Regarding Sorry We Missed You · 4:01am Sep 9th, 2022
I've never written an in-depth commentary on one of my own stories before; I've never needed to, but in light of the largely negative reception that Sorry We Missed You has received, specifically as it relates to the last couple of chapters, I will attempt to do so now. It is my hope that this commentary will help to alleviate much of the confusion and disappointment that I have seen from my readers.
First off, I would like to make it perfectly clear that this work is a legitimate attempt at storytelling. This story is not a joke, it is not a trollfic, it is not a bait-and-switch, and it is not an attempt to waste anyone's time. I care deeply about this story and about the themes it addresses, and enjoyed writing it probably more than any other story I've ever written. It is for this reason that I was very saddened to see the reception that it got at the end.
To a certain extent, I was aware that people would have issues with this story; I knew it from the moment this story got into the featured box and then proceeded to stay there for around a week. I realized that I had attracted the attention of a very broad audience to a story that I knew was not going to be a crowd-pleaser. I knew that, by nature of what this story is, there would be people who wouldn't “get it” and who, ultimately, would not enjoy it when I finished writing it. I am okay with that. I was happy to see that so many people liked the earlier parts of the story, and I was understanding when people said they didn't understand the ending.
What doesn't sit well with me, however, is the fact that some people, from what I have seen, are outright upset about how this story ended. The last thing I want is to make my readers feel disappointed, or to make them feel like they have wasted their time by reading my work. From what I have seen, much of this negativity seems to be the result of unnecessary confusion on the part of my readers as to what happened in this story. I am not trying to imply that you, my readers, are at fault for this. I am not writing this to insult or belittle anyone, or to present my story as being “too smart” for anyone.
As a writer, I try my hardest to write stories that people will enjoy, but if my readers can't even understand my stories, then they're certainly not going to enjoy them. While I hate to have to explain my writing in such a meta way, I would rather swallow my pride as a writer and admit that I failed to convey the ideas I wanted to than have my readers think that I am staying silent out of apathy to their feelings.
I had really hoped that all of you would get as much enjoyment from reading this story as I got from writing it. For those of you out there who did enjoy my story, then I am glad that you did. For those of you who did not, then I would like to sincerely apologize for any disappointment you may have felt. If you continue to dislike this story after reading this post, then you are perfectly within you're rights to do so. All I want is to make sure of is that those of you who do dislike this story aren't doing so for the wrong reasons.
This post will contain spoilers for Sorry We Missed You, if you care about such things.
What is this Story About?
The biggest question on everyone's mind seems to be about what this story is even about. I have seen a significant amount of speculation on what this story is and what it is meant to convey. To a certain extent, this was my intention. There are certain elements of this story that I deliberately left up to the reader's interpretation; I will talk more about these later on. What was not my intention, however, was to make people think that the entire story is one subjective mess where everything is a metaphor.
From what I have seen, a lot of the confusion about this story has resulted from people taking certain things that are literal as metaphorical, and taking things that are metaphorical as literal. I am going to tell you all right now that the vast majority of this story is literal. When I describe the world of Equestria, that is the real Equestria. The events of this story are not a dream, they are not a hallucination (for the most part; more on that later), and Rainbow Dash was not dead all along. I would shudder to use such tired cliches, and even if I did use them, I would have been much more explicit about it. As I have said, there are quite a few metaphorical elements in this story as well. In the vast majority of cases, these metaphors are either not necessary to understanding the literal story, or presented in such a way as to make it clear that they are merely metaphors.
I feel that much of the unnecessary reading-into this story has been motivated by the extraordinary, fantastical elements that this story contains. Yes, there are many such elements in this story, but at the same time, this story takes place in the magical land of Equestria. I had hoped that, given this setting, my readers would be more willing to interpret these elements in a literal way. Given the amount of confusion that this story has caused, I evidently did not do enough to make that clear.
In order to clear things up about the subjects of this story, I'd like to draw your attention to this story's short and long descriptions, the most straightforward, meta explanations of this story that you all have had prior to this point. I do this because I felt, and still feel, that this story is “exactly what it says on the tin”, as they say. Let's start with the short description:
Rainbow Dash slept in on the day the world ended.
I don't know how much more clearly I could have described the literal plot of this story. I didn't make the description “Rainbow Dash slept in on the day the world almost ended, but then managed to save the day.” I didn't make it “Rainbow Dash wakes up and discovers that everyone is gone, then finds a way to bring them back.” The very first thing that the vast majority of you probably saw when you clicked on this story on the home page, before you even opened the first chapter, told you all exactly what this story was about.
This story is about the day (technically one day), that the world, the world of Equestria, ends. This was never meant to be a secret, and this was never meant to be a mystery (not to the reader, at least). I have seen quite a few people who did not seem to grasp this, even after reading to the end. At the same time, I have seen at least a few people who did seem to understand this, so I'm not entirely sure what to think. I will talk more about this part of the plot later.
Let's move on to this story's long description, which I think is an even better summary of what this story is really about:
Rainbow Dash is a simple mare. She loves flying, she loves napping, but most importantly of all, she loves her friends. She loves her family. She loves the little tortoise who sleeps in the corner of her bedroom. She loves her town, she loves her country, she loves her world.
She's never thought about what she would do without it all. She's never thought about what she would do if she woke up one morning, only to discover that the world had passed her by. She's never thought about what she would be willing to do, how far she would be willing to go, to get it all back.
This description highlights the main themes of this story, which I consider to be the most important element, much more than the literal plot. This story is about love and attachments, such as those attachments we have with our loved ones, our homes, and our world in general. Furthermore, this story is also about the loss of those same things. It's a story about how many of us are unprepared for loss when we experience it, and when we do experience it, we will often go to great lengths in an attempt to avoid or reverse it. I will talk more about this topic later on.
These two story elements, the very literal element of the end of Equestria, and the very thematic element of the exploration of loss, are the core of this story. The literal elements act in service of the thematic ones; Rainbow Dash is forced to deal with loss because of the world ending. Everything in this story is built on these two things, so if you understand this, then I don't think that there's anything in this story that should be confusing.
Now, I know what you're all thinking: “I had to read the descriptions to know what the story is about?” To that, I would say no. I did not write this story with the requirement that people be familiar with specific meta information. When writing this story, I presented these elements as explicitly as I felt was necessary and was comfortable providing. Stories can always be more explicit, but past a certain point, doing so compromises the artistry of the work and insults the intelligence of the audience. I presented this story the way I did for these reasons.
The End of the World
Let's first talk about the more literal half of this story, the end of the world of Equestria, since that is the more straightforward part of this story, and because the other part builds off of it. When I was writing this story, I had thought that this part would be the easiest for people to understand, and that most of the confusion would be over the more metaphorical parts. Evidently, I was wrong.
Before we go further, let's discuss what “the end of the world” actually looks like. There are many different versions of what the end of the world might look like, because everyone seems to have a different perspective on the topic, and some people are very adamant that their version is the correct one. There are many different kinds of people in the world, people with different faiths, different beliefs, and different thoughts on where we're going. There are some people who think that, when the world ends, the good people will go to live in a paradise, while the wicked people will be punished. Some people used to think that the world would end when the frost giants returned and defeated the gods in a cataclysmic war. Still, others think that the world will end when all the energy in the universe is used up and things get really chilly.
In writing this story, I did not attempt to portray any real-world perspective of an end-of-the-world scenario. I did not pick a particular faith's perspective on the topic and say that that version was the “correct” version, and that the world of Equestria would end the same way. I could have easily done so, however. I could have easily lifted elements directly from the Book of Revelation, or from any other religious text, and carelessly inserted them into this story in order to make things even more overt. I did not do this because that would have been extremely unfitting and weird to do, and because it would have alienated those of my readers who did not share such a perspective on the end of the world.
I wanted this story to be as universally understandable as possible, both in terms of this element of the plot, and in terms of its more thematic elements. To this end, I presented an end-of-the-world scenario for Equestria that was not based on any real-world perspective, but on a fictional one presented in one of the most famous works of modern fantasy fiction: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, more specifically, the seventh book in the series, The Last Battle. I found it fitting to draw inspiration from this source, as that story is also about a magical world inhabited by talking animals, and is tonally similar to Friendship is Magic. I saw at least a few of you who figured this out. It probably wasn't very hard for those of you who are familiar with The Last Battle, as I included textual references to that book in addition to just imagery.
That being said, I did not write this story expecting that my readers would recognize this reference. I still believe this outside knowledge is not necessary to understanding the events of this story. In fact, I was somewhat worried when writing this that those of you who were familiar would see too much similarity, and feel that the ending was uninspired as a result. I would argue against this, as the scenario that Lewis presented was not wholly original either (more on that in a moment), and because the themes that he focused on in his story are not the same that I have focused on in mine. I will discuss this latter point more in-depth later.
As I mentioned, the end-of-the-world scenario in The Last Battle was not a complete invention by its author. It is a common interpretation that the events of that book, as well as the other books in that series, are inspired by the author's own faith. As I stated earlier, I did not want the events in my story to be associated with the perspectives of any particular real-world faith, and so I deliberately did not take elements that would have made this story too culturally specific. Like The Last Battle, I showed the people and animals of the world being removed from the world, I showed the oceans swallowing up the land, I showed the stars falling from the sky, and I showed a door being closed on the world of empty darkness that remained. I did not, however, show Princess Celestia passing judgment on the ponies of Equestria, as I would have considered that to be unfitting.
Despite my attempts to portray an end of the world of Equestria in a culturally neutral way, the end result seems to have been a portrayal that was so neutral that only a few people understood it. If I had the power, I would love to look into the heads of my readers and see why they had so much trouble understanding what I wrote. I firmly believe that the events I presented in this story, despite being so culturally nonspecific, are still dramatic enough to lead people to the conclusion I wanted them to reach. I believe that, if I walked down my street and talked to a whole bunch of people of differing beliefs and backgrounds and described to them the events of this story, a majority of them would characterize those events as “the end of the world”, or something similar. In fact, I have even presented the events of this story to friends of mine who, without prompting, described the scenario exactly as I had intended it to be perceived.
As I said earlier, I am not writing this to alienate anyone who did not understand an element of my story. I can only speculate as to why this part of the story didn't “click” for some people. I only want to help those of you who are significantly bothered by your confusion about this topic, as well as those of you I have seen are significantly overthinking things.
The Grief of Loss
As previously mentioned, the main themes of this story are loss and how people deal with loss. As the more thematic half of this story, I was worried that this would be the part that would trip people up more than anything. I was happy to see that this part of the story was not the primary point of complaint; although, that was mostly because people complained about everything else more. There were a few things related to this that I saw some confusion about, so I will attempt to clear those up too.
In this story, Rainbow Dash experiences loss, and subsequently has to deal with that loss. This loss may be caused by the end of the world, a fact that makes this story slightly more than “Tanks for the Memories” 2.0, but that ultimately isn't that important. The point is that she experiences a loss that she has no real way of averting or reversing. Whether that loss is the result of something fantastical or something mundane, how she deals with that loss and the associated grief would largely be the same.
The first step of dealing with loss is, of course, recognizing that you have experienced loss. Rainbow Dash wakes up one morning and discovers that her loved ones, and everyone else for that matter, has mysteriously disappeared. At first, she goes to some somewhat reasonable explanations for the disappearance, such as that the ponies of Ponyville have fled, or are in hiding.
As Rainbow searches the town and discovers that whatever happened was most definitely not something so mundane, she begins to engage in denial of her loss. She continues to search Ponyville, hoping to find her friends, even as we, the audience, know that she's not going to just find everypony in Ponyville under a rock or something. Her denial culminates in her making her way to Canterlot in search of Princess Celestia, hoping to hear that everything is not as bad as it seems.
