Sometimes You Can Go Home Again (Huge Announcement) · 1:06am Apr 24th, 2019
Remember that first year or so you were a brony?
You were one hardcore superfan! You watched the show. You learned there were other crazy fanatical people like you who were all about MLP. Then you found the virtual mountain of content they produced and suddenly you were learning all sorts of things about these people you'd never met, and about yourself. Some of those things took a while to accept I don't doubt. Truly the Zeal of The Convert is a phenomenon like no other. Oh, it's cringey as hell to think about but I, like a lot of you, went through that phase.
In 2014 that Zeal led me to write my first fanfic, one that soared straight to the front page, despite grammatical issues and a general lack of knowledge on how to write well. I've beat myself up over this story in the past, even wrote a blog so filled with profanity I had to delete it in shame. That was nearly 5 years ago to this day and I've concluded the story did as well as it did because occasionally one man's zeal is enough. There's a scene in Into The Storm: The Flight of Firefly where Sky Sentry, a pegasus defeats another combatant, a griffon, by stunning him with repeated bashings from his unprotected head. The guy who got knocked out was wearing a helmet and trained pretty well but damned if that was going to save him. Sometimes, by sheer force of will, you can defeat the longest odds.
But five years can do a lot to a guy. Everyone burns out eventually. Just a part of life, ya know? Everyone eventually hangs it up and moves into the retirement home and turns into that old crusty guy who criticizes things. The love is still there but there's the feeling that something has changed and more often than not commentary turns towards the negative when talking about the thing that once brought him joy.
Often once you become aware of what's happening you put on the nostalgia glasses and think about how cool it would be to feel that way again. Almost never turns out that way though. Still, it would be cool to feel that way again, however unlikely the odds. But how could someone like me get that Eye Of The Tiger feeling back again?
What is family to an alicorn?
Before the time of the Destroyer who ended the life of our goddess and tore the skies asunder, family was the telekinetic embrace of thousands of souls each bound by a single will. The knowledge and lived experiences of an entire race; our victories against the lesser creatures of the new Equestria bathed in magical fire and the final anguished moments of our fallen sisters.
All that remained for me now was me and my two sisters fleeing certain destruction and with any luck, finding a new family.
Below me, the wasteland stretched out green and desolate, aside from a gray decaying stretch of macadam atop great pillars of concrete. The ruined civilization of old was being encroached upon by the stubbles of newfound life pressing up from the earth — green grass and living trees that spread their pollen like a choking fog with the coming of Spring. Our magical fire was gone, purged by ancient magic stored away by ponies of renown in the Old World.
Our world was gone. Our family was gone. And the ponies who used to fear us now openly challenged us.
“Sisters, look! There’s a stretch of old pony transport atop that slab of highway. There might be treasures untold within!” My purple-furred sister and escape artist Shadebloom was, and is, a refined spellweaver with a knack for teleporting out of scrapes that would have doomed even the hardiest of adventurers. She’d also discovered that together we could ‘overpower’ each other’s abilities by drawing on each other’s reserves, allowing us to contribute to much more potent versions of our usual abilities. She’s a bit jittery and nervous at times, never staying still for very long but that’s often a good thing when the place you were just standing gets shot through by gunfire.
“Azura is certain such pre-war military transport could also be carrying megaspells and it has been far too long since we’ve felt the holy glow against our fur!” My blue friend with the bad habit of speaking in the third-person was as lethal an assassin and effective a scout as an alicorn could ever fight alongside. She could get on your nerves at times but she always knew just what to say to win you back over. If there were a contest for most adorable, she’d charm the judge out of first, second and third place trophies.
My name is Shimmersage. It is a name I grabbed from an old pre-war coloring book in the ruins of a school; one of the few surviving books in the entire cursed den of raider scum. As my name implies I am as green and shimmery as megaspell glow. I was declared de facto leader out of my three friends primarily because of my ability to read their minds and coordinate actions against our countless enemies, including, but by no means limited to, every other form of life in Equestria that wasn’t an alicorn. I certainly wasn’t elected because of my good tactical decisions…
I surveyed the plot of highway from a distance. In fairness, it was easy to dismiss the danger of a trap. There was simply no way for anypony other than a pegasus or fellow alicorn sister to access the strip of macadam set almost thirty-feet off the tall grass below. The pegasi were currently occupied by a righteously upset coalition of ponies who were less than enthusiastic about The Grand Pegasi’s Enclave’s designs for world domination. It wasn’t often they were getting out these days with weather control being the domain of The Destroyer. Besides, I’ve found unopened containers of missiles and supplies in far more conspicuous places. “I guess we can spare a moment for the ruined convoy. We need to make it quick though! We need to get to Whitetail Woods with all speed!” No need to waste time to scout ahead when there’s a family to go find, right?
I can't believe I'm doing this but it's already almost done. I've been writing for little over a week straight and the story is almost fully written. I am writing a Fallout Equestria side fiction; the thing I swore I would never do. Kkat knows what I'm doing and has graciously offered me some help with a bit of the lore I was confused on. Grypher over on derpibooru has allowed me the use of one of his pieces to use as cover art for my story and has shown interest in reading it. He actually put the idea in my head to write it when I saw his alicorn drone artwork. Something about the combination of the show-accurate art with the image of these misunderstood antagonists from the FoE universe really struck a chord with me. I knew I had to write about them.
