The Buttery Snake Show: Failure is what makes you LEARN · 4:07am Dec 10th, 2021
It was a dark and stormy night. Dark, ominous clouds loomed where clouds were apt to loom, namely the sky. The trees lay bare, the last of their leaves having departed in the cold winds of the dying year. What little light came through the damp sky was gray and cold.
Buttery Snake, his own story long-since fallen into obscurity, wandered through the cemetery, a rusted shovel trailing a narrow furrow behind him as it scraped past tombstones and the lids of sarcophagi, their names faded and devoured by uncaring lichen and the acidic rain of a more modern world. He ignored them. He was interested in only one particular grave.
He came to it and stared at the tombstone. It was the grave of one Unwhole Hole—and, without sound or remorse apart from the creak of his shovel and occasional high giggling, he began to dig.
The grave was shallow because Unwhole Hole had not dug it deep. As his name implied.
Upon striking the body, it sat up, and Unwhole Hole blinked.
“I’m not actually dead. You know that, right?”
“Not yet you aren’t.”
The shovel fulfilled its purpose as the so-called author was smacked in the face with it.
Unwhole Hole blinked, finding himself on a fine wooden stage, staring out over a live studio audience. Of Buttery Snake. Just him. They were all staring at him, even the derped one.
“I can’t escape, can I?”
“Nope,” said the one true Buttery, sitting at his desk next to the overstuffed floral couch that served as furniture in this strange purgatory of an excessively prolix blog post.
“Was it always this...fancy?”
“No. But remember, I’m not real. Just a representation of your own insecurities.” Buttery smiled, revealing a mouth filled with, ostensibly, teeth. “And your latest story seems to have given me a SIGNIFICANT amount of vim and vigor.”
“Not it hasn’t.”
“It hasn’t?”
“No. It doesn’t really matter.”
“Nihilism won’t save you now, Hole.”
Unwhole Hole slapped him with whatever appendage he had in your personal imagination.
“You—you hit me! With your thing!”
“No I didn’t, and you didn’t hit me with a shovel. We’re being dramatic. Neither of us is real.”
“Um...I think you probably are.”
“Am I?”
Buttery paused, considering the psychological implications of this, and eventually deciding that giving it any sort of psychological pretext was pretentious. It was, in fact, Unwhole Hole being silly.
“And that’s exactly the problem,” continued Unwhole Hole, folding back into his chair. “I got to o silly. And through my hubris I was smote with well-deserved criticism. Those who fly to close to the sun get sunburnt. Those who dare to slap the rump of the Celestia receive a far worse sentence.”
“That sentence was pretty bad. Now who’s the pretentious one?” He shuffled his imaginary papers, giving the sentence a critical pause before the subject changed. “That said. ‘The Warp Core Conspiracy’. It isn’t good. Would you call it a failure?”
Unwhole Hole sighed. Literally, he did, while writing this. “A ‘failure’, in this sense, is hard to define. I don’t know. I mean, some works are better than others. Sometimes I swing and miss. My first two stories might be considered failures, but that’s because I had no idea what I was doing. ‘Four Yellow’ is a failure, just because it was poorly conceived and I haven’t gotten around to reconstructing it as ‘Four Black’ yet.”
“And then there’s ‘Humphry Dinklehuegen’.”
“That story was unpopular but fun to write.”
“Yes, but you can’t just go making fun of the Harry Potter universe. People take that stuff seriously.”
“You should see Star Trek fans.”
“I have. They are very detail-oriented. That’s why they’re here. Now answer my question, you metacognative hat-licker!”
“Yes.”
“So you DO lick the hats!”
“No. I mean it’s a failure. It is probably my least successful story. Sort of. Because it did what it was meant to.”
“Alienate your fans and turn a new legion of readers against you?”
“No. The idea of ‘The Warp Core Conspiracy’ was, largely, a tonal experiment.”
“You’re just claiming that to avoid responsibility for your mistakes. Horrible, horrible mistakes.”
“Yes. But also to explain that I have LEARNED from those mistakes. Not in an apologetic sense, because apologies are for apologists, but in an academic sense.”
“Meaning?”
Unwhole Hole sighed again. “I am, essentially, trying to figure out what it means to be Unwhole Hole.”
“A self-reflective narcissist?”