Of course, when she finds that the princess has also disappeared, she has no choice but to finally recognize her loss. And what does she do when she reaches this point? She indulges in anger, of course. She immediately lashes out and starts looking for someone or something to blame for what has happened. Naturally, she assumes Discord is responsible, because who else could it have been? This train of thought leads her to the Elements, and she is forced to reconsider her assumption upon finding them altered in some way, something she knows to be impossible for Discord to have achieved.
Having overcome anger, she then moves on to bargaining, and attempts to find a way to somehow undo her loss altogether. As Rainbow feels she has no real hope of solving the problem on her own, she turns to her friends for help, or rather, the closest thing to her friends she can get. She constructs stand-ins of her friends out of miscellaneous junk and her own imagination, using them to help her think.
These stand-ins for the rest of the Mane Six serve two primary purposes to the story. The first thing they do is allow me, the writer, to add dialogue in a story that only has one character (similar to Wilson from Cast Away). The second thing they do, and the more narratively relevant thing, is allow Rainbow to externalize her thoughts and more easily process her feelings regarding her situation. Doing this works out very well for her, as she is able to come up with a plan with their help, albeit a questionable one.
It is important to understand that, at least at first, these stand-ins for Rainbow's friends are just that: stand-ins. They are not the real Mane Six that are somehow manifesting in the inanimate objects Rainbow assembles. I made a point of explicitly saying that Rainbow is the one speaking for these stand-ins, and that everything they say is, therefore, a product of her mind. Rainbow knows her friends very well, so obviously, the stand-ins are very “in character”. Whether these personalities Rainbow gives the stand-ins are the product of her conscious imagination, or of something much more serious, I largely leave up to the reader's interpretation. In real life, people don't start hallucinating voices overnight, and I didn't want to imply that Rainbow reached that point so quickly. When she starts doing it, even she recognizes what she is doing and that the stand-ins are not real, but chooses to deny that reality and keeps up the charade.
After deciding to search the world to find where everyone had gone to, Rainbow's first destination is her hometown of Cloudsdale. This is the part of the story at which I really start to emphasize the sensory manifestations of Rainbow's mind, be they imagination or hallucination. I make a point to highlight how, in addition to hearing the products of her mind, she is also seeing them, feeling them, and even smelling them. By doing this, I both establish a stylistic precedent that Rainbow's thoughts and feelings can and will be presented in a very sensory fashion, and hammer in the fact that the story has dipped into “unreliable narrator” territory.
When next we see Rainbow, we go even further into that territory, as we see what has happened to Rainbow after a significant amount of time has passed. I don't make it explicit exactly how much time has passed (because that's not that important), but I do make a point at showing that it has been enough time that Rainbow has degenerated, both physically and mentally. She has pushed herself to explore the far reaches of Equestria, with the bare minimum of food and rest keeping her going. This physical decay is matched by her mental decay, and we see that Rainbow no longer has the energy and hope that she once did.
Again, I do not make explicit just how much of the Mane Six stand-ins are genuine hallucination, but after being stuck in her situation for as long as she had been, I think most of you could understand what was going on. The stand-ins had become even more of a product of Rainbow's subconscious mind, and so were able to act more independently (from Rainbow's perspective) and confront her about her true feelings. They know that Rainbow has recognized the futility of her mission, but refuses to accept the truth.
Rainbow, of course, denies this, as to accept the fact that there is nothing she can do would be to stop her bargaining, to give up on trying to “fix” her loss and avoid her grief. Eventually, she gives up the fight, having been pushed to the limits of her mental and physical endurance, and finally gives in.
When we see Rainbow next, she has gone full-on into depression, wallowing in her grief and giving up on doing anything else. The rest of the Mane Six recognize what Rainbow needs to do to finish dealing with her grief, because Rainbow also recognizes it on a subconscious level. They know that she needs to finish processing her grief, accept her loss, and move on with her life. They also recognize that their continued presence is hindering that, as Rainbow is using them as a way to pretend that her friends are not really gone. It is not until they threaten to leave that Rainbow is finally forced to take that step, because she is going to lose her friends no matter what.
I want to stop here and discuss how people deal with grief in real life, because I have seen some people questioning how Rainbow ultimately deals with her grief and moves on from it. I will say that I am not a psychiatrist, or otherwise someone whose opinion on the topics of grief and loss would probably be more meaningful than a fanfic writer's. I present these topics in this story purely as the product of my own perspectives as a human being. If you want to disagree with my portrayal and say that I'm doing it wrong, then you're welcome to your opinion.
I am sure many of you have had to live through the loss of a loved one at some point or another, or if not that, then at least the loss of something you care very dearly about. I have also lost people and things I care about, and when I think about those things and how they'll never be a part of my life again, it hurts a little bit. Moving on from your grief doesn't mean forgetting about the things you loved and just cutting them out of your life altogether, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The things we love, and the grief born from the loss of those things, never really leaves us. Yes, we all lose things in a physical sense, but our experiences with those things, our memories and our feelings, they never just go away. Our experiences shape us, they make us who we are, and consequently, we feel the effects of our experiences throughout our lives. These experiences include such things as grief, which we can never just erase and pretend that it never happened.
The more proper way to deal with grief is, therefore, to accept it. We have to accept our grief as what it is, recognize that it is not bad or wrong to feel it, but at the same time, not let it consume us and rule our lives. Yes, bad things happen, and no, those things can't always be fixed or avoided. When we have these things happen to us, the wrong thing to do is to obsess over these things, because that prevents us from focusing on the good things in our lives. In order to recover from our grief, we have to “move on” with our lives and not let our hurt feelings keep us from being happy again.
