My stories, a look back - #10: Time Immemorial · 11:44pm Oct 13th, 2021
Back to original fics one last time!
Of all my fics, I think this is the one I'm proudest of, the one I most consider to be a "proper" Fimfiction story. No experimentalism, no in-jokes or awkward references... just a solid comedic short executed from start to finish within a few thousand words. Like several of my other fics, this was one that I just bashed out entirely in one go over a period of several hours because I'd pretty much nailed the plot from beginning to end before I even started.
Like Read it and Sneak, the premise for this one came about from a single moment in an episode, where the show went one way and my head went another. This time, however, it's a more unconventional source - it's from the "Friendship is Forever" series, which were essentially a set of clip shows with an episodic framing around them.
That little series showed up by surprise shortly after the end of Friendship is Magic, and honestly? I rather liked it. I think a lot of people dismissed them on account of them being clip shows, but I really enjoyed getting to see my favorite ponies one last time after the end of all things. It gave me the feeling of a proper denouement to the series, a calm winding-down and sending-off to take the edge off a bit.
Anyway, if you're one of the people who missed it: it was a series of full-length episodes based around the premise that Starlight and Spike are trying to put together a magical scrapbook of memories as a coronation gift for Twilight. Starlight has cooked up a memory-recording spell to do it, but she needs Twilight's friends to basically stall and lie to her for half an hour each so that she can hide and collect the memories in her book. It's totally not creepy honest. The episodes are mostly just clips of old episodes, but the parts around the clips are genuine MLP.
Starlight's plan goes more or less fine until they get to Applejack in the fifth episode, "Harvesting Memories", as AJ is not a pony known for her skill at deception. And so her episode is basically Starlight trying to coach AJ in how to lie to Twilight. In the end, it turns out to be unnecessary - AJ may not be a good liar, but she knows Twilight well enough to be able to chat to her without giving the game away.
At least, that's how the episode played out. My story goes a bit differently.
Time Immemorial
Starlight accidentally reveals Twilight's coronation surprise. An alternate ending to "Harvesting Memories".
May 2020
Comedy
The story opens at a point midway through the episode "Harvesting Memories", where Applejack seems like she's about to give away Starlight's plan. In a panic, Starlight leaps out of her hiding place and tries to salvage the situation, thus forking this story away from the episode and in a new direction.
With the coronation surprise ruined, Starlight tries to come up with a way to repair the damage, and thus goes to her usual default: mind control! But at least this time it's consensual. Starlight's reformed. She asks permission now.
Twilight shoots down that idea, sadly, as she's not too keen on giving her former student an excuse to practise her hobby, but Applejack comes to the rescue by smashing Twilight over the head with a heavy book until she passes out. Applejack assures Starlight that her more physical approach will have the intended effect of relieving Twilight of her memory, thus saving the day! Well, that was easy. Guess we can wrap this story up early...
...except that another version of Starlight suddenly arrives from 20 years in the future, taking her class on a school trip to the past.
Several people commented that the story should be tagged Random, and I think it was because of this moment of Future Starlight suddenly showing up out of nowhere. But guys, you don't understand. This is the plot. There's a reason for this. Starlight even says it: she knew it was safe to come to this point in time because she doesn't have any memories of these events. Memory is the theme here.
I reused Starlight's spherical time portal from "The Cutie Re-Mark", because it looked awesome and I figure she can just cast it whenever she likes by now.
Anyway, Future Starlight has brought her entire class with her - this is continuity with the finale, since we know Starlight is still teaching at the School of Friendship in the future. I took some liberties here with the class demographic - it's much more like an elementary school class, the kind that Cheerilee would teach, even though the friendship students in the show typically seem to be young adults. I figured it was funnier that way and just supposed that the school age had dropped at some point in the intervening years.
For Future Starlight, I supposed that 20 years at the school had made her much more teacherly than her present day self. She's a confident, enthusiastic speaker and knows how to effortlessly project an air of authority, something that Present Starlight lacks.
