One Sided Crush

by Arctofire

Chapter X: Reflection On One Sided Crush

BEHIND THE SCENES: ONE SIDED CRUSH
REFLECTION
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Hello! My name is Jarvy Jared. You may refer to me as such, or as Jarvy, Jared, or JJ. I am a Sonic the Hedgehog fan, as detailed by my avatar, and have been a brony for a whopping seven months! (Woo)

As you are probably all well aware, I am co-author of Arctofire’s story, One Sided Crush.

Believe me, this was not an easy task. Looking back over our inbox, we have sent a total of 129 PMs to each other. Most of them were about other ideas we were considering that we eventually threw out. (And half of them have been deleted automatically by the system…)

In fact, in the planning stage, our idea was centered around the return of a G1 villain. Now, as I am a very new brony (in fact, I was converted from a hater to a lover), I felt a bit unprepared for writing an adventure story with a G1 villain’s return. Nevertheless, we tried to formulate several ideas. In one, we had Celestia die, and had a series of political uprisings occur in the wake of her death. This, of course, proved to be too much for us, as I have little political know-how and the story was going to be way too big. Another idea had me suggesting we give Grogar a chance to shine; but, as I found out, he was not the best villain to bring back.

One of our more weirder story ideas was a sequel to Cupcakes. I must confess, I do not like writing dark fics, and though I was prepared to write one with Arcto, he graciously decided not to impose it.

Eventually, we settled on a topic that I found interesting and which Arcto was extremely vibrant upon: Sparity. Or, rather, Anti-Sparity.

For those of you who don’t know, Sparity is the shipping name for Spike and Rarity. While I am not much of a shipper, I do get that this pairing is a bit odd. For starters, Spike is a baby dragon, while Rarity is a full-grown mare. That is downright pedophilia, should a relationship even start. And while I understand that, in Sparity stories, Spike has been raised to the age of consent, realistically speaking, as Spike aged, so would Rarity. And old feelings and crushes would die away. (Then again, realistically speaking, watching a show about pastel-colored ponies is rather insane.)

(On a side-note, I prefer SpikeBelle. And I may or may not have read several stories shipping Sonic the Hedgehog characters with the Mane Six…)

Anyway, once we settled on the central idea, we began to spout out any kind of central plot. I especially liked the ideas brought up in Silver Quill’s Spike Speculations. We eventually decided to write a story with Rarity growing increasingly uncomfortable with Spike’s romantic endeavors.

We threw around idea after idea, structure after structure, trying to come up with something decent.

We did this several times, discussing various sequences and structures, before we settled on the one you see here.

We set it up so that each of us did one chapter. I was to do the odds, Arcto the evens. We also decided that, since Arcto had no stories on his account, to put it on his.

I must admit, I was pretty wary about doing this. I had never collaborated with another author before, and I was worried that my style of writing would clash with Arcto’s. This was a learning experience for both of us, as we had to figure out a way to play off of each other’s various writing techniques. Experienced and well-observed readers will notice that our chapters differ greatly. I write more fluff and take the ordinary and try and make it new and interesting; Arcto is more direct, quickly getting to the action and making the dialogues flow. As such, my chapters were noticeably longer, while his were much shorter.

Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. A lot of great writers prefer to cut the fluff and jump right in. Many don’t like to toy with the characters, preferring to thrown them in realistically unprepared and let them solve their problems from there on out. In fact, fluff is actually one of my biggest weaknesses; not because I can’t do it well, but because I do it too well. I have a bad habit of adding too much fluff to a story and completely ruining the pacing of it. As I wrote this story, I tried my best to curb that habit to the best of my ability.

And the story turned out better than I expected. It got many likes, plenty of constructive and positive comments, and an eager audience. It surprised me that such a simple story could garner so much attention; none of my other works have ever received this much earnest!

I suppose my favorite chapter of the story was Chapter Six. Not because it was written by me, but because of the unique challenge it offered. I wanted to discuss the concept of love differently. I didn’t want to attribute it to just a feeling; I needed an analogy, something for it to liken to. And I wanted it to occur seamlessly in Rarity’s head. I wanted her to think through her problem and consider what love is to her.

So, I wrote a comparison—in Rarity’s thoughts—between love and orchestral pieces, detailing how the two can be similar. I offered up the idea that both love and orchestra need the pieces involved to work together, else they result in something awful. I also decided to expand on what I believed to be Rarity’s true feelings for Spike—she would, in my head, love him as a brother, not a lover. This, I believe, is a different love, a caring love. Not a romantic love, like the one Spike has for Rarity.

Of course, I could have just gone into Chapter Six with Rarity ruminating for a bit before a male customer showed up and helped her. But, I wanted to interject a bit more to it. We had planned to have the male customer be getting ready for the wedding, but, using Cash Cash’s song Speak With Your Heart as inspiration, I managed to craft a conversation between Rarity and the male. I tried, to the best of my ability, to make the male character memorable, and to make the advice he gave reasonable and realistic.

