Behind the Story: A Little Louder · 2:36am Jun 13th, 2022
This was supposed to go up earlier, but then I think I mildly concussed myself. Oops.
However, I’m feeling better now and can write this blog post as intended.
So, we’re going to start at the beginning, as per usual.
In 2020 and 2021 (at least), there was a sitewide contest known as Pride and Positivity. It was held in June, and encouraged people to write several pride-influenced stories, under the context of them all ending on a positive note. With each story, the event runner donated $10 to whichever charity the author of that story wanted those $10 to be donated to.
I participated in the Pride and Positivity event last year, and despite it being one of the most stressful few days in my life, compounded by a mess of a story and an even worse comments section, I decided that I wanted to do it again.
I’d had the idea of this story bouncing around in my head for a few months. Though, I participated in the Thousand Words contest, and the month after that, decided to work on this story, A Little Louder. Of course at that point unnamed.
Then I remembered Pride and Positivity and ended up shelving the story until this month to participate in the event.
Then, the event got cancelled. I discussed running it regardless with a few friends, but then the event runner said that Pride and Positivity was not going on this year and they didn’t want anybody else taking the mantle either.
I still wanted to write this story though.
While pride month usually isn’t my prerequisite to writing a trans story, I figured it was a good time to regardless (though every time is a good time to write a trans story, but I digress). So, I decided that I was going to utilize this idea that had been in my head.
The original concept for A Little Louder was boiled down to two words “Trans FlutterDash”. I had found myself really liking the trans Fluttershy headcanon after Fidd mentioned his support for the transmasc Butterscotch headcanon on several occasions in a Discord server. So, I decided to gender-flip the concept and immediately fell in love with the headcanon.
It also had the side effect from me going from a FlutterCord shipper (which is still a good ship, all things considered) to me barreling straight into FlutterDash because my two favorite Mane 6 characters are gay little beans for each other. There’s honestly probably a t4t story there, too, which just makes it double bias.
So, I decided that I wanted to write Trans FlutterDash because it seemed too cute not to.
Naturally, the prompt got more complicated as the story sat in my brain for longer. I needed to have some reason for this ship to be a thing.
So, I thought about Rainbow Dash challenging some ponies to a race for Fluttershy’s honor.
Then I realized that using what we know about Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy from the episode ‘Cutie Mark Chronicles’, namely that Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy knew each other when they were fillies, I could make that specific race about Fluttershy.
Then I realized that the bullies already existed, and that Rainbow Dash was racing them in the flashback.
This eventually cumulated in what seemed like a perfect story concept. Fluttershy deals with the bullies we see in a few flashbacks, mainly from ‘Newbie Dash’ and ‘Sonic Rainboom’, Rainbow Dash comes in and challenges the bullies to a race because they don’t need to bully Fluttershy, and it’s the race from ‘Cutie Mark Chronicles’.
But that still left the trans headcanon. Then, I reached into my subconscious and remembered one very specific thing about my experiences in grade school. One very specific thing I remember being told on the playground.
“You scream like a girl.”
That added the final missing piece. Fluttershy is ‘girly’. The bullies are participating in the classic schoolyard insult of calling boys ‘girls’ as if that’s a terrible thing, and Fluttershy has to deal with it, at least until Rainbow Dash comes down and saves her.
That idea was basically fully-formed for a month, and when June came around I was completely ready to start working on it.
However, I did set myself on a hard time limit, I was to get it done by the 10th because the QnS LGBT+ extravaganza started on the 10th, and I wanted to write a story for every single one of those. So, A Little Louder was to be fully written and fully ‘edited’ by that date.
So, I took a couple days to write a skeleton of a story. Same basic framework, but I felt that the story was off in the same way that Zephyrina/Zipp felt off. Despite what some people might think, not because it was a trans story. It just felt like there wasn’t enough of a story. That massively hurt me because unlike Zephyrina/Zipp, A Little Louder had a plot, and was written with a plot in mind.
In fact, I even added a little pre-release A/N for myself telling myself what I thought was wrong with the story. I listed two things, a copious amount of ‘tell’ (which is actually one of my biggest strengths and weaknesses as a writer), and a disjointed narrative voice. I got the first one down pretty easy, in fact resorting to overshowing at some points (which I did fix to be less repetitive on final pass-through). But I couldn’t quite get the second down. Regardless, I showed the original last two lines (which read “The flag was dropped. And Fluttershy fell.”) saying that I was actually quite proud of them to a Discord server.
Then one of the writers pointed something out to me. Those original last two lines were passive.
Now, I know many people don’t know my stance on the process of writing stories. I may write a blog post explaining it in more detail later, but the short story is that I don’t like people who proclaim the ‘correct’ way to write. I’m more interested in stories that write ‘incorrectly’, throwing out basic constructs of how a story should be written (to a point) in favor of a more bold or experimental direction. I’d rather see something experiment and fail than just be a nicely written story that’s been written a million times (I know A Little Louder doesn’t fit that definition but shhh). I’m currently reading Destination Unknown, and that’s a great example of it. The story has a plot so loose and unjustified you could probably ignore it entirely, and contains no dialogue. However, it doesn’t need to have those things. It tried an experiment, and the experiment worked.