Starlight is surprised, although not particularly shocked, to see her future self - I figure she knows enough about time travel to have anticipated this kind of thing. In any case, she's now busy trying to handle two problems: herself from the future, and a reawakened and unhappy Twilight in the present. This goes fairly well until Applejack, not having quite read the situation correctly, knocks out Twilight with the book again.
Starlight wisely decides that the best course of action is to get Twilight out of there before she can sustain any more head trauma, and teleports her back home. There's a bunch of comedy bits as Starlight tries to answer various stupid questions from the future students, and then Future Starlight prepares to take them all back to their own time again.
Finally, we get the ending that the fic has been secretly building up to: it's never revealed why Starlight doesn't have any memories of this time period, and she doesn't think to ask why until the very end of the fic, at which point Applejack prepares to knock her unconscious with the Book of Memories.
I'm really happy with how this one turned out. Almost everything that's set up in the fic has some payoff, and most of the jokes pull double-duty as they are revisited or echoed later in the fic. Even the title's pretty good, being a pun that references both the time-travel aspect and the memory aspect, while maintaining the same "memory" theme used by the Friendship is Forever series.
Trivia
* Future Starlight identifies the current year as 1009 in the Celestian Era - that is, 1009 years after Nightmare Moon was banished. I've always used the calendar that zeroes at Nightmare Moon's banishment for convenience, and I simply added 1 year for each season of the show to end up at 1009. I know that there's evidence to suggest that the show's 9 seasons actually take place over a shorter number of years, but I felt 1009 looked better.
* A few commenters questioned why Future Starlight didn't seem to care about Applejack or Spike knowing about their own futures. My reasoning is that Starlight was only concerned about self-paradox - ie. the problems caused by having a conversation with yourself. That's why she specifically looked for holes in her own memory.
* "Evil is a point of view, Twilight": An unsubtle Revenge of the Sith reference.
* Maud's ambition to petrify all of Equestria is a reference to "Rock Solid Friendship", in which Maud claims that she could take over all of Equestria with the right stone. It's never made clear if she's joking. The meta-joke here is Starlight's transparent friendship deficiency - she knows Maud is plotting something evil and is clearly not even trying to stop her.
* Future Starlight mentions a character named "Buzzsaw" - this is Buzzsaw McColt, a one-off background character whom I like because she's cute. I needed some unlikely character for the joke and she fit quite nicely.
* "...Starlight begged, her eyes sparkling as she raised her hooves in a supplicatory gesture." That was supposed to be a reference to this bit in Mirror Magic:
* Starlight says "The Snowfall Frost look suits me" in reference to her future self's attire. For reference, here's Future Starlight:
And here's Snowfall Frost:
I felt this was quite a nice layered reference, since Starlight played Snowfall Frost in the imaginary scenario in "A Hearth's Warming Tail", suggesting she feels an affinity with the character.
* I do ship Starburst and had no hesitation with having Starlight and Sunburst be married in the future. Future Starlight is seen to be wearing a necklace indicating her marital status - it's my headcanon that necklaces are the traditional way to go about this. While horn rings are seen in the show, we only ever see them at weddings, so I assume that they are only used symbolically in the wedding itself and that a necklace would be the more permanent symbol of marriage. It also solves the problem for pegasi and earth ponies, who don't have horns.
* Present Starlight seems a bit shocked at hearing that she and Sunburst are married in the future. My headcanon is that she does already love Sunburst, but hasn't yet figured out how to take their relationship forward. The idea that she will definitely marry her oldest and dearest friend is a sudden emotional shock that she doesn't know how to handle in the moment. She then gets distracted thinking about the physicality of their relationship.
* The fic obliquely suggests that Sunburst is good in bed. See, I can do adult humor.
* "International Purple Custard Day": A reference to Loganberry's Custardverse, of course. It was originally just "International Custard Day", but I made it specifically purple because that was funnier.
* The description of Future Princess Twilight as "like a giant stick insect" is my own opinion of how she looks, but it also made a useful joke for the fic.
