Stains Postmortem and Q&A · 4:55pm Dec 31st, 2021
Two and a half years ago, I had an idle whim to write some content about ponies and corruption. I had this idea for a scene in which Twilight Sparkle was speaking to Celestia and Luna when suddenly everything froze. She was unable to move, but she was still conscious of what was happening as a shadowy figure appeared and worked its power over the other princesses, changing them.
I came to the decision though that this idea would be too complicated for a simple one-shot so instead I just did a story about Non corruption with Celestia and Luna.
Now, here we are.
And where do we go from here?
I suppose I mostly had an idea of what I was getting into when I decided to sit down and write Stains. I always knew the broad strokes of where it would end up going, even if the details weren't entirely certain from the outset. I knew that this was going to be a big commitment. And yet even with that...it was still a lot to deal with. The original impetus behind Stains was that it would be a sequel to Tinged, a continuation of its events and an expansion of the ideas that it presented. By the time I got around to writing and finishing it, though, what it actually is is a sequel to Rising Tide, my big project from last year. Well, maybe more like a prequel, in-universe. It's complicated.
Stains differs most obviously from Rising Tide in its pacing, diving straight into the horror and the fetish from the beginning instead of slowly building from it, and consequently doing more to show the aftermath of these events. But the most significant difference is that Stains ended up being far more personal for me. As I've already said before, the descriptions of the main characters' struggles that are presented in Chapter 9 are largely reflective of my own internal struggles. It was pointed out to me that a lot of them boil down to anxiety about how they are perceived by others in some form or another, which is a good summation of the turmoil that I've felt for the past few years of my life. Spike/Barb, though, was the most significant of them all. It was always something that I knew I wanted to do. Spike fascinates me as a character, as a person who had to grow up around people who are so different to him and having to rationalize those differences as he gets older and learns about what kind of a person he wants to be. This was always something that I wanted to explore. As it came time to actually write about it, though, it occurred to me how relevant it is to me. I don't really know that I can say that I'm transgender, nonbinary may be closer but I don't think that that's entirely accurate either. I don't particularly care how I am identified, I simply want to be something else, something that's not really feasible in real life. I want to be Non. I want to be me. That's the vibe I'm going for with Barb, not merely gender-nonconforming but species-nonconforming. Barb is Barb, pure and simple.
I have done my best to better my self-image by cutting down on self-deprecation, I want to say above all else that I am proud of this product now that it is finished and out in the world, but I don't think I can go without acknowledging some of its shortcomings. The most pertinent is that, despite being labeled as a transformation story, there actually isn't that much transformation that takes place on-screen. Some amount of this can be ascribed to the vibe that I was going for, I wanted to emphasize the horror of discovering that the people you know have turned into something strange and unfamiliar. I think a big part of it though is in the fact that the original concept for the story had it estimated as being a lot shorter than it ended up being. If I had known that the meatier parts of the story, the big dream mediation sessions and the whole sequence leading up to the final battle, would have taken as long as they did, I think I wouldn't have pushed so hard to hurry things along toward the ticking time bomb of the singularity. I think I could have afforded to make more time for going around Ponyville as things are going to shit, showing a few more ponies before they become corrupted. This would also give more allowance for the trauma of these characters to be elaborated upon instead of mostly having to wait until the dreams for them to be revealed. Of course, that would have pushed this from being a 100k+ word story to probably nearly or more than 200k, so...ehhhh.
After several editing passes between completion and uploading, the final word count for Stains is sitting at (by estimations of Microsoft Word) 130,705 words, making it the longest ongoing story I have ever written by a substantial margin. This makes it over twice as long as Rising Tide, but despite that it took over a year for me to complete Stains where the former story only took a month and a half. The majority of Stains was written in the time between mid August and early November, which is a better showing of how I can work at peak efficiency. This, however, came at the cost of me having to work almost exclusively on this project with little time left over for smaller projects. Even since completing Stains I haven't really been done with it, between the editing work and the time I had to spend preparing chapters and pondering over things to say about them in the uploads, which is a large part of why I still haven't done much since November.
I think that amateur writers, as most fanfic authors are, tend to have a bad habit of biting off more than they can chew. It's extremely easy to come in with a plethora of ideas for what you want to do for your story and before you know it the scope is ballooning further and further beyond what you had anticipated it would be to start with and suddenly you've created a monster that consumes all your time and effort. This was why the Eldritchverse never got off the ground beyond pictures and a handful of short snippets and why I never got around to writing anything for the Decaverse before the decision to reboot it again. I didn't want Stains to be nothing more than a spring board for other stories, I wanted it to be something that stood on its own aside from the obvious ways in which is is a continuation of Tinged, and yet all the same I couldn't keep from thinking about ways to expand the concepts and think of further spin-offs and continuations and work in little hints for what might be yet to come. How does Equestria change as a result of this near-cataclysmic event? What does the work Twilight did with Non in the time between the final chapter and the epilogue entail? What happened with characters who weren't shown during the story, like Cadence and Shining Armor? What are the tests that Discord alluded to? Who knows. I have no idea if I'll ever have the time and energy to put those into being.
I am conscious that I am standing at a turning point in my life. I have tasted what it feels like to really create something of substance and to carry it through to completion. I can continue working on fan projects, be they fetish-based or not, I presently have three major story ideas that I could be doing. One of them is an expansion of the original concept that Tinged was going to be, which is ultimately Stains but wholly MLP content. I want to do a Kingsman-inspired action spy thriller starring Rarity and Fleur de Lis. I want to do a new weird cyberpunk story featuring even more indulgent gender identity stuff. Or...I could take that headlong leap into original content. I could work on something that might actually have a chance of being published. I have already made efforts to start The Well of Life, although I'm not certain that I might have to start fresh to better consolidate things. You and Me, Always Forever spawned ideas for what could potentially be an anthology series.
There are many, many things I could be doing, and I simply don't know what I care about the most. The simple fact of the matter is that I don't care about making money, I just want to be able to write what I'm passionate about and, with any luck, get some people who are interested in it. I deeply appreciate everyone who has stuck with Stains through its development and the time that it's taken for it to be uploaded. It is my greatest hope that this story will resonate with someone out there, even just one person, in the same way that it did for me while I was writing it.
To end this long ramble, I'm leaving this post open for readers to ask any questions that they might have, be it about Stains and its potential spin-offs, or about any other projects that may be in the pipeline. Of course, beware that this may entail spoilers for these projects, I can't say for sure how much detail I'll be able to offer for my answers.
i hope you do a stains sequel
It certainly feels like you went through a lot of personal growth while writing this.
I figure just write what you want. Perhaps we'll collab one day; I've got some stuff in the works.
As Uncle Iroh said, What your destiny means is up to you.