• Member Since 21st Aug, 2016
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Czar_Yoshi


Nancy Janeist

More Blog Posts12

  • 111 weeks
    How White Chocolate Almost Ruined Everything

    Do you like deep lore? How about meta-lore? It should come as no surprise that over the course of three years writing daily, plans can change a lot. This is a story about how things once were going to go, which I rambled about a few weeks ago in discord and figured I'd do a deeper dive on here, to record it for posterity and because I don't post enough blogs and bet it'll make for a decent yarn.

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    8 comments · 385 views
  • 159 weeks
    The Year that Didn't Happen

    On March 5th, right about a year ago, I left work early because news had hit that covid was in the schools and it was time for things to close down. I didn't particularly mind, because TOW was at the end of its final arc and I had already taken the next week off so I could dedicate everything to the ending and then relax a little afterward in peace. It just felt like that break came in a few days

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    7 comments · 542 views
  • 187 weeks
    An Update Is Probably Warranted

    Remember when I said I made no promises regarding scheduling?

    This is why.

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    6 comments · 540 views
  • 210 weeks
    The Olden World is finished. What will I do next?

    I just had the least-productive week of the last three years of my life.

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    11 comments · 617 views
  • 262 weeks
    Stay Determined: Sequel Blog Two

    ...It's really been two years, huh? I guess that makes it time for another update. The state of the story is this: it's still happening. It's still going to be a while... but a year less than it was going to be when I posted the last update blog. And I don't mean that in the sense of me sitting around and doing nothing for a year. It's been getting time to cook, and it needed it.

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    1 comments · 405 views
Feb
5th
2022

How White Chocolate Almost Ruined Everything · 2:10pm Feb 5th, 2022

Do you like deep lore? How about meta-lore? It should come as no surprise that over the course of three years writing daily, plans can change a lot. This is a story about how things once were going to go, which I rambled about a few weeks ago in discord and figured I'd do a deeper dive on here, to record it for posterity and because I don't post enough blogs and bet it'll make for a decent yarn. It should go without saying, but there will be a lot of TOW meta-spoilers for how things could have gone, as well as real spoilers for how they eventually did. No spoilers for TID, though.

You probably remember White Chocolate... or maybe you don't, because she didn't do much that was memorable. Maple and Starlight encountered her in Ironridge, a never-employed, single mother with a gigantic brood who had been ditched by her husband and looked just like Maple's childhood friend. Not long before, Valey had introduced the party to the concept of moon glass, a sinister black material that could give blank ponies cutie marks, but at a cost: the marks would be completely random instead of matching their skills and personality, and their personality might even change to match the mark.

Of course, since moon glass would go on to be such an important plot device for later events and the overall lore, I wanted to have a character who had actually used it, so the party could see its effects firsthoof. Enter White Chocolate, a broken layabout and walking sob story who had used it, and could thus show it off to our heroes and help firm up their earlygame conceptions that moon glass equals bad. Because clearly, if an already messed-up person is using it, that just goes to show... Wait a minute. Might have gotten that backwards.

Anyway, about as soon as the protagonists left her house, I decided I wasn't too thrilled with how I had handled something with a lot of potential unfortunate implications and White Chocolate would be my story-sanctioned moon glass ambassador no longer (a crying shame, since that was a very ripe character archetype that never got filled later). I wouldn't retcon anything; retcons aren't allowed in TOW. Instead, I'd just forget about playing up that aspect of her character. But it wasn't like I could leave her behind and never write her again - she was too important to the character drama of some folks who stayed back in Riverfall, and beyond that, I was already planning to use her as a tie-in linking the party to Kero's overcomplicated scheme.

You remember what he was up to, right? No? Dispensing moon glass to socially dependent mares to turn the souls in the glass into children to take back to Chauncey to evaluate for candidacy for godhood for his crazy apotheosis experiments that were supposed to create an alternative to Garsheeva and the Night Mother and wound up giving us You-Know-Who instead?

Man, those guys were psychopaths. Especially Kero, who not only didn't have the excuse of being magically dead inside but got away with it to boot.

