Starlight and Spike, alone among many.
(Contrary to the cover art, this takes place between season 5 and 6)
Written for the Pony Poetry Contest!
Inspired partially by RunicTreetops' One Path
Chapters (1)
6-D Pegasus
Joined 19th Feb, 2017 ·
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Chills. Excellent work!
very good job on this
Little hard reading it but all in all good work.
I've never seen a story in this format before, but I love it.
This story makes me wish the show had more Starlight and Spike-centered episodes. The relationship between these two is very underrated.
That was sweet and fun. Lots of parallels I hadn't considered before. Coming from a theater background I picture this as the two of them saying this from opposite sides of a wall in a simultaneous soliloquy, with the words blending together only to break when the differences come.
They are more alike than I realized.
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Check out Runic's poetry! I linked it in the description, it's so cool :o
Fantastic work. Love it. This just hits right in the feels and now I can't help but see cute Starlight and Spike friendship blossoming from this mutual feeling. I wish they'd done this in the show, but oh well. We have great writers like you to make up the difference ;)
It's so wonderful to see you trying some poetry for the first time; I'm glad you finally dipped your hooves into its creative expression.
Reading this actually reminded me of a poem I wrote many years ago featuring similar themes - except it expressed means of sudden isolation. I think what I like most about this coming from a formatting standpoint, is the coloring of the letters! For some reason in all my time writing poetry, that was something I never thought to explore, so I found that rather unique and playful. ^^ In terms of contents in the poem itself, I am liking how their words align up in certain instances, then delve separately into their own sort of inner monologues and self reflections; you can get a good sense of each of their characteristics.
If I may, provide feedback. What may help this poem is further experimentation with formatting, punctuation, and flow. Currently, I think the voluminous spacing is too excessive, and I found it easier just to have read the left column first all the way down and then the second column with Starlight; rather than attempting to dart my eyes through each of their words back and forth trying to put it together. Which I do not think was the intention. If this were to be written on paper, it would be about 12 pages long. However, I do have a couple of ideas to share.
Firstly, I'd compress the spacing down to single lines, but increase the spacing on words that I specifically want to emphasize a feel of isolation and loneliness; while also emphasizing the feeling of being together and what Spike and Starlight share by combining their words in a middle column. Also remember that poetry can play with punctuation as well; so you do not need to follow completely concrete rules as if you were writing standard paragraphs!
It can be fun to even break some standard rules.
I think maybe you understand ^^. You can show isolation depending on what word or set of words you separate more than the others! Such as "But are they?" I think one could interpret the large gap between "but" and "are they" as a display of distant friendships, or at least actively showing the amount of distance between them being questioned. Other formatting you could play with is seeing if you could string together Spike's and Starlight's own individual thoughts in such a way, that while being separate, they can be read together as if they were one. I tried to do that a little with "Dragged along, kept in my place, keeping Twilight company, so I don't break again?" I'd argue that, in a way, this sentence makes sense whether you read them together or each separately.
You don't necessarily have to combine what they share together in a middle column either. If you really want to emphasize something, you can do so through repetition as well! Something like:
Finally, I'd see about perhaps trimming some of the words down and letting the formatting do more painting, but that may just be personal preference.
Please do more poetry in the feature. I really enjoyed seeing your interpretations and experimentation into it!
awesome job bro!!! i love how you’ve protrayed starlight and spike here, both thankful yet a bit resentful of twilight, and feeling guilt over before resigning themselves to the hope of the present, its lovely :]
Nicely done! I like the use of repetition; it makes the differences hit that much harder.
the experimental fics on this website are the best. Fuck doing it the normal way, we're gonna get interesting with these feelsssss.
I luv u 6-D hugs
this is the first fic i read at this power level. Worth it
Lovely & interestingly formatted! I'll be honest, I never really got what the supposed relationship between these two was supposed to be that the fandom kept trying to push... but you've convinced me utterly in the (relative to a fic) few words of this prose poem. The parallelism was interesting, but the formatting was what kicked this up a notch into something even more clever. Bravo! Good on you for using the medium in a new & inventive way to help tell your story.
This is really nice! Good job!!
While I'm not quite sure about Spike being in such a rough spot emotionally or how close he was to the Canterlot Crew, these two are often left behind while Twilight and co. run off to do stuff. So the idea that they might both feel extraneous or even unwanted, at least, is very understandable. If nothing else, they'd be total chums with plenty of downtime to spend chatting and playing games.
The strength of the poem is that the lines that are different are not just different, they are often opposite to one another to reflect the contrary pains of the characters, since Spike is "inferior" but Starlight was extremely domineering. I find it odd that Spike refers to himself as a "filly". He may know almost all girls in his life, but he probably knows the word foal, yes?
