Freeville Chronicles: A ruin in the forest · 4:53am Jun 6th, 2021
There are a lot of reasons why Freeville Chronicles failed, some of them in-universe and some of them connected to real life events, but the most pronounced in-universe reason is probably the impossibility of its beginning. Some very simple and basic considerations inevitably lead to the conclusion that Freeville and its inhabitants and characters are impossible. They cannot exist for a number of reasons, but the most important one is also the simplest: The time frame is too short. Between the Canterlot takeover and Dainn's death, exactly one year passes. Before that, about another year has already passed between the Lindisbarne landing and the Canterlot takeover. (A bit less than a year, in fact, because if it had been exactly one year, the Lindisbarne landing would have to have happened during an unusually long night - which it did not.)
Freeville Chronicles itself obviously takes place over most of the one year of Dainn's rule, in fact over a considerably longer period of time than Bruised Apples, beginning its narrative some time in late summer or early autumn, i.e. not long after the Canterlot takeover (a time period that features in Bruised Apples exclusively in flashbacks). Within only little more than three months at most, Eadgil decides to become an abolitionist (presumably after witnessing the horrors of the Canterlot takeover), gathers a group of followers, somehow acquires Luna's Castle, and then lays out the plan for Freeville.
All of this of course happens entirely off-screen.
There is an obvious reason for this, and that is the fact that I couldn't have possibly shown any of this in the story, because all of it is utterly impossible. There is no way for Ari to have emancipated himself this quickly and thoroughly from his own culture within what would have to be only weeks, even with the shock of Canterlot taken into consideration. He pretty much had to invent (or accustom himself to) an entirely new way of thinking, acting and living completely alien to his own culture, which essentially amounts to reinventing himself, even if we make the reasonable assumption that he was already a rather progressive caribou to begin with - and since the time span is so short, this couldn't have been a gradual process either. Even the idea that the White Cow's influence on some of the stags has diminished due to her participation in the creation of the Crystal Rooster does not fundamentally change that fact. It opens up a space, but that space remains an empty void. Of course, if this is impossible for one stag, finding an entire group of them, homogenous enough to form a community like that, is doubly impossible. It is not even clear to me how one would go about searching. In fact, it is not even quite clear what the plan behind Freeville is even supposed to be. Vestri giving Everfree to Ari can be justified from Vestri's perspective (and I believe I have done so convincingly in the respective chapter in the story itself), but what exactly does Ari even want with it? What exactly is the plan here? (A possible answer within what I've set up is that Deepest Desire tricked him in order to get back to her hive, but that is a narratively rather unsatisfying non-explanation.)
As a result, we start in medias res: with an already reformed Ari who has no backstory and whose only baggage are worries about relapsing and a certain tendency for depression and panic attacks (caused by the trauma of his own childhood abuse), and a Freeville that is already being formed and is never directly challenged by anything at all - which has the huge advantage of allowing the characters room to breathe and grow, but also makes a lot of Freeville Chronicles feel like a slice of life comedy, which it never really intended to be. Subsequently, the characters in the early chapters aren't really characters: Ari and Baldr in particular are mouthpieces, and Deepest Desire is a pure exposition machine. Her entire brief arc is about little more than the discovery that cows are empaths, and she vanishes from the story for a long time after providing exposition for that. She wasn't my own character, and I honestly feel I was never able to make her mine to begin with. I borrowed her from Akinyi (with her permission, of course), and while I do like the character a lot, I do not feel her voice the same way I feel Ari's or Birgir's, or even Monolith's - who is Rylasasin's character, but whom he developed in close cooperation with me. But I digress.
Of course, over time, my writing improved, and what started as one-dimensional mouthpieces and exposition machines turned into fleshed-out characters with living, breathing relationships that I came to value a lot. The later chapters of my story are still a pleasure for me to revisit, and I am proud of them. I believe they are still the peak of my narrative writing thus far, maybe together with Hope in Bleak Times, my collab story with my dear pet Moonshade. But if it was just a matter of me improving over time, if the failure of the earlier chapters was just a matter of a lack of experience and practice, then nothing would be easier than to go back to them now and rework them. But I can't, because fundamental pieces of the story are missing, and have to remain absent because they are impossible. It is also why characters like Spring Breeze act downright bizarre and unnatural in the early chapters: they cannot exist, and they're still seeking (to create) the conditions of their own possibility.
