The Element of Inspiration (aka The Day I First Watched the Show) · 6:42am Nov 10th, 2017
Blog Number 31: The Backstory Edition
Today is the sixth anniversary of my introduction to My Little Pony. My first proper introduction, of course: I was vaguely aware of its existence before then, but only in the casual “oh yeah, that thing exists, cue joke about how saccharine it is” sense.
Or, more likely, the “huh, it exists, moving on” sense: I did not care about it at the time. Broad as my interests were, they’d written whole books about things that didn’t interest me, and I say this as someone whose favourite place in the world is a library. Pony wasn’t exactly calculated to get my blood running.
So on this day, the sixth year of the pony-inclusive portion of my life, after seventy two months of writing about it and talking about it and occasionally having arguments about it, perhaps it’s time. Time to stop rushing forwards, to turn around, and to travel back to the starting line. To look at where it all burst in on my life, and at what I thought the next six years were going to be (spoilers: much more productive than they turned out).
You don’t know much about me. Beyond pony fandom, I’d prefer to keep it that way. That’s probably one reason why this is the first time I’ve ever done an anniversary post at all. Yet so much has changed since those early, exciting days, and so many things have gone unwritten and unsaid, that perhaps a glimpse would be a good thing now.
I’m still keeping extra-pony material to a minimum, mind. But that’s because there isn’t much you need to know about me. Not if you want to understand what pony fanfiction has meant to me, and why I’m ultimately disappointed with myself.
Caveat: I’ll try to keep the nostalgia goggles loose, but I do have to wear old shoes again, the better to convey what an impact this show had when I first encountered it. The two things may clash. (I have some self-awareness, after all.)
So let's go back six years, to when it all started…
The Anniversary
TO BEGIN BEFORE THE BEGINNING
THE DAY I HEARD THE THEME TUNE
TO WATCH A SEASON IN TWO DAYS
(Call of the Cutie)
(Suited for Success)
THE AFTERMATH OF THE GALA
FIRST FANFICTION FORAY
ENTER FIMFICTION.NET
AND NOW IT HAS COME TO THIS
WHAT NEXT?
The Anniversary
TO BEGIN BEFORE THE BEGINNING
Season Two was well on its way when I first encountered My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. In the days before then, things weren’t going as well as I’d hoped. I was studying English, though around this point I was mostly attending workshops for such things as procrastination, relaxation, and confidence. The success of each workshop was tremendously encouraging… so long as I was in the workshop. As soon as I stepped outside, it wore off fast. My sleeping was awful; late nights past midnight were the norm rather than the exception.
Yeah, I was in a bad place.
Hard as it is to believe, my writing aspirations were even more disorganized than they are now. At that point, I was absorbing loads of ideas, but producing little in the way of actual work.
For example, I was reading David Attenborough’s and Oliver Sacks’ works – on the nature-inspired artworks of history and on his childhood respectively – browsing TVTropes to the point of daily addiction, and watching a lot of fascinating science programmes. To give you an idea of the eclecticism of the latter, in nine days I watched programmes about:
Dinosaurs
Animals in the Arctic and Antarctic
Human intelligence
The earliest bones of prehistoric humans
The nature of waves in three dimensions
The sociability of primates
Also, I was watching Frozen Planet. Can you tell I like nature documentaries?
So take all these beyond-fascinating ideas and potential launching points for literary exploration, and filter it all through my mind. What do you get? An amazing tale about someone surviving in the ice age? Sea apes who use complex waves in an information war? Archaeological drama?
Well…
Actual output: a bit of a story about a mermaid travelling the world, getting captured by a fleet of scientific ships, slowly learning to communicate with her eccentric captors, and waiting to be rescued by her father and a consortium of mermaid inventors who have perfected – gasp! – a device for letting them walk on land.
Less specifically, it was a continuation of a prior idea. From June. I produced nothing during the interim. Even that November, I only occasionally revisited the project.
And when I say it was a bit, I do mean a bit; it covered less than a dozen pages and went nowhere. I’ve probably still got it buried in my files.
In short, I was floundering, and almost certainly ripe for a creative leap out of the pit I’d dug myself into.