The important part was, back then, I was already planning for Act 3 to be a massive and incredibly elaborate origin story for Chrysalis. That one was planned for since the beginning of publication. While almost all of my focus for the first two acts was making sure Ironridge went smoothly, I was constantly thinking about Chrysalis in the background, and how I could use her to maximum effect. I remembered the way Skirts used her in Odrsjot, wanted something with ginormous scale and magnitude. All the time, in the back of my mind, I was thinking about how I could make the Chrysalis chapter cool and impactful in a way that could make full use of this story's absurd length... Bear with me, White Chocolate is related to this.

I wanted it to be dramatic. I wanted it to be impactful. I wanted my characters to hurt. And one of the first things I decided was that it should be their fault, too.

In particular? Maple's fault. Maple, I decided, would convince the party to abandon Crystal in her darkest hour.

This blog's title might give you an idea of how and why Maple would do a thing like that, if you remember who Crystal was and what she was like and also who White Chocolate was and what she was like, especially around Maple, and the ways that made Maple feel. But before we get into that, let's look for a moment at where Maple's character came from.

TOW had a rough draft. It's something I've mentioned a time or two here and there, but it covered Riverfall and Ironridge and gave me a cool five months of daily practice before I actually started posting. It's a pretty bad story, but it's also the only reason TOW is remotely as good as it is, particularly the first two acts. One of the biggest changes between the rough draft and the published version, aside from the addition of a substantial amount of content, is that in the rough draft, Starlight was an adult instead of a filly.

Long ago, in a story without Willow or Amber, Starlight Glimmer was the sole unicorn resident of the northern town of Riverfall. She was a foreigner, an Equestrian, and a stick in the mud who had been there for quite some time, hiding from the idea of cutie marks. She fulfilled most of canon Arambai's roles in the town, being a general magical inventor and custodian. One day, a griffon adventurer named Gerardo sailed through, and Starlight decided she had stayed in one place for long enough and had better skip town and join him. And they were accompanied, for whatever reason, by the shopkeeper Starlight and Gerardo visited when stocking up on supplies for Ironridge.

Why did she join them? Out of context, I decided I needed another body on the team for logistical purposes. In-world? I wasn't thinking these things through yet as an author. I decided she would just find it to be a good idea at the time.

...Can't laugh too hard, though. That's why Slipstream joined up in canon!

In fairness, Slipstream didn't have much better to do, but I digress. Over the following three days, Ironridge was rocked by conspiracy and militia warfare and subterfuge, and Starlight handled it not all that differently from canon TOW: stoically, with a black and white worldview, a combination of too much and too little agency and never a hint of a smile.

And Maple? She stuck with her like a lost puppy. I couldn't figure out why Maple was staying, I was too busy coming up with plot lines about yak treason and trying to make Selma and Herman's motives make sense and generally having a ball writing Valey. I knew Maple needed to stay, because I was already planning on doing an ending involving Starlight "getting" all her friends' cutie marks as an explanation for her flight in Season 5, but I couldn't be bothered to figure out a reason. At all.

Not that I didn't try. Everything I thought of just didn't seem right. A romantic attachment? Didn't feel like the way I wanted to write Starlight. Loyalty over some past deed? Even in the rough draft, I was writing in no-takebacks mode and refused to go add one, instead working with what I had left on the table. Dropped plot threads and I'll-fix-that-laters? Okay. Sequence breaks? Nope. Gotta keep moving forward. So I just had Maple choose to follow Starlight, each and every time she got a chance to do otherwise.

It started to look like a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome, where the abuse consisted mainly of being ignored. Or maybe of major depression, an inability to set goals or think for herself. And my you-broke-it-you-buy-it philosophy of dailying was only taking greater hold, so I just decided if that was what it looked like? Sure, that's what it was.

Until the reset, where everything I had done went from the canon law of the land to mere suggestions and experience to draw upon while doing it for real. And I decided Starlight and Maple's relationship was weird and unsympathetic and kind of unsettling and characters I was going to lug around for hundreds of chapters deserved better.

Step one: I made Starlight a filly. Her and Maple's relationship, I decided, would work much better if I could frame it as needy parent and needy child, instead of two random strangers just glommed onto each other for no reason at all. Starlight's worldview would also work much better on a child struggling with growing up than an adult living in denial.

