) so I had to wait until it passed. Thankfully, it has, and my next one-shot story is planned to be out on either Friday or the weekend.Director's cut: Princess Cadance, The Shipper · 4:26pm Feb 8th, 2022
Like my Who is Santa Claus? Story, the premise for Princess Cadance, The Shipper was a request as part of a three-year special I had last December. I had some trouble trying to think of how to handle this story, however, and was unsure about having it either be meta and actually reference Fanfiction.net or not.
My first thought was to bring Fanfiction.net into the story, before later deciding to have it be Princess Luna that wrote the stories. The story’s first draft even had Princess Cadance stumble across a computer and a manual was beside it, explaining what the computer was and how it worked, since computers didn’t exist, just like in canon. The manual wasn’t going to be there arbitrary; it, as well as the computer itself, was sent by Discord as a joke.
I also had a bit of trouble trying to choose which of the many ships to have Cadance trying to make happen. LyraBon was an easy pick, but the others weren't as immediate a choice. Surprisingly, being a Starburst shipper myself, having Starburst as one of the ships wasn’t as easy a choice; I was torn between using that and Startrix. This is partly why I ended up using both, as well as thinking it could add a laugh by having a moment of Trixie being jealous since she legitimately had a crush on Starlight.
However, even Cadance being unsure of whom to pair Twilight Sparkle with was partly due to me being unsure. Twilight is possibly the single most shipped character in the show; she’s been shipped with just about anybody. In fact, if you can name a canon, non-background character she’s never been paired with in a fanfic, you will win a fabulous prize.
As for noteworthy cuts and edits I almost bring up in this “Director’s cut” blogs, I already mentioned a big one, where I changed how Cadance found the stories and who wrote them.
Another change was that Shining Armor was going to find Cadance in Ponyville and order her to explain what was going on. He said that his “Your wife is abusing her power” sense told him she was up to something. I later took him out when I thought he was needed.
A third change was to what Discord said when he “dropped” in. He told Cadance “If you ever get ponynapped again, I am not saving your flank, even if Fluttershy begs me to” since he knew everything was her doing. Partly since he would save her if Fluttershy begged him to, I edited to him just saying that he thought love hates him by how he took a heavy pounding from “Love Overload”. Speaking of which, I didn’t have the term “Love Overload” in the story originally, but I added it in during editing.
A fourth change was about the final scene with Celestia and Luna. It wasn’t there at all, but once I decided that the stories Cadance read were written by Luna, I added the scene to reveal it.
And finally, one last edit was due after a comment pointed it out. Because it is normally unicorns that turn into alicorns in stories it was mentioned in the story that she’d lose her wings if her alicorn status was reversed. However, it slipped my mind that Cadance was, apparently, a pegasus originally, so she’d keep her wings regardless. What’s even worse is that she even said that she’d be turned back into a pegasus if Celestia got mad at her for her tactics in the story, and my mistake still slipped during editing! I rarely let mistakes that bad slip during editing, and it was embarrassing that I did.
At least I was sensing that something wasn’t right even after I was done editing, but I just didn’t know what.
And on a closing note, I don’t actually have a fabulous prize.
Is the prize a lie than?
Judging by Twilights machine in feeling pinkie keen I think computers do exist but they arent like our current ones
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It was more of a joke than a lie.
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It wasn't much like a computer though. It had some functions that might be added to a computer to help with further analysis or the like, but it wasn't anything like a laptop or desktop itself since it didn't even have a monitor. Twilight's machine seemed to be somewhat like an EEG or ECG/EKG machine, but without any monitors.
How Twilight was baffled with how to work CHS's computers in the first EQG movie points to computers not being a thing in Equestria, unless they are very different to ours (like you theorize) to the point that they are more something else entirely. Or at the very least, they have nothing like the internet. They do have video games, which is something I actually didn't know for a while.
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I always thought they did have computers but those big bulky ones that filled up rooms like we used to have.
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Hmm. Thinking about it, Equestria may have computers or something computer-like, but just not anything like a desktop or laptop, and definitely no internet.
Some stories do have Equestria have desktops/laptops if the story wouldn't work without them, so I would have gone that route too if I had no other choice and couldn't use the EQG world as the story's setting. Or if I just didn't want to (I.e. if I wanted to use Equestrian Twilight over Sci-Twi, and the story wouldn't work if pony Twilight was in the EQG world for whatever happened).