THE DAY I HEARD THE THEME TUNE
Interestingly enough, the day itself started relatively innocuously. I was browsing TVTropes, and to give an idea of the kind of Wiki Walk I’m capable of starting, the pages visited include such topics as:
Futuristic Tech
Clones
Movie Twists
Free Will and Fate
Wham Lines
Twain’s Observation on Originality
Hanlon’s Razor
The Hidden Purpose Test
If my notes are any indication, it was around this last one when I apparently thought, That pony thing again. It keeps coming up in the examples. What is it, exactly?
I had a look at the article. I read some of the user reviews. I was intrigued enough to browse a little more, and then to look it up on Wikipedia. The trail became strong. I smelled something different.
Finally, I searched YouTube for the first episode or two, presumably just to take a sample and then go off and think about it. So I watched the new artwork, the steady build-up to the quest, the range of characters introduced, the cartoony jokes, and the strange balance between cutesy and epic.
Oh wait, those guards made actual horse noises. Nice touch. Oh hey, cowboy ponies: I like cowboys, and neighbourly ones too. Whoa, Rainbow’s ten-second stunt was a cool first impression! Aw, Fluttershy’s adorable! And she likes birds! Nightmare Moon’s dark. That’s quite an arresting change of tone.
You get the idea.
Initially, I was kind of cool about it, academically interested, and uncertain, but slowly the charms of the characters warmed things up, and comfortably. With hindsight, a lot of the second episode is flat-out weird – Nightmare Moon’s ploys seem inconsistent and half-hearted, to say nothing of Fluttershy’s unusual stunt and Rarity’s casual tail-slicing – but I think the relatively minor moment I was willing to stick with the series for a little longer was the moment the manticore first roared. I’m a sucker for monsters.
After that, I watched the third episode, and I’m a sucker too for moral dilemmas. Yes, yes, Ticket Master is not exactly going to win any prizes, but I was intrigued by how Twilight was going to resolve the ticket distribution problem. And then I watched the fourth episode, where one of my favourite main characters had a prominent and self-harming role.
Then the fifth… Then the sixth… Then the seventh really got the ball rolling with both Fluttershy and the dragon… Then the eighth introduced something I wasn’t really expecting: a sleepover episode that I actually wanted to watch, namely because of how Rarity and Applejack showed off their differences. Then zebra xenophobia. Then a tribute to The Trouble with Tribbles. The more episodes I watched, the more pleasant surprises I kept coming across.
TO WATCH A SEASON IN TWO DAYS
So that was it. Ten episodes in one day. Enough to satisfy a newly emerging appetite for pony, right?
Heck no. I stayed up even later than usual watching them. It carried over into the next day. More episodes poured in, and with hindsight I can see that I swiftly went through what I consider the greatest stretch of pony so far: the second half of Season One.
This is what really won me over. To get an idea of how much I liked it, I watched all the remaining sixteen episodes in one day. One day.
My word, these episodes were amazing. Most people single out Winter Wrap-Up as the moment that kicked their appreciation to a whole new level, but in my case it was arguably a toss-up between Call of the Cutie, Suited for Success, and Sonic Rainboom. Virtually everything after that was gold.
Since I went on about the rainboom episode in my Royal Canterlot Library interview, I’ll touch upon the other two here.
Call of the Cutie has a level of maturity and childlike awareness that, due to focusing on the older cast, the previous episodes hadn’t managed to pull off. But this was all about one kid: Apple Bloom. About her classroom insecurities, her need to figure out how the life cycle works from family and friends, and her not-so-patient exploration of how and why she should find her purpose in life. I found it really easy to identify with her.
Moreover, she’s not an innocent naïf, either. She’s (adorably) aggressive and tricky when she needs to be; she’s alternately hopeful, eager, shocked, confused, depressed, and desperate; she tells lies to hide her shame, gets stuck in mental ruts, and becomes distressed as the big social event draws closer. That’s a surprising amount of breadth, and it’s only a pity Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle don’t get equivalent treatments.
A lesser story would have taken pity on her and given the long-suffering kid what she wanted at the end, but the actual lesson about using childhood blankness to explore and stretch oneself is surprisingly fitting and mature. The fact that she gets some friends who are on the same empathic level – reducing her feelings of isolation – is a nice little bonus and a great launching point for future stories.