I take the time to say all of this because this is exactly what Rainbow ends up doing to finally finish processing her grief. Her friends tell her that she has the opportunity to live the rest of her life and to seek new happiness in new places with new people. Initially, Rainbow refuses to accept this, because she cannot imagine finding something better than what she had before. This leads Twilight to point out that she herself found happiness by finding a new home and new friends somewhere else. When Rainbow questions whether this means that she must forget about everything she once loved, Twilight tells her explicitly, just as I did earlier, that that would be the wrong thing to do.
Rainbow then questions why the loss she has experienced had to happen in the first place. The question of why bad things happen to people is a topic way too huge and complicated to be properly tackled in a story such as this, so I did not attempt to do so. Asking why bad things happen is a question as enigmatic as why the world has to end. Instead of attempting to answer this ultimately irrelevant question, Twilight points out what everyone already knows: that bad things happen, things change, and those changes are not always good. Twilight points out that people are not always prepared to deal with their losses and their grief when they experience them, but that does not mean that they will be spared from those things.
It is during this conversation that we have one of the more important metaphors of the story, that of the door, which is explained here, but is also relevant later. Here, Twilight compares the suddenness of the loss some people experience to a knock on the door, in that not everyone will always be ready to address it when it happens. In this story, Rainbow does experience a very sudden loss that she is not prepared to address; in the context of the metaphor, Rainbow is not prepared to answer the door, and so is stuck in a metaphorical limbo of having been confronted with something, but not having dealt with it properly. This metaphor is where the title of this story comes from.
In the end, Rainbow does agree to “move on”, and allows her friends to help her finish processing her grief. Again, I have to stop and comment on this, because I have heard some people suggest that Rainbow would never have done this and that she should have continued clinging to that which she lost no matter what. I consider this to be a wholly unreasonable position.
Rainbow Dash is a human being (well, you know what I mean); she has a life, she has feelings, she has limits, and she has responsibilities to herself as a person. Even someone as stubbornly loyal as Rainbow Dash will eventually give up on certain things when they are pushed far enough and are given enough reason to do so. I made a point of showing that Rainbow had pushed herself about as far as a person could in an effort to “fix” things. I even suggested that she would have been willing to die rather than give up on this. Obviously, this would not have been the ending I would have wanted, and would have gone against the message I was trying to convey.
Giving up on certain things, even the things you are loyal to, is not wrong if you have a legitimate reason to do so. A widow is not wrong to seek happiness in a new marriage if her husband was lost at sea, even if she has not seen a body. In Rainbow's case, she has had no reason whatsoever to think that she will ever recapture that which she has lost. In such situations, people must weigh the slight chance at regaining lost happiness against the guarantee of unhappiness that comes from that pursuit. Most people in Rainbow's situation would have given up long before she did, and I consider her to be loyal to a fault for hanging on for as long as she did.
Once Rainbow is willing to “move on”, Twilight walks her though doing essentially what I have described earlier to deal with her grief. Rainbow does not forget about the things she lost, but rather acknowledges that they, and the grief that came with losing them, are a part of who she is. They are her experiences and her feelings, and they are reflective of who she is. As such, Rainbow metaphorically puts these things in her heart, at the “center of her being”. In other words, she is accepting these things as a part of her identity, and recognizing that the things she lost will never truly be parted from her. I describe Rainbow as feeling a “warmth” as a result of doing this, something which comes up again later in the story.
Having finally finished processing her grief, Rainbow has the freedom to move on with her life, and to go wherever that life takes her. This brings us to the next point...
Endings and Beginnings
The ending of this story seems to be the greatest point of confusion that I have seen, and so I will attempt to discuss it as thoroughly as I can. As I mentioned previously, I was expecting some degree of confusion from my readers regarding the ending, but I feel that people are getting confused unnecessarily.
As we near the end of the story, the two major story elements, the end of the world of Equestria and Rainbow dealing with her grief, both come together into a single story thread that continues through to the end. While many of you have recognized the metaphor that connects these two things, some of you have also taken this to mean that the entire story is one giant metaphor and that the events it describes just didn't happen. As I made very clear earlier, this is not the case.
As Rainbow takes the last step of dealing with her grief, finally accepting it, she then gets to witness the end of the world she has accepted the loss of. More literally, she witnesses the seas rise and swallow up the land, and hears the stand-ins for her friends display a level of independent knowledge and thought that we have not seen them display prior to this point. This is one of the points that I realized would cause confusion, as it is one of those elements that I deliberately left up to the interpretation of the reader.
Going back to my earlier discussion of my portrayal of the end of the world, I will remind you that I deliberately portrayed it in a fantastical, fictional, and as culturally neutral a way as I could. I did not want to insert specific real-life beliefs, faiths, or other ideas about the real universe into the world of Equestria. That being said, a cultural cliché I did make use of was the fact that, in real-life conceptions of the end of the world, ones which are as extraordinary and fantastical as the one I presented in this story, such ends are typically not “natural” occurrences, instead being brought about by some intelligent, non-human force.
Again, it was not my desire do drag any specific real-world beliefs into my portrayal of Equestria, and I did not want to spend time creating a wholly original cosmology for Equestria with an in-depth explanation of how it would end. Instead, I presented what I considered to be a very overt, and borderline cliché, portrayal of the end of the world, knowing full well that many of my readers would fill in the blanks with their own beliefs and perspectives. If you are the sort of person who believes that such a climactic end to the world as I presented would be the result of some sort of divine action, then you would probably have no trouble using that to explain such things as the actions of the Mane Six stand-ins, where Rainbow ends up at the end of this story, and why the end happens when it does. If, however, you prefer to interpret such things in a more materialistic way, you are welcome to think that the voices Rainbow hears are merely the products of a mind pushed to the brink of insanity from isolation, although I will remind you that Equestria is not a world that operates on the same principles that our world does.
As Rainbow watches the seas swallow the land, she is guided to safety by the words “further up” and “further in”. This is one of the references to The Last Battle that I mentioned earlier, something which some of you picked up on. In that story, these words are used in a similar situation as the one I use them in in this story, that being people leaving behind the world after it has ended. While this phrase as it is used in The Last Battle is commonly interpreted to be a metaphor relating to the author's faith, I do not use this phrase in that same way in this story. Consequently, being familiar with this reference is not necessary to understanding the story that I have written.