Step two: I decided depressed, zero-initiative Maple wasn't who I wanted to write, but also that I had been writing her for too long to completely erase it - after all, it was one hundred percent of who she'd been. So, I made it her backstory. Enter canon Maple: impulsive, prone to making stupid life-changing commitments at the drop of a hat because she used to have crippling depression and is mortally terrified of losing her initiative again. Fragile, hopeful and optimistic. Oh, and she'd need a narrative reason to have been depressed in the first place. How about losing a foal? Perfect way to make her need Starlight more, too! Not exactly a healthy relationship, but what I really needed was an ironclad excuse for them to stick together, and if Starlight got too much stability in her northern life, there wouldn't be a story and I couldn't have that.

Rewind to when I was talking about Chrysalis. Who's the most vulnerable member of my party? What kind of phobia or flaw does she have that I can exploit to make her, in a moment of weakness, do the wrong thing?

Yep. Poor old Maple and her fear of creating offspring. Crystal, I decided, would be with foal, and Maple would chicken out at the moment of truth because she had a bad history with that.

Which finally brings us full circle, back to White Chocolate. She was important as a plot device, for Kero's plan and for Willow's character arc, but what about her character arc? I had just decided I didn't like writing her around moon glass. And, you know, she was pregnant, and I can't let the audience forget about this one character trait that literally everything bad will hinge on a million words from now...

And that's how White Chocolate became the character who harassed and triggered Maple, completely by accident, every single time she appeared from then on out. But it is not, however, the end of the story.

Because that's the tale of what I was going to do. There's a whole 'nother side to why I changed my mind.

Remember that rough draft? I didn't start writing it with the intent of practicing for a daily. I started writing it, very much not a daily, with the intent of pre-writing some stuff so I could edit it before I posted it. It was going to be big, epic, a fabulous grand masterpiece spanning every imaginable genre that switched premises like changing lights on a disco floor, mashing every different idea I wanted to use into a single jumbled-up snarl. You know. The same stuff every new writer wants. Why, the Ironridge arc would just be the beginning! I'd make it an Equestria Girls crossover, and have Tirek be a business mogul, and there would be a metropolitan college arc in Starlight's backstory where she would date Countess Coloratura, and I had a big fancy cosmology that only Discord could comprehend that was based on quaternions and three round axes of supernatural opposites, and I'd certainly throw in all my favorite ships, but of course in order to keep all the stuff manageable and concise I couldn't have too much overlap between the arcs because their concepts were so different so I'd just kill off every non-shipped character at the end of each of them and wait what do you mean that sounds like a horrible train wreck?

When I did turn that draft into a daily, I didn't really know what I was doing. Skirts had just posted his 2012 blog, other writers were trying dailies, I was beginning to feel a bit of fatigue with my current writing and wondering where I was going with it and if my plans were worth anything at all. Didn't help that the story I did just publish had completely bombed (and deservedly, too. It was awful). At first, I tried to daily because I knew if I didn't make myself write, I would just give up and never start again.

Very quickly, I became exhausted with my old plans, but kind of liked the Ironridge setting I had sunk two months of brainstorming into. So, around the point where Starlight passes the Water District dam (I was already planning to blow that up) on her first trip to the Stone District, I completely and utterly excised all traces of the previous monstrosity and pretended they didn't exist. All plans for the future? Kaput. All cosmology? Temporarily irrelevant. Sunset and Twilight, who had been time-traveling to spy on and learn about Starlight's past, and were actually the PoV characters and madly in lesbians because clearly that would make Glimglam's history more compelling? One day they just didn't exist.

Only Ironridge. No plans. I wrote because I could.

And, you know, I became real attached to the setting and certain characters coughValeycough and decided hey, maybe when I was done I'd go back and rewrite the intro and publish it as a standalone thing. Except instead of just redoing Riverfall and the first few chapters of Ironridge and stopping there, I rewrote the entire thing, and here we are today.

The reason all this matters is because for a very long time, I was pointedly not thinking about the future. After Ironridge? No plans. Well, except for my old plans, about how Starlight and her friends would eventually infiltrate a secret lab under Prince Blueblood's countryside estate where he was researching draconequui and all of Starlight's friends would dramatically drown in a trap and she would steal their cutie marks to keep a part of them with her, of course, but I wasn't seriously considering doing that. It just stayed there because I had no other plans to replace it. Kind of like how if you're painting a mural over top of an existing one, you've still got the parts of the old one up until they're replaced with something new. That's how plans sit in my brain: deprecated, sure, but still there.