Meanwhile, Suited for Success is basically the episode in which Rarity shot up from “amusingly ambitious prissy pony who joins in on the zaniness” to “one of the best characters in the show; seriously, watch this space”. The metaphors layered (pardon the pun) over the episode alone are fun to spot, but more to the point they all cast Rarity’s business and work ethic in a new light.
It’s not just the big things, like the obvious moral about trusting artists to do their thing and not depend on inexpert interventions. There’s the little stuff too:
Her mounting irritation with Applejack and Twilight’s whispering before she politely asks them what they want; her confusion at Fluttershy’s knowledge of haute couture; her discomfort at receiving misguided and tacky ideas; her getting serious stage fright before the disastrous fashion show; the way she innocently inconveniences Opalescence while she works; her still going out to help her cat even while she’s supposed to be in the middle of a breakdown; the sheer happiness while she works on her first batch of dresses while singing about the details.
It tells you what you need to know, and is quite entertaining besides.
Even more remarkable, it makes a winner out of a character who could so easily have been a tired stereotype. I am by no means a fashion aficionado, but this is one of the few times that I actually felt that intrigued by the artistry of clothes. When you’re an aspiring writer, that’s a strange connection to make with what at first glance looks like someone who solves problems with makeovers and empty prettifying.
The symbolism of the clothes pushes it into more meaningful territory; Rainbow's Greek-inspired ensemble is my personal favourite in that respect. An episode suffused with such meaning is one to be reckoned with.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE GALA
So what to do once I'd watched the entire first season in two days?
Over the rest of the month, I re-watched the episodes repeatedly. While I touched upon that mermaid story occasionally, my mind was elsewhere for a good long while. But arguably, my introduction to MLP:FiM did nothing for the rest of my daily living.
I was still watching science programmes (in this case, about such things as scavengers, twins, the genetic code, and electricity). I still had sleeping problems, and a little trouble studying.
Elsewhere, my casual reading turned towards Sci-Fi around this point. I read Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Sirius. In fact, a wonderful if idiosyncratic thing happened. I got into astronomy (briefly, as it turned out), and joined a group in peering up at the night sky. We were lucky one night; I am delighted to report that I saw beauty in the cosmos.
To be exact, I saw Jupiter and its four moons, I saw the “seven sisters” of the Pleiades, and I think – though I’m still not sure – I saw our sister galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy. Such inspiration! Such perspective! Is it any wonder I was drawn to science, and thus to science fiction? With my writing ambitions, it was only a matter of time.
Nevertheless, the seed had been planted. Pony was on my mind.
So on the one hand, I was gripped by this strange new show, but on the other hand, my writing interests were moving towards a genre I was arguably much better suited for. The union of show and writing did not happen yet.
Delighted by the discovery of more episodes, I finally started and caught up with the series’ second season on Friday 18th November, watching the first six episodes in one day. Only the fact that nothing else had been released yet prevented me from watching more, so I simply re-watched already-seen episodes again. Not until the next day would I finally match the show’s current airing schedule, by watching May the Best Pet Win on YouTube.
Now I had to wait a week for satisfaction. It wasn’t enough. I began browsing the show’s pages on TVTropes. (Incidentally, there was another thing I was looking up around that point, which in hindsight is an astonishing coincidence given recent events, but… well, I’ll save that for another time.)
FIRST FANFICTION FORAY
The interval between my first watching the show and my first writing fanfiction for it can be dated precisely. I first watched the show 10th and 11th November 2011. I first tried my hand at writing fanfiction 29th November 2011.
Why the long gap? Firstly, at that point – incredible as it may sound – I had no concept of fanfiction. You have to remember that they don’t exactly teach it to you in English. Moreover, I was – and to some extent still am – a dilettante when it came to internet culture, which was the only plausible outlet for me to discover it at the time.
Secondly, even on the internet I was pretty unadventurous. It took days to discover that there were other pony things besides ripped episodes from the show itself – something I learned while impatiently waiting for each new episode to come out – and pretty much had to rely on them while the old YouTube videos kept vanishing. They were volatile back then. Heck, I only discovered DeviantArt around this time. DeviantArt. You tell me how slow I was to catch up.
Thirdly, I was still busy elsewhere. My reading increased greatly. Science reading, obviously, but I also looked into William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Larry Niven’s Ringworld. The eclecticism never wavered. Not to forget I was busy dealing with the usual truckload of educational problems.
Nonetheless, I did discover Equestria Daily on Saturday 26th November, on the same day the notorious Mare-Do-Well episode came out. That was almost certainly how I discovered the fanfiction scene – pony fanfiction, specifically.
Most of the stuff available back then hasn’t withstood the test of time. Not that I was fussy. My reading eventually inspired my own attempts in this direction, a mere three days after discovering it existed. Right at the end of the month, my interest grew. I found the official fanfiction.net website, and the attempted story I was working on would later become All of a Fluttershy.
Such was my enthusiasm that I completed it in three days. That's a fic which is at least 11,000 words long. Completed writing it, anyway: I actually had a finished version – after editing – two days later still, on fanfiction.net. It went up Saturday 3rd December, the same day one of the best Rarity episodes aired (Sweet and Elite).
Yep. Barely three weeks after the intro, I'd discovered whole new concepts and started writing things again. To me, that was astonishing, and it was only the start.
ENTER FIMFICTION.NET
Now we’re approaching one month after my introduction to the show. Ah, times were different. For one thing, Equestria Daily had much more relaxed entry requirements, or else All of a Fluttershy would never have been accepted on Sunday 4th December and published on Tuesday 6th. Compared with the waiting times of today, that’s lightning.
Oh, it was a wonderful feeling to see the fanfiction.net ratings soar. Anyone else might have coasted after that. Not me. I was in the grip of pony fever, and a persistent strain at that which had latched onto my writing ambitions.
Back up a bit. Before that same Sunday was even out, I was coming up with yet more fanfiction ideas. My second project, Baking For Humble Pie, started life around that time. By its second day of writing, I had in total four ideas and still kept thinking up more. Baking For Humble Pie – in its current form – was ready and uploaded on Friday 9th December on fanfiction.net.
Exactly one month after I watched the first episode of the show, I’d submitted Baking – unwisely, as it turned out – to Equestria Daily and was already working on its next part – also unwisely, as it turned out. That's a fic almost 22,000 words long.
The momentum kept going. On Monday 12th December 2017, I went from Equestria Daily to FIMFiction.net for the first time. Pleased to have found another home base, I joined up, uploaded All of a Fluttershy, and – naturally – started work on my third project (Cutie Mark Espionage Agency), part one of which ended up on fanfiction.net on 14th December, FIMFiction.net on 15th December, and Equestria Daily on 16th December. That's at least 7,600 words. Then the day immediately after – 17th December – I wrote Cutie Mark Espionage Agency’s second chapter. That's at least 8,300 words.
Total by then: roughly 50,000 words. In 19 days.
Yeah, I was running a heck of a tight schedule. It slowed a bit in the wake of Baking for Humble Pie’s less successful reception and my abandonment of that project soon afterwards, which took me down a peg, but probably for ultimately good reasons.
Long story short: not long after discovering fanfiction, I discovered in quick succession the fires of writing inspiration, the delights of publication, the joy of being judged and accepted, the soaring ambition of frantic ideas, the shock of rejection, the sobering astonishment of the possibility that my work might actually not be good, the sudden and urgent need to make sure I’m not writing hack material, and the bittersweet pill of seeking out critical feedback as necessary and painful as surgery. For someone who’d been struggling for months, that’s a lot to go through in roughly two or three weeks.
I wanted in. I wanted in real bad.
AND NOW IT HAS COME TO THIS
Ultimately, I switched to FIMFiction.net simply because it was easier to edit stuff on this site, and with the additions and modifications since, I don’t regret it. Development of Cutie Mark Espionage Agency continued, but the initial buzz of excitement wore off… eventually… inevitably… alas.
I have managed months with far more impressive feats of writing since. This is partly experience, partly practice. Just look at the stuff I did in February and compare that with what I wrote all those years ago. Now tell me which is better edited, better managed, more professional, less prone to pointless references.
But this is all about pony’s influence, and it was huge. Immediate. Mind-opening. The fever stayed with me throughout the following year until too many factors caused it to collapse, followed – regrettably – by too many failed years of non-writing. Before that time came, however, I re-watched episodes almost daily. One cute thing I did was re-watch the Hearth’s Warming Eve episode precisely on Christmas Eve, just because it was thematically appropriate. Yes, I was corny like that.
