Behind the Story: Zephyrina/Zipp

Wow? Sinbin? This is probably the single best reaction I’ve gotten on any story I’ve ever written. I remember when I was excited to get 50 views on a piece, and now I’ve hit Sinbin, so thanks to everyone who contributed to that goal! I can check that one off my FiMFic bucket list.

I find this funny mainly because this story was written out of a place of disappointment.

I came up with this idea while grinding away at Me and Poppy for the majority of February. I’ve had talks several times on my Discord servers about my absolute impossibility to gain a lot of traction with the stories I write. Sure, they hit popular, but they hardly ever break a hundred views and very few people seem to actually like them.

In several of these talks, we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t my writing that was the problem, it was the fact that I only wrote OCs. OCs are my main mode of storytelling, but it turns out that OCs exclusively aren’t a tag people click on much when it comes to one-shots. So, as I was working on Me and Poppy (a story I loved writing very much but also wasn’t very popular), I figured that my next story was going to be about a canon character.

I wanted to write about another headcanon I really enjoyed having, not unlike my Lil’ Cheese story. However, I hoped that this story would go down better than that uniquely terrible mess.

This headcanon was the trans Zipp headcanon (or Tripp). When I heard Liza Koshey’s voice for her, the only thing I could think of was Zipp being transfemme. It’s the type of trans girl who really is just trying her best to not sound like a guy and we all love her for it.

But another notable thing about Zipp is that, in case you didn't notice, she isn’t really ‘feminine’. It’s for this reason that I feel a lot of the Tripp subscribers headcanon her as transmasc instead.

However, having had plenty of struggles with not feeling ‘feminine’ enough to be a trans girl, and also knowing Bicyclette who is practically a butch trans lesbian, made me feel like writing a story about how Zipp didn’t have to be feminine to be a girl. I felt like that was a message that could help a lot of people.

Compared to me spending a painfully long time writing and fine-tuning Me and Poppy, which was a story which had a heavy message and was more focused on plot, I just felt like I owed myself some plotless fluff.

While the three days I spent writing Zephyrina/Zipp pale in comparison to the 5+ I spent on Me and Poppy (I cannot emphasize how different these two stories are), I wrote what I wanted to write. Zipp looks in the mirror, wonders if she’s actually a mare, Pipp comes in to remind her about royal business, Pipp makes her feel better, and then profit.

It was a simple concept, and while I wondered if it would be seen as ‘too much filler’ (as it’s basically all dialogue) or that the ‘plot resolution’ was too short, that clearly wasn’t an issue.

In fact, the biggest challenge I had while writing this story is getting Zipp and Pipp’s character right. So, I threw in some little words that'd make Zipp’s brainer side come out, and imply that she’s been thinking about this a long time (“what if my calculations were wrong”). In addition, I made her very up-front with her honesty portrayed in the movie by being vocally against the royal tradition. For Pipp, I decided that because the movie gave her about as much depth as the kiddie end of the local pool, any personality revolving around social media would be acceptable. So, I gave her a personality more akin to a slightly spoiled teenager who had just discovered social media. Given that this story takes place before Sunny fixed the world, it was a believable trait.

I like to think that Pipp was like this before she was forced by Haven to be a teen idol (that’s a different headcanon, I have a semblance of a story unfinished that follows that) and make Zephyr Heights look good.

After that was all ironed out, it was just a matter of writing whatever I wanted to, and it turned out pretty decently. Nothing I’ll hang on my wall or anything, but pretty good.

As for the title, I chose it to show the double life Zipp saw herself leading. She thought she’d be Zephyrina, but instead, she turned out to be Zipp, and she’s having trouble figuring out which is correct.

Aside from my normal influences, there were no big ones here, just a couple of my other plotless fluff stories like Orion.

And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie