Progress Update, Spoopmonth 21 part 2: The Spookening · 7:33pm Oct 28th, 2021
A couple of days ago I finished chapter 16 of The Seven Trials, after two weeks of work. It turned out to be quite short, at a measly 4400 words, and was quite cooperative throughout, and was all in all a very pleasant experience.
This is the chapter that was originally supposed to be the ending of chapter 15, but which I split off to its own chapter when it became clear that chapter 15 would be enormous and complicated. But then chapter 15 was still enormous and complicated, and this chapter so short, that maybe the split was pointless.
And that leaves only two chapters to go, covering the final showdown and its aftermath. I'm almost at the end. I don't know how that's going to go. I've written out my ideas for the final two chapters, they clearly need a lot of polish to make them work, but still... I'm almost at the end 
I still don't expect these final chapters to be particularly long, but they might be particularly complicated. Dare I hope that I can reach the end by new year? That might be too ambitious. But it sure would be fun.
Speaking of the Founders, last week on a whim I went looking to see if there were any nice pictures of Clover the Clever or Princess Platinum I hadn't seen, and I discovered something. It turns out that there is kind of sort of an official design of the Founders, one that never made it into either the show or comics but which was used more than once in other media.
Earlier this year I saw these tiny little pictures in an unusual style of some of the Founders (sadly not including Clover) in the MLP Wiki's page on the Founders of Equestria, which I eventually figured out came from this popup book, Castles of Equestria, where one page depicts the ancient Castle of the Two Sisters with several of the Founders hanging out. The relevant page is shown in this video starting 3 minutes in:
I don't know who made that art, if they created those designs themselves or what, orif they've done anything else in mlp. I wrote it off as just a one-time oddity. But then last week I found that the same designs from that book were used for the Founders when they appeared at some point in the MLP mobile game (maybe as recently as last month?):
https://derpibooru.org/images/2696373
So yeah. It seems like that's probably the closest we'll get to a canonical look for the Founders of Equestria. And it does seem canon came down on the side of Clover being a boy, in the end. I do like that design for Princess Platinum in particular though.
Ahuizotl? O.o
And who the heckity heck is the alicorn?
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That is Queen Parabola, who appears in exactly one panel in Friends Forever #32.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/10/3/1847156.jpg
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what the literal fuck
whose goddamn zebralicorn oc made it into the comics
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Some questions were never meant to be answered.
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We don't talk about Queen Parabola.