It's that time again. The time where I finish a story, and talk about how I totally finished the story. If you're a repeat reader of mine, you probably know exactly where this AN stuff is going to go, because I do it every single time. All both times before now, and I don't plan on stopping. If you don't like it, you can leave. Or you can stay and read some funny shit, because normally I find an interesting way to tell you stuff you probably already know about myself or this story.
Anyways, gonna follow the usual format, with interesting topic headers. Here we go.
PLOT STUFF YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNEW BUT I'M GOING TO EXPLAIN ANYWAYS
No sense beating around the bush when I can't just beat you over the head with my header, if you know what I mean. As always, I'm not going to cover every little bit about the plot, but will focus on the parts that I particularly enjoyed and explain myself a little bit as to why I may have done a few things the way I did. Don't expect spoilers for later Visionary fics, I won't give them to you. (Aurus gets a fancy hat in Opposite Day.)
Starting from the very, very beginning, the story needed to be born from Twilight's perspective as the girl we all know and love becoming a young adult, and facing the emotional crisis every nerd brings upon themselves: trying to figure out what the hell to do with relationships. Rather than using Rarity for relationship advice (because I already did that in Visionary) I decided to use Applejack, who I thought made a spectacular candidate due to her honest nature. Not to mention a little bit of irony for you all to enjoy if you read Visionary, since Applejack didn't know shit about relationships in that story.
Obviously that was supposed to remain the underlying focus of the story, and so reasonably it got pushed to the background. However, I decided to bury the topic immediately following Twilight's conversation with AJ because it seemed like something Twilight would do. So, with her priorities way out of whack, but a new one at least introduced, off I sent her to Manehattan, city of lights and really neat drunk people.
No sense wasting any time, I introduced the love interest immediately, but decided not to name him or even really touch on him until the next chapter. No real reason for it, other than I thought it fit the setup well enough, and it helped to further make Gearrick into the initially mysterious character he needed to be to really cash in on Twilight's natural curiosity. From there the romance did what it did, going nice and slow at certain point, and then abnormally, awkwardly fast at others. Intentionally so, because this is how a relationship behaves when neither party knows what the hell they're doing and can't make up their god damned minds.
The romance kept doing this thing where it would jump to the foreground, then become the background for a while, and just cycle through, constantly trading places with the other plot arc: all the stuff with the Gearbox Guild. I thought it was a nice touch personally, if a bit cliche, that something bad was surrounding Gearrick way before Twilight even laid eyes on him, and that it kept on growing and growing until it finally swept Twilight up, too. Made all the better, of course, because nobody knew who Twilight was, really.
The best part is, that wasn't even intentional. Aside from Gearrick, who's naturally clueless about world events and famous people, Twilight only ever mentions her last name to the hotel staff pony, meaning there are literally only two ponies who know her name until Gearrick mentions it to Mick and everything goes to shit. It turned into a nice, usable plot point for me all on its own, and that just tickles me effing pink.
I'd talk more about the Mick and Myla/Phyla stuff, but there's a character section for that, so instead I'm going to talk about mech suits. Yes, I admit openly to making up a ton of shit in regards to mechanics and the properties of electricity, sound, the whole works. I shamelessly modified real-world facts and theories to suit my purposes so that in the end I could give everyone, myself included, what they really came here to see: two geniuses duking it out in badass power armor. And a cool car. So don't bitch.
Moving on, I had to create that conflict with Gearrick possibly going to jail. Yes it was cheesy, and probably uncalled for, but it served a very important purpose on both a large scale and a small scale, for my universe. One, it gave Twilight a reason to admit her feelings to other people and to have the chance to save Gearrick instead of the other way around, which the story pretty badly needed to remain stable. That's the small scale.
Two, it introduced a more detailed view of Equestrian politics, specifically the justice system. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but both Visionary and Wings of Courage, my only other two fics in the universe, currently, had heavy political themes. I couldn't let Tinkermane escape that trend either, and so I used the opportunity to touch upon the fact that Equestria is not some happy go lucky "fix it with magic" country where everything is solved with the Harmonic Nuclear Deterrent. I need it to be a little more deep than that, this isn't a freaking kid's show.
And, for the first time ever in this universe, I created not one, not two, but three redeemable villains that a lot of people found relatable and were, at times, even rooting for. I like to think it takes all kinds to make the world a miserable place, and not everyone can be so damnably powerful and set in their diabolical ways as Gerd and some select other spoilery villains. Don't ask. Anyways, it was refreshing to utilize those characters: one as a repentant soul, very reminiscent of Malik in Visionary, and the other two as tragic victims of circumstances beyond their control.
