I’ve Been on this Site for a While · 7:24pm Apr 9th, 2022
This is my fourth year of being on FiMFiction. This may not seem like a big deal, but when most of your friends have younger accounts than you, you start to feel like an older presence.
I also have 99 blog posts, and I wanted to do something special for my 100th. I know 100 blog posts don’t mean much, but all FiMFiction numbers are arbitrary, really, and I wanted to discuss this.
So, with all the time I’ve spent here, (you know I’ve been on FiMFiction for almost a third of the MLP fandom’s lifespan?) I decided to create a blog cataloging my journey on FiMFiction, at least as best I could.
The story starts in 2018. You may be asking what brought me on FiMFiction, whether it was the pony fandom, some of my favorite stories, or something akin to that.
Well, let’s talk about DragonForce.
DragonForce is a Power Metal band who is well-known for their song Through the Fire and Flames. I used to absolutely love their music. I thought they were the coolest thing since sliced bread, I used to scour the internet for any fact I could find about them. I thought they were the most skilled band ever. Now, of course, I know that skill isn’t just playing as many notes as possible and making it sound cool, but DragonForce’s music still has a special place in my heart.
So, I found a picture which showed the band as ponies, and I thought it was so cool and that it would make a great story. It would be the story to put myself on the FiMFiction map, gain a lot of followers incredibly quickly.
So, I wrote a amateurish fic about a niche Metal band. Wonder why my ploy didn’t work.
So, my first story I ever wrote was called StallionForce. It was sort of a ponified history of what I thought would be cool to portray DragonForce’s history as. Nowadays, you can’t read the story, as it has been deleted forever. For those that can’t see it, the story was split up into years, and you’d see their lineup changes and whatnot over time.
It didn’t do much. But, what it did do was make me very interested in writing stories based off of music. So, after I discovered Piano Man and started loving the imagery the song painted, my next story was going to be based off the song.
The Piano Mare was a valiant first attempt at a simple SoL story, one of the things that’d become my trademark. It got bigger than StallionForce did, and I remember riding the high of those two likes I got, thinking it was the best thing ever.
Overall, the story really only started me on a path of stories based on songs, and thus enters the first era of my writing.
Dashie04: Song Story Era
My third story is Turning Pages, a story that’s actually really well-written until my songwriting screwed it over.
Turning Pages solidified one of my favorite tones to write in: loneliness and solitude. The idea of just stepping out, and examining the world. The idea that someone could have a life just as meaningful as yours.
Unfortunately, it also started the trend of my favorite stories never being my most popular. Turning Pages remains to this day one of the least viewed stories from my late 2018-early 2019 collection.
After that, I was driven by one of my favorite games, and a game I still play often to this day, Rock Band 4, to write my first crossover. It also remains one of my only crossovers to gain footing, but after grinding it out to diminishing returns, I cancelled it.
While one of my least necessary stories from this era, Rockin’ On did start off my obsession with naming chapters after songs. I still love naming chapters after songs, and it’s probably the only reason I read Fallout: Equestria - Make Love Not War (though that story is very good regardless).
Next was a rewrite of StallionForce which accomplished practically nothing. However, my next story was going to change a lot.
Orion followed. Orion was a lot of things. It was my first story based on no preexisting template, my first story which had canon characters in it, and my first foray into Scootalove.
And it blew up.
It wouldn’t blow up, but inspired by FabulousDivaRarity (my absolute biggest influence if you want me to repeat that yet again), I decided that I wanted to write fluff. The story hit a number of views which was huge for me then, I don’t remember the exact number, but I felt like I was king of the world right then (yes, I mean king, we’ll get to that).
Orion was a teaser of things to come, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was entering 2019 with a story I very much enjoyed becoming a story that people didn’t hate, and that’s all that mattered to me then.
After this story, I naturally returned to writing song stories again. Seasons only taught me that romance isn’t my genre, and I moved on. Some of my better writing at the time, but I tried to tie it into StallionForce, and that probably wasn’t the way to go. Then, I decided to get ambitious, at least what seemed ambitious to 14-year old me.
Trench is a fantastic album. It solidified my love for concept albums, and I decided to write a story based on the concept.