I had no idea how I was going to end The Olden World. When I started publishing for real, I had only just decided that Act 3 was going to be about Chrysalis, in the east. Hadn't even thought of sphinxes yet. And Act 3 took up all of my planning capacity that wasn't spent on Ironridge, as though it actually was the end of the story. After that? Nothing. And so Starlight's friends dying like redshirts stayed on as the best I had.

Let's come back to Chrysalis and White Chocolate. Ultimately, this was the reason I was okay with doing that to Maple, letting her feel responsibility for the genocide of the east's sarosians and everything else Chrysalis might do. I wasn't actively thinking about murdering all of Starlight's friends to turn her into the pony she was in the show, but I didn't have any better ideas and that meant I didn't have an ending planned for Maple's character arc and that meant I didn't need to concern myself with not doing irreparable damage to her psyche because what was I planning that needed me to repair it? I had no reason to spare her, and could go drama mining instead.

After Ironridge, I stalled for a while in Riverfall so my plans for Act 3 could congeal a little more, and then I began Act 3 in earnest. And now that Act 2 was completely done and dusted, I had a little space free in my brain to work on the ending. Surely what I wanted to do would become obvious with just a little thought, right?

"Aha," I cackled one day, "I know! I'll let Starlight be hunted by a relentless killer whose name rhymes with Bell, who will catch up right at the end and destroy her last budding hope of a normal life, and kill all her precious friends to explain why they're missing in the present day, too!"

On second thought? Nope.

"I've got it now," I mused a day later, twirling my mustache and rubbing my chin. "Instead of killing her friends, they'll all survive, but he'll still trash her hopes of settling down and maybe all of Sires' Hollow while he's at it! Then Starlight will continue her travels and I'll start a new plot arc in the sequel! Nyeh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heeeeeeh! For bonus points, that'll happen in the stormy remote mountain seaside fishing and farming hometown of the cast's resident adopted prodigy unicorn filly at the end of book-sized act number four. Heh."

Real original, chief.

But, that's what settled in as my plan. It let me start planning out Starlight's abilities in the name of a real cool final battle (I'd been doing that for a while, just didn't know against who or why). It let me not worry about drawing anyone's character arc to a close, and thus be okay with having no idea what to do with Maple post-Chrysalis. It let me keep cooking up stuff in the distant background for Varsidel and Yakyakistan, because I'd totally go visit those in the sequel (this was still planned as the ending of TOW). Leave it to the sequel to figure out how to actually end stuff and make Starlight into her present-day despotic lil' self. Oh, and it would be a trilogy, of course, because who am I kidding? Of course all this is setting up for a continuation in the present.

Three books, four acts each? An even twelve! Perfect! No one has ever thought of this before, and I'll never get tired of dailying before I've written them all. Why, I'd already finished the first two! That was a whole sixth of the way there!

A cool million words of Griffon Empire did a lot to change my mind.

Not actually about getting tired, though! No, what it convinced me of was that I could not, in fact, keep the character arcs of all of Starlight's friends going for a cool three times again what I had already done. They'd get finished. Burned out. Stale. Even if I didn't run out of plot twists, I'd run out of abilities to keep my ponies fresh. I had a large, gradual mindset shift away from perpetual continuation and toward giving these characters endings they deserved, and that I deserved to give them for carrying them so far.

Out of that mindset was born Act 4, a three-step sequence of recovery between the trauma of Chrysalis and the final boss of Gazelle. And once I started thinking about building my characters back up so they could be their best selves to face the end, I started thinking about what I wanted to rebuild them from.

I had never approached the Chrysalis fight from that angle before. And looking at it like that, I couldn't figure out anything I would gain for Maple's path by putting Chrysalis on her shoulders. That phobia of hers, I had written and let her struggle with for long enough already, and aside from it being slightly uncomfortable subject matter, I had absolutely no ideas for how to resolve it beyond her just... learning to live with it. You know, like real people do, because silver bullets to erase emotional scars only exist in Starlight's dreams. And this was an answer that wouldn't change at all whether I made her abandon Crystal or not.