The epilogue is going to go to some really, really fun places later on in the universe. First in Dustmarch, then again in a direct sequel (or a prequel, maybe, I haven't made up my mind) if I can get enough done by the end of the year to allow it. To make a long story unreasonably short, I loved writing this so much that there's no way I'm going to let it end here.
I MADE AN UNREASONABLY SMALL NUMBER OF CHARACTERS
Which is so not going to make this section any shorter. I'm going to start off with my favorite one.
Gearrick Tinkermane:
You know all those times when you see the Romance tag, look at the characters hoping to see two of the Mane Six, but instead you see one of the Mane Six and the OC tag, so you cry a little inside? Well, I decided to try my hand at it, because I knew, just knew, that someone would go: "Oh look, a Twilight x Self-insert OC ship. Bet this is going to be shit."
Gearrick was a self-insert, and I fucking got all of you. Simply by reviewing the vast number of comments in which Gearrick was either "best pony" or everyone's "favorite character in the universe so far", I think I can safely say that I took the 'bad self-insert shipping' stereotype and decimated it. I don't brag about my stories often, but I think I earned this one.
Anyways, enough about me. Just kidding, let's talk about me, and how Gearrick was a self-insert some more. Obviously I am not any sort of genius, mechanical or otherwise. If Gearrick had been based entirely on me, it would have been a very boring story, simply because he would not have had any talents at all, and would have simply been a lazy good-for-nothing.
Instead I made him the character he needed to be, but with my overall personality. Gearrick is very laid back, doesn't deal well with structure, and hates being looked down on, despite the fact that he doesn't do much of anything in the ways people expect of him. He marches to his own tune, and it gets him into trouble more often than not. He pays very little mind to the ideas of money, spending everything but what he needs to stay alive pursuing his dreams rather than improving his lifestyle. He happily lives in the worst circumstances, so long as he is doing what he loves.
Which made him an amazing contrast to the by-the-book, completely orthodox, and very worrisome Twilight Sparkle, and introduced the much-needed balancing element of the ability to 'let things run their course' from time to time, while she in turn brought him some badly required stability.
In the end, Gearrick turned out in some ways to be the character I wish to be, yet in many ways the man I am with his snarky, witty way with words, his carefree and humorous sense of adventure, and his love and dedication to his dreams, whatever they may be.
Twilight Sparkle:
A lot of the same dorky mare we all know and love, with Razorbeam's own personal twists here and there to make her a more reasonable, less cartoony character. She's older by a few years in this story than what we're used to, and so I strove to make her seem more mature, without taking away the charm of her childish curiosity or her incredible intelligence and wit. Whether I succeeded or not isn't my call to make for you guys, but for my own part I feel like I managed to make her into her own person inside my universe, breaking away from her canon self by a comfortable distance and allowing her to engage in the more mature themes and events that take place in my messed up world.
Though I had many plans for Gearrick's character (as a plain old, boring no-real story OC) way, way before I even decided to write Tinkermane, I didn't build the relationship aspect of the story around him so much as Twilight, though many of you might like to argue. It seems as though a lot of the story focuses on Gearrick and leaves Twilight hanging in the background, letting him play the hero, and that's not entirely untrue. Neither is it correct, though.
I built the relationship itself, arguably the key component of the story, mostly from Twilight's character. Though many of the scenes take place from Gearrick's perspective, it is always Twilight's actions and reactions to the things he does, says, and everything else that are driving the romance forward. Gearrick's feelings aren't even considered until the moment before Twilight admits hers to him. So, while Gearrick may undeniably be the hero of the tale in terms of the dramatic conflict, it is Twilight who really pushed everything to where it was going and made this story what it was. She may not have felt like the main character all the time, but she sure as hell was.
As a side note, for the relationship itself, I'd like to say that it was wonderful to get the chance to write it how I did, cheesy or cliche as many parts of it may have been. I'm not a shy man, so it doesn't bother me in the least to admit to all of you that Gearrick's relationship with Twilight was my vision of the ideal relationship, with the ideal woman. The Twilight you see in this story is most certainly the girl I would love to meet in my life, and so to me this particular romance has felt more real than any other I have ever written. Say what you will about a man and his fantasies, but I hold that it is right, and I was fortunate to have found the opportunity to discover what it is I am really looking for. I suppose this has nothing to do with Twilight's character, but hey, I did say 'side note' at the top of this paragraph.
Mick Magnet:
I loved this character. Absolutely loved, because he represents a very real personality that every single person reading this has encountered, in one way or another, without fail. He is the man on top, the world in his hand and his head in the clouds. A man so full of himself that straightforward success isn't enough, so he grasps at the power to mess with the successes of others.