It was my first album story. Loosely based off Trench by Twenty One Pilots, it follows a batpony named Prancey as he tries to fight against the system. That certainly won’t come back to my stories later.
This story is notable for being my first chapter story I walked in with an intent to finish, and I finished it. I was proud of what I’d created, so I decided I’d write some more chapter stories in the future.
Trench also contained my first LGBT+ character in one of my stories, Wingless. I came to really love her, and even added her to my OCs for a bit. The story says she’s ace, but 14-year old me didn’t know the difference between asexuality and aromanticism. She was always intended to be ace/aro. I feel like I could’ve portrayed her better, but she still was an LGBT+ character in one of my stories. That certainly won’t become a theme either.
But Trench at the time was just another song story, but in time, those themes would come back.
Anyways, next up… next… I’m gonna have to talk about it.
Hurt is a smoldering garbage fire of a story and I didn’t know what was going through my mind when I wrote it. I’ve never felt comfortable writing Twilight, so not only did I write Twilight, I wrote Twilight in a song story based off a work of art that utilizes one of the most overused tropes in 2020. Ahead of its time is not an excuse when it comes to clichés.
Twilight is horribly OOC, and I decided that writing something I had no experience in (depression) was a fantastic idea for a story. Not to mention, I based it off of one of the most powerful songs to ever exist, Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt, and thought that my story could do it justice.
It didn’t work.
Hurt has since gone on to become my most viewed story of all time, for a long time. All I can say is thank Celestia it wasn’t featured.
As for what it actually did to my writing career? Hell if I know. It really only began a minor slump of stories that I had too ambitious of a concept for that all ended up not really accomplishing anything.
The first of these stories was The Shad0Ws Inside, which had a great concept. DJ Shad0W is a popular DJ who plays bars and sells them out, but he’s actually incredibly lonely, and never really feels like he’s amounting to much. Great concept. No idea how to continue it. Ended up leaving it behind. Although, this was notably my first chapter story concept to not be based on a preexisting template, which I feel is an achievement in itself.
Story after that was Equestrian Idiot, which was just too biased for anybody to read. At least American Idiot is catchy so you don’t feel like it’s preaching to you constantly. The funny thing is that at the time, I didn’t even share those views. I could probably do better now, but it’s a mess right now.
If Equestrian Idiot did one thing, it’s that it got me interested in Green Day, and that would be coming back.
The next story, though, is probably one of my most important stories when it comes to how I write.
The Endless Cycle was my first story based on an abstract concept. How does one conceptualize an ‘endless cycle’ and a ‘bagel of life’? I wouldn’t say that this story is the start of what I like to call my style, ‘concept-based writing’. Where I think that a story can be well written; but if you have an interesting concept, it better get that concept across first and foremost. However, The Endless Cycle did kick off a very important development.
First off, the story went over incredibly well. Two authors I very much enjoyed at the time, FabulousDivaRarity and ZombieDice, both commented on the story, saying how much they liked it, and I was on cloud nine.
The story made sandbox, the story became my most liked story in a matter of an hour or two, and most importantly, it was simple SoL.
Remember way back in the Orion section, I talked about how simple SoL went over well but I ignored it. Well, The Endless Cycle basically yelled that so loud I couldn’t ignore it.
However, what the story taught to me the most was that people wanted to read what I thought about and what I wanted to write, and that broadening my horizons was probably a good idea.
Thus, era 2 begins.
Dashie04: The SoL Saga
Let me tell you, when I say SoL, I mean SoL, distilled to its rawest, most literal meaning. Most of my stories that came out in the next year were literally stories about everyday occurrences, barring a few, and even then, still had signs of it (barring one exception).
So we start off with… The Great Equestrian Journey, which isn’t really a SoL story. However, I feel like it still fits the SoL mold. Inspired by GeoWizard’s straight line missions, it follows an average pony doing something he’s interested in. It also marks my first foray into comedy, which would not be something I’d be returning to. However, it’s something that I’d be taking influence from for a couple of my later stories.
After that, it was followed with one of my stronger stories, Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. Heavily influenced from a moment in my own life, I feel like this story is when I started focusing more on concept. The concept was simple, a young colt’s grandfather dies from a heart attack, and he has to take solace in what he and his grandfather enjoyed, to keep his memory alive.