I wish FIMFiction had more formatting options (EDIT: unless it does???) The lines that are the same between the two end up taking up lots more vertical space than they need to because you can't have left- and right-aligned text on the same line (EDIT: or can you???) You might be able to emulate this with centered text and whitespace characters, but it'd be a huge pain, it might display different on different devices, updates might break it, etc. Probably not worth trying.
If you were able to do that, or you post a version of this somewhere else with more formatting options, then I think it would work great if the mirrored lines are closer to each other on the page and the lines that are different are further away from one another. Maybe the words weave in and out in a double wave between these two positions.
Anyway, I'll have to look at the other things on your page sometime!
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Hehe it is a bit of a headcanon of mine that he fit in a little more with the old Canterlot friends. Keep in mind that while Twilight couldn't remember their names, Spike remembered all of them
Glad you enjoyed it! I honestly enjoyed this experiment wayyy more than I thought I would :3
12022157
Also, it weaves a lot better when reading on mobile, if you want to improve the experience x3. For the alignment and stuff, I did intentionally choose to alternate the lines for spacing issue, but yeah I can see that it may look better if formatted in a 'mirror' style!
And thanks for the watch! Hope you like my other stories <33
I loved the structure here. I feel this definitely succeeded in bringing a new perspective on Starlight and Spike’s friendship. You should be proud
I gotta say I really liked the way the format of the text was presented. The double positions and double colours were a really cool thing to know clearly who was speaking. Also I really enjoyed those little moments in which only a word would change between Starlight's and Spike's poem. They were a nice contrast, and it was interesting how some of the differences presented in the poems were at times almost antonyms.
Overall I really enjoyed it, pretty short but beautifully packed up
Have a non-lonely Spike moustache
I normally don't read poetry, but I made an exception and honestly I'm glad I did. This was a really good read, I love how you portrayed the two in this and their feelings, it's really good.
Nicely done :D
It is amazing how well you made these two work together in this poem. One upvote from me.
Poor fellows. I'm glad they were able to find solace in each other.
That was a fun read. I hope you fare well in the contest.
Very interesting format here. I don't know if I've ever seen poetry like this.
I like the connections of Spike, and Starlight and wish they had more moments like this in the show.
Oh. Oh, does that hit hard.
Nicely done.
This has tremendos potencial in several ways, You could wven make a ship story from this with solid bases
Experimental fic let’s goooooo!
Spike and Starlight do have a lot in common, apparently!
Dang. It's crazy all the new ideas that we can keep pulling from the show after all this time. Also, thank you so much for acknowledging that Spike is Twilight's sibling. That was an excellent touch.
In my opinion, this was a success, and congratulations on your first attempt at this sort of thing working.
I read this in a browser window, so the gulf of white space between each character became a little tiring as my eyes ping-ponged between the text. Afterward, I restored/un-maximized the browser window to bring the columns closer together... but when I narrowed the window too much, the back-and-forth actually read too quickly -- having that slight beat between each sentence fragment works in the poem's favor.
I don't think there's a perfect solution on a website that needs to be readable on a variety of screens, and this is probably the best compromise possible. But I do think some non-trivial amount of white space down the center is necessary.
Really great job 👌
Wow, that was... incredibly touching.
A lot of the time, when authors play with the formatting like that, it doesn't work well on mobile. This one works perfectly.
This is so lovely. I'm so stoked that someone elses notices Glimmy's and Spike's relationship with each other, there's not a lot of stories about them together even though Starlight practically became a second sibling for spike
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One trick that MIGHT work would be to specify in a preceeding author's not thatbit should be read in Justified format and the background color the reader should use. Then replace spaces between words by the same speaker on the same line with x's or .'s or something in the color of the background. The only actual spaces would be when you want to change sides of the page. Might work better with several tabs rather than a single space if the site overrides justification for.sufficiently short lines.
This is so bittersweet! I love how much chemistry Starlight and Spike have!
Pairing these two together in this manner really highlights the similarities that these two share and why they have such a strong bond in the show. Reading this made me immediately think of the song “Learners Paradox” by Woodlore. It’s one of my favorite songs and this poem is right up there with it. Bravo!
Genuinely beautiful poetry. Starlight, Spike, and Twilight’s little pseudo family unit in the castle might be my favorite group dynamic in the whole show, and it’s a massive shame that Starlight and Spike’s connection got the least official acknowledgment of them all.
This is a perfect encapsulation of why they bonded, why, even in the writing documents, they’re both listed as “loyal” above most other traits. They may be a little lonely, but they have each other, and they have Twilight, so are they really alone, together?
Top notch! Fabulously poetic prose and excellent characterization of these two. A magnificent box hit with tremendous staying power.
First Erasure and now this.
Dang, you got a knack for these Spike and Starlight stories.