Flashbang Post Mortem · 3:43pm Aug 9th, 2021
Hi, hello, welcome, Bienvenue (I am not French)
Welcome to another edition of "Otter trashes his own work so he does better next time". Today we're going over Flashbang.
Standard warnings: the entire story is spoiled here, but yet again I wonder why you would read this if you hadn't read the initial story.
Let's begin!
Conception
This story is the culmination of a shitpost gone wrong. A friend by the name of Shillic was throwing around this idea of the two Flashes (Sentry and Magnus) competing for Twilight Sparkle's affection but wasn't sure if they wanted to write out a hardcore romance. I waffled on it for a bit then asked if I could use the concept. Shill allowed it and thus I began writing an accidental competition piece when I realized Pillars Shipping was still ongoing.
Other pieces of the story came in from my enablers Sir Fiddler, and SockPuppet who gave me the idea for Flash Magnus' speech and the title of the story respectively.
Afterward, I made it gay (because I am the patron saint of gay Flash Sentry) and then got to work with the running idea that this entire contest was a ploy for Flash Sentry to ask out Flash Magnus because Flash Sentry is bad at this.
Oh, boy was this a mess.
Slang Bang
Flash Magnus does in fact talk with 1920s slang. As well as a few other eras to keep readers on their toes. The chapter titles are also in fact real greek idioms. I suggest looking into Do the Duck because the real-life equivalent is wild.
I like the slang. I think it really helps with the feeling of Magnus being displaced from time and it defines his personality closer to being stuck in the past. The only two problems I had were that I didn't use more of it, I eased up in Chapter 5 very noticeably but that chapter had other problems which Ill get to, and editing was a nightmare .
But not for the reasons you think.
Surprisingly, I have never needed a prereader more for one story as I did this one. I ran into the absolutely dumbest problem of understadning the slang too well. My brain would auto-translate making it impossible for me to tell if the slang was too thick and incomprehensible. Thankfully, Graymane caught the few instances of "too much" so it worked out but that was such an odd problem to experience.
Why is This is M Rated?
Confession time. I did not outline this story very well. It went from 6 chapters to 5 and was so ill-defined I was mostly writing chapter by chapter, and it shows. It's really hard having written Rails look at this one and all I can think is stupid stupid stupid. Ugh, I do not set everything up properly for this to pull off right.
I needed to set up Sentry more for having Magnus being the target from the beginning. If you look there are in fact several hints throughout all the chapters that show Sentry's true target of affection. But they are subtle and not in a good way. Plus I needed to set up Magnus better for his motivation of not dating Sentry and hooking him up with Twilight due to lingering thousand-year feelings problems.
The whole thing could have been tightened up much better. And the M rating change.
<screams in gay>
I hate that I had to do that. Chapter 4 is so funny and its great but it is so out of place with the rest of the story. I should have started with the M rating, and wrote accordingly, but nooooooooo. My main issue is literally that I didn't outline and plan this fic enough. It was sloppy. I still like it, I think its good, but it could have been better.
Word Count is the Bane of My Existence
I HATE MAX WORD COUNT LIMITS. Ugh, I never realized how verbose I was until I was editing Chapter 5 of this story and trying to get it to 15,000 words. C5 is rushed and I really didn't have the kind of build-up as I did in Rails to pull that off. I got away with it there because everything built to the confrontation with Point Guard and resolution with Next Track. This did not have that.
The confession and dialogue are cute. It resolves but it really needed at least another 1000 words or so to be done properly. I like it, but again could be better. That being said...
Anecdotes Are Great
I absolutely love the anecdotes from Magnus at the start of all of the chapters. The moments of world-building and goofy stories are just so much fun and it makes me want to write about Filocuse. The world and language and ideas in those anecdotes were great. I think they were honestly the strongest part of the story and the C5 anecdote is honestly heart-wrenching to me.
Favourite part hands down of this entire story.
SEQUEL SEQUEL SEQUEL
Okay, first off, yes there is a sort of... what happens next fic that is point blank going to be smut. I'm not telling you where it is when I post it, or what happens but... it will exist and be posted somewhere on fim.
In terms of continuation... dunno? I don't really have a good hook for any follow-up and I'm not sure I want to do a prequel. I like both of them and their dynamic is stellar, but it's hard to picture any story I would actually write about them.
Eh, we'll see regardless.
And that's all of it! Post mortem done. Huzzah!
Now, the next thing you can expect from me is probably a blog post about what I have on the backburner, which for now Im keeping secret, but look forward to it.
Anyways, have an amazing day y'all~!
Honestly, it's still kinda surreal to me that this story exists at all. It's not at all what I would have done with the concept, (I'm still not sure what I would have done: My final iteration had the same basic setup, but the Flashes would have disliked each other to start off with, and their attempts to impress Princess Twilight, who in my version had no idea what they were doing because she's an asexual idiot, end up impressing each other instead. I dropped it because it would have meant writing active romance from the perspective of someone who is in love, something I straight up can't do) but it turned out great, and I'm honestly really not sure what to even say.
As for sequel potential,( apart from the inventible smut) my personal taste wants you to do something with Filocuse and Magnus' past. Either a prequel, something involving the city, or some kind of adventure based sequel involving the two Flashes and the ruins of Filocuse. That's just my two bits, though, the kind of story I would want to see. Either way, I look forward to anything that continues the story of these gay idiots.