Behind the Story: The Castle Swing

I’ll be releasing another one of these soon, but I’m a bit backed up right now, so I have to do them one at a time.

So, The Castle Swing is a story that exists. I unfortunately have nothing about it like I did with Sticky and Sweet, it’s merely a story that came from an abstract image and a killer song.

As mentioned in the author’s note, my family went up to Amish Country to pick up a new dog, and as my mom and the girl selling the dog were talking, I became naturally drawn to the swing set across the gravel path.

Sometimes, my mind sees these interesting images, usually ones of mundanity, this one being a wooden swing set near a ‘road’, and I’ll keep them mentally locked away until they’re ready to use, a coffee shop selling bagels, cars passing by while I’m waiting to get picked up outside of [REDACTED] (sorry, too much info for my city), or a bunch of middle school students loading into a bus.

Now these images are absolutely nothing special whatsoever, but that’s part of what makes them special to me, as I see these absolutely beautiful images that nobody pays attention to because it’s such a mundane part of life, and in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of my stories are based around that. It’s part of the reason why I love liminal spaces so much, too, probably my absolute favorite genre of photo.

This swing set was locked away in my mind for my brain to reawaken at some point in the future. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait very long this time, because on our way back home from a different stop, I noticed the moon.

The moon was massive in the sky, and bathed in an ethereal orange color. My mind took the key, unlocked the little box, and immediately connected the dots, thought Luna’s Swing, and put it on the backburner for a bit.

When I got to writing the story, I decided that I wanted the story to have a segmented feel to it. I’d cover the relationship between Celestia and Luna in a few different breaks. So, I did one on them as young ponies, them as new rulers, the whole Nightmare Moon debacle, and Celestia mourning the loss of her sister.

I wanted to emphasize the characters’ youngness in the first break by utilizing the Royal We and Luna’s decorated speech in both of the characters.

Because that got confusing fast, the next break was there to emphasize that Luna was stuck in the past by continuing to use her decorated speech and the Royal We, and a little sour that Celestia was getting more glory than she was.

The third was obviously the fight, I just threw that one together.

The fourth break is my personal favorite, I realized that because I used the Royal We in break one, I could call back on those words and have them mean something completely different. Notice the distinction in capitalization between the first line of break one and the first line of break four.

“Luna, it’s Our turn now!”

“Luna, it’s our turn now.”

I capitalized the Royal We because it’s a substitute for ‘I’, and that ending was merely Celestia wanting Luna to come back because she was tired of ruling alone.

I tried to stitch the breaks together in such a way that I could manage a gut punch at the end.

Now, for the million dollar question: What does the swing mean anyhow?

The answer to that is I don’t know. It’s merely meant as a framing device, not a metaphor, trying to show how important such a swing was in their lives. I suppose it could be a metaphor for their relationship, but I only thought of that while writing this and it’s not written in. They do say that hindsight is 20/20.

While I wanted to write The Castle Swing, much like Paul McCartney says he writes ‘work songs’, songs that he writes for the sake of album filler and aren’t really memorable, to me The Castle Swing is a work story. I wrote it, and that’s all I really did. It’s not personal, it’s not groundbreaking, I just thought a swing was pretty.

And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie