Sometimes the Difference Between a Dream and a Nightmare Is When You Wake Up
She was in Las Pegasus, missing her little sister Berryshine. Yearning to be with her. Feeling that there's an empty spot in the bed.
She fell asleep.
In her dream, she flew through the night. Still a pegasus, okay. In a way, every moment she spends when she's aware that she's the same pony race as she was last moment, is just very slightly reassuring. In the sense that somepony who lives in a narrow, deep mountain valley that's prone to landslides and earthquakes and avalanches, can look up at the mountains around herself and say, nope, I don't see one right this moment. I definitely have seconds left, maybe even minutes, to live. Maybe a lot more than that, but at the least, the tiny sliver of future that I can already see.
As she thought about that, the landscape melted and changed around her. The mountains faded, the buildings slid and wobbled like spilled raw eggs slipping along a countertop. The sky was still mostly the same, except that with the mountains out of the way she could see more of it.
Finally the liquid world all around her went solid again, and she recognized her surroundings. Ponyville.
She knocked on a door. A light went on inside. After a minute, the door opened.
Cherry Berry breathed the word, "Berryshine."
"Cherry Berry!" Cherry's little sister said. "You came back! Oh, how I've missed you." Berry grabbed Cherry in her forelegs, as if trying to smoosh herself into her big sister's chest.
Berry's shape started to change, gradually becoming more like a pancake wrapping itself around Cherry.
But some part of Cherry that the bigger sister didn't recognize stirred. It said, "Enough." Berry snapped back into her normal shape.
Berry blinked, confused. "What was that? First I...and now..." She shook her head.
Cherry Berry said, "This is a dream."
After a moment, Berry said, "Oh. Of course. I should have known this was too good to be real."
Cherry said, "But this is really me. Aren't you really you?"
Berry said, "I THINK I am. But of course, a dream pony would say that, wouldn't she?"
From somewhere inside her that she didn't quite recognize, Cherry said, "She might. Or she might not. Quick, let's tell each other things that we would only find out if we're really each other."
Berry said, "I'm still living here in Ponyville. But you could already guess that. I have a new job, after school. Do you remember that year when we were living in the woods without anypony to take care of us, and food was scarce, and I was so happy to see a big garden with carrots growing in it, that I just ran up and stole as many as I could? Well, now I'm working on a carrot farm. All the vegetables I can eat." She sighed. "Ponyville really is a nice place. When a pony is in trouble, they try to find a way to help you make it better."
"The carrot farm job is one thing I didn't know," Cherry said. "Tell me another."
"Trixie came back through town again. She has a new act where she cuts a Diamond Dog in half, and the bottom walks around while the top half talks."
"That's good," Cherry said. "I'm hiding out in Las Pegasus, because that's a town where a pegasus can fit in, but there's lots of race-inclusive housing where even if you're not a pegasus, you won't fall through the floor."
"That makes sense," Berry said. "But the ponies in Ponyville are good ponies. They learned to accept me, and they can learn to accept you too."
Cherry said, "I don't want ponies to see me as some freak!"
"You're not a freak!" Berry said. "You're just special. Both of us are."
"SPECIAL is how polite ponies call a freak a freak," Cherry said. "Here in Las Pegasus nopony knows who I am, or what I am. And I like it that way."
"But Cherry! If you never let anypony know who you are, you won't have any friends! That's no way to live! You even left your own sister!"
The night around the ponies started to grow lighter. "Cherry!" Berryshine cried out, "Tell me something else quick!"
Cherry looked at the surroundings starting to fade. "I love you."
Berryshine said, "I love you too!"
At that moment, the dream vanished. Berryshine's eyes started to open. "Harmony take it!" she spoke rudely. "Just when...well, it was a pleasant dream, anyway. While it lasted."
Berry crawled out of bed, and twitched her wings. Still there. She had feared she might have changed pony races during the night. She always had an underlying fear that some night a time might come when she would change species, and who knew what that might to do her life? But she was still okay. Today, at least, she wouldn't have to flee town to find another place where nopony knew her.
How many years would it take her, she wondered, before she ran out of big cities and little towns to hide in? Maybe today she could find time to stop in at a bookstore or a library, and look at an atlas.
Bleary-eyed, Berry took a shower, brushing her teeth at the same time. It was more efficient that way, and who knew how many more days her life would give her before a horrific transformation might do her in for good?
Berry went outside, strolling as she tried to think of the closest place to get an atlas. But as she passed a pair of ponies, they looked at her strangely. After they passed, Berry checked her wings, and looked down at her own body. Nothing weird about her at all. Why did they react like that? Were they tourists so rustic that they'd never seen a big city pegasus before?
As Berry approached a shop window, she looked inside. No books here, she thought. But in the window's reflected light, a motion caught her attention. Her eyes refocused, to look at the reflection instead of the shop's contents.