The first ever work of fanfiction I'd read was Fallout Equestria and I admit to having had mixed feelings about it in the past. It's such a great story but I often found myself struggling to push through the absolute wall of pain and misery it put its characters through. Someone like me was probably never really meant to be reading such works of grimdark fiction and I thought about quitting many times. And yet for all the suffering that 600,000 words put me through I came out the other side with an appreciation and respect for the tale that I never will forget. I discovered the story through a brony mod for the PC game Civilization V of all places. The guy said it was a great story and linked to the googledocs version of the story. What a way to spend the spring of 2014!
You really can go home again, even if home isn't necessarily paradise.
The story will be M-rated Sex but be as far divorced from fetish as possible to focus instead on the characters and how they relate to the canon established by Fallout Equestria itself. This one-shot story is intended to be a faithful rendering of Fallout Equestria's story and a version of events I feel is likely from what we got in Kkat's story. The story will be set canonically but be a much less grimdark take on FoE instead taking a more science-fiction approach to one of its least-written about characters, the alicorn drones. My story will follow three of them: a green-type, blue-type, and purple-type to a new location in the Wastelands simply known as "Oasis".
The story will be edited as always by Firesight with prereads from Denim_Blue and a guy who knows more about the greater universe surrounding Fallout Equestria than I will ever know exists, Silentwoodfire. I'd also like to shout out Meep The Changeling for also contributing information that would be necessary for writing this. I look forward to releasing this one-shot within a week to two weeks depending on how things line up with the folks who are helping to make this crossover fic possible.
I'll see you in Oasis. Don't forget your stimpaks and radaway!
What amazes me about FoE is that I keep managing to accidentally reference it in my stories without even having read it! Well, in fairness, I’ve done it deliberately twice, but it seems like every other chapter I do has something that be associated to it. I know the story by reputation even though I’ll probably never read it myself, as I just don’t go for heavily grimdark stuff. No, the Firefly series doesn’t count because it’s not wall-to-wall horror.
That you could rediscover your MLP muse this late in the game is a very good thing, and I must admit, I’m very surprised to see where your inspiration came! I always thought you were a bit nuts to be going through FoE and leaving longpost comments on each chapter, but it turned out to inspire you in a rather unlikely way! I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of the story so far, and certainly look forward to its finishing! Hey, if even someone like me who never read FoE can follow this and get it, there’s hope for it, and I think it’s really cool you got Kkat’s sign-off on it!
Best of luck in finishing this! Suppose I should get cracking on my own stories again. For once, you’re outpacing me!
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I wouldn't call Firefly grimdark at all. Firefly is fundamentally a documentary on war from those who fought.
I can't entirely explain what attracts me to Fallout Equestria. I can explain what attracts me to Equestria. I can even explain what attracts me to Fallout: The 1950's nuclear fantasy future, the old-timey music, the fact quests were so badly designed in Fallout 3 that playing it felt like a sandbox adventure RPG. In a weird sort of way it was like playing Vanilla World of Warcraft with its flaws you fell in love with.
Fallout Equestria itself? Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's well-written. But why do I go back and read it? If I had to guess it's because I respect how much it makes me hurt. The pain feels like workout pain or labor pain, I guess. I've never given birth to anything. It's also seeing one woman's passion for two franchises that so permeates every single word that I can forgive what she put her characters through.
You remember that time I sent you clips from the webcomic Concession? You'll know from just the little bit I sent that that was the completely wrong way around to do anything grim, whether that is your thing or not. There is a world of difference between edginess for the sake of edginess and being in a place so dark that others truly can't know what it's like and channeling that energy into something artistic. That's really what FoE is to me. It's an absolutely horrifying and tragic work of someone with far more talent than I who's seen or been through something bad.
Perhaps I just want to understand it so I can express myself albeit in the same way.
Keep in mind I'm not saying I know who Kkat is or what she's been through, but I subscribe to the belief that authorial intent is basically useless when criticizing any work of fiction. Whether or not she's experienced some sort of trauma isn't as important as the underlying structure which conveys this feeling of acute and persistent suffering throughout. Littlepip, the narrator, has experienced this trauma and vicariously so too has the reader.
Edit: My second readthrough also would confirm that I did indeed enjoy the story. Having only read through it once I would forever be asking myself whether what I experienced was real or simply Zeal of the Convert telling me what I'd experienced was meaningful or special.
I remember those first months of discovering that I was a Brony. It was so thrilling to discover a fandom that cherished it fellow fans who contributed to its existence. I can relate to the feeling of being burnt out from a fandom; immersing oneself in such a big thing can overwhelm a Brony pretty easily and feel they've taken on too much.
But I found the best way to get back into something is to stop doing it for a while. When I'm tired of writing, I just indulge in fic reading and enjoy my time on this site. You'd be surprised how fast the creative batteries get recharged once you let your mind relax. FimFiction time should be fun time, if it's not then the individual is most likely doing the wrong thing for themselves. That's how I get the fire back in my heart to write more. I hope this helped in some way; please don't feel like 'the thrill is gone' because the glow of being a Brony has faded a little. My feeling has been since first joining in: 'Once a Brony, forever a Brony!' And that's the happy truth! :)
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Update: Rough draft complete. It's going through the editing process.