My stories, a look back - #9: If Today Was Your Last Day · 12:26am Aug 30th, 2021
Ahahahahaha this was a fun one
This fic was both an April Fools joke and also a gift for Samey90 in appreciation of one of my favorite fics that he wrote. I believe I started coming up with ideas for it around late 2017, and started putting it together over the month of March 2018, in time for 1st April. Of course I didn't mention any of these plans at all at the time, for maximum impact. :)
If Today Was Your Last Day is a parody of Samey90's fic It's The End Of The World As We Know It, a story that I absolutely adore. ITEOTWAWKI is basically the side of Equestria Girls that the show teased but never actually gave us - the lives of all of those colorful humans that live in the background of the rainbow laser shenanigans of Sunset and co. The story is centered around the five Shadowbolt students from Friendship Games, but more specifically around Indigo Zap, and is essentially a soap opera following Indigo's relationships with her friends in their final year of high school.
That bare summary doesn't do the fic any justice at all - what makes the fic worth reading is the amazing characters and the hilarious and tragic situations that they get into. It's really a full novel about teenage life in the Equestria Girls universe. Fans have commented that Samey understood the potential of the EQG setting far better than the showrunners did, and I entirely agree.
In particular, Samey gave us a set of Shadowbolts that I find it very hard not to see as their definitive characterizations. If you thought Sugarcoat's bluntness was funny in Friendship Games, imagine being friends with her and having to hear that every day. You liked Sour Sweet's mood swings? She actually has schizophrenia*, and everyone has to live with that. Which they do, for the most part. Did you wish Sunny Flare had, like, a personality? Well, she's a teenager with elite hacker skills and too much money to care about things like the law, or ethics. Don't leave your computer unlocked when she's around.
* Or some mental disorder similar to schizophrenia, but I'm using the term for simplicity.
When the fic ended, I wasn't quite ready to let it go, and so I was determined to give it a send-off via what I called a "parody" but is really an affectionate homage. (Cinder Vel even called it the "missing chapter" to Samey's story, which I take as an accolade).
I placed a massive spoiler warning on the fic - this was kind of part of the joke, in that I wrote a fic that was guaranteed not to be read by almost everyone - but also completely serious, because ITEOTWAWKI has a number of significant plot developments that I feel people deserve not to be spoiled on.
The other part of the joke is that this is absolutely not the kind of fic I would ever write. It contains persistent and repeated usage of the F-word, drug usage, and sexual humor, none of which tend to feature heavily in my fics, so it was perfect for an April Fool venture. I took great pleasure at being able to put so many red tags on the fic, even though it is actually fairly tame.
This fic is difficult to recap, since a lot of it is just characters in conversation, so I'll skip over much of the detail except when there's something I want to talk about. And since I can't really talk about my fic without spoiling it, consider this your massive spoiler warning.
If Today Was Your Last Day
Parody of Samey90's It's The End Of The World As We Know It. Indigo Zap and her friends enjoy one last party together before they all part ways.
April 2018
Sex, Narcotics, Violence, Profanity, Romance, Drama, Slice of Life
The story starts a few months after the end of It's The End Of The World As We Know It, at Indigo's baby shower party, where she is receiving gifts from her friends: Bulk Biceps, Flash, Lemon Zest, Muffins, and Sugarcoat.
Her first gift is from Muffins, a large drinking horn. I figured that Muffins' gift would be the perfect one to come in on, just because if anyone can make you curious as to what on Earth is going on, it's Muffins. In the original fic she is a friendly but rather eccentric klutz, so I needed her gift to be something off-the-wall and inappropriate for a baby shower.
According to my notes, I considered baby Klein bottles first, before settling on the drinking horn idea, figuring that this makes some twisted logical sense to Muffins. (I do actually like drinking horns. The friend who I was sharing a house with at the time had one, and they look awesome).
This also sets up a large, sharp-ended object which definitely won't get used as a weapon later on.