I may not have thought about it at the time, but it’s painfully obvious to me now that that colt was supposed to be me (yes, colt, we’ll get there). It’s how I would’ve reacted if my grandfather had died around that time. We didn’t have any particular spot on the dock or anything, but we liked each other. We had things we’d occasionally do together, and I feel like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay was my way of showing that in the story.
It definitely started the phase of my writing career when I started focusing on the concept of a story, but not quite when I started to see myself as an artist.
Unfortunately, the story didn’t do very well, but I kept on going.
Fallout Equestria: 21st Century Breakdown was far too ambitious of a concept to last. Nothing in the story is really bad, persay, but writing a story inspired by one of your favorite albums that is slated to take place over a timeframe of 50 years? A bit ambitious. If I ever try and hit this story again, I’m breaking it up into decades.
Now, FOE:21CB wasn’t a SoL story. It didn’t even follow an ordinary guy really. It was about ponies trying to rebel against the system. It’s an exception to this little era of mine.
However, FOE:21CB continued that drive for concept, and it also kept my fire for FO:E alive, which would come back rather soon in a different form. It did terribly, but I was still pushing onwards.
A Series of Letters was written in a month. It shows. However, A Series of Letters is about a soldier and his wife, mainly at least. It’s about two ordinary ponies, their lives, and their children. It’s very family-centric, which would make it the first of its kind when it came to my stories.
It contained another LGBT+ character as well, Sparky, who is a lesbian. It was just a little teaser of what was to come.
However, another thing that A Series of Letters did, much subtler, was pioneer the way I write descriptions. The short description’s a hook, the long description’s a short description that’s paired with a hook. It’s a simple and effective way of doing descriptions, it having took me 2 years at this point to master it is besides the point. It would be the style that a lot of my future stories would have.
Then, I read The Beatle by CrackedInkWell and I suddenly got a very different concept.
There’s a movie called Yesterday. It’s a movie about a guy who wakes up in a world where The Beatles never existed, and he has to recreate all of those songs to the best of his ability. It’s a good movie, and the soundtrack is an absolute banger of an album if you can get your hands on it, but basically, The Beatle was this… but pony.
Ocellus wakes up and realizes that The (pony) Beatles never existed, but it turns out that Pull McCart (Paul McCartney) actually knows who they were, and endeavors to teach Ocellus about The (pony) Beatles’ music and get it all recreated. It’s a great story, and I highly recommend you read it. It got me into The Beatles, which is a pretty damn good feat by itself.
I realized that I wanted to do my own take on the concept as well, so, I wrote a story where the entirety of Rock is not present in the pony world, and somepony… okay, it’s an HiE. Somebody wakes up in Equestria and has to recreate all these songs he loves so much, being from a cover band background.
I had a plan for this story, just haven’t gotten around to writing it. Also, I have a much more ambitious Rock history idea planned, and coming along… very slowly.
Reinventing Music did become very popular very quickly however, which was quite a positive thing to me after a couple weak showings.
However, what Reinventing Music did for me as a writer, despite getting me even deeper into music, is that it showed me how to touch up my stories with a little bit of humor. I’m still particularly fond of the joke where Mercury calls O Brother Where Art Thou the “movie companion” to one of the greatest albums of music history, implying that he holds the soundtrack album in higher regard than the film.
Reinventing Music also told me that I shouldn’t discount music stories just yet, but that’s a secret tool we’ll save for later. While it wasn’t a very SoL sort of story, this is still filtered by era, and this one doesn’t deserve it’s own category, so it’s here.
Anyways, I went to a birthday party after Reinventing Music came out. I’d broken my toe, a few of my friends were there, thought about leaning on my crutch and saying, “hey guys,” to introduce myself, and then I returned home and wrote the craziest story of my profile.
I say crazy because it has underwent many changes… while the story was up and published. I rewrote a one-shot, basically.
But before we get to that, let’s talk about a good friend of mine.
If you follow me, you’ve probably heard of gender questioning, or at the very least, gender dysphoria. Dysphoria is a mismatch between who you think you are and who you want to be. But that’s not what really drove this story.
