The years have not been kind to Starlight Glimmer's social life. With her friendships waning, Starlight is more and more afraid of taking the chances she should have taken a long time ago.
Enter Thorax and the novelty which is the changeling Masquerade Ball. For one evening, his guests will take on the shape of someone else to mingle and see life from a different perspective.
Starlight's transformation goes in a direction which opens her eyes a bit more than she might like. Confronted by a mysterious pony who looks just like her usual self, Starlight wrestles with her feelings and those of another.
When all is twice laid to chaos, only one question remains:
Is it too late for Starlight to fight fate itself and seize the cure for her aching heart?
Only time will tell.
Written as for Bean's Writing Group, as prompt no. 32 "Dancing with Myself."
Thanks to LysanderasD and RDT for editing and other help!
I definitely broke the word limit (two times over and change), but I couldn't help myself.
Let me know what you think about the story!
How come Trixie isn't in the cover art?
Well played! This is very nicely written, and your use of setup and payoff is really good here. The way you handled that twist! I was kicking myself for not realizing for the rest of the story, which matched nicely with Starlight's own reaction to the reveal. The lack of longer paragraphs leaves the formatting feeling a bit odd, perhaps, but it works for you here. It plays into the pacing. 10/10, would melt into a puddle again.
Major spoilers: Wow, the cover art though. Seriously, nice job. Having two Starlights there is a hint so obvious in hindsight, as is the hourglass shape they form. The self-reflection we got to see Starlight go through here as she interacts with her past self is a lot of character development you packed neatly into a small space. It was fascinating watching her realize things with the context of both sides of the interaction, especially after wondering who this stranger actually was for the first half.
This is very nicely written. I loved every second of it.
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She is in the background. :)
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Thanks! I'm a sucker for details and foreshadowing. Even the name is quite literal. :D I did find the formatting a bit of a challenge. But it used to be much worse, believe me. I concatenated a lot in editing and it still shows in several places.
Stories about self-reflection can get kinda sluggish when it's just that - despite it being crucial for self-improvement. But I find the internal world often more important than the external. After all, you are always with yourself.
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Thank you, I'm glad you liked it!
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You're welcome!
Sorry, I cannot help, but think of this song after reading the the story title and cover art! The song is close enough. LMAO!
This was fun to edit; always a joy to see stories about Starlight doing a little self-reflecting. Time travel is
headache-inducingfun! Keeping track of tenses is also fun!Glad to have been of help, and glad to see this in the box. In retrospect I probably could have been still-heavier with condensing paragraphs, but the final product is pretty good if I do say so myself.
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Thank you again for your help. I will try to mitigate the problems for the next time.
And yes, it was fun. I'm happy how it turned out.
This is a terrific idea, full of potential and with some great moments, but for me it ultimately doesn't live up to its promise.
I think it suffers when it goes over the same events twice. Any time a story goes back to re-cover events from a different perspective, it's repeating itself and retreading ground the audience is already familiar with. To my mind, this is only worth doing when the new perspective offers something so incredible it outweighs the drag of being told things we already know. Often this incredible thing is in how the new perspective twists things we saw before, putting them in a new context. And I think that's what you've gone for here, which was a good idea, but I think the execution caused some issues.
Firstly, you're recapping a lot of the evening. The new perspective is the sort of thing that a film might handle with a montage, but here you're going through it all, repeating almost all the conversations we already saw Starlight have earlier. And the new perspective, to me, just isn't revelatory enough to justify that? The other mare being future Starlight I think is a great move. But once that's out there, at the halfway point, the story then needs something else. And the conversations they then have together aren't really reframed in a new context all that much, I don't think?
All that's really added in the second half is Starlight's musings about stable time loops. But, as Starlight is the first to acknowledge, we know that stable time loops absolutely can exist in FIM, because Twilight already did it. So it's not really a dramatic subplot. And it's then kind of quietly dropped at the end, ultimately going nowhere.
I saw that this was written for your writing group - I couldn't see anything on the group page about time limits, so don't want to assume anything. But I think an idea this intricate requires very careful planning and studious execution, and I fear writing it for a prompt may have got in the way of that?
That said, the characters were all rock solid, the slight melancholy of Starlight's older self was well balanced, the idea of the event and its changeling origins was a great thought, the dances were written clearly without being annotated diagrams, and I absolutely love the idea of a character going back to meet their past self. Particularly in this context where there's something of a romantic element. Lady Cassandra was always my pick for Doctor Who villain with the best ending. The cover art is magnificent.
But I think this was a very bold idea to go for, and, while I enjoyed the story, I don't think it quite pulls the idea off.
Well, that was an interesting story. I was expecting the other Starlight to be Trixie, but you certainly threw expectations for a loop. So, I take it that Starlight tricked her past self into using that spell to go back in time? In any case, this was a pretty interesting story.
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Sorta. If she hadn't, the time loop would not close, and therefore the timeline would not exist.
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I'm pretty sure that's what was on the mind of the person who had suggested the topic, too. :D We did "The Winner Takes it All" as a previous prompt, after all.
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That's very valid criticism - thank you for taking the time to provide it!
I'm glad you enjoyed the aspects of it that you would, and I agree the story can feel fairly sluggish in chapter five. I hope you found the story worth reading overall.