On the sidewalk to one side of her, a pony was bowing deeply, almost laying his body down onto the pavement. Berry didn't look forward to dealing with some obnoxious beggar! With the frequent changes disrupting her life and losing her job after job, she hardly had enough bits for herself!
She finally noticed something else in the reflection. Something was stuck in her mane. Berry reflexively tried to straighten her mane...with magic.
Berry recognized that today, she was an alicorn.
"Oh buck," she said to herself. "As if I wasn't an obvious enough freak already."
Author's Note
Another story that used a somewhat similar premise, but with a rather different tone from Shaslan's Changing Cherries, is Element of Malice's It’s NOT conTAGIOUS!!.
Second Author's Note
This story's metadata (title, summary/summaries...) received some rather pointed criticism from some people who I respect. (The story itself was also criticized, but that's another thing.) So I'm changing that metadata on the story, but for future reference the old metadata is here, at least so I can be criticized for what I did instead of some misunderstanding of what I did not do.
TITLE
Cherry's Dream (An I-Hated-the-Ending-Fic)Short Description
Cherry's spontaneous night changes make her, in many ponies' eyes, a changeling-like freak. But one night, an innocent dream turns into a nightmare that leaves her no place to hide. (Unauthorized sequel to a story by Shaslan because I hated the end.)
Long Description
Where did this story come from? I read a very, very good story that was marked "Complete," and I was disappointed (maybe even peeved) that in my view it wasn't a story, it was a situation plus a backstory. Both very well-written, but NOT A STORY.
It turns out that Shaslan is working on at least one more chapter to Changing Cherries. I didn't realize that, because the story was marked "Complete," and I didn't see any indication that more would be coming, in the story description/summary or the Author's Note.
So...this is an unauthorized sequel to Chapter One of Changing Cherries, because I hated the original ending to a "Complete" story THAT MUCH. This is also my first speedfic, I guess.
TAGS:
AU
Comedy
Drama
Slice of LifeMain Characters
Other
Cherry Berry=========
CHAPTER TITLE:
Sometimes the Difference Between a Dream and a Nightmare Is When You Wake Up
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Idk, the whole concept of writing a fix-it fic to someone else's fic seems kinda rude to me
10431463
Maybe it is rude?
But you know what else is rude?
Putting a "Complete" tag on your fic that you know is not yet complete and has no appropriate ending is inconsiderate. Because some people don't want to read a fic until it is complete.
Probaby the "worst" thing I've done here is to suggest that if you publish an intentionally unfinished fic that you plan to finish, you should indicate somewhere that you plan to add more to it.
But yeah, different people's ideas of appropriate etiquette are different, I guess.
10431488
"A person providing a free public service didn't do it the way I wanted. So I publicly belittled them on my shitty little 33 follower account. But don't worry they're the rude one."
Laddddddd what the fuck are you smoking.
10431463
As for whether it's rude to write a fixfic for someone else's fic? That is a good question. Is it ever appropriate to write a fixfic for any piece of fiction? Should fixfics be banned from the world? Or should we simply say that only "real" works like actual MLP episodes can have fixfics written about them, and everyone else's stories are "not real stories"?
Anyway, when I wrote what I wrote, it was not a fixfic. I wrote a sequel to a story that Shaslan had marked as "Complete," I explained why I had done so, and I credited Shaslan thoroughly and conspicuously for everything Shaslan had done.
10431497
Episode fixfics suck as well. What you're doing now (and by extension, what most fixfics in general do, specifically if self-identifying as such) is going "Wow, I hate your thing. Let me show you MY way." The main difference between this and writing regular fanfic (which can edit or change or "fix" parts of canon and the story without being so obnoxiously loud about how they're "fixing" something") is the attitude. Fixfics imply something is broken, or wrong, and needs to be fixed. This is already annoying when people do this with an episode of the show, and comes off as very condescending and self-important. Doing it to someone else's fic on the site, however, where that person can stumble across it and see you having a fit about how their fic wasn't up to your standards to the point where you had to go "ugh just let ME do it" is honestly just downright rude and a bit mean.
10431488
The Changing Cherries story was a speedwrite, completed in an hour or so with a bit of editing after the fact, and was intended as a standalone story. The ending was the hopeful note of Cherry seeking mental help. Enough people have asked for more that I'm now working on more to be published in the next couple of days. But I don't think it was 'rude' to publish it marked as complete, because at the time I thought it was complete.
I'm glad that you liked my fanfiction enough to write a spin-off, but I do wish that you had asked for permission to publish something based on my work rather than telling me you'd done it, and that you hadn't put that you 'hated' it in the title. On the whole though I get that we're all on a fanfiction site writing about other people's characters, so stories are bound to build off of one another.
10431493
Well, the significant respect that I have for you as a writer doesn't come from your follower count.