Of course, a lot of Freeville Chronicles' impossibility has to do with its embeddedness in a larger narrative that is itself utterly impossible. I'm not going to go into all the details about FoE's plotholes and inconsistencies again, because these topics have been discussed to death over and over again, and to the point where I doubt there is anyone left who isn't bored to death by the topic. In fact, in the years after Cardinal's departure, it has become increasingly obvious that the entire setting is beyond fixing. On part of the most active contributors, there have been roughls speaking two different and seemingly opposed reactions to this realization: Schorl's and my own (and of course, the reason for that is that until Summer 2020, before my own departure, we were effectively the only two left). I'm going to argue that they amount to the same. The first reaction is Schorl's, who has decided to return to NCN's canon with all its flaws and just run with it, to the point where she has tried to gradually take over NCN's job of policing content, although with even less success than his own. The second reaction would be my own, which is to likewise accept the futility and then advocate for moving on from FoE and towards other shores and endeavors - possibly even as a community.
There is a paradox to both of these replies though. I will begin with my own paradox: It simply consists in the fact that I'm still attached to my narrative and my characters. I love them all dearly and I don't want to leave them hanging in the air like this - but I don't think I have any other choice. The narrative, charming as it may be, simply does not work on a fundamental level and cannot be made to work. I've pondered a lot of ideas over the last year, from relatively simple edits to really far-reaching reworks, like merging Ari with Birgir from Hope in Bleak Times and then reworking the entirety of Freeville Chronicles to incorporate that story as a prequel. But the simpler the edit, the more quickly it proves to be insufficient, and the more complex and far reaching, the more it reveals even more deeply rooted problems. For example, the idea of merging Ari with Birgir only makes it palpable how short the time span is, how a year simply isn't enough time for the events of Freeville Chronicles to happen. On the other hand, detaching the story from Schorl's timeline altogether only makes it gradually more pointless and renders larger parts of its narrative inoperable. I don't think I'm going to write stories in FoE ever again. I'm still open to RPs (including the lovely group RP I still eventually want to continue once I have more time again), and guess I'm also still open to revisiting Hope in Bleak Times if my pet asks me for it, but I hardly see to what end. I am still deeply thankful to Schorl for including cow empathy and the White Cow in her FoE primer, I think those two are my most valuable contributions to FoE, and maybe a better writer than I am will be able to do something with them in the future. As for me, I look at these things as a golden past of passionate involvement, but a past nonetheless.
As for Schorl's paradox, it consists in the fact that for all her attachment and dedication to preserving NCN's legacy and vision, she herself has not added to it ever since the end of Bruised Apples (possibly until now with her Primer, though that's more of a summary than an addition). She has written FoE stories, of course: Meet Thy Maker, Legacy of Dainn, Weak and Powerless. But these stories cannot in all honesty be said to be within the scope of NCN's vision. In fact, they're great stories precisely because they aren't. NCN's vision is that of Dainn and the caribou ruling Equestria forever - and Schorl once correctly remarked that you can stretch the definition of "forever" by simply writing a potentially indefinite amount of stories all taking place during the course of the one year of Dainn's rule, thus providing new content "forever". But that's not what Schorl does, is it? Ever since Bruised Apples ended, none of her FoE-related stories have been FoE stories in this sense of the term. They've been After-FoE stories, taking place after Dainn's death. It is true that Dainn's death itself followed logically from NCN's own directions, and thus is part of his vision in a weird sense - but everything after Dainn's death is by definition outside the scope of his vision. Schorl simply leaves the unsalvageable mess of the two years between the Lindisbarne landing and Dainn's death as they are, adds nothing to them except in the form of Trixie's highly subjectively colored flashbacks in Weak and Powerless (which don't meaningfully affect any of the big events of that time anyway), and then simply jumps ahead in the timeline to a point where the crazy messiness and incoherence has subsided and a room for coherent stories (that was reopened by Bruised Apples, of course - the one story that actually managed to make sense of the nonsense) exists again. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that for all her recent defense of NCN's vision against deviations, she has also moved on from it, maybe more thoroughly than I have. Fall of Equestria stands there like an abandoned building - like a certain ruin in the middle of Everfree. But ruins have a certain majesty to them. They're witnesses of past glory, but they also bear witness to past follies and the ever-gnawing tooth of time. Maybe instead of attempting once more to rebuild and repopulate it, we should leave it standing as it is - and appreciate it from a distance.