“I am not a flower. No. I mean to fully understand the tone that I have, over time, developed here on Fimfiction. Why some of my stories work and others don’t. To understand the true essence of Unwhole Hole. What he sounds like. How he writes. So I can apply that to future projects.”
“How self-indulgent. Subjecting poor people to poor writing for your own gain.”
“Quiet you.” Unwhole Hole paused, adjusting his chair. “The story failed because I came to an incorrect conclusion. I had been working under the assumption that, essentially, I was being an edgelord. That my work lacked sincerity and was too dark. That no one wants dramatic, dark science fiction.”
“It’s true. They don’t.”
“No. It’s not true at all. It’s really a matter of connecting with the right audience, but that’s not the point. I was having trouble writing my own projects because they were too dark, and I interpreted this as ‘be silly all the time’. That people want to read funny, silly things. That it keeps their attention. The problem was, that’s not true.”
“So comedy is bad.”
“No. MY comedy is bad, when people aren’t expecting it. I came to a basic conclusion that I have three parts that need to be constantly balanced. One part is technical, which is worldbuilding. I won’t claim to be good at it, but I need heavy backdrops to build on as a kind of crutch. I’m not good at understanding emotion, so I compensate with weird sci-fi stuff and cliches.”
“Then why Star Trek?”
“Exactly. Because in terms of what you can do with themes and worldbuilding, Star Trek is extremely restrictive. It’s meant for a visual medium. It’s already pre-built, and it comes down to a matter of knowing canon. And Star Trek fans are very, very perceptive of that. And they know more than I do.”
Buttery Snake grew slightly.
“But that’s not the point. The point is the other two parts, which must always, ALWAYS exist in balance. One is absurd, somewhat grotesque darkness, while the other is absurd, somewhat grotesque humor. Which I failed to do in this story. It’s all silly humor, and not the kind most people find funny.”
“Then tag it as a comedy.”
“I know. I finally gave up and did. Because I realized that it is. Which is unfortunate. And it gets worse.”
“How can you possibly make it worse?”
“This story has a flaw that is extrinsic, instead of the many that are intrinsic. In that it was more ‘popular’ than I expected.”
“You’ve been writing for years. Isn’t it good that you’re finally getting some attention?”
“If it was for a good story, yes. But for an experimental story where the first ten chapters exist almost exclusively to make me personally laugh? Not good. Not good at all.” He sighed yet again. “The story was written with the assumption that a few people might read it, and that most of them would be people already familiar with my tone. That didn’t end up being the case. Many new people came to see it and, as a German emperor once said, stepped right into that unwhole hole.”
“Meaning you simply failed to produce a story that could appeal to a broad audience.”
“Yes. That is a failure on my part and it doomed the story. I tried, poorly, to be as Unwhole Hole as possible—and ended up undermining the quality of my work in the process. And it gets worse.”
“Still?”
“The ending.”
“What ending?”
“THE ending. I’ve already written it. I know what happens.”
“Well don’t spoil it. People might be reading. Maybe? Am I getting graded?”
“I won’t spoil it, but it’s bad. Really, really bad. In a way that will make no sense to most of the audience. A story that starts off too silly, got actually maybe a little competent in the middle, went over-the-top on the climax, and then ended with a stupid ending.”
“If you were a sea anemone, I’d tell you to brace your mouth.”
“I already am. This is going to be messy. But I can deal with it. I need the criticism. I am actually glad I am getting it now, instead of just seeing the dislike bar grow and grow with no mention as to why. I got what I wanted, and I learned important things.”
“You don’t learn. Ever.”
“I know.”
Buttery Paused—and gulped.
“You were gone for a while. And you came back with...this. Are you…?”
“Losing my touch?”
Buttery nodded nervously.
“No. I’m realizing I never had it. And that I need to learn to touch harder.”
“And that’s why your story did poorly...unless you're just doing this to fish for compliments to make people tell you you're NOT a failure.”
“As much as I enjoy fish, I am not. I do not require external validation. I am addressing a misstep and thinking about it to move forward. It actually may have helped. At least a little. I am in the process of working on yet another non-pony story, and it was originally intended to have a tone matching that of ‘Warp’. After seeing the response, though, I realized that I cannot have humor without constant, grating horror.”
“You never manage to complete the independent projects.”