All this to say that I wasn’t too jazzed about this ‘passive verb’ thing, but I looked it up anyways. Something must’ve clicked because upon my 3rd(?) passthrough; I suddenly realized how to fix the disjointed narrative voice, and that turned out to be the problem.
Not my proudest moment, but I still stand by my beliefs.
So, I fixed all that, and the story was in a really nice position at this point. I was up on Friday, knowing that I would be helping at the food bank on Saturday, and I needed to get the story uploaded. So, despite my usual habits of uploading at night, I did my final passover Friday morning, it took an hour, and I mainly just did some housekeeping, I dropped my idea of Fluttershy’s voice being a main driver of dysphoria and instead made it so that the bullies’ attitudes were what was putting Fluttershy off.
However, one thing still remained, I had the first section, where Fluttershy first encounters the bullies, the second, where she encounters Rainbow Dash, and the third where the race was this massive climactic event, with Fluttershy finding herself more and more each time.
However, there didn’t feel like there was a reason for Rainbow Dash to actually help Fluttershy. The story as it was written then implied Rainbow Dash was doing this for Fluttershy, but we all know Rainbow Dash doesn’t do things for other ponies. It felt like a massive ooc moment for a Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy I felt were really well-done, and it also felt like it implied that Rainbow Dash straight-up thought mares were superior to stallions and that’s the only reason she raced in Fluttershy’s honor.
Then I came up with what I consider a hypothetical ‘brilliant move’. A ‘brilliant move’ is a Chess term for a move that gives you a massive winning advantage that usually takes a bit of thinking to reach. My 700 ELO ass has only ever performed one I know of, and it was literally just tunnel vision turning out to be good.
Of course, I didn’t make a legitimate ‘brilliant move’ in the story. This isn’t Chess. However, I came up with a line that certainly felt like one.
Naturally, these are the same bullies who we see in ‘Newbie Dash’, and Rainbow Dash implies in A Little Louder that this isn’t her first rodeo with these bullies.
In A Little Louder, I suddenly came up with this line.
Both bullies laughed in unison. “Yeah, right. You’re a mare, you can’t do that, Rainbow Crash.”
The single addition of ‘Rainbow Crash’ justified all of Rainbow Dash’s behavior toward the bullies after that point, I felt. Rainbow Dash has always seemed like the type of character to have a terrible Poker face, but she really knows how to bluff, if you know what I mean. Not that she’s dumb, but that she has obvious emotional outbursts, but passes it off and pretends like they didn’t happen.
So, with the addition of ‘Rainbow Crash’, Rainbow Dash has an outburst against the name, and lashes out in her usual way to speak before thinking and challenge the bullies to a race, all because she hates it. Meanwhile, she passes it off as trying to help Fluttershy to Fluttershy and Fluttershy is too much of a social anxiety-ridden mess to question it.
That’s a great segway into the characters, but I would just like to add that nothing spectacular happened with the epilogue. It went exactly as was planned and no major developments happened while writing it. Though what I wrote at the end did melt my heart, with Fluttershy merely saying thanks while Rainbow Dash embraces her.
Now, the characters were interesting ones. I tend to keep bullet point lists of character traits when writing a character in my head. So, one for Pinkie Pie might look like this:
- Loves parties
- Never shuts up
- Cannot be comprehended by mortals
- Mentally unstable
- Loves pretty much everypony
So, naturally I have ones for Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, too. Generally, the more I like a character, the more fleshed out the bullet point list is. So, someone like Twilight might have pretty much nothing (sorry Twilight enjoyers, but I just can’t get into her character), while characters like Curie (from Fallout 4) or Rainbow Dash might have a more substantial list, because I just like those characters more.
Naturally, with Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash being my favorite Mane 6 characters, I had substantial lists for both of them, lists which I utilized in the story.
I always imagine Rainbow Dash as this AD/HD pony who’s the type to eat cereal at 9 PM because she forgot to eat dinner at 5. She talks a big game, but only if she feels like she can back it up, and to her credit, she puts her money where her mouth is. She only brags about being the fastest pony in Equestria because she is. So, I tried to work that all into her character, and because they’re younger, I emphasized their weaker points of their personality. Rainbow Dash is a braggart in the story, and while she can back it up, she’s a little more arrogant and ‘about me’ than her later portrayals in the show.
Fluttershy on the other hand, has crippling social anxiety and wants to be unnoticed. The two are completely the opposite of each other. While her show has a lot more interesting parts of her character, this being younger and dysphoric Fluttershy, she has very, very bad social anxiety. This is dropped in the epilogue, where she has a much calmer and gentler personality on account of being happier, but the bulk of the story is the young Flutters.
I was very happy with how I wrote their characters, generally.
That’s pretty much all their is to A Little Louder. A longer story, and I suppose this blog post is pretty long, too.
The title actually came from my partner (shoutouts to Minotaur_Asterion), who suggested A Little Louder based on what Rainbow tells Fluttershy in the cheering scene in Sonic Rainboom. This was like a week before writing the story, and I had no better ideas, so it became A Little Louder.
Influences for this story included the usual ones and not much else.
Until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie
Nice
Wait, you're telling me that's not normal?
5664359
Who eats dinner at 5?