Life of a Project - Cherry on Top

The only reason you got to read Cherry on Top is because it was scaled back. Like, a lot.

I had in my head a Cherry Jubilee and Applejack fic since… well, I can’t remember exactly when. I’m willing to bet all the way back in late 2016, but it could be even earlier. Of course, it didn’t take three years to write the one-shot you see today. Instead that came about in about two weeks or so, after I finally decided the direction I wanted to take with this.

As for what this story used to be, much like Three of a Kind I originally envisioned a much longer, slower burning fic. It was always going to take place during the Last Roundup episode of the show, but the context was vastly different. In fact, it wasn’t conceived to be clop at first.

Instead the story would play out kind of like Something to Rave About, where Applejack would be offered a position at Cherry’s farm, but not realizing it involved diapers until a little later. Cherry was originally going to offer AJ a lot of money to pretend to be her foal, involving all the feedings, playtime, and yes, accidents that comes with that. I figured I could get a number of chapters out of AJ begrudgingly accepting since she needed the money, and slowly coming around to the idea of being treated like a foal by Cherry. And then her friends would arrive, much like they do in the episode proper, and we get some hijinks of AJ trying her best to avoid being seen by them while still letting Cherry baby her in order to get all the money she needed.

So yeah, quite different from the finished product. The main reason the original version never took shape was because no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t convincingly get AJ into that situation. She pretty much had no reason to resort to being babied by Cherry if she could just get other work. And because there was no element of her being forced to do so by Cherry, there was no reason AJ could just take all the foal stuff off when her friends arrived. As far as keeping suspension of disbelief in tack, this one was pretty weak.

So I put it in the Pigeon Hole and slowly over the years used bits and pieces of that idea in other works. I already mentioned StRA, but Stupid, Stupid Dress and On Brand also borrowed elements of this idea. And while that helped me make a lot of stories, it also took away what was unique about this one, meaning it would likely never see the light of day.

Eventually I did come back to this idea, and started tinkering with other ways to make this work. In the time since abandoning the project and then, I had grown fond of AJ and Cherry in a romantic pairing, so I decided to lean into that idea rather than a mother/daughter dynamic. That quickly just spiraled into clop, but that was enough to keep me motivated in the idea and I got started.

Early into the fic I realized it was shaping up to be pretty similar to Rainbow Dash’s “Mommy” (older mare takes advantage of a tired Mane 6 character and introduces them to the ABDL fetish before they have sex, ending with the two falling asleep together). At first, that discouraged me and I almost started over from scratch. But then I saw an opportunity.

I mentioned before my dissatisfaction with RD’s Mommy in a different blog, so I won’t repeat myself too much. Ultimately I was just not happy with the way consent was used (or rather, not used) in that fic, so I made it a much more overt moment here. Rather than losing her agency, Applejack chooses to keep going with Cherry after the diapers are revealed and makes it explicitly clear that Cherry should stop if she’s not comfortable. It just sits a lot better with me now than how I used the same premise back in 2017.

And that about covers this fic. Hope you enjoyed reading about it’s journey from idea to the page. And if there’s another story of mine that really interests you, feel free to ask for a blog about it as well. I’m always curious what you guys want to know about!