As in The Last Battle, this phrase as used in this story accompanies characters literally, physically moving from one place to another. In this story, however, the phrase can also be seen as a metaphor for Rainbow emotionally moving from one place to another. Just as Rainbow is physically leaving behind her world, her home, and her former life, so too is she emotionally leaving them behind. As I discussed at length earlier, she is “moving on” from these things, but is not cutting them out of her life entirely, because they will always be a part of her. Rainbow herself recognizes this when she sees Equestria swallowed by the sea, and remembers that she still carries those things which she has lost in her heart. Here, I again reference the “warmth” those things manifest as, as established earlier.
After witnessing the end of Equestria, the sun setting for the last time, the stars falling from the heavens, and the world becoming a dark, empty void, Rainbow must take the final step and go through her door. As previously established, the metaphor of the door represents Rainbow confronting and processing her grief. Because of this, when she attempts to open the door the first time, she finds that she cannot. This is immediately addressed by Rainbow's Mane Six stand-ins, who had been born from her denial and her need to process her grief, who tell her that they cannot go with her. Just as Rainbow cannot move on from her grief while she still believes her friends are with her, so too can she not move on from Equestria without first giving up her friends' stand-ins.
Rainbow says a final goodbye to her friends, who tell her that they will always be with her in a metaphorical sense, the same point I have discussed earlier. Additionally, Rainbow leaves behind the Element of Loyalty, leaving it with the other Elements, as she feels is fitting to do so. Having done this, Rainbow is finally able to open the door and leave Equestria, literally going towards the light into whatever is beyond it. As she does so, the Element of Loyalty finally fades, just as the others had. As the Elements had been reborn from the Mane Six in the first place, it is only fitting that the Mane Six's departure from Equestria lead to their end.
This next part, this story's final chapter specifically, seems to have tripped people up more than anything, despite its relative simplicity. I will first discuss the events of this chapter in a straightforward, literal sense, since even this seems to have caused some people some trouble. Next, I will discuss how this chapter ties in to the rest of the story.
Rainbow Dash is standing in a grassy meadow in a world that, unlike the world she had just left, has wind, sound, and life. She has been healed of the physical decay she had experienced. I make a point of describing her taking in her surroundings with many of her senses, looking and listening to what is around her. She sees the meadow, she sees some wildflowers, she sees some bugs, and she sees a forest. What she does not see at this moment is a crowd of thousands of ponies standing right behind her. I do not say that she does, because she, like you, would probably notice immediately if she were in such a situation.
After doing this, Rainbow closes her eyes and puts her hoof on her heart. In a previous chapter, I spent quite a while showing Rainbow Dash closing her eyes and reaching back into her memories prior to “seeing” those memories before her, as if they were really there. Additionally, I had spent the previous chapter showing how Rainbow had metaphorically stored her memories and her feelings of the things she had lost in her heart, which I again refer to here as a “warmth”.
I describe how Rainbow can “feel” this warmth, the warmth of her friends, her family, and everything she lost, as if it is a physical thing. I describe how she can feel it as if it were a hoof resting on her shoulder, a metaphor that I did not think would trip up anyone. I then describe how Rainbow looks at “the one that hoof belonged to”, with “the hoof” being the one I had described her feeling immediately before that. As I had explicitly compared that hoof to the warmth Rainbow felt, and had already spent quite a while establishing that that warmth was the product of her friends, loved ones, and those she had lost, I had hoped that my readers would make the connection that that hoof “belonged to” those ponies.
As such, Rainbow now looks around and “sees” those ponies: her friends, her family, Tank, and everyone she had lost that had made up her world. She “sees” these ponies in the same way she “saw” the stadium of Cloudsdale full of spectators. She “sees” them in the same way that she “heard” the Mane Six in the previous chapters. She “sees” them in the same way that she “smelled” the food in her mother's kitchen. After spending two previous chapters establishing that the things Rainbow perceives are not necessarily there, I had hoped that this instance of the same metaphor would be understandable to my audience.
Finally, after seeing that the ones that she lost are still with her, Rainbow remarks that it is “a new day”, and resolves to make it a good one.
Now, let's discuss how this chapter relates to the rest of the story. This chapter is closely related to the previous one, so much so that I had initially considered combining the two. In the end, I decided not to, as this chapter is so tonally distinct from the previous one. It does, however, relate heavily to the literal events of the previous chapter.
As I have discussed at length, the penultimate chapter describes the climax of the end of Equestria. As I have also discussed, I deliberately did not specify what caused this end, only how it was carried out. Just as I wanted the reader to be able to imagine whatever divine force (or lack thereof) that had brought about the end of Equestria, so too did I want the reader to be free to interpret the world that Rainbow arrives at in whatever way they saw fit. If you are the sort of person to attribute such a climactic end to a divine force, then I'd think you would be able to imagine what sort of world would await her afterwards.
In a literal sense, Rainbow has left Equestria and moved on to someplace else, regardless of what you think that place is. In a metaphorical sense, she has also moved on from Equestria emotionally, and so this place serves to represent the world she lives in after having conquered her grief. I further hammer in this metaphor by having Rainbow remark that it is “a new day”. Literally, she is in a new day, since the previous day, the day Equestria ended, is now over. Metaphorically, it is a new day in that it is a new part of her life that has the potential to be different and, ideally, better.
What Was the Point?
Now that I have finished discussing at great length what this story is, I would like to comment on why it is the way it is. Specifically, I would like to address the complaints that this story's conflict had no resolution and/or was ultimately self-defeating. I firmly believe that this is not the case on either count.