My respect for you as a writer comes from your publishing good stories that I've read and enjoyed, and my memories of them.
Now I realize that my respect for you also comes partly from my never having seen you obnoxiously mistagging.
1.) Not every story has to end the way you want it to, or even have a definitive end. You note that you did not know whether or not the original author was doing another chapter, which is fair, but it also now looks like you bullied the original author into doing so, which is not a great look, and is part of why you should probably remove the long rambling explanation for why this fic exists in your story post.
2.) If you don't want this downvoted to hell I'd change the description a lot becomes it comes across as a little uh. Not great. In general it is not a good idea to write anything in the description that isn't a blurb or an acknowledgement. Adding unnecessary information at best bores people and at worst irritates them.
3.) The ethics and merits of fixfics are one thing. Advertising your fixfic as a fixfic is incredibly ill-advised. Fixfics as a concept are largely decried as being at best boorish and at worst actively hostile creations, and the creating of them is seen as less an innocent creative act and more as an inappropriate outburst. So labelling the story that kind of dooms it to be largely read in that context, making it difficult to read on its own merits.
4.) No one owes you any artistic act and maneuvering yourself as responding to someone's inconsiderate not-completing of their art is... I mean, I won't mince words, that's kind of a dick move. Don't say that or do that. Even if they had been cynical in their approach this would make you look a lot worse.
5.) After reading the original... Not only does this story not understand what makes the original work, it doesn't understand the original's themes at all. It's weirdly maudlin instead of confessional, written in a different style without really offering any new spin or extension, and it feels like less of a "fix" and more of an ill-advised midnight renovation. Even if we were to for the sake of argument say that fixfics aren't kind of problematic as a concept and just accept them at face value, ignoring the tone and form of the original story would still not jive well with their stated mission. The original ending's abrupt cut off, as the speaker finished their explanation, was sort of the point--it was a character unburdening themselves to another. The entire thing works precisely because we only have this character's part of the discussion and are left to infer or hope that there is a response that will fit. Adding additional characters weakens this a lot. It flattens the emotional curve into a line.
6.) There are some sections that do seem like they are intending to match the tone of the original:
This is probably the closest this story gets to the original not only in prose quality (the raw eggs thing I'm 50/50 on but I can see an argument for it being a good image) but also in tone and approach. The original is built largely on long descriptive passages and long prose-poetic lists of what is done or seen.
This is where the story loses the original completely and drifts off into something rather different. Ironically, as the original is concerned with the experience of being Other! But these lines fall flat in a big way that fails what comes both before and after. They are incredibly cliched, making this section feel inauthentic and kind of limp. When the exchange ends incredibly quickly after this, the feeling of dissapointment is amplified. The scene, again ironically, works better without this there at all, which is unfortunate because this Otherness is the thrust of your story.
Less than an ending, this story really feels like the first roughish draft of a mid-act passage of a longer story. It doesn't actually continue the original, and arguably isn't connected to it except tenuously, and ends abruptly. While a story can end ambiguously, or without a "true" resolution, we generally do this in a more nuanced way. You poise a question (lady or tiger?) or suggest that one of two or three things may have happened or is about to happen, perhaps. But these sorts of endings are supported in the text. We don't just stop mid paragraph and ask the reader which comes out of the door, a lady or a tiger, in a story that heretofore has had neither of these things.
These endings also have their own finality, a weight to them that suggests that yes, this is the ending, this was intentional. The last line here does not have this finality, and so I genuinely thought it wasn't finished at first. If you plan to return to this and plan to keep this ending I would definitely focus on reworking this line heavily.
The alicorn bit has really no thematic connection to the rest of your story, and because your story doesn't have strong thematic connection to the original, it has no strong ties there either. The ending is unmoored from what you've written. That's not great! It might kind of work in a jazzy, metafictional work, if you were out there writing something fragmented and artsy. This would work for something jazzy like Slaughterhouse Five where time is a mess. But here, in a straightforward and now conventional third person narrative, it doesn't work at all. It feels less like an ending, abrupt or not, and more like a non-sequitor vaguely related to the feeling of being an "other". (The way that you have this experience of Otherness playing internally doesn't quite match the tone of the original either, by the way, and on its own merits is kind of unfortunate in how it really leans on the Freak as an archetypal response.) There's a version of this that connects, but that version is a lot slower, a lot more heavily written, and probably just needs to be its own story with no real connection to the original.
7.) On a personal note, in relation to my first 1-3 points... writers gotta stick together, friend. Antagonizing other writers needlessly without really gaining anything and then being very in the wrong about it... that does you more damage than anyone else. Can't get prereaders if nobody likes you--can't get good feedback from people you've alienated. It's not a good way to be and it isolates you from community if you don't learn to pull out of it. Just consider that. Better luck with your next story.
