the most emotionally composed and dependable characters in a stressful situation, even when she makes a big show of screaming like a damsel in distress.
The contradictions of Rarity largely wrote her epiphany for me. It felt like I hardly needed to do any work. Where they fell short, I simply deduced that, comparatively, she would have a fuller understanding of Sweetie Belle than her parents did. They had decades of life detaching them from youth, and that seems to minimize the trials and tribulations one goes through when you’re young if you aren’t careful. Rarity is still in high school. Rarity has known, and will know Sweetie Belle for the majority of her life, where her parents have given a relative fraction of their time to her, not even accounting for how much they apparently spend traveling without either of their daughters.
I just wish I had the room, reason and wherewithal to explore Holiday and Lofty as characters in this way. They’re another facet of the Red quagmire. To be clear, I haven’t even watched the show past a certain point; I fell off pretty hard for a while, and they were introduced in my absence, so I don’t have as much familiarity with them as I should have. But again, this is not their story, so I can only force myself to accept this fault and call it a relatively minor one.
I had the ending in mind in rough form from almost the beginning. I just… really needed a soft, sweet walkdown after everything I was going to write, and that only became more and more true as the shape of Audience of One became more defined. The details almost didn’t matter. As long as the three of them were hanging out on that hill together, everything was going to be okay. The only question was: how far into the future would it be?
Ultimately I decided against jumping any further than a few months. I did consider including all the other CMCs who join over the course of the show/comics, but on top of that not making a lot of logistical sense to me, I also wanted to refrain from fumbling characters I don’t know well. Or in the case of Babs Seed, have not revisited since I made a really crap remix of her song all the way back in 2013. The closest I’ll get is a little unfinished doodle I posted on Twitter (and also is part of my last blog post, I believe). For that matter, moving any further forward would require me to explain the more mechanical divergences (read: make them up on the spot) that my version of Equestria Girls makes, and I’d have to be extremely careful not to set anyone’s arcs in stone. I’ve already painted myself far enough into that corner with Testi d’Amore; I refuse to do it again.
It’s so normal in my mind for an autistic person to turn out trans that making Red be a trans boy after the time skip was an automatic. And if you’re wondering, yes. Red chose his name because he’s a huge Bittybeasts fan. I WILL live up to my silly blogpost. The more dislikes I get, the more trans this entire franchise becomes.
Pinkie Pie being the one to break off from her own party was solely so I could write more of her. One of the chapters I plan to post (and soon) for Testi d’Amore will be a challenge I’ve set for myself to write her directly, to test how believably I can capture the fundamental tragedy I see in this character -- I will not abide by works that make her lolrandom or a psycho killer, but that’s a rant for another day.
Applebloom is utterly wrong about pineapple on pizza, by the way. There is no greater topping, and anyone who says otherwise is a filthy pizza elitist. I will fight you in the comments over this.
And you know what? I’m glad I allowed myself to make this a romance. Nothing is greater comfort food for me than getting to feel Gay coursing through my veins, especially when it’s as pure and cute and earnestly awkward as I got to make it here. Testi d’Amore has yet to actually feature a suitable injection of fluffy lesbian feelings in my estimation; ironic, I know. And it’s not going to ever focus on these two, because I personally don’t know what it’s like to have love be kindled at this young an age and have it last. Hence, why it’ll be absent from my meditations on love. Besides, if you’ve been paying attention, this story is (at least part of) the spark that brings five of the Spectacular Seven together, and part of that Pinkie chapter I’m going to write is going to be a reflection on how such a big group got started in earnest, in which we'll examine where these three are post-Pinkie's time in high school.
Rest assured, though; SweetieBloom is canon here, their love is true, and they’ll be together ‘til the end, no matter what shape their relationship takes.
That’s about all that comes to mind without additional questions, I think. I don’t want to write anything as personally upsetting as Audience of One for a while (and no, I don’t take requests or commissions), and I’m gonna try to take at least a week break from writing anything. There’s a lot of reading I need to catch up on, after all! And I need to reckon with the fact that I have three times as much attention as I expected to ever get on this account… These comments and follows give me aNXIETY,,, (Thank you so much~~~!)