In order to answer the question as to whether the conflict was “resolved”, we first need to establish what the conflict was. As I discussed way back at the beginning of this post, this story has two core elements: the end of Equestria, and Rainbow dealing with the grief of loss. I have said that this latter element is the more important one, as that is the conflict that I consider this story to really be about. That being said, it is not immediately apparent that that is the case.
As this story beings, it plays out in such a way as to make the audience think that the story will merely be a straightforward mystery/adventure with a clearly defined conflict and resolution. In a sense, it is a “mystery”, because the story follows a character who finds themselves in a mysterious situation and then proceeds to try and understand and fix that situation. Obviously, Rainbow Dash possesses neither the meta knowledge nor the real-world cultural knowledge to properly recognize what she is experiencing, which is why it feels like a mystery to her.
For my readers, however, this was never intended to be a true mystery. As I said earlier, I outright stated what this story was about, and even if you didn't see that statement, the story (eventually) presents the conflict in such a heavy-handed way that I firmly believed that it would be obvious to everyone by the end. By the end of chapter two, I believed my readers would recognize that something very unusual was going on. By the end of chapter three, I believed my readers would recognize that what was going on was big...really big. By then end of chapter four, where I imply that even the nigh-omnipotent spirit of chaos would not have been powerful enough to create the situation Rainbow finds herself in, I believed that most of my readers would have connected the dots. By the end of chapter five, I had thought the nature of the situation would have been obvious to everyone. I saw at least one person who correctly guessed what was going on very early in this story, so I had believed that I was on the right track with this.
Assuming that you realize the true nature of this story's events, which you should be if you've read this post, then you should also recognize that they were never a “conflict” in the traditional narrative sense. Rainbow Dash is confronted with the end of the world, and this story does not expect her to “resolve” that, because why would it? The end of the world, in the way I have presented it, is not something that can be avoided or prevented, and is not meant to be. The only thing that a normal person could do when faced with such a situation is to accept it.
In the same way, the other half of this story, Rainbow's struggle with loss and grief, is not something meant to be “resolved” in the narrative sense. Rainbow is confronted with extreme loss, and while she does attempt to undo that loss, those efforts are ultimately futile, because that's how loss often is. Just as one cannot prevent the end of the world, one cannot prevent loss in their lives. As I have discussed, the proper way to address genuine loss is not to fight it or try to avoid it, but to accept it as the inevitability that it is and process it in a healthy way. In the end, this is what Rainbow does; she does not undo her loss, she does not prevent it, but learns to accept it. This is the only resolution to this conflict that I would have ever wanted to present.
I have seen some people suggest that these conflicts should have played out differently, such as by having Rainbow successfully manage to reverse her loss and restore everything to the way it used to be. I believe that to do something like this would have undermined the entire thematic element of this story and presented a bad moral to my audience. The entire point of making the story about the literal end of the world was to present an instance of genuine, unavoidable loss. By doing this, I was able to force Rainbow to justifiably go through the entire cycle of grief and demonstrate how best to deal with such loss. If this story had focused on a more mundane, easily solvable conflict, then this would not have been the case. Such a situation would have presented a message that loss can always be avoided if one fights against it hard enough, which is a terrible message and not one I would want to tell.
Amongst those of you who did recognize the main theme of this story, as I have just discussed it, some of you felt that the way this part of the story was inconsistent in terms of message. Some of you thought that I meant the message to be that, even if we lose things, we will eventually be reunited with them once we deal with that grief, which is in no way what I meant to imply. This confusion seems to have resulted from misinterpretation of the last two chapters, which I have already discussed in detail earlier.
Something that is worth mentioning here, however, is that, because I have given my readers the ability to interpret the end of the world I present in the way they wish, they may wish to believe that Rainbow will be reunited with those she has lost at some point. I recognize that there are some people who firmly believe that they will be reunited with the ones they have lost at some point in the future. As I have said, I did not wish to present any real-life beliefs or faiths as being “correct” or “incorrect” in this story, and so did not apply this belief to the events of this story. At the end of this story, Rainbow Dash is not reunited with those she has lost in a literal sense, as I have discussed. If you are one of those people who subscribes to the belief I have described, then you are free to interpret this story according to that belief. For you, the message about loss and grief as presented in this story might hit a bit different for you, but I hope not so different that you cannot see the value in it.
Final Thoughts
I have spent a significant amount of time writing this story (and this blog post). I have put a lot of effort into doing so, and I firmly believe that the end result is a good one. In writing this post, that opinion has only strengthened, as I have been able to think about and address those criticisms this story has received in a rational way. As I have said, I know that not everyone is going to enjoy this story, but I do not take that to mean that this is a bad story, only that it fails to relay its ideas as universally as it could. Because of this, I have no plans to significantly alter this story as a result of the feedback it has gotten. I have presented this story in the way that I think is best, and I will just have to live with whatever response it gets.
If you are one of those people who had issues with this story, then I hope that this post has helped resolve any confusion you may have felt. If this post has not helped you, then I am sorry for wasting your time with it. You are free to dislike this story and (politely) voice your criticisms of it, but as for me, I am done talking about this. After spending so long on this story and so long writing this post to defend it, I am very burned out on this topic. I feel I have addressed every major point of confusion I have seen as clearly as I can, and so I have no desire to talk about things further. You all are welcome to discuss this story amongst yourselves, but I will not be engaging in any debate or arguments about this story or this post. If I see someone bring up a point I consider significant enough, I may edit this post to address it, but I do not think it will come to that.
If you have read this all the way through, then I thank you for giving me the time of day. I wish you all good reading, whether that be reading of my own works, or the works of another.
Sincerely,
Starswirl the Beardless
tl;dr for people who didn't want to read all this: It's the end of the world. Everybody got rapture'd. Rainbow Dash learns to deal with that. It's stylistically designed to be that way.
I kind of figured it was something like that, it just caught me off guard.
(Ok, I'll admit I missed the bit in the epilogue where the others were just a projection. I tend to listen to these stories at work through the site Robo-Reader and I sometimes miss little elements like that.)