And so I didn't. Instead, Gazelle got the honors of finally pushing her over the edge. But that decision, to drop a plot thread I had been planning for one and a half million words, was a big enough one that I still decided to pay it homage, and even wrote the chapter and scene where Maple would have done it, just because. This one, right here.

Maple's face creased in a shadow of grief. "Yes. I'm not comfortable with it. I know I have issues with this, that I..." She swallowed. "But I should have dealt with them by now. It probably wouldn't be good for me to have someone like that around, but at the same time, if me not dealing with my problems causes us to fail to help someone who needs it and we could otherwise..."

Valey slowly nodded. "Yep. That's why I'm kinda voting no, even if everything else about this was perfectly safe. So if we do bail, it's not your decision."

The rest of the room held still as the two mares watched each other. "That's not how it works." Maple shook her head. "If you're doing it for my sake, even if it's not me making the decision, you'd be letting her down because of me. And besides, I feel for her. Knowing what it feels like to forcibly lose a child who is the only grounding in your life..." She winced. "And this Crystal has had months to see it coming. It must have ruined her. We need to help her. I need to."

There it is. In a crueler existence, Maple could have said no, and then blamed herself until her dying day a few months after. And White Chocolate's role as a character was, for the full duration of her presence in the story, to goad Maple into that no.


This has been a hopefully-interesting deep dive into the thought process of planning a daily and just how zany the reasons for some things can be with Professor Czar, retired dailyist who still hasn't learned his lesson and is back to writing long stories with no end in sight (though I've got one planned this time, I promise!). One more interesting White Chocolate fact before I go: in the rough draft, she was a much more mature and steady presence, with only a small number of kids (no Jamjars) who helped some of the protagonists get their heads on straight, then was left behind as our intrepid heroes moved on to bigger and better things. Sound familiar?

If it does, it's because I liked her enough that I brought her back earlier in the published version, renamed to Willow to fit Riverfall naming convention. Then I re-added White Chocolate because I still wanted her for Ironridge, and just made her someone different. Which is the real reason they look identical; I couldn't be bothered to change either's appearance. The more you know!

Report Czar_Yoshi · 385 views · Story: The Olden World ·
Comments ( 8 )

That story was so damn long that there sure are tons of characters I forgot about, but this train wrack of a mare from her Gnarlbough hobbit hole sure ain't one them :)
Quite some interesting sight behind the curtain into what all went into this epic story.
I wonder if we will ever meet her again in TID.

No Jamjars you say? I think that rough draft was really on to something…

Anyways, it is really cool to see your thought process behind this and how the story formed. Thanks for sharing!

Theres so much adventure in TOW that I wanna read it again.

really interesting seeing how the final published item compares to what is written here - especially about starlight originally being an adult

Can't believe there was no Jamjars originally - she's one of my favourite characters!

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Jamjars was completely, 100% unplanned. I was just throwing character concepts at a wall and seeing what stuck, trying to fill out WC's family a bit so her kids weren't conspicuously absent, and lo and behold, I liked her and decided she could fill a unique role in the story as Starlight's rival and contemporary, and brought her back.

Kind of ironic when you consider the massive, in-depth planning history her mother is tied into, but that's just how it be.

5634140
So what point did you decide she would stick around - was is genuinely not until she actually appeared in the published work?

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I was more or less always planning to use the evacuation arc as a way to keep WC somewhere near the protagonists so she could stick around for the return to Riverfall, so Jamjars was contractually obligated to appear there again. Keeping her around permanently didn't get decided until after the chapter where she and Starlight talk during the walk back from Gnarlbough to Grand Acorn, at the start of that arc. So it wasn't only until she appeared, it was until her second appearance.

Of course, I entertained the idea since her first appearance, which was on the day I created her. Just didn't decide until then. The travel chapter was kind of like me deliberately giving her an audition.

This is all so interesting! I was particularly amused by the reasoning for Willow and WC's resemblance. That, and the fact that TOW was apparently originally even sadder, which I'm going to thank you for changing...

And, you know, I became real attached to the setting and certain characters coughValeycough and decided hey, maybe when I was done I'd go back and rewrite the intro and publish it as a standalone thing.

It's funny, and very sweet, to know that everyone's favorite character is just as dear to the author.

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