Maybe instead of zealous guardians or detractors, what this ruin needs today is a capable tour guide or two.
To be honest, I feel like Freeville suffered from latching on to Bruised Apples. Because that not only forced it into an uncomfortably tight timeframe, it also left it as a mere side event. A cute little thing happening somewhere in a forest that is ultimately unimportant to the main show. Are you certain that didn't discourage you as well?
However, I might not be someone whose opinions are worth much in this matter, admittedly. Not with all those baggages and biases weighing me down.
5530705
Well I know your opinion about that, but here is the question you need to ask: What is Freeville Chronicles even about? You may have noticed that the time frame is just the - forgive my pun - framing device for the arguments in my essay, and that I essentially use it to address other issues that go a good bit deeper and have far more to do with the ties to Fall of Equestria as such than with the ties to Bruised Apples specifically. For example: What even is the plan behind Freeville? The truth of the matter is that as far as a resistance movement goes, Freeville has no discernible plan, and thus no endgame. Once I realized that Schorl had an endgame for Dainn and his regime and I hadn't, Freeville became exclusively about saving the caribou - or rather it was always about that and Schorl having an endgame made me realize that it couldn't be about anything else. But sure, you can try to convince me otherwise. Why don't you propose a possible endgame for Freeville and the Dainn regime that makes sense independent of Bruised Apples?
5530722
The question is, when you realised Freeville didn't have an endgame of its own, especially not with Bruised Apples having a decisive, regime-destroying one, did that help or did that hinder you? Did it make it easier for you to work out your narrative, or harder, did it encourage you or discourage you? If the narrative goal became mapping out a blueprint towards allowing some Caribou to survive, even thrive, in a freed Equestria, was it important that Bruised Apples was going on in the background? Were there so many major story beats hinging on that other story that your story couldn't work without referencing it? Would it have been easier for your if you took yours and Schorl's advice and rewrite the parts that didn't mesh with your work, like stretching out the plot of Bruised Apples into three years? Or more? Or less? You both kept telling other writers not to stick to NCN's framework slavishly. Would it have helped to apply the same here? Why would it have made your story gradually more pointless?
Convince you of what?
I don't get what you're saying here, Ari. It SOUNDS like "Well, why don't you do it better!" but I want to think it's not, because that's kind of a deflection. If it's not, and you're genuinely interested in alternate ideas/goals/narratives for Freeville... then I'm sorry for misunderstanding. And sure, I can give it a try. No promises it'll be better, of course.
For example, let's draw upon some ideas from the IDW comics for inspiration. Let's say there's an old deer artefact hidden in the Everfree. A nexus of cleansing and healing. It can only be accessed by those deer who prove themselves worthy, and in this case, that means proving they've truly put their peoples' violent, selfish, sadistic ways behind them. They need the uncorrupted ponies to vouch for them, without fear or coercion, before they are let in. It was what drew Ari and his band to the Everfree in the first place, either by knowledge, or a feeling, or both. Something was there, calling to them, because they had the potential to be worthy. Once they proved themselves, they might find the artefact directly, or they might find an abandoned forest city of the deer, their ancestral home, and the artefact within. Now, they can find refuge there, safely away from the Caribou, and do what is needed to power the artefact that will, in turn, cleanse the corruption around itself more and more, fir the Everfree, then Ponyville, and on and on, giving the ponies the will and the freedom to fight and take back their country.
That's just something thrown together in a few minutes. Is it better? That, we must decide individually.