Also, I read the description, but my long time love of action/disaster movies has taught me that "The End of the World" is almost never a literal element in any story it's used to describe.
Most “end of the world” situations, when described as such, are not described as a “almost end-of-the-world”, so I do hope you see where the confusion came from there. I enjoy Ark survival evolved, for example, and that’s what people would describe as an “end of the world” game, along with Horizon Zero Dawn and others like them. So once again, I see why you were frustrated, but I hope you know why others were taken aback by the ending.
Also, you say you presented it in a culturally neutral way. I could be pedantic and say “that’s not possible”, but that wouldn’t be constructive. What WILL be constructive, however, is me letting you know that some Christian faiths actually do interpret the end of the world as God removing all the “righteous” from the planet in a manner similar to how you portray it here. I’m sure that’s where C.S. Lewis got the idea from, even if he didn’t subscribe to the idea himself (I have no idea if he did or not).
But never mind all that. You still got a thumbs up from me at the end, because I did genuinely enjoy the fic. But there are still unanswered questions. Like, WHY did the world end? Where did everyone go, or did they just get Thanos-Snapped away? Why was Rainbow left behind? She can’t have been the only pony asleep in all of equestria at that time, right? If she just “got to see the end of the world” why did the oceans only start when she finally let go, and why was her house the only place that was spared from the flood? It sure seems like someone cared enough to spare her, but we never learn who or what that is. I’d thought there was going to be some grand conclusion that answered these questions and more, but there wasn’t, and that clearly got under people’s skin a little bit. Once again, I enjoyed the direction you took it, but those lingering questions, those loose ends, they make it less satisfying than the ending could have been.
My biggest complaint is in the absence of an explanation for why the disappearance happened at all. Who or what caused it? Was it just random? The fact that there’s not even any material to really theorize with here leaves it as the clear biggest loose end of the whole thing, and it is sorta annoying for it to not be addressed.
That being said, the themes you did end it on were still good. It felt like a love letter to G4, and mirrored some of my own thoughts and hold-outs to the show. The idea of “I want things to stay the same” that Dash expresses are direct mirrors to how I felt. I was actually out of internet access for about a year, and in that time the show ended, and I really felt like Dash here, where I “slept through the day equestria ended”, which sucked to deal with. So thematically and emotionally I think you hit the nail right on the head, and you captured the emotions of Dash very well. As I said earlier, I still dropped a thumbs up, and I appreciate the deep emotional themes here. But you can’t just ignore the mystery elements completely, you can’t just leave every major question unanswered! Equestria and Narnia have a lot in common, but the ideas are still very different, so many things don’t translate very well, and a scenario like that, I’d argue, is one of them.
I hope you enjoyed my Ted Ta- I mean, essa- Dangit, text wall. Those are some of my thoughts on it. As the author you have final say on your story, but hopefully my novice insights can help you improve and keep excelling at what you do well. No hate meant, just trying to share my honest thoughts on it!
-Spiney09
Ah, well then...
I never commented on the story itself because I didn't feel it was worth it. I figured it was basically exactly what it said on the tin and people were thinking too hard. But at the same time I didn't feel the story was all that interesting after it wrapped up.
Take this with all the grains of salt but I don't think the story was well executed. It was well written and technically sound right up until the end. But the execution of the story feels lacking. We as readers simply don;t have the context from the story to process the "lack of ending".
By it's nature the story can not "resolve" emotionally; because as you say, there is no real conflict. the story starts, builds up tension, and then... well there is a (IMO) rushed scene with Dash "accepting" and then it ends.
We, as readers, are left with a dangling thread of a story with no proper resolution with no chose to move on ourselves.
I think this was your point.
Believe it or not this style of story is not unique! but it is rare. Congrats you've joined a small club or writers!
I've never read The Last Battle -- mostly because i despise C.S. Luis but don't let my opinion turn you off a author -- so I can't be sure this isn't an aspect of that story you were trying to emulate but I'm familiar with one other story that deals with similar themes.
Have you ever played To The Moon? It's plot deals with most of the same themes. Dealing with grief, moving in with life after loss, etc.
And it too doesn't have any real resolution. but it does have is closure. This is what I think your story is lacking.
Dash can;t bring back the world, She accepts that her friends are gone, she's ready to move on. But she doesn't have closure, not in the scene's you've given us.
Note that closure doesn't mean figuring out what's happened or finding any Truth that helps her move on.
To the Moon achieves emotional closure by revisiting the events of the life of the "main character" and then letting them realize a lost "dream" using a machine that let's them tailor a dream at the end of their life. I'm NOT saying this is the direction your story should have taken. but this type of emotional closure is missing and it's absence undercuts the story IMO.
/rant
tl;dr
I like the story and it was well written. I also feel it has a slightly rushed ending and that while the story intentionally lacks resolution the lack of emotional closure undercuts what I see as the point of writing such a story.
Honestly, I genuinely enjoyed the story. I majored in psychology myself and I've been through loss so it was easy (for me anyways) to recognize the stages of grief as well as the coping mechanism's Rainbow used. I'm sorry you got so much backlash and criticism from this story. I personally think its exactly because of the type of story it is. Everyone wants to see the hero prevail, everyone wants the "happy" ending. But sometimes... there isn't one. This ending was bittersweet at best but it fits. Grief hurts, loss is hard. It never really goes away. But we can only keep moving forward from it, or let it consume us. In my mind that's what the final chapters can be summed up as. Rainbow was very close to letting the grief completely consume her again but she moved forward with the help of her subconscious and stand-in friends. Its unfortunate that bittersweet and ambiguous endings are much less well received. But I personally liked the entire story a lot.
Thank you for writing and posting this blog and clearing things up (as much as they can be cleared up). I am sad to say that I must still count myself among those who were not able to enjoy the story as it concluded.