Gender questioning is the act of asking yourself if you’re really happy adhering to what you were assigned at birth. It was around the time I wrote The Meeting Place that the questioning I’d been feeling for so long (‘you can’t be dysphoric if you tell yourself this is how you’re supposed to feel) came to a head.
If you read the original story of The Meeting Place, you would’ve wanted to make omelettes. The character based off me preferred to go by Sunny, because I didn’t feel a close enough connection to my ponysona (Athen, and he was well-defined at this point), wore eyeliner, dyed his hair, and even outwardly joked that ‘he didn’t know if he was straight’, when I felt like I was 100% straight.
The other characters were all based on friends, two of which I haven’t contacted much since then, one of which I haven’t tracked down yet.
The Meeting Place would later undergo a rehaul in which I realized that Sunny was an egg, decided to crack her shell, change nothing about the picture or description, and something which I hoped people would just stumble into.
The Meeting Place was the first manifestation of gender stuff in my stories, something which would become much, much more prominent very soon.
I was still on the war train, so I wrote The Friendship House. Not one of my more necessary stories, and while I was planning to make the Great Equestrian War its own canon, that didn’t really come to fruition. I didn’t have any ideas at the time and I still don’t.
It was after The Friendship House when I took a long break away from the MLP community as a whole. My presence on the site waned, and my stories would start to fly under the radar. I participated in an RP as a female character, and that RP inspired my next story.
I created Jessica, sort of inspired by the DQVIII character. My current romantic partner created Aspen, her cell mate. Aspen loved old country, much to the annoyance of Jessica who was more of a Rock gal. One of these songs was Neon Moon, which is a beautiful song. So, I decided to revisit my roots, and write a song story.
Neon Moon leaned heavily into the solidarity angle that I’d established with my other stories like The Shad0Ws Within. It was established to such a degree that it became one of my favorite tones to write in, and Neon Moon became one of my favorite stories, with music references weaved in seemlessly because they just worked.
My song stories were coming back, and I feel like Neon Moon perfected the craft. Not only that, but it inspired me to add song stories back into my repertoire.
But then, you know that gender stuff I discussed? It’s back, and it says hi. I realized I was a girl that August.
The Drumming Pegasus was the first appearance of Reinn in a story. Athen appeared in Rockin’ On, and while canonically, the two are the same character, Rockin’ On and The Drumming Pegasus are not the same canon.
Reinn was a transmare, and because I didn’t feel like writing a story about being trans yet, The Drumming Pegasus follows a scatterbrained Reinn as she recounts her cutie mark story. It was one of the best characters I feel like I wrote, and I felt such an intense kinship with her that it was absolutely one of the funnest stories to write.
The Drumming Pegasus didn’t say Reinn was trans outright, but Reinn being the character she was pretty much all but stated it in the story. This drew the attention of a particular commentator, who would soon become very important to me.
Now, when I say I haven’t made a lot of friends on FiMFiction, I mean it. Most of my friends are through Discord or Fandom. However, there is one person I can outwardly state I made friends with, and that’s Faera Mossgarden. She first commented on The Drumming Pegasus saying that she enjoyed the story, and was starting to ‘accept the trans field’ so to speak. She did follow me, but that was out last interaction for a while.
Now, I’m going to ruin this whole chronological setup to say that I was browsing the story again one day, and found out that Faera had changed her name to, well, Faera, as opposed to her last account name. So, I did some digging, found out that she had fully accepted the trans field, and happily said ‘hi’ and congratulated her on finding herself.
This began a friendship that I’d say continues to this day. We don’t talk much, but I do want to help Faera on her path any way I can figure out how. The kinship I felt when seeing another trans person was pretty strong. I’m not going to say that Faera inspired my sudden burst of trans story writing, but I do think she drove it forward.
But after I wrote The Drumming Pegasus, all this hadn’t happened yet, and I began a long stretch away from pony. I suppose that the diminishing returns on my stories was starting to take its toll, and I moved over to the Authors’ Academy wiki, to write orignal, conceptual fiction.