I won’t say I was particularly deeply involved in the pony subculture. Still ain’t, if I’m going to be technically accurate about it. I certainly don’t regard myself as a “brony”, but as someone who’ll happily watch an episode or look at some quality art or read a bit of fanfiction. To be a “brony” requires more full-blooded loyalty and devotion, I think, and I have neither.
I don’t go to conventions and could never really imagine myself doing so, simply because big social events just aren’t my kind of thing. Even back then, I’d have happily written out of my mental life a couple of the less-than-impressive episodes; my nostalgia goggles aren’t that tight. And the only merchandise I ever bought were the DVD sets for the first two seasons. That was in 2016.
WHAT NEXT?
Sadly, the buzz has died down and stayed mostly down. I think part of the reason is that the novelty has worn off a bit, as has been suggested to me before now. I’m certainly not writing with the old enthusiasm.
Nowadays, I can’t even remember the last time I re-watched an episode of the show. I certainly haven’t been keeping up, and Season Five remains the last time I saw every episode at least once. By now, I basically regard the show as expensive fanfiction: interesting, maybe, with one or two ideas to take away, but not something to care much about if ever it comes time to write my own.
Hopefully, this lack of buzz will soon change. Merely writing this has made me realize how much I’ve changed since then, and not all in negative ways. There are now obvious actions I can take to rectify this, (re-watch some episodes, for a start).
I don't forget. The explosion of ideas continues, even if my writing doesn’t. I don’t forget where it all started. I am far from finished here.
Those who study the past may yet contrive to repeat it.
Intelligently, of course. Selectively.
I hope.
Until then: Impossible Numbers, out.
Statistics
NEW: List of Reviews
I'm awful at keeping track of these things, so this is a temporary measure until I can think of something better.
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/84457/reviews-round-2 (Griffon a Load of Bull)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/289039/for-the-record (miscellaneous)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/700481/lexual-favors-horror-edition (Lapidify: To See and Die)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/702800/fic-recs-december-30th-plus-stats-and-state-of-the-reviewer-2016 (Lapidify: To See and Die)
- http://louderyay.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/ponyfic-roundup-142-carrot-top-edition.html (Practical Nightmares Only)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/710197/impossible-numbers-lapidify-to-see-and-die-royal-canterlot-library (Lapidify: To See and Die)
- http://louderyay.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/ponyfic-roundup-144-return-to-royal.html (Lapidify: To See and Die)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/714522/sa-reviews-98 (Lapidify: To See and Die)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/718206/under-appreciated-stories-1 (Lapidify: To See and Die)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/725641/review-imposing-sovereigns-stories-warrior-pt-1 (Healing Properties)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/732915/sa-reviews-103 (Friends of the Ponies)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/733536/fic-recs-may-3rd-imposing-sovereigns-edition (Healing Properties)
- https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/737447/review-107-areas-of-expertise-rise-of-the-solar-wind (Rise of the Solar Wind)
- http://onemansponyramblings.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/mini-reviews-round-208.html (Hive Versus Hive)
Fics Accepted By Equestria Daily
Still waiting to hear back on Transient. Told you it was lightning before, didn't I?
New Stories? No.
New Updates: No. Hopefully, this will change soon.
Story Count: 59
My Total Story View Count: Rendered obsolete due to new site changes.
Age: 2,159 days, or 308 weeks and 3 days.
Working: 19 days in December 2011, 2x366 days for 2012 and 2016 leap years, 3x365 days for 2013 and 2014 and 2015 combined, and 313 days so far in 2017 up to today.
My Follower Count: 147
My Followed Count: 87
I realize this is tantamount to necroblogomancy, but I was going back through a bit of your stuff and this seemed as good a place as any to offer a cheerful, "Hello!"
Herd-joining stories are always great to see. Most tend to be variations on one or two "core" storylines, of course.
Mine was more of the "discovery in time of darkness" flavor, where yours looks more like the "drawn in by curiosity" flavor. It's fascinating to see similar stories repeat time and again. I wonder what the stories will look like once MLP:FiM's run is over?
Anyway, I wanted to mention that I do a bit of pre-reading/editing from time to time if you're ever looking for an opinion on a fic you're working on. My availability can be limited sometimes, but let me know if you're interested and I'll see what I can do. Also, I've been trying to draw inspiration from Novel-Idea's style of fic covers and Aragon's style of descriptions recently, and I could always use more practice with both.