First of all, I never read The Chronicles of Narnia and thus by extension never read The Last Battle. I appreciate that you tried to avoid having read them be necessary to understand the story, but I cannot shake the feeling that I was/am missing crucial clues due to not having read those books.
Secondly, I when I started reading the story was aware that the story was/is not about "the day the world almost ended, but [Rainbow Dash] then managed to save the day" - I knew that here the world had ended, and from here the logical questions (for the reader) were "why" / "what has happened" and "how does RD deal with it" / "what happens next". So I am perfectly fine with the world NOT being saved.
Now to the sore spots:
Every story requires a certain amount suspension of disbelief. The world being real with RD being the only "survivor" is part of the premise for the story. The point where the suspension of disbelief started to break for me was when the water started to consume the world right at the moment RD began to "let go" of it. As this kind of perfect timing would be highly implausible, the only conclusion would be that RD "letting go" was causing this - which then called the "this is the real world" premise (on the story had firmly operated on for now) in serious doubt. The cryptic "Further up, Further in" encouragement from the imagined friends, and the remainder of the chapter further eroded the idea of this being the real world - which had been a core premise of the story so far. And the - I hate to say this - for me utterly confusing last chapter finished off what little had remained of the suspension of disbelief.
Also every story needs a purpose (even if the purpose is the purpose were to be along the lines of "the path is the goal") For the first four and a half chapters it appeared to me that we were following RD both in trying to discover what happened, and seeing how she deals with the situation. Only the latter was your, the author's, intent but that was unknowable at this point. But fact that it was never discovered what had happened was, while not critical on its own, a major contributing factor to the confusion - I (and probably others) falsely assumed that discovering what had happened would be part of the resolution of the story.
As for the tone and setting: The story was straightforward and clear in the four and a half chapters, even the hallucination of her friends were to understandable as part of her deteriorating psyche. But in the final part of the story it makes a sudden major shift towards the metaphorical, which - compounded with at least part of the premise appearing broken (i.e. "all this might not be real") and the absence of any helping background information - created a storm of confusion for me. As a reader I was no longer able to tell what was to be taken as real, what was meant as a metaphor, and what was only the imagination of the character. I understood - after rereading the last chapter twice - that there was no Twilight - at least in body - talking to her and no horde of ponies standing near her, but I still thought that Tank was really there, looking at her hoof, for no reason that I could tell.
I wrote this in a comment to the story, but I'll repeat it here, because it is unfortunately the truth: At the end of the final chapter I caught myself thinking "Adding the line 'And then Rainbow Dash exploded into a million butterflies' wouldn't make that any less clear or more confusing".
And sadly this was the state I found myself after reading the story. The mystery of what had happened was not resolved, and while Rainbow Dash had finished her journey to deal with her grief, the crucial moments were also caught in the storm of confusion. So, with almost nothing revealed or very little resolved, the ending left me with... almost nothing. The payoff the story was seemingly working towards had not happened for me. Having read the story I scratched my head "Yeah, ok. So, that happened..."
Reading your blog I now understand the story a little better, but I still don't feel I like it - which is unfortunate, because it is well written otherwise. But as with food, everyone has their own taste, and sadly - at least for this story - yours and mind do not line up.
damn i was just chilling with it on my read it later i didnt know it was so hated it just by the summary looked pretty damn good, dont worry about what other people say we are talking about the same people who almost always uplift and popularize the most tropey "its been done hundreds of times but ima do it again anyways without adding thinking im the bee knees" stories and they eat it up, I'm glad you decided to go against the grain and make something fairly unique, i guess il take it off my read it later and read it now
5685365
crazy how you wrote almost a entire story talking about your fic, really shows how much you put into it
Look, I'm not trying to be a dick, but if you need to write what basically amounts to a college thesis to explain a story you wrote then maybe you didn't do the best job with the story in the first place.
at least in the final part the first few parts were clear-cut to understand for the final Parts just went completely off the rails crazy bananas
c.tenor.com/00m6tDSXeo4AAAAC/steve-harvey-im-just-saying.gif
For me, the epilogue was the only bit that really threw me since I didn't pick up on the hallucination aspect. Overall the story was phenomenal and I think you should be proud. Kind of reminds me of how everyone was up in arms with the ending of "background pony", despite the fact that that was pretty much the only way the story could have ended that would have fit.
It sort of reminds me of the feelings I had playing Outer Wilds, which if you haven't played I strongly recommend you do so before reading this spoiler text. I think you'd appreciate it, but you can't let yourself be spoiled by it. It's a game you can only experience once. in the game you are stuck in a time loop, where every 20 minutes the sun explodes and everyone you know and love dies. At first, I thought the objective was to figure out how to stop the sun from exploding and save the universe, but the game constantly gives you clues that this is an inevitability, that every sun eventually dies. That everyone will die, and nothing we can do will stop that. After a while, you realize that the only thing you can actually do is stop the loop, to stop resisting, and accept that everything must end eventually. And that, perhaps, that isn't such a bad thing.
Don't let critics get you down, and write what you want.
>Consequently, being familiar with this reference is not necessary to understanding the story that I have written.
I was the one who made this claim, and now that I understand your intent more clearly, I realize I was wrong, and I apologize.
That being said, while it's not required, it *did* result in me interpreting your work exactly correctly in terms of literalism vs metaphor! :D
I really liked the story and the themes it covered. I do understand the confusion many had, as in your efforts to keep things generic, you made it quite tricky to find meaning instead of accidentally projecting our own on it. That's what I'm sort of understanding from others, anyway.
I think the issue is there was too much left out, and when most people think of 'end of the world' it's not just everyone being Thanosed. I agree with the person that said if you have to right an essay to explain the story it says a lot.
Okay, it doesn’t matter much now, but this is a story about Rainbow dying in her sleep and is seeing her life flash before her eyes.
Her connection to the element of loyalty is stopping her from moving on properly. Then when her mind finally uses projections of her friends to relieve her of her duty. She can let go, and move on to experience a New Day