Rarity is a successful fashion designer slowly growing to hate what she's doing.
Gertie the Dinosaur is one of the first cartoon characters ever animated.
Winsor McCay is her creator, a pioneer of early animation.
...At night, the three of them dream together.
Click here to see Gertie the Dinosaur! (watch it, it's fun!)
A crossover with Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, considered by some wikipedia editors to be the first proper “character” brought to life by animation. McCay, a newspaper cartoonist, pioneered for the film several techniques that remain essential to animation today – including keyframes, registration marks, and animation loops. McCay's animations were variously successful, but as time went on he became increasingly disillusioned with the burgeoning industry, and in 1921 was forced by his editor to give up animation almost entirely. In 1934, he woke to discover his drawing hand completely paralysed, and was pronounced dead later that afternoon.
Winner (!) of Estee's Who Crossed Over My Little Pony? contest. Check out the other entries here!
Couldn't find a definition for aneldic or pressonious when I searched them... or was that intentional? EDIT: I suspect it was intentional.
Lovely.
(The lack of an exclamation point is ONLY because a quiet mood suits this work.)
Meaningful to me at a personal level.
11199861
Yup, the nonsense words are fully intentional! Sort of a linguistic extension of dreamworld.
11199872
Aww, thanks! I’m so glad it reached you.
Wow, this is my favorite "Who Crossed Over" piece I've read so far!
First of all, well done capturing Rarity's voice - I heard her in my head the entire time I was reading
I watched the video in the description before I started and I'm really glad I did. You did a great job turning a short animation into something to be interacted with. I especially like the "slides" as a form of communication. I'm also happy to learn something new about the beginnings of animation that I did not know before - thank you for that!
And the story itself : I feel, Rarity, I feel
Reading as she talked of loving the dream but not so much the waking up part was so bittersweet.
Overall, awesome job!
Fascinating. I was wondering how you'd tie together the dreams and reality, and you did so marvelously. The dramatic irony is very strong with this one. After all, a century or so after Gertie, the art McCay invented, in all its subsequent mass production and commercialization and so forth, would yield Rarity. The dream shifts, but it never really goes away. One hopes it doesn't, anyway.
Wonderful meditation on changing eras, those who get left behind, and the question of just who's moving at the wrong pace. The open ending works very well. Rarity may have given the industry something to think about, or she may have sealed her fate as incurably behind the times. We won't know, and given the themes of the story, it's probably better that we don't. Still, she should probably send a letter to Luna to see what the heck just happened.
Thank you for this, and best of luck in the judging.
I appear to be the thumbs-up that took this out of the gray bar, and I'm proud of that. This is a work of art.
holy shit.
I don't really know what else to say, but please trust me when I say I loved this. It actually got me emotional! holy shit, holy shit, this was incredible.
You write Rarity so well. Your prose is fantastic. I'm legit in awe. I aspire to write a fic like this someday
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Winsor_McCay_1922-03-19_Oblivion%27s_Cave.jpg/1920px-Winsor_McCay_1922-03-19_Oblivion%27s_Cave.jpg
Captioned: Oblivion's Cave--Step Right In. Winsor McCay (1922).
The sad thing about dinosauruses, of course, is that eventually, there just weren't any more of them. Birds may live on in their own kind of majesty (and it is magical!), elephants may recreate some distant memory of the sound of thunder, but the great sauropods of old have never been replaced, and likely never will.
I'm glad Rarity was able to do something transformystic with the end of her career. The real Winsor enjoyed some new developments at the end of his. Reviving Little Nemo for a bit. Doing some sketches for a newspaper of a fresh crime scene. But he never drew cartoons like he did in his golden age. Some of the old wonders just pass us by, never to return.
11218330
Very much appreciated, I assure you!
11219938
Aww, thank you! I'm so glad it touched you!
11220203
Yes! There were so many other interesting things McCay did after leaving animation, and even more before then that I didn't have nearly the time to get into. And I think part of him not returning to it was choice -- not liking the way the industry was going, and all that. It's a romantic idea, but in cases like these I like to remember the words of the late great Sir Terry Pratchett: "A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." I somehow doubt he'd much appreciate being remembered in fanfic for a show that exemplified all the hypercapitalist nonsense he rejected in animation, but still. Like you say, sometimes the old wonders pass by -- the sauropods are gone -- but they still left a bloody big footprint, didn't they.
11222128
Regarding the passing of the dinosauruses: That's true, and a lovely way of looking at it. I'm a dinosaur scientist by trade, you see. It's what got me interested in your story. And while we may never seen a sauropod, for generations after they were gone, there have been creatures that have found their ancient footprints frozen in stone and wondered.
Regarding Winsor and Friendship Is Magic, I think he'd see it as an inevitability, really. It started as a woman's remembrance of her childhood. Rarity, Twilight, Pinkie and the gang are all Faust's imaginary friends, come to life for another generation to play with. I think he would like that. That a corporation then drove her away from her own creation by pumping it full of soulless merchandise grabs would not surprise him and likely sadden him. But, at the same time, she then made the characters for Them's Fightin' Herds, and seems to have made some peace in what happened between her and Hasbro in that. Maybe that's the lifecycle of all artists. I hear George Lucas is much happier with his new museums of film history that he's been building than he ever was running the Star Wars juggernaut. Who knows.
What a wonderful story.
I had never seen Gertie before, so thank you for that alone.
I'm trying my best but I don't have anything to say that the others haven't said already. Congratulations on your victory, it was well deserved. And bringing these great artistic minds together, across a century and different dimensions, was inspired.
An oddball ghost happened across your fic and read it. Have a review!
It took me a bit to read this, but once I realized that you were the same author as Paths Less Travelled I just HAD to dive in and I was thoroughly pleased to have read this. The parallels between Rarity's struggles and Winsor's own life and with such a poignant ending, another assured fave.
11369690
Hey, thanks so much! Happy to hear that one of my stories made enough of an impact on you to read another.
Change is really hard sometimes, especially when it's us that needs to change to be happy.
Getting on has definitely meant being less able to indulge in whatever I want to, because I know that I'll be paying for it the day after and the week after.
If something is keeping you back, if you find yourself not letting go just ~because~, it's time to reflect and see what else you can do
You can has review!
I hate it when I go to read a story and instead I accidentally read literature. I never understand literature.