Some Thoughts

TL;DR: I disown Godzilla in Equestria and only keep it up to make sure my ego stays in check. I hate it. Please don't read it.

There's a popular urban legend about Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin and it goes something like this: If you happen to bump into George Clooney on the street and tell him you saw that movie in theaters he'll refund you your ticket price on the spot. Whether or not this is true is debated, but it speaks volumes as to how Clooney (supposedly) feels about the flick.

I feel the same way about Godzilla in Equestria.

If I could I would return the time spent reading it to everyone who's ever laid eyes on it. I won't beat around the bush here, this story sucks. It sucks eggs.

When I wrote it, I was a teenager who'd just seen Gareth Edwards's 2014 take on the legendary beast, I had zero experience writing anything, and I made up a new chapter every night. It was always a first draft, rushed out the door around two in the morning. Somehow the thing got popular and to this day I get the occasional notification that someone's slapped it into their favorites folder.

I only wish I could be like Clooney and refund the time and energy everyone spent reading it.

I haven't fully read the story since 2014, and the few times I do try to get through it I can't make it past the second chapter. It's just nauseatingly bad. The protagonist is a pinball with no agency, the other characters are as compelling as a sheet of paper, actual characters from Friendship is Magic don't even appear in the story save for a clumsy implication at one point, and Godzilla himself barely does anything. The prose is clunky, the structure nonexistent, and a half-hearted attempt at making it feel like a non-fiction book published in-universe ends up giving it this indecisive style where it can't decide if it wants to keep that idea going, or go full narrative fiction.

I hate this story. I hate it, hate it, hate it. It doesn't work as a Godzilla piece or as a My Little Pony piece, let alone as a combination of the two. It's dreck pushed out by a dumb kid blindly hammering away at a keyboard. I hate it so much, in fact, that once I realized how awful it was I didn't write anything for six years out of fear that I'd just repeat the same mistakes all over again. I've only recently felt comfortable enough to start writing fiction again, and that was after taking creative writing and screenwriting classes. I still don't think I'm a good writer, mind you, but I'm better than I was -- and I'm finally up for sharing my work with other people again.

So why, you might be asking, haven't I deleted the bloody thing? I deleted just about every other story I wrote back then (and the one survivor is only there because I don't want to invalidate the work of the wonderful person that made it into an audiobook). Why not get rid of this one, too?

Oh, how I want to do that. I'd like nothing more than to wipe it from existence and pretend it never happened. But I won't. For one thing, it keeps my ego in check. I can improve as a writer all I want, but this garbage will always be an albatross tied 'round my neck. A little reminder of how terrible my output can be. Secondly, a lot of people do seem to like it, for some reason, and I don't want to remove it in case they ever feel the need to read it again -- even if I'll never understand why you'd want to do that.