“I know. The last thing I did was actually editing ‘The 192’, which was one of the last stories I wrote before shifting to fanfiction. If you recall the character Robette D’Bordeaux (she has cameos in several of my stories), it was the story where she first appeared.”
“Did you just put parentheses...in your voice?”
“No.”
Buttery shrugged. “Then what are you working on now?”
“Basically ‘Mass Core 4’, to be honest. Except with brand-agnostic alien unicorns. Which is fun, because I can play with their culture a lot more than I could before.”
“In what way?”
“Do you remember how all the ponies in ‘Mass Core’ were racist jerks?”
“Yes…?”
“I really, really like writing racist jerks. So I increased that tendency. Although I still can’t quite get a grip on my main character. That’s the main issue with non-fan fiction. The characters aren’t pre-built, and you lose the mental muscles to build them over time. I can’t just say ‘this is Rarity, but she’s a misanthrope’ and build from there. I have to keep asking myself who this new person that I’ve never met would act. That is a challenge.”
“So you are moving away from fanfiction, then? I will be left here to die?”
“You’re not alive, so no. And I may be remaining. I have a few ideas and I will need to redeem myself at some point for ‘Warp’. I usually alternate.”
“Are you still trying to be a novelist?”
Unwhole Hole fell silent. Then, slowly, he answered. “Sometimes the only way to reach your goals is to eliminate all dreams and hope. It’s the only way to gain the freedom to move forward.”
“Edgelord.”
“I can erase this blog-post right now.”
“But you can’t erase me. I’m just you with alternating quotations. With the way you write dialogue, most people can’t even tell which one of us is speaking at any given time.”
“Because I am always the one speaking, even when you are. That’s the point.”
Unwhole Hole leaned back. He considered for a moment, the continued.
“I just created an extensive paragraph. Then deleted it.”
“Why?”
“I created an aside talking about events in my own life, and what I actually do for a living. Then I remembered that no one cares. It is better if I have no autobiographical information. For mystique and all.”
“The blue lady?”
“She is not always blue. That’s kind of her thing. Also that joke was stupid.”
“Then why did you make it?”
“The same reason I do anything at all. Because nobody is stopping me.”
I feel you. Personally, the popularity of my own work is inversely proportional to how proud and satisfied I am with it. And yes, I admit, The Warp Core Conspiracy isn't your best work. But I also loved Four Yellow, so then again, what do I know? Regardless, you seem to be taking this well enough. Just keep doing what you do, and eventually everyone will see what I have: that you've got a real talent for this.
Well, I read your entire blog, and realized a few things and my part in them. You mentioned tonal conflict, and after reading through this I have to agree. I didn't pick up on it being a silly comedy, and I didn't comment and critique as though it was one. Rather contrary to your statement of, "That my work lacked sincerity and was too dark. That no one wants dramatic, dark science fiction," I was engaged with this story under the assumption that it was dramatic and dark science fiction, and it was accomplishing that part quite well. Twilight possibly being trapped inside/built into the warp core? Multiple alien species with no love for humanity having been involved with and influencing Equestrian technology and development for several years? The idea that the entire balance of power in the galaxy, up to and including telling the Borg to go pound sand, could be affected by which faction got Equestria's enormous dilithium crystal deposits?
That was all freakin' great, and I still want to see how it plays out, but that's how I thought of this story. With that mindset, Spitfire freaking out and trying to shoot the Enterprise, Luna freaking out and wanting to send crewmen to her BDSM dungeon, Lyra freaking out and screaming "hoomins!"; it all seemed totally out of place. Looking back at the story with the lens of it being a silly comedy though, it starts to take shape as crazy Equestrians being played off the straight man of the Enterprise crew, much the way you were playing Kirk off of Spock. The biggest reason I missed that, I believe, was as you mentioned about Star Trek as a backdrop: it's very restrictive, and writing it depends on knowing canon. I came into the story expecting a Star Trek story, and judged it against that.
This site can be an especially hard audience to read, but I do agree with your analysis. Constant wacky comedy with no grounding or moderating force has its place, but Warp Core Conspiracy demonstrates how not to do it very well. Still, like any good exercise in screwballl absurdity, it has been a fun read when not scrutinized too closely.
Very nice bit of self-analysis. I'm glad you shared it with us.
Now I'm really curious what it is. If you do change it before posting, can you also please post the original?