The group's prompts run for two weeks and I tend to start fairly late. Not counting the deliberation and notes, from putting pen to paper, it took me about five days to finish the first draft. Another six days were spent on-and-off on back-and-forth with the editors, as well as making the cover.
My thought process for the events after the loop was to split them into five five major parts:
(1) The confrontation in the bathrooms, where Starlight (and the audience) quickly realizes what happened, and it's shown how relatively inept at fakery Starlight actually is. The future self's actions are reframed from from toying with her to humoring her. And the numerous blushes, pauses, and stutters are recontextualized from what (should) seem at first to be the "fake's" infatuation with Starlight to a mix of shock and dealing with the growing realization of her love for Trixie.
(2) The explanation of the mechanics of the loop. The point isn't for it to be a dramatic twist - it's a confirmation of the previous scene. Twilight's episode is used as a building block, but Starlight ultimately arrives at a viewpoint of hard determinism. This is important, because it should cue the audience that the rest of the evening will indeed repeat as is and the significance lies outside of the actions.
(3) The dances with herself. Here, the reframing once again gives context to body language and dialogue. Future Starlight's resolution to reveal her love changes from being vaguely threatening (young Starlight still thinks the older one is in love with her) into being the solidifying of her determination to face Trixie. The pace slows and allows the reader to absorb the journey and get to the significance of future Starlight's promise to herself.
The story stumbles here, but I cut out a lot already. With more truncation, I feel like the buildup to determination would be made less significant. And cutting it out altogether would rob Starlight of the apex of her self-reflective journey - or force the readers to look for it in retrospect, which might be asking too much.
(4) The dance with Trixie. Starlight is way more at ease and sure of herself and her emotions. Loose ends are tied in a way that the original Starlight would be unable to do.
(5) The (repeated) end of the Ball and the confession itself; final payoff of the plot and the falling action, basically.
I'll grant you the story can feel repetitive in the third part (chapter four). But some of it is by design; the reader was meant to look for the shift in context and enjoy the significance of Starlight's promise to herself. The large amount of repetition was also meant to serve partly to slow down the pace of the story and allow the reader to think about the changes Starlight had gone through. Of course, it can't work for everyone and it wasn't exactly perfectly executed. :D
Once again, thank you for your criticism. I will definitely try to keep it in mind for the future.
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you beat me to it.
That. Was. GREAT... and powerful...
How do they select guards and spies now?
Very nice story, I hope it'll stay in the box for quite some time. I wrote a review about it, but it hasn't yet popped up on the aggregator, so I'll just paste it here:
The site I originally submitted this on has a character-limit, so I couldn't get any more in-depth than this, but I gotta say, you're one clever author. I'll definitely be on a lookout for your following stories and I also loved your CMC one.
If you like these kind of thought exercises, I highly recommend the show Dark. Like the name suggests, it’s a really grim show, but does an amazing job playing with the ideas of fate and time loops.
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I suppose Thorax never outright said they didn't use it for the selection in some capacity. The "dark times" were mostly about general rule of Chrysalis. While the demand would be lower during peacetime, I can imagine the very best changelings would still be noticed.
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Glad you liked it!
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Thank you, I'll check it out.
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Thank you for the review! I'm glad you enjoyed the story!
I do adore details.
I think it is the glimpsed effects of a wider world which truly allows the reader to feel the story is realistic, which in turn makes it easier to get invested in it.
Like how the long-distance teleportation is an evolution of previous magical technology, with the focusing diagrams being obviously a permanent installation despite the princess herself having to attend as a key part of the process. Tells you a lot about how important the dance is, and how Twilight is still trying to push the envelope even as the ruler, without spelling it out. Enough things are left to infer - and for the reader to enjoy pondering - without burdening the story with clumsy worldbuilding dumps.
Related to that, I do agree the time travel explanation section somewhat breaks this principle, and temporarily shifts the tone. But it was written more or less to clarify the mechanics and solidifying that Starlight is indeed in a stable time loop. Mostly to stop people trying to look for differences between the two timelines for still deeper mysteries. And also to show how Starlight deals with the questions of fate and determinism.
And of course, it was made to publish my own thoughts on the mechanics of time travel in It's About Time, and what I believe the wider implications are. :) For the dump-ish nature of it, that part of the chapter ends the chapter, too – if one reads the story again but does not want to go through the explanation, it should be easy to skip.
As for the hints, yes. I do love to foreshadow and hint, in all forms I can do it in.
A good mystery should have the reader's realizations be in lock-step with the explanation delivered by the plot - a natural step which seems like an obvious thing in hindsight. And for some, it should give the satisfaction of catching the culprit before the detective does - while never leave anyone feeling like the writer is hiding things from them.
I hope to get to that sweet-spot one day.
HA! I love this.
The rug has been pulled out from under me, and yet I thought I had been standing the entire time on a wooden floor.
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:D Glad you liked it!
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Nicely said. I hope you enjoyed it.
Hot new fic of my favorite ship? YeS please!
Oh my stars!
The masquerade ball setup was absolutely ingenious! And that twist... It was perfect!
It's weird how, even when you make us read the story basically twice with the pov shift, it still feels fresh thanks to the twist.
Expertly done Romance story, even if I'm only just lukewarm to ~Star–Trix~ myself, it's going right to my favourites!