Ultimately, you are the only one who really knows if it helped or hindered you to work within Bruised Apples's set frame. I don't believe it did and from what you've written above, the time constraints were a problem, but I'm just some guy with my own opinions and my own baggage. I'm not perfect. Not at all. If I were to write something FoE-related, I'd probably not stick to the main setting iron-clad, to tell the truth. I'd do something fun, doing my best to make it work, knowing it's going to be flawed. And if I were to write a Bruised Apples-related story, it would probably be terribly flawed too and not stick to the former's narrative all that well, because I don't remember everything and haven't read any of the stories depicting things after Mac breaks Dainn's neck XD but I'd still try to make something decently enjoyable, hoping I won't get bludgeoned over the head by folks who think touching it is sacrilegious.
5530754
It definitely more than just helped me, and in a number of different ways. Even below all the ways in which it inspired my work and offered a background, Bruised Apples simply was my connection to Fall of Equestria by that point. The rest of NCN's canon was pretty much a Swiss Cheese, not really workable as a background. And at that point, I simply did not see the point in writing a story with no connection to the mainline interpretations of Fall of Equestria at all. That's why I didn't go the road of Caridoon, for example. I don't think I would have come anywhere near that far without that connection. Heck, if I hadn't found out about Schorl's plan, good old Herma-Mora might still be in this story. I also think I might have quit far earlier, because the motivation to fit into a world wouldn't have been there. Your suggestion is interesting, because once more, it is not even that far off from something actually going on in my story. I really don't like the concept of having a purely extrinsic motivation for reformation though, that seems inherently faux to me - but that's probably a different discussion altogether. That is of course not to say that it didn't hinder me as well. It's just not as simple as a straightforward binary opposition.
5530889
Well, then I appear to be off quite a bit, aren't I? I hadn't realised BA was so important and influential to your own work. It wasn't clear from the story itself, I'd say; but please don't take this as a challenge or an attack, or even criticism really, because that only means it stood well enough on its own and I think you probably hadn't gotten around to making more iron-clad references. Perhaps they were planned? I don't know.
Though, let me also say, and I don't know if I told you this before (if not, I should have!), I did appreciate Freeville for its unique and thoughtful premise. Me, someone not at all invested in Post-FoE! Don't know if that makes it better, but hey, it needed to be said!
Few people think of what comes after the current moment in FoE time. Fewer people still try to work out a way for some of the stags to gain genuine redemption. Cows tend not to feature at all in Post-FoE, probably because writers of revenge fantasies don't know what to do with them... but I digress. I wish things had worked out better for you. If I ever get around to writing anything FoE, be it alternate timeline or Post-Post-FoE, your input is something I will surely seek out, if possible.
5530952
When they do feature, it's usually even worse. But let's not go into that.
That said, the connection to Bruised Apples is complicated and not as straightforward as looking for direct references in the currently released chapters. So far, there weren't too many overly direct references that couldn't be handwaved in the immediate text of Freeville Chronicles - although this would have changed in later chapters, e.g. Ari being present at the Gala when Dainn dies was always a pretty integral part to the story, and everything after that connects to the general situation set up in Schorl's After-Fall stories far more directly. Keep in mind that Schorl and I developed the setting after Dainn's death together for over four years if not five, from 2015 until far into 2019 and even 2020. I'm not saying it's impossible to divorce Freeville Chronicles from it entirely, but it's difficult to do so without losing essential parts of its meaning and significance, not to mention its ties to Fall of Equestria as a whole - and then you'd have to reconstruct these somehow. In fact, the thought to even try that never really occurred to me. It would have meant a substantial amount of additional work while at the same time draining a lot of the motivation, and I just didn't see any sense in that.
5530889
I really, really support this statement. Obviously I'm a fan of stories where people change the world with small decent actions; that's kind of the basis of most our franchises. But just like there are a ton of ways in participating in a fascist or tyrannical regime, there's millions of different ways people can resist. (That's been part of my fascination with Owl House fanfiction lately). It's also perfectly rational to have members of a civilization or species deviate from the norm, without it turning into some kind of faction war, or not serving some role like handing a McGuffin to a protagonist.
I also just really appreciate your MO of just existing in the world of Bruised Apples. They're not dependent on each other at all. I think that's what the actual point of a shared universe should be. Not constantly having recognizable names and locations constantly popping in and out of each other's stories.
5671322
And yeah, I agree with this whole-heartedly, although I do think my story ultimately is dependent on Schorl's with regards to the outcome for the regime and the caribou as a species.
Thanks a lot for your kind words.