Indigo tries to pre-empt Sugarcoat's gift by guessing at various random ideas, but Sugarcoat turns out to have given her a home phrenology kit, phrenology being a discredited nineteenth century pseudoscience. I forget where that idea came from, but it made sense to me as something Sugarcoat could give which was well-intentioned, useless, and vaguely insulting. There is no such thing as "Developmental Phrenology" - I made that up, but tried to make it sound just plausible enough to be real. (Although given that Samey also thought he made up vegan condoms, maybe there is such a thing).
The gifts from her other friends were not shown, but according to my notes, they would have been a wooden crib from Bulk (made by his family, who are carpenters), a baby blanket from Lemon (possibly her own childhood comforter made by her mother), and a teething toy from Flash.
The doorbell rings, kicking off a running joke that Sugarcoat is expecting her boyfriend Sandalwood to arrive, but it's always someone else. In this case it is Sunny Flare, fashionably late, who has arrived with Sweet Leaf.
If you don't know your minor Equestria Girls characters, you may not recognize Sweet Leaf - she is the girl pictured on the cover, and was an important character in the original fic, who ended up in a coma after a car accident. Therefore, Sweet Leaf showing up at a baby shower is kind of unusual. But! The fic has a perfectly logical answer for this: Sweet Leaf has had some kind of robotic interface installed in her brain, turning her into a cyborg.
Sunny Flare vaguely explains that these robotic modifications are Twilight Sparkle (Sci-Twi)'s doing, and that she is simply taking Sweet Leaf out for a spin, because Sunny is an expert hacker who always makes very good decisions that never end poorly.
Lemon Zest, who was close to Sweet Leaf, is horrified by this turn of events, but the Canterlot High students take it in stride, having experienced too much of the weirdness of Equestrian magic to be too concerned about a little mad science. After a short demonstration of Sweet Leaf's capabilities, they decide to watch a movie, which appropriately turns out to be Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. (Terminator 3 was, I think, much maligned at the time for failing to live up to its predecessor, but I unironically love it, I think it's great. Since it's one of the few movies with which I have a good amount of familiarity, it felt perfect to include here).
The doorbell rings again and Sugarcoat goes to answer, but it still isn't Sandalwood - it's Sour Sweet. The gang's all here! I had to have Sour in this story or it wouldn't be a proper homage, but at the end of ITEOTWAWKI, Sour was sent to a mental institute. I explained it here by simply having her escape temporarily.
Sour is just there to wish Indigo her best, but unfortunately, wasn't prepared to see Sweet Leaf, her former lover. In a moment of prescience, Indigo gets the drinking horn away from Sour so that surgeons are spared the effort of having to extract it from a teenager's rectum. See, told you it wasn't a weapon. I was subverting expectations before it was cool.
The encounter with Sour was the hardest part to write. I tried several different approaches, including having the characters stall Sour at the door and having Sweet Leaf hide behind the couch, but in the end I just went for a direct approach - I figured Sour wouldn't have any patience for any shenanigans.
Because Sunny Flare is terrible at being a person, she doesn't twig that Sour might be a little perturbed at seeing her lover being puppeted like an automaton, and an awkward conversation follows, ending with Sour losing it and trying to attack Sunny. Unfortunately, Sweet Leaf has defense protocols and can't let you do that, Dave.
A fight ensues which begins to trash Indigo's house, much to her displeasure, and in the commotion, Sandalwood finally arrives. The running gag is now reversed as it turns out that Sugarcoat has mysteriously vanished.
The fight continues outside, although we don't see much of it because I only had one camera for the shoot and it's hard to move. As Sunny tries to stop her out-of-control cyborg, she accidentally unlocks Sweet Leaf's eye lasers, which is why Sweet Leaf's eyes are glowing on the cover. See, it wasn't just parodic weirdness, it's plot-relevant. Eventually Sci-Twi, Sunset, and the Rainbooms show up to try to handle the situation, which is our cue to leave, because we don't have time for any of that magical nonsense in this serious teen romance. I had originally planned the fight with the Rainbooms to be longer and more ridiculous, but I felt it was funnier to have the action never leave the house, so I cut most of that.
