Soulmate Saturday
Every night, I stare up at the stars and realize just how much I fear them. The night is worse than the day because it shows all these suns unseen. That was what I read once, in a library book. I don't think there are any other kinds of creatures who look out at the stars on other worlds and feel filled with the same fear, the way I do. It's too implausible and feels like nothing more than silly god-driven propaganda that there could be life somewhere else. I'm glad it's just us here, alone. Even if we go to sleep scared and alone every single day because of the inequalities in our waking hours.
Sunburst, are you as afraid of the stars as I am? Please don't laugh and say that just because I was named for them, I have no excuse. The stars are like a brand over me, the same way that everypony else's name is a brand over them. Think about how our names and the names of the gods are rooted so deeply inside us, holding a power none of us ever asked for. I do not know what Starlight Glimmer of Wispgrove really means, or why it isn't more than a forgotten utterance, in the same way, the filler words of our conversations are. Why does 'Starlight Glimmer' have to mean more than 'a' or 'went'? Why do my name and mark carry more implications of a burden than my quest to be the savior of equinekind?
I remember every Nightmare Night you let me help you home early, even when we were both afraid of the dark. The first time it happened, your parents let us trick or treat on our whole street alone. You had been terrified of the fireflies, and I didn't know that night wouldn't last forever, that my time with you wouldn't last forever...
I kept you from everything I was asked to, and I would do it again. I know I've made mistakes. What you don't seem to understand is that I'm trying to change, and I always have been. You never believed in change, Sunburst. Look where it got you. All you do is nose through dusty old books about magic formulae, sit through enchanting labs, and brown-muzzling for the sun goddess. Give me long enough, and I'll be single-hoofedly responsible for bringing total equality to proletariat ponies under the hooves of the gods. I accept this will not be a hero's errand, and after my success, there shall be no more heroes. I will not be popular, not like Princess Celestia was in her rise to power.
There are going to be so many ponies that hate me, and even though I know that these bad ponies exist, the thought of being hated is tearing me up inside. Should I want ponies to hate me more than ever, and push me away as you did? To this day, I can't understand why you left me, not when I was your everything. You knew you were that to me, don't you? If you did, then how could you be so cruel with your abandonment? I waited for months after they shipped you away, and I wrote to you every day. What did I get? Nothing but heartbreak. You never wrote back, never visited your family. I didn't even get the new address when your parents moved out of Wispgrove. The post-ponies never gave me any answers, and my Great-Aunt Andromeda started losing herself completely. She ended up being too busy trying to decide whether to call me Aurora Glimmer or Cassiopeia Glimmer, after her mother.
Do you know how soul-crushing it was for me to have to pretend I was my mother, a mare I had never met, in order to keep a senile old nag from having a fit? Or how much of a relief it was to cast off that horrible homework assignment once I left for good. Poor, poor Sunburst, he never had to do research on what his mother was like because she was always around! You've always been so privileged to have loving parents, and I don't think that's something that should be so selfishly exclusive, not like you had things. I could have been somepony else's niece, or daughter, or even just a charge. My dear, sweet, Sunburst it was always you who reminded me not just of all the things I never had, but that I was capable of being loved.
Not once since the day you left have I stopped needing you. Sure, Sunburst, you may have been the one who had to have his hooves held every time you dropped your glasses, but have you forgotten that I'm the one that needs you to hold her hoof through life? I've sent countless apologies to you, and never once have I stopped begging you to just reach out. To say something again. I understand we all say things that we don't mean. In my case, I know I've gone through times when I've denounced you, written some very awful things, and have just generally been a pretty bad pony. However... I've always been there for you. There isn't a day that goes by since I stopped writing to you; I have always ensured that you have gotten letter after letter ever since the first one I mailed to you. That's why I have ALWAYS addressed every single letter to you and you alone, my dearest most treasured possession; my one, and only Sunburst. In your case, you didn't mean it when you told me you were gay.
I've always believed in soulmates, just as much as I believe ponies can change. You may think that sounds like a contradiction, my sweet, sweet Sunburst. It isn't, and it never will be. I knew you were my soulmate on the eve after the first Hearth's Warming I spent with your family. (In hindsight, I think that finding anything of value during the most material, unmagical of days is horribly ironic.) You act like that kiss wasn't the sweetest moment of our lives. For pony's sake, you pulled away from me and said you might be gay! You can't do that to me, Sunburst. We're soulmates, and that means we can't be hurting each other like this. Not when the world is such a cruel place and ponies have resigned themselves to behaving that way too like it's somehow natural or that anything natural is also good. You need to stop pretending that you're gay, and I know I've told you that so many times now. It's still true because you have turned avoiding into full-on abandonment for years.
Do you have any idea how much I've cried for you? Or over you? Do you not know that it would be painful just for me to try and add all that up into something to explain? I know you're confused, and it's okay to be that way. But but but. At the end of the day, I need you to realize that we will always be soulmates and that I will love you forever and ever.
I will always be here for you, Sunburst, waiting for you to love me back. That's the one thing that will never change, and I promise that I will make a world where even you realize we have to be together.
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...But Starlight, you're gay too.
Also, yikes. That explains Sunburst's silence in the end. This was an interesting piece, the ramblings of a madwoman and seeing how she falls in the end, like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Good work!
10248465 Thank you very much for your time and comments! This one didn’t get a lot of attention, but it was great having notifications from someone.