In the end he overextends his reach, of course, and it all comes crashing down around his ears. Though Gearrick certainly won the fight he had with Mick, I wanted it to be known that Mick defeated himself way, way before that. Gearrick's assault only drove the point for him home: that his own pride and greed had been his downfall. But, rather than letting him be destroyed by those things, I wanted to offer this character the chance to make things right. Though it was sudden and probably should have been handled a different way, I chose to extend that second chance to him by very nearly killing him, and forcing him to reassess his life.
In the end he became a minor hero of sorts, and that was a very, very fun thing to do. Perhaps villains like these are a dime a dozen, but I would never have done this any other way.
Myla and Phyla Trellon:
They were honestly my favorite characters in the story. I'd say Gearrick, but I deal with myself on a daily basis, so to me he's old news. The twins were a very unique pair of characters that, in my personal experience, had never been done before. I don't doubt that in the wide world of fiction someone beat me to the punch, but I hope I spun it uniquely enough to impress even the people who had seen such a thing before.
It gave me the chance to create a romantic conflict, for one, which allowed Twilight to take up her role as a heroine in that particular plot chain, since Gearrick proved the hero in the other. My primary hope with these characters was to create a generous amount of trouble in the story for the heroes, while still allowing the readers to feel as if the twins were the real victims all along. Doubtless nobody felt much of anything for Phyla, and everyone probably felt miserable for Myla. I just want you to reflect on that likelihood, and realize the parallel between what you felt, and what the characters were like. You couldn't truly empathize with the pony who felt nothing, yet you pitied the pony who was an emotional wreck. At the very least I did, and that amuses me to a wonderful degree.
Jack:
He was a Jack Daniel's shout out from the very beginning. I regret nothing.
AND NOW I START THANKING PEOPLE
You know how this goes. I've said it a million times, and I'll say it a million more before I'm through writing, at the end of my days. I write for nobody but myself, and I think that's best for several reasons. Firstly, because I can tell anyone who decides to get in my face with a negative opinion that I really, really don't care what they think of my story. Secondly, because if I write for nobody but myself, it makes sharing the story mean something. In turn, that makes what you choose to say about my story a gift, rather than something I expect from you.
This was my adventure, and I loved every second of it. It took me so much longer to write than I expected, and I was blessed by your patience. Never once did you make me feel as if I was letting you down, or brushing you off, because all of you have graciously understood that I don't work for you, and you don't 'belong' to me as readers. I'm just a guy who likes to share his adventures with people, especially his friends. If you consider yourself just a reader of mine, you're not seeing the bigger picture. Anyone who shares in these adventures of mine isn't a reader, they're a friend. I wouldn't share my stories with anyone else.
Your excited comments, honest feedback, and undeniable patience, made this adventure of mine even more grand than I had hoped. As always, you have driven me to be better with your criticisms, encouraged me with your praise, and pushed me to make this thing really shine on its own. Though I can't say I write for your pleasure, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of you have impacted my story, this adventure, in incredible ways
I'd like to offer my particular thanks to a few choice people, as always.
Firstly is Medicshy, an unwavering friend who has been with me since long before this story even started. His critiques, advice, and encouragements impacted this story more than anyone else's. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his critical eye and his much-needed honesty, which keeps me improving with every word I write.
Next is SocraticBrony, who has been a great source of calm for me. I began this story at the start of a very troublesome time in my life, which created a great struggle to continue. Though I never worried that I would give up and let the story die, it would still not be done today if not for him. Whether simply lifting my spirits on days where I felt defeated, or allowing his excitement to infect me and drive me to work on the story, he has been a wonderful friend and brother to me. He'd never let me thank him directly, so I'll just thank him here, where hundreds of people will see it.
Then there are the Mentlegen, the unsung group of heroes who very few of you reading will know. These are the good men I speak with in chat on a daily basis, and they have been an magnificent source of morale, encouragement, and simple fun. My thanks go out to these madmen and witty bastards, who have helped to keep me from going sane. Proud-Dust, Nathan Traveler, Doorknobs, and Twilight at Dusk, this little paragraph is for you.
And lastly I would like to give a special thanks to this story's number one fan: HeimoBauss. Nobody has sung this story's praises like he has, and his zealous love for this tale has brought more smiles to my face than I can count. Every comment by him has been an undeniable pleasure to receive, and he more than anyone else comes to mind when I recall the many chapters I have left behind me on this one. I tip my hat to him, and I pray that someone else is lucky enough to draw his attention and earn his magnificent viewership. Stay classy, Finnish Zombie.
That wraps this up, ladies and gents. Look to the future: tomorrow we right, but tonight we drink!
Regards,
Razorbeam.