* Future Starlight asks them to stop asking her about which ponies are alive or dead - the reason is that she just remembered that Granny Smith is not, in fact, alive in her future.
* The idea that Queen Chrysalis is just pretending to be a statue came about because I needed the kids to volunteer some unlikely-sounding urban legend, something that a child might believe but that an adult wouldn't. I was quite proud of coming up with something that is actually plausible given what we know of Chrysalis' powers - and it's a perfect fear for a reformed changeling to have, as they are presumably terrified of Chrysalis returning. Starlight never does, in fact, get to investigate whether it's true or not, because she loses her memory.
* "The Day Equestria Stood Still" - you know, I don't think I've ever actually seen the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, and I have two back-to-back fics that reference it.
* Future Starlight creates some "Haycartian axes". In our world, the orthogonal coordinate system was invented by Rene Descartes, the same guy who "Haycart's Method" (also namedropped in this fic) is named after. I guess Haycart was a bit of a renaissance mare.
* Spike's "I thought I might be, like, big big" refers to the fanon that Spike will someday become one of those enormous great dragons. As we know, he is merely a beefcake in the near future.
* "Did Counselor Trixie really defeat a herd of giant space bears?": that story has gotten wilder every time she tells it.
* "Is it true that if I go to the human world, I'll turn into a dog?": Ah, poor dragons. For the record, I believe the dog thing only applies to Spike and not dragons in general.
* Starlight answers "Kind of" to the question "Are Miss Bloom Miss Belle and Miss Scootaloo related?". This was a reference to the somewhat nebulous cutie mark connection that they share - I figure that their students in the future would quickly notice that their cutie marks are near-identical and wonder why.
Good stuff
* I loved writing Applejack in this one and really playing up her down-to-earthness while all of this absolute nonsense is going on around her.
* Applejack justifies her beating of Twilight with "It's the earth pony way". Honestly, I just love the idea that Applejack can use this excuse to justify anything on the grounds that nopony actually knows what the "earth pony way" is.
Bad stuff
* Future Starlight's squeeful reaction at seeing younger Spike is honestly rather cringy and the part of the fic I like the least. It doesn't feel appropriate for the character. The purpose of that scene was to show that Future Starlight hasn't seen Spike like this in a long time, and also to set up the "how many nervous breakdowns" joke, but it could have been better.
* Starlight says "Good thing I cast Platinum's Preservation on this already" to justify why the Book of Memories wasn't damaged when Applejack smashed Twilight with it. It's a decent-enough reference, I guess - you could suppose that Princess Platinum, who we know was a unicorn, invented some spell to protect relics - but it's a fairly pointless throwaway line otherwise.
* When I was writing the fic, I realized at some late point that Future Starlight would actually have no idea what kind of situation she was walking in on - she doesn't know, for example, that they're trying to erase Twilight's memory. I got around this by having Starlight randomly mention a "memory spell" at one point, and that's the only reason for that line. Could probably have done that a bit better.
Was wondering if this series would wrap up!
While my opinion of this one being just a pleasant diversion and little more hasn’t really changed (it doesn’t help it’s tied so heavily to an era of the show, and specific events, that I detest, though I don’t think that bias coloured my opinion more then marginally), I do better understand why you think rather highly of this one, especially after having read the prior blogs, what you think of all those stories, the evolution of your writing tone, style and chosen genres. And so on.
Author self-satisfaction remains good, y’all. We shouldn’t undervalue it!
And I also better understand why it doesn’t have a random tag, even if I don’t personally agree and feel it should still. But, I digress.
Seeing/Being reminded of a few select cases in the story of dancing around who needs their memory erased and what facts are okay to remember for Applejack and Spike, etc. -good stuff, proof that it was well planned out for a fic that unspooled in just a few hours!
Eh, haven’t got much else to add. It’s decent for me, but great for you, and I do get that. One-shots, especially short ones like this, are hard to judge, y’all.
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I am considering it! Nothing in the pipeline yet but it would be fun to do another Best Worst tournament.