While it would take some time to make itself known on my FiMFiction space, AA is definitely where I learned to appreciate unique concepts. While the wiki isn’t very active, it’s still around, and I help moderate it.
So, close to a year after The Drumming Pegasus, I felt my career was nearing its end. Then, Twenty One Pilots released another album.
Dashie04: The Transition Period
Scaled and Icy is a fantastic album. It solidified my love for Trench and the lore behind Scaled and Icy is very interesting.
Scaled and Icy is based on the world from Trench, Dema. However, the album is meant to be a ton of propaganda from the Nine Bishops, even with the anagram of ‘Scaled and Icy’ being ‘Clancy is Dead’. However, the last two songs are implied to be the rebels overriding the software, and Twenty One Pilots have teased a sequel to Scaled and Icy based in the same world.
While the album was divisive for being very poppy, I personally loved it a lot, and decided to come out of hibernation to write another song story.
It was a sequel to Trench, with Prancey trying to figure out how to take care of Trench after Wingless’ death. A lot happens, and the story sort of moves at a breakneck pace, but it was overall a story based around my new approach, technical ability. Scaled and Icy is written very well, but it doesn’t quite have the same emotional core as my other stories I’d written to that point. It has its moments, and a decently written action scene, but it was a little different.
I was back, but I felt like I needed some emotion.
For You… was my second attempt at writing Scootalove. I don’t know where the idea scratched at my brain, but I had an idea of writing a story with an emotional core.
For You… ended up being about Scootaloo trying to get over the death of the other CMC. It was a sweet little story, and I wanted to write better Scootalove than Orion. In the end, it ended up that Scootalove hadn’t changed in popularity over three years, because the story did really well. A welcome change after Scaled and Icy did record low numbers.
I have to admit, no matter how much I say I write because I enjoy it, I am human. My stupid human brain likes attention. It’s something I had to learn how to admit to myself to write more. While I write stories because I enjoy them, I also write stories because people enjoy my stories. I’m not going to pretend I don’t like the attention.
For You… did really well, the story that started my permanent residence in the popular box when I upload. So, I decided that writing more stories was paramount. Thus, began my most active period of time on FiMFiction, the summer of 2021.
My first story was going to be another song story based around an album. I wrote Equestrian Idiot because nobody had finished an American Idiot story yet, and The Nightmare Procession was written because nobody had finished a Black Parade story yet.
I used to do a blog series on Authors’ Academy, where I listened to legendary albums and I gave reviews on them. Naturally, I was going to cover The Black Parade at some point, and after I did, I realized that I’d love to write a story based on it.
Thus, The Nightmare Procession was born. It was my first time really messing with layouts, starting each chapter with a little selection of ‘song lyrics’ I wrote for the story proper. It was also slightly experimental, being that the character was talking directly to you, the reader. Both of those themes would start reappearing in my stories, and the experimental fervor this story held for me would eventually be replicated in at least three stories I haven’t uploaded yet. It also helped that The Nightmare Procession did very well, and it really made me want to write more.
I was dead set on finishing the story, but I eventually realized I wrote myself into a corner. So, the story joined the ranks of being unfinished. Meawhile, pride month was coming up, and there was a sitewide event.
Not Who I Thought I’d Be was something else. I came up with the idea after finding that I really liked the enby Lil’ Cheese headcanon, and wrote the concept out on a church bulletin in the dead of night while my sibling was at a softball party.
What I’d just written was a historical moment for me on many levels.
Not Who I Thought I’d Be was my first trans story, for one. It was my first story explicitly about gender issues, and not just having a transgender character as an aside or to make a point. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but boy, the comments sure thought about it a lot!
Not Who I Thought I’d Be was my first experience with reader outrage, while said outrage was mainly transphobes and people who completely misread this MtNB fic as MtF, it still put in a panic.
While Not Who I Thought I’d Be did really well, it became my most liked and most disliked story in a matter of hours, and the conversation held in the comments was awful. So, despite this story being so concurrent with my feelings, and something I really wanted to write, I was about ready to throw in the towel on my trans stories before they started taking off.