10431537
Well, your comment is certainly well-tempered, reasonable and constructive.
Also, while Changing Cherries is good [EDIT: I see that in my story's original long description, I called your story "a very, very good story," and I might as well still stand behind that part], it is especially impressive for a speedwrite.
If you thought of your story as finished when you published, it, you did not commit mistagging.
When I read the story text (as it was when I read it, as I was at the particular moment that I read it) I did not take from it the idea which you apparently had in your head that Berry was seeing the kind of 'Doc' who provides effective mental health help, nor that Berry was on track to have her problem solved. So I did not know that you thought the story had an ending on it.
So I'm sorry that I thought you were committing intentional mistagging.
At least you are glad that I liked almost all of your story, and you see the implicit and explicit compliments in that.
I haven't seen this much dislikes/hate in ages. I'm confused as to the context of what's going on
10431583
It's weird how you seem to think people should care about the way you judge them.
10431562
I've read some of your (Cynewulf's) stories, and I very much respect them, and you as a writer.
I think probably the main metalesson to be taken from this whole event is that I posted something while ticked off and in a bad mood, and the saying "act in haste, repent at leisure" exists for a reason. I'm guessing there's also something in Proverbs about not speaking & acting hastily in a bad mood. Cynewulf probably knows where it is.
Your comment is really about at least two things: (1) advice for dealing with people on a fimfiction.net type site, and (2) a critique of my story.
There's not much point in commenting on a critique. I will just say that I think your critique has a lot of value in it; I expect to reread it one or more times in the future, and give it some more of the contemplation it deserves. So, thank you.
Really, one of the things I most regret about this whole event is that Cynewulf has used (his/her/their) time to critique my story while ticked off at me, which is not necessarily the best use of Cynewulf's time.
For whatever it's worth, I have edited the title and story description and changed the Status tag from "Incomplete" to "Cancelled" to discourage readers, and hastily try be less annoying to some people? Because annoying someone encourages them to waste their time.
I moved my original metatext (title, story summaries, etc.) to an Author's Note that states its origin. I won't delete that, simply because I would rather be criticized for what I have done, rather than risk being criticized only and purely for fuzzed-up, angry memories or third-hand accounts of anything I have not done.
10431757 I probably have no right to say this but at this point, it would just be better to remove the(this) story, post a blog apologizing on the matter and then starting from scratch. Of course, that's my two cents on the idea
*I noticed I got a dislike. Was it something I said?*
Wow.
I just skimmed it throught and I haven't read the originator fic, but I fundamentally disagree with that other people are saying.
I think it's very disingenuous to suggest that just because this fic was born out of spite for another person's writing, that this is somehow "bad writing", and even worse, using it as an open license to be jerks to the author.
Hello............................Mocking Bird. If that is your real name.
Allow me to introduce myself, I am C.L. Strife also known as, Seth Standmore. Now you may have heard of me you may not, now I was reading through the new story box as I do often when I am at work on break and, I saw this story in the new story's box. Curious I looked at it and read the first chapter and, I was astonished at how it ended, I was looking foreword to a sequel.
Well imagine my surprise when I looked at the tags and....................IT WAS CANCELED
:TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2:
HOW DARE YOU???
:TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2: :TWILIGHTANGRY2:
I do not understand why someone would write a story that ends in a way that means the story will continue but label the story as CANCELED WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THE STORY IN THE FIRST PLACE IF YOU DID NOT PLAN TO CONTINUE IT :TWILIGHTANGRY2:
Therefore I, have had no choice but to write the next part of the story myself, it is MY ORIGINAL TAKE on how you're story would continue and if you want to write your own version of the story then, that is perfectly fine just let me know but until that time happens it is MY WORLD NOW
here is the link to it
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/477800/cherrys-jubilee
I hope you re-consider your life choice's.
Sincerely Seth Standmore.
10431488
10431562
One thing you wrote was always, for me, one of the more puzzling comments I ever got from anyone about this whole business. I posted my story with a status of "Incomplete," until, in response to a deluge of hostility, I changed it to "Canceled."
That being so, why would anyone bother to say:
I don't know whether you simply failed to notice the story's "Incomplete" status?
Your comment could be taken uncharitably as implying that I had posted the story with a different status from the status I had put on it, but I'm not eager to take the most negative interpretation. Maybe you really just didn't notice?
Oh, it was a little different from that, and in some ways even worse. When I saw the "Complete" status on the original story, I initially assumed that the author was calling their story complete and done. Only later did I find out the situation might be otherwise.
I would certainly be cautious now about ever writing a sequel to another author's story without permission, whether the story was marked "Complete" or not. Ironically, what I think are the best reasons to be so reluctant hardly came up in the deluge of hostile reactions that this story received. In any case, I appreciate that the tone of your lengthy reply to my story was so relatively constructive.