Sunburst is silent because it’s just Starlight writing a journal to him at that point, with no one else to send her loneliness to. Sunburst is the journal. Starlight is just crazy in thinking she can still have him read the journal in the same way he would have been able to read the letters she sent at some point in the past.
And yeah, she can be a little gay herself. She’s just got a fragile, childish mindset and possession issues.
Considering Sunburst wasn't reading and responding to anything from Sire's Hollow within the show, Starlight might very well be feeling Sunburst abandoned her by not answering any of her letters.
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With that in mind, I wonder how Starlight feels about the below ponified Sorabji quotation:
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...I've never had anyone with a name that was barely not 'Public Clop Account' comment on one of my stories before! I gotta say, that's what struck me first.
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The origin of my username was that there were a ton of Reddit accounts with names like "MyLittleClopper" or "SecretClopAccount" so I made a spoof of them.
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Huh, I never dug into pony Reddit stuff but I know there are accounts on here with names like that.
I think this is my favorite line out of all of the entries. It was a tough call, though. There were soooooo many good lines in here, especially in the sections that centered around Sunburst.
Holy crap, my dude. I am so glad I saved this one for last on this "Ice Star Reading Day," because, holy dumb shit do you get Starlight Glimmer. The possessiveness, the denial, the descent into madness... The desperation to understand, to find her place, to stop the pain, to have Sunburst, to have anyone, to know and be known... It's so deliciously dark and tragic and beautiful in a terribly sad way. Like watching something burn. Even Starlight's homophobia was a fitting addition, both because it closes one door so firmly, but because it further amplifies her own self-hatred and denial.
The diary format was a great choice for this, even moreso than a first-person narrative. While there are events that occur over time as she gets closer and closer to where the village was founded, ultimately, it's Starlight's evolving mental state that the diary entries serve to highlight. Great storytelling choice.
Sunburst leaving just destroyed her so much. The fact that he never, ever wrote back, canonically or in this story, undoubtedly must have added to the misery that led to what she did. She is just a pained, tortured soul taking out all of her misery on the world... None of which makes her misdeeds okay at all, of course, it makes them compelling to write and read about.
Although this was written before we knew about Firelight and Sire's Hollow, I don't feel like canon Starlight is any less ostracized than this version of Starlight with her crazy aunt. You captured her loneliness perfectly. After all, one can't look at Starlight and her village of fake smiles and, beneath the horror, feel anything but lonely.
The books that she read (and misunderstood) added greatly to the formation of her character and Our Town. Trotsky was a clever way of implementing the totalitarian/collectivist ideologies she did display in her village. I wouldn't go so far as to unironically call her a communist, but she definitely was a collectivist who believed in Jante's Law. I was really glad to see the "tall poppy" reference for that reason.
Overall, this is probably one of my favorite pre-S5 Starlight stories. Granted, I haven't read a ton, and there aren't that many to pick from, but... you just nailed it. The tie-in to Wishing Werelights is a nice bonus too.
An easy frickin' fave, this one.
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Oh boy, that implies there will be more Ice Star Reading Days. I admittedly wasn't sure what you would think of this one, considering that it is way darker than most of what you've been dipping into for my horse fare. Plus, you know that I admittedly don't write Starlight that much compared to other characters.
It really puzzles me how people didn't realize from her debut that Starlight was insane. She quite literally snaps when she loses her one friend in the world and is completely unhinged. She does not operate by much rhyme or reason prior to her reformation. The girl literally founds a cult, and considering the amount of bullshit she imposes on others and still manages to spout, the sheer hatred she holds, it really came across like her first victim would have had to have been herself, since of all the ponies in her village she showed herself to be the most vulnerable to hateful and twisted ideologies. Plus, most dictators were mentally disturbed figures, as were many of the philosophers behind those kinds of ideas. For Starlight to be part of that mentally ill target audience makes far too much sense.
This is probably going to sound bizarre, but I would hesitate to use 'homophobia' here too. I write Glimmy as pan, so it isn't that she has any disdain toward gay ponies, she can't take 'no' as an answer to monosexuality. If their orientations were reversed, and their genders with it, Starlight wouldn't have understood if Sunburst was heterosexual. Orientation incompatibility and monosexuality do not exist to her, just the forceful idea of soulmates. I was hoping that came across well.
I really wanted to convey just how fucked up her abandonment issues left her, especially since I've written a couple of other characters who have them really bad/warped in other stories. Since she has canonical abandonment issues, it made her rife for exploration.
I'm pretty accustomed to the diary format after all the other utilization I've made with similar kinds of storytelling. It's just so much fun! Plus, it easily accounts for a) the no electronics nation of Equestria having hobbies like diary-keeping being common and b) Starlight has no one to talk to!
I mean, the girl literally starts a cult. One has to wonder how she got all those ponies to stay. There are not a lot of stories that try and reconcile the Starlight of the season opener with what we learned in the S5 finale about why she did things.
Starlight always struck me as someone who was too disturbed to function through the rest of normal society after Sunburst. Part of why I had her leave home so early was because of that and because she needed to build up the skills needed to run her cult one day. People/ponies like her are the ones you vaguely remember going to high school with and only ever think about when their name comes up on the late-night news for the heinous shit they've gotten themselves into — something reminiscent of the ending of My Friend Dahmer, if you've ever read that.
I'd say that she shows the cultural/philosophical understanding that would make her a communist. She certainly shows enough that she would likely agree with the ideas that spread when Marx rewrote how he saw human nature. Her village did have some of the softest examples of political elements they could probably get away with (labor in her village is collective, there isn't any currency) but other than that, yeah she'd need to be more political.