But we're not done! We transition to Equestria and find out where Sugarcoat went. It turns out that Sugarcoat went to see Fluttershy for some reason. The fic does not explain why, but I reasoned that, tired of being constantly told to shut up and eff off, Sugarcoat does so, and goes to Equestria.
This whole ending bit was kind of based on earlier ideas that I had had for parodying ITEOTWAWKI before I decided on this baby shower framing. There's a bit in the original fic where Sweet Leaf suggests running away to South Africa with Sour Sweet, and I had this idea where they actually go to Equestria instead, but Sour Sweet hates it because it's so bright and colorful, and none of the native Equestrians know how to handle a personality like hers. That idea didn't go anywhere, but the general concept instead became the ending for this fic.
Fluttershy is playing counselor and trying to give Sugarcoat a sympathetic ear, but it's difficult because Sugarcoat is Sugarcoat. After much awkwardness, they eventually part ways, but not before Sugarcoat delivers her honest opinion of Fluttershy's housing condition, and promptly gets told to eff off.
Trivia
* "If Today Was Your Last Day" is a Nickelback song. For the parody, I knew that I wanted something that sounded similar to Samey's title, but with a less-reputed band. After experimenting with Justin Bieber, I eventually settled for Nickelback, figuring they had achieved the desired level of memetic infamy with that "Look at this photograph" meme. I was happy to discover that "If Today Was Your Last Day" fit the thematic tone of the fic (being a sort of journey's end for the characters) while also sounding similar enough to Samey's title to make the parody more apparent.
* The cover image is a direct parody of the cover of It's The End Of The World As We Know It:
Samey90's cover featured a bunch of snippets of song lyrics behind the cover character, and I duly did the same, only with all Nickelback songs.
* An aurochs is an extinct species of ox, which I knew because I read a furry transformation fic about 20 years ago where someone transforms into one. I actually got the name wrong in the fic by calling it an "auroch", which wasn't intentional.
* Flash's suggestion that drinking horns are made to be un-put-downable is probably not true, but it is something I heard once. In fact, you can put down a drinking horn if you have a stand for it; in the ones I've seen, the stand is made from another part of the horn, which allows you to prop up the vessel even if it has liquid in it.
* Indigo doesn't complain about the use of the name "Little Indy" for her baby - it seemed to me that by the end of ITEOTWAWKI, she had given up protesting it and had adopted the name herself, so I carried that through to this fic.
* In one rather random moment, Muffins gets very angry while watching Terminator 3 due to the incorrect depiction of the operation of a particle accelerator. I was referencing the bit where they use the magnetic field of the accelerator to trap the T-X. Muffins' anger is never explained, but then nobody can really follow her logic at the best of the times anyway. Pleasingly, Samey90 later canonized this in Wallflower's Rush, the third story in the series, where it's revealed that Muffins is studying particle physics at university.
* I wasn't exactly sure what Indigo's house is like or what kind of neighborhood it is in. In my head, it was a semi-detached house of the kind that's typical in the UK, with a large front window that opens onto a front garden/driveway and a suburban street. In the original fic, the Shadowbolts all come from somewhat wealthy families, but I don't know how that translates to properties (Sunny Flare, for example, is mega rich and lives in essentially a mansion, whereas Sour Sweet and Lemon Zest both live in an apartment complex).
* Sunny says "I hate this virtual machine shit" - this was a bit of headcanon from me, in that I had supposed that Scala was Twilight Sparkle's programming language of choice. Scala is a more rigorous alternative to Java with better support for functional programming, which tends to appeal more to academics and scientists. As well as being a bit advanced and obscure, it produces bytecode for the Java Virtual Machine, which is why Sunny doesn't like it - I figure she's more of a C girl.