So, I decided to just move onto a concept I'd had for a while, hopefully to curb some of the reaction. I’d always wanted to write a story about the coffee shop in The Endless Cycle, and I had a long-standing idea writing about a story covering a business that builds itself up not unlike The Inn at the End of Equestria. So, I decided to combine the two.
At least, that was my concept. What followed was probably my most disastrous release. The prologue was trying too hard to be a history book, and made a better description than chapter, and the first chapter was lacking in real big moments.
The Butterfly Effect also seemed to prove that the massive popularity of my last few stories was a fluke. I quietly reshuffled the entire format and left it to die. If there’s one thing The Butterfly Effect did do for me, it’s that it was my first time writing siblings, and I wrote them reasonably well.
So, after that story failed, another idea inspired by Soul scratched at my brain. I think I was watching the La-Da-Dee pmv, and I thought about a story I’d read, Only Tree in the Forest, and decided that Golden Oaks was coming back.
A Single Seed was a big success. It once again reinstated that SoL style I’d developed. This stallion just liked Golden Oaks, and that was fine. It didn’t have to be complicated, but I wanted to tell the tale of a stallion who’d fight for what he’d believe in.
So, in an instant, after having to find myself, I was back to SoL. This was around the time when SoL became my ‘brand’. I talked myself up as being a SoL writer, even when that wasn’t necessarily the case.
But I still wanted experiments, I still wanted music, I still wanted emotion, and after finding Johnny Cash cover albums in the Half-Price Books bargain bin, I wanted to honor him better than Hurt had.
This manifested itself in his amazing cover of A Legend in My Time. That song is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard, and I decided I was going to make another song story right then. So, I created this entire character, this entire world, that starred one Cash Money.
A Legend in My Time was a passion project. A labor of love. I put thought into every review, every newpaper article, and created a This is Spinal Tap-esque story about his rise and fall, loosely based around the career of Johnny Cash.
It didn’t do very well, but for once, I didn’t care. The story’s a little clumsy, yes, but I put so much effort into it. A Legend in My Time served as a point where I started to really get into experimentation, writing stories I’d never seen before, in layouts I’d never thought about, with concepts I very much enjoyed. In addition, the story inspired another story I wrote later, albeit indirectly. Just keep the name ‘Celestia’s Lullaby’ in mind for later.
Driven by this new interesting concept phase, I came up with an ambitious idea. I wanted to write a story that was a satire of JRPGs. What came out of that was Twilight’s Quest, which was supposed to be a parody of JRPGs, I had entire ideas for this story, too. There was going to be an act 2 and everything. I didn’t end up writing much because my interests change quickly, and my particular sights landed on some of the more important moments of my 2021 tenure.
Twilight’s Quest didn’t end up doing much for me in the long run, but around this time, I joined Quills and Sofas. QnS is a writing server that’s well known for hosting speedwrites, but it’s also home to some of the best writers I know of. Bicyclette, AuroraDawn, Applejackofalltrades, The Red Parade, and so on and so forth.
I knew QnS existed for a long time beforehand, but I never felt like I was good enough of a writer to join. Every time I’d see a super cool story, it felt like it was always, ‘Written for QnS’, and as such, I really didn’t want to join without proving myself.
That July, July of 2021, I decided that I was going to take the step and joined. I wrote a terrible first showing, but assimilated myself in. QnS would provide writing support, and I’m still in it today, though I don’t release many stories from it to my profile.
But also, a little after Not Who I Thought I’d Be, B_25 mentioned me on stream. He voiced his support of the story in question, and said that I was a really promising writer who just wanted to express myself, and criticized the outraged comments in the same vein.
I believe it was also the same stream in which he mentioned that the best way to stick it to the haters was to show them that their words had no power over you.
It was at that moment that I felt like I had my first fan, after 3 years of writing. I felt like I had a fan, and the fan just so happened to be an incredibly prolific writer.
QnS and B_25’s words would soon intersect, but let me move on.
What Were They? was another attempt at writing comedy, for the pillar shipping contest. I tried to approach from the funny history angle in which historians can have a mountain of evidence implying same-sex relationships, but they’ll continue to state that ‘they were just friends’. The joke, of course, being that they can literally just ask these historical figures.
