State of the Author, Spoopmonth 2021 · 10:16am Oct 15th, 2021
Been a while since I did one of these. So here’s the big thing: after three months of work I completed chapter 15 of The Seven Trials of Clover the Clever! It ended up at a hefty 21k words, making it the longest single chapter in any story I’ve yet written (breaking the record set by chapter 7 of the same story at 19500 words). It was very complicated and very difficult to write and since I finished it last week I have been very exhausted.
For those keeping count, chapter 15 is the sixth of the Seven Trials. It's titled “The Court of Monsters”, and appropriately for the season there are indeed a lot of monsters in it. Who knows, maybe it will turn out that there are only monsters in it, the protagonists included.
In fact the chapter was originally going to be even longer, but I realized early on that it was too much and cut away the ending to make its own chapter. So at present count there are three chapters left to go in the story. I expect that they will all be shorter than this, but frankly I am very bad at predicting that particular thing so we’ll have to wait and see.
So, since last I blogged the g5 movie premiered. I thought about doing a whole essay about it but couldn’t be bothered. So here’s the short version: I liked it! A lot! It was really good and I'm excited to see more :D But one thing worries me: I see a lot of fans implicitly and explicitly demanding that the new show must carry on all the continuity of the old show and fully explain everything that happened in-between and why in a fashion that all the old fans find satisfactory.
And can we just not? Can we please just let the new show have its own identity and let the new creators tell their story, and not demand that it carry the weight of a decade of continuity and lore in a way that seems tailor-made for nitpicking and gatekeeping rather than telling good stories? Please? That’s what I want from g5. That it gets the chance to be itself.
In the full essay version of this review I would go on about the perils of that kind of thing for many pages but this is the short version so I’m gonna stop there.
Preview time! From The Seven Trials, chapter 9:
Clover looked up to a storm. Rain whipped across her face, and her ears were overwhelmed with the sounds of roaring wind and water, and everything around her was dark.
She pushed up on her legs, groaning as she caught her breath, and looked down at her hooves.
They had five little pokey digits attached to them.
Her eyes shot wide open as she stared at them, and at the soft, fleshy lump they were attached to where her hooves used to be, and started screaming again.
There was a sound of something approaching, and a stallion’s voice cried out, “Hey!” before a creature that was not a stallion pushed through the tall grass. It was bipedal, furless, and while its garb was adapted for its bizarrely shaped body Clover nonetheless recognized the unmistakable style of a Roaman legionnaire.
“Oh thank goodness I found you,” he said, looking immensely relieved to see her. “I’m Sentry Flash Magnus. I’m here to help.”
Get rekt Clover, though I suppose the mirror to the movie version of Earth had to be invented sometime, it might as well be by accident.
The way I see g5, the new movie presented the g4 universe as a story within the story. Twilight Sparkle is a legend to the new generation. The sort of legend that is believed to be based on something that really happened, but exaggerated by the storytellers so we don't know how much is true. It follows the 'closing the book' finish to g4, and gives me something to add to my list of similarities between MLP and King Arthur.
Sunny has shown all three pony kinds did used to be friends, but does that mean Twilight Sparkle really existed? Was the sonic rainboom a real thing? Were there really griffins and dragons in ancient times? We don't yet know, but it will be fun to find out. There is an expectation that most of it will be shown to be real, but insisting that everything should be as depicted in g4 feels like a sort of religious fundamentalism - insisting every line in the bible is the literal truth.
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Clover the Clever: "Mirror? There wasn't anything as convenient as a mirror, I just--you know what? You'll see."
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I don't want to tell fans not to have a good time. I expect there will be many references, all over the place (I just rewatched some scenes of the movie today and saw one of those rubber chickens in Alphabittle's stash). But any full explanation of the relationship between the two shows in-universe is doomed to fail because it's a new show by mostly new creators and there will be inconsistencies that confound any attempt to make one. And that's fine and we should let them tell their story and judge it on its own merits and on its own terms.
Please, let's not! (Though, I know full well that the plea is a futile one.
) I am perfectly content with not having an explanation for the intervening years beyond a few intriguing clues like the abandoned balloon station. To not have a detailed explanation makes the world feel more real to me.
"And can we just not? Can we please just let the new show have its own identity and let the new creators tell their story, and not demand that it carry the weight of a decade of continuity and lore in a way that seems tailor-made for nitpicking and gatekeeping rather than telling good stories? Please? That’s what I want from g5. That it gets the chance to be itself."
Also, I think that leaving an aspect unknown is better than covering it badly. An "explanation" of "the answer to that question is lost in the mists of time and the decades of archaeological work that might answer it are outside the scope of the show" leaves things open. Those fine with it being left open can just roll with it, and those who need an explanation can use the gap to spur creativity and/or conversation and find their own that suits their tastes. Whereas, if there's an "explanation" in the form of "Okay, X happened. Yes, we realized X doesn't make sense five minutes after we sent the footage off, but you pestered us so much that we gave an intern two hours to come up with something. So I guess now we just have to deal with having said X happened for the rest of the series"... theeen that's kind of a number of different problems at once, isn't it?
And those people who've been upset that what Twilight built eventually fell... would they be happier imagining, because the show said basically nothing, that fifty thousand years of utopic harmony were only ended when at last the invasion of the Giant Alien Space Bats was the crisis beyond Twilight's ability to handle, and the tribalism was a result of the GASBs' mind-control rays, or if it became show canon that Twilight ruled for less than a century before things kind of just fell apart, and whoops, guess she was actually just bad at this and friendship had poor staying power?
(Relatedly, I hope, for instance, that either we get a good explanation for Maretime Bay's food and raw material sources, or that's never really addressed and there being farms and mines and such just offscreen isn't ruled out. Rather than, say, showing things that make it really hard to claim there are any farms nearby while also trying to "do" that bit of important worldbuilding by ignoring it and hoping no one notices or cares.)
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As someone on twitter remarked, only six years passed between Nixon's resignation and Reagan getting elected.
It is normal and realistic that good things don't last, let alone for all eternity. It is perfectly realistic and understandable that good things must be continually fought for, especially in the present in real life. The insistence that this MUST reflect a deep failing on Twilight's part or else receive a satisfactory explanation just utterly baffles me. Obviously neither of those is true and it's absurd to demand the new creators address the fans' weird hangups in canon.
So yeah. Can we please just not?
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"The insistence that this MUST reflect a deep failing on Twilight's part or else receive a satisfactory explanation just utterly baffles me."
Aye, I don't get it either.
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There are many reasons to be skeptical of the idea that they should explain everything. I think the most fundamental one just the recognition that these are artists telling stories, and we should give them the chance to tell their story in their way.
And well, I just keep thinking back to this essay I linked to back in april, and especially this bit near the end:
Maybe sometimes people need a reminder that art is made in real life, aimed at real-life people, and talks about real-life things. And that, y'know, that's the part that really matters.
But I should stop complaining.
I went to the library today! Because I suddenly remembered that's a thing I can do now
And because after an indeterminate period of feeling Very Exhausted By Everything today I suddenly felt like I had the spoons to do that and it was a beautiful day for it. I wrote a few lines of chapter 16 and went for a walk in the crisp autumn sunlight and it was lovely.