If there’s anything that bothers you about my work I do want to hear it. I’ll do my best to not sound like an insecure baby in response (and will likely fail, but I Pinkie Promise that I will make an effort). I do want to be more engaged and involved with the people on here, and while brief praise is nice, I find it difficult to muster anything worthwhile to say in response to it.
Otherwise, if you’re enjoying my Extremely Queer Work, then absolutely stick around; there’s more brewing in my gay witch cauldron, as we speak~. *insert gif of Bayonetta winking here*
Keep it bewitching, keep it stylish~ 
Well, regardless of what your inner doubts may say, your writing is great, and you have plenty of allies here (though not as many as I'd like). It was also neat getting an insight into your process like this. I'm typically way more methodical and take many hours to get even a simple one-shot out, but apparently it sometimes works.
And yeah, pineapple on pizza is good. It's the people who put mushrooms on pizza who need an intervention.
5511125
Def not a fan of mushrooms on pizza, but Applebloom is right about one thing; people are allowed to be wrong.
For the most part I'm on the same page with myself when it comes to my own output, but when it's something like Audience of One, the reader in my head isn't just concerned about how entertained they'll be, but are actively combing through it for something to point fingers at and say "there it is! the proof that you're exploiting people's experiences for clout!", and no amount of telling that strawman that I'm literally trans and neurodivergent will shut them up. Throughout this entire past month I've just been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and the larger these numbers get, the worse that anticipation becomes.
This fic was a significantly different process from how I had initially meant to post work on here. I've tried to post serial works as I made progress on them before, and it has not worked out. With The Big Project at the center of all this, I'm trying to pre-write it such that I won't have to worry about that. If you ask me, it was a wise decision, because between what I've posted publicly already and my own personal struggles with creative productivity, I'd have one chapter up for it three months ago, thanks to having stalled out on the second one. So the fact that Audience of One actually got finished, more or less, is kind of mystifying me.
May I ask: how much am I missing out on by not having prior experience with Lancer, reading your entry? I'm unfortunately not in the best mood for sci-fi stuff (and it's not just Star Wars' fault
it's Warframe's fault) and there's only so much room in my brain for multiple tabletop rulesets. But you apparently wrote something that will give me Gay Horsey Feels and that cannot be ignored.5511174
Haha. But yeah, you don't need any experience with the game whatsoever.
<33
As an autistic trans man myself, I was overjoyed when I read that Red came out as transmasc! I'm not as "high-functioning" as he is, mind you, but I can certainly see aspects of myself in Red's character.
Applebloom and Sweetie Belle's growth are just as emotional to me. Dealing with identity at a young age, being met with half-hearted acceptance, going through a traumatic event, all of these scenes tugged at my heartstrings in the best way possible.
I can confidently say that this is my favorite story on FiMFiction. You're an incredible author!!
5513691
I actually want to cryyyyyyy I'm so overjoyed to see someone say that
Thank you so much for reading~! Here's hoping that it gets easier for all of us.
I just came across your story, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wish I had an earlier realization of being trans like the characters in my story, but given my religious upbringing, I'm not sure things would have gone well (my family, what's left anyways) still doesn't know I'm transgender. Anyways, I love reading these kind of stories, even if I don't get those kind of experiences myself, I guess it lessens the sting of feeling like I wasted my youth feeling vaguely awkward and not understanding why.
I also liked you including representations of neurodiversity and disability. While not so severe as Applebloom in the story, I suffered a back injury several years back that left me with permanent nerve damage (even had to learn to walk again). I can't be on my feet long periods of time, wear braces on my feet for stability if I'm going to be on them for any significant period of time, and well, a lot of little problems that come from nerve damage, (loss of feeling chief among them).
So, uh, yeah, lovely story, thank you for it, it spoke to me on multiple levels.