While it failed at being a particularly funny story, it further showed me that I really loved spicing things up with humor. I got the idea from The Red Parade in the QnS Discord server, and soon after they were going to have a contest.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of Vylet Pony. If not her, you’ve probably heard of Antonymph. Antonymph was the lead single to her album CUTIEMARKS, and she led the album with the tagline ‘sing a song about life’.
QnS had a contest based around that tagline, and the theme was transitions.
Taking into account B_25’s words, and an idea I had for a while. I figured it was about time to take the prompt literally.
Dashie04: The Transition Period.
Something About a Violet.
It’s a story that also stars Reinn. In The Drumming Pegasus, it’s implied that Reinn is asked about her transition by every single interviewer. So, Something About a Violet is her answer to the question. It’s a story that’s full of comedy, full of tangents, and just overall, well, starring Reinn. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s probably the most important story I’ve written for my development as a writer.
I took all the panic that I felt, all the disappointment that gender dysphoria gave me, and I molded it into a story that served as the antithesis to that. I molded it into something fun and jovial, that just so happened to be about a trans pony and her transition.
Something About a Violet was me finally turning to the haters that had made me so nervous to do something like Not Who I Thought I’d Be again, and staunchly giving them the finger. I was still branding myself as a SoL writer, but now, I had another trick up my sleeve. Trans stories.
Something About a Violet didn’t do very well, but it steadily grew, and ended up hitting popular two separate times. It gave me another story to write, and now, I was comfortable in writing it.
This carried over into my next story, another trans story, Sticky and Sweet, which dealt with the idea of chosen names generally being a good thing to call someone. It continued my obsession with trans stories, and again, transferred my gender euphoria into a digestible form.
It didn’t do much else besides, although it may have started my obsession with OCs. While Caramel isn’t really an OC, he might as well be. OCs would unfortunately plague my stories for a short bit after this one.
I still wanted to write song stories though, so I wrote The Castle Swing, another story based on an abstract concept, a ‘swing of life’. It didn’t do remarkably well, but while The Butterfly Effect first developed a sibling relationship, The Castle Swing made sure that siblings would be a theme in at least a few of my stories. It focuses on Celestia and Luna, and is inspired by the song Luna’s Swing.
One thing The Castle Swing did do was show that I really liked writing history, and that would be coming back.
Story of Us is a special story to me. It got second place in a QnS batpony contest, and was one of the stories that showed me I wasn’t really bad at writing, or at least that I was reasonably good at it. It’s also a story I did a lot of worldbuilding for, a lot of which I tied in real-world issues to, or at least real-world movements. Some people might hate that in their pony fic, but I actually like it.
It again showed my penchant for experimentation. Formatted like a journal written by Luna’s secretary, it really stuck out to me as having a truly unique concept.
QnS took over my next couple of stories A Collection of Speedwrites was merely an anthology. Shattered Dreams and Broken Wings was probably the story to note from there, as it really cemented my love for Scootaloo. Haven’t done much with her, but I still love her.
Two of Us was next, which was another story about Rock Stars. In this one, The totally-not-Beatles have a fight, and the pony Paul meets up with somepony who totally isn’t inspired by Moody Blues to get together with pony John and make another album.
It may sound ridiculous, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve never been one to hide my influences, and this story shows it nicely. It’s heavily inspired by Tangled Up in Blues, as with most of my stories, and that’s perfectly fine. While I definitely still like experimentation, sometimes, you can do something obviously derivative and make it really good with a great concept.
QnS also dictated my next story, but this one was different.
I had already written a good few trans stories before Raining. was released. However, one thing Raining. did differently was that it was an experiment, it was very autobiographical, and I also poured my heart into that one. While I’d previously tried to raise awareness of trans people and issues, Raining. was me raising awareness of mine.
The story didn’t do very well, but it came in first in the contest it was entered into, and it was something I was very happy with, and for those that saw it, it really affected them, if the comments are to go by.
Raining. marked the precise moment when I started seeing myself as a writer. I was proud of what I wrote, and I was glad that I was able to take the stress of being a trans girl in my everyday life and squish it into a story drenched in metaphor and meaning. I wanted to talk, and I said my piece.