Interestingly, if you think about it, love, as wondrous and amazing as it is, is mundane. We take it for granted, tossing it around like it has little value other than a word. Only a few truly understand what it means for them, and for others. Writers are among the few that can.

There’s a saying for this kind of phenomenon, a sort of writer’s philosophy: “Writers take the new and make it familiar, and make the familiar new.” Indeed, taking something as common as the concept of love and turning it into an analogy for a beautiful orchestral symphony was, admittedly, something different. And, injecting philosophy into my stories has become my trademark—but only the truly observant will catch these snippets of philosophical understanding.

I guess I had written this chapter very well, as Arcto was incredibly awed by it. I don’t consider it my best work, but it’s certainly up there.

My main story, Nix: Identity, has received less than positive reviews; and Cycles, my first Slice of Life, has been mediocre at best. Arcto has had to remove several of his stories due to poor reception. It is my wish that, through this story, we have both improved—and I hope that readers will continue giving our stories the chance they deserve.

It has been an immense pleasure working with Arctofire. Though he was a bit nervous when we started this, I found that he grew more confident as time went on. He certainly has numerous ideas in mind that I hope one day he’ll be able to write. Though he may call me his writing superior, I attest to his ability as a writer. We are all growing and learning to write better; none of us ever start as masters at our craft. Through practice and diligence, we may be graced with getting noticed. Or we may not. Yet, I find that the journey of a writer is more important than the destination of fame, and I hope that many of the readers will understand that.

(Would you look at that; this is only a reflection, and I’ve already added so much fluff and backstory to it!)

Arctofire, you have my utmost thanks for deciding to produce this story with me. It has been an honor working with you. Hopefully, you’ve learned something from all this; and I hope that something involves always trying to write. My thanks also goes out to Azrael, who assisted with sending PMs to Arctofire while there was a glitch with the system. Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with that mess in the future. Finally, I thank the readers for their positive feedback and encouragement for the story; without your insistence, this story might have fallen into disarray.

Sincerely yours, and with the hope that you all will try to support the both of us,

Jarvy Jared

***

Hello, it's Arctofire here. After that wonderful reflection from Jarvy, I just want to add some of my own thoughts.

Before writing this story, I was very anxious and unconfident in writing. I like to take into account that maybe it was because I'm a very unknown brony reviewer, and can find it hard to keep up with my own standards. Whilst that is true, it's also due to the fact of downvotes.

I have written many, MANY, stories before this one, but all of them received mixed reviews at best or were shunned at worst. Due to all featured and well known fanfictions being 90% upvotes, and me still finding HUGE problems with the grammar, narrative, and storytelling a lot of the time, the fact that I had a lot of downvotes was excruciating, as my story was obviously REALLY bad, so I deleted all of them due to this reason.

Now, this story has got more downvotes than I would like. But JJ helped me realize that downvotes don't mean everything and what's really important is if your proud of your work. He also said and now I completely realize that people can downvote stories for really stupid reasons. Some are just trolls, some are hardcore shippers,.... etc. What's also helped me gain confidence with this story and has made me want to write in the future regardless of downvotes, is how supportive the fans of the story have been. I can't thank you enough for the support you've given us, and you are part of the reason why I am fully prepared to write again regardless of downvotes. You can expect more from me in the future, so look forward to that.

Arctofire

Comments

[RadicalDishonesty]

This belongs either in a blog post or an Author's Note.

But it was interesting.

[Jarvy Jared]

Hopefully you all have enjoyed this little story Arcto and I put together. It was certainly a pleasure working on this!

I have an idea for a spin-off of this story that I will be writing sometime in the near future. I won't reveal much, but it involves to characters introduced in one of the previous chapters—and they are not the main cast. Do with that information what you will.

[Azrael the alicorn]

6196336 I liked this story, not for nothing is among my favorites.

[Hillbe]

It isn't shipping if it's cannon, A good story needs conflict, characters that readers can relate to and a nice plot , Don't worry about down votes just have fun in the process,

img12.deviantart.net/4f95/i/2015/095/8/4/raritys_egg_colored_by_hillbe-d8oj3qg.jpg

[Ordertaker]

I don't know what others are saying but I've enjoyed reading it (though Spike was a tad too creepy but hey that was the huge what if for this story right?) and it gets an upvote from me :) Great job and more power to you both! :)

[Arby]

I'm a huge Sparity guy but it was a good read I'll admit. +1 4 u

[Humanity]

As someone who once had feelings very similar to Spike's, I understand the adoration and the frustration that comes with these one-sided relationships. It's not an easy thing to deal with and the outcome can often be worse than what happened here. Glad to see things turned out better with Spike and Rarity that it did with me and her. Nicely done.