* The "Jesus fuck, I'm on fire!" line is a reference to Sour's "Jesus fuck, I'm deaf!" from the original. The fic doesn't say who said it, but I supposed it was Sunny.
* Four people tell Sugarcoat to eff off or shut up: Indigo, Lemon, Sunny, and Fluttershy.
* One usage of the insult "wanker", from Flash. It amuses me that both Samey and I are sufficiently European to feel comfortable employing this insult, even though the story takes place in America.
* I made a characterization/continuity error with Sandalwood - in the story, it seems like he doesn't recognize Sweet Leaf or know who she is, but in the original fic, he definitely does, as they're in the debate club together.
* When I was writing the fic, I had forgotten whether or not the characters have the same colorful skin tones that they do in EQG, or whether they are more humanized. I therefore avoided referencing physical appearance too much - the most you get is a deliberately vague "whirl of color" when Sweet Leaf and Sour Sweet are fighting. In fact, they do have the same skin colors as in EQG.
* Muffins' "Would you love me if I was a sex bot?" is a reference to the "Is it because I'm not a horse?" line in the original.
* Sandalwood prepares to smoke a cannabis joint when he arrives. I know absolutely nothing about drugs, so I don't actually know the assembly process for creating a joint. I therefore didn't go into much detail on this.
* Sandalwood mistakes Sci-Twi for Princess Twilight. This was a reference to the fact that Sci-Twi now also ponies up into a human-alicorn form.
* Sugarcoat is correct that you shouldn't feed large amounts of carrots to a rabbit - this isn't their natural diet. It's kind of like feeding a baby with nothing but chocolate.
* Fluttershy mentions that the pony Sandalwood is "a friend of a friend" - that friend is Tree Hugger, which is how Fluttershy met Sandalwood once. Only once. Never again. This was a reference to Sandalwood and Fluttershy's brief relationship in the original, which ended somewhat badly.
Good stuff
* I'm very proud of the "that was a real baby shower" joke. I don't actually know if it is medically possible for gas to build up inside the womb in the manner Muffins described, but it sounded plausible. It also set up the requisite "I didn't want to know that" gag, a staple of Samey's EQG fics.
* Sour Sweet's schizophrenic disorder is something that I felt Samey handled really well in the original. Schizophrenia understandably comes with a lot of stigma, but Samey's treatment of Sour's mental illness is always honest and respectful, and never played for laughs - or if it is, it's a joke about who Sour is as a person, rather than making fun of her condition. I even feel it made me a little more compassionate and understanding toward mental illnesses like these than I otherwise might have been. So naturally I had Sour beat up a robot with a bicycle frame I tried to maintain similar dignity for Sour in my fic - she isn't treated like an escaped lunatic, but just as someone who wanted to see her friends one last time. It's only when faced with the emotional situation of seeing her lover again that things spin out of control.
Bad stuff
* Lemon Zest just spends the entire fic being moody and angry. I couldn't actually think of much to do with her. In the original fic she has an unfortunate tendency to get into bad relationships, but there wasn't much scope for that here.
Or common decency. Also, her sexual orientation is "you don't want to know".
It's actually a few different things, including borderline, schizophrenia, and PTSD from the pageants.
I also canonised this one in Wallflower's Rush, the part where Sugarcoat mistakes Wallflower for a dealer.
That's kinda cute.
I asked you for advice with this one, didn't I? (it doesn't help that you remember more lore than me, even though I wrote this).
This may as well be canon (not that I'd ever tell who's a C girl and how they're different from Scala girls...)
The former. I think Muffins said Wallflower looks like a watermelon when she blushes.
Tbh, I kinda felt that way about my fic. Like, nothing good ever happens to her (that's probably the reason I scrapped a fic where she works at Camp Everfree in the Summer and ends up with Gloriosa).
5575520
Ahaha I forgot about that XD
Yes, you needed a subject for Muffins to be studying at uni, so I took the opportunity to ascend my fanon. ^^