My next story was another romance story (somehow I kept finding myself in these). Amethyst hasn’t really done much for me yet, so we’ll move on. It’s an alright story at best.
Now, I had set myself a goal to write a story monthly. At least one. The first planned story of this was The North Star which was once again me projecting myself into a character. I’m 17, and my birthday is coming like an approaching freight train. I’m terrified of growing up, mostly because I think I’m so close to becoming somebody who I don’t like. I’m unemployed, moody as hell sometimes, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached to me, and I feel like I haven’t really contributed much of anything in my irl life. I can’t just hide in ponies forever, as much as I want to, and I feel like suddenly being forced to grow up is going to be disastrous.
So, The North Star is about a pony who happens to be in the same predicament. Her parents died, and she was forced to grow up, her brother already had, she wasn’t prepared to. The North Star once again showed that siblings weren’t going to disappear from my stories, and it also continued the trend of me projecting onto OCs. It had a rock-solid concept, but alright execution.
My February story was Me and Poppy, which took an excruciatingly long time to write. This story is the moment I started to see myself as an artist. I found myself getting so attached to these characters that I wanted to make their story absolutely perfect. I wanted to touch up every little thing to show these mares interacting in a way that seemed natural. I wanted to craft the world stroke by stroke, line by line, and I felt like I was making something truly beautiful.
And you know Celestia’s Lullaby? Well, to memorialize another song story, I decided to write out every line of the folk song to try and make it sound natural, and showcase how much my lyricism had improved over the last 4 years. Me and Poppy reminded me that writing is as much of an art form as art, and I don’t have to be able to draw to be an artist.
It didn’t do very well, which gutted me, but I kept going. I was not going to write an OC story with how much effort I put into Me and Poppy with only middling response, so I channeled my favorite character.
Zephyrina/Zipp was not meant to be a smash hit. It was meant to be a fluffy trans story about two siblings being siblings as Zipp tried to alleviate some of her dysphoria. I just felt like I owed myself something cute.
Then I woke up on the 16th of March and saw that people loved the story. Then, I checked around noon to see my story in the sinbin and quickly becoming my most-liked story.
It had taken 4 years of pony fanfic, but I had finally hit sinbin.
Zephyrina/Zipp was such a smash that I finally realized what I was going to do on FiMFiction. So many of my followers were trans that I realized I felt like a voice for the first time. I felt like my goal was to flip off the haters, transphobes, etc., and just write what I wanted to. I want to write trans stories, so I should write trans stories. Representation is very necessary, and very needed. So, no matter how many times I get haters, or things that could be construed as death threats, I want to provide that representation, and Zephyrina/Zipp told me that.
That brings us to today. Looks Like the Fabric of Reality is Broken Again is an outlier and should not be counted. I value experimentation, representation, and music, and I feel like my FiMFiction catalog is representative of what I want to do.
For the art of writing, I want to do experiments. For my personal interests, I want to do music. For the trans FiMFiction community? I stand by all of you. Let’s bring out the representation.
And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie
This was a great read Dashie! It was really nice to hear about your writing history, and you really do have a way with words.
Thank you for sharing your experience on FimFiction in this blog. I always enjoy getting a peek behind the curtain of something that feels distant to me, in this case it being trans issues.
So much of this. I wrote a gender-bender that I tried to write in such a way that didn't bring up trans issues at all and the first comment was still transphobes. It's not a character type I think I will even write or be capable of writing. I'm Aro-Ace myself, and I'm pretty ho-hum when it comes to representation. If a character is somehow LGBTQ+, it's just a thing that is. I don't really push anything beyond it being mundane. Still, it's always helpful to get a good read on things I sometimes don't understand. Let me give an example.
Apologies to all my non-binary friends, but I still struggle to wrap my head around identifying as non-binary itself. It might be because of my economic preferences, but It's the only headspace I can't really pierce without being distracted by a preconceived notion. The embittered socialist part of me feels like it can be the result of being brow-beaten by so much deceptive advertising in "perfect" body image in an attempt to sell you things that it makes an individual feel utterly inadequate to be what society would deem is a him or her, so they go with they.
Stuff like this blog is very helpful for me in understanding others and practicing empathy, so thank you again.