So I’m seeing this post going around and just want to rebut it real quick? Hi. I’m an animator. Lemme tell you about animation.
I can’t say much about the budget for the Sonic movie, though it’s worth hanging an asterisk on that figure since it’s not out yet. I’m also suspicious of such a low figure for the MLP budget, since that has to include the salaries of a few fairly notable people (notice how Songbird Serenade only had like, five lines in the whole movie?), but that figure has an academic source, so I’ll trust it for now.
Anyway, here’s why I think that whatever this post is trying to imply is kind of wrongheaded.
So first things first, let’s make the distinction between what these two pictures are. Sonic the Hedgehog (2019) is a live action... well I hesitate to call it a “blockbuster”, but it’s a special-effects heavy action movie. It has big name actors, location shooting, all that fun stuff. The My Little Pony movie is a 90 minute TV special that accidentally found its way to a theatrical release.
Lemme take a step back from what’s on the screen and take a look at the economics of these productions. I’m largely just speculating this part, but bear with me. The way the Sonic movie makes the most sense to me as a venture for Sega is if the movie studio pays them for the rights to the property, and then any royalties they make are gravy. If the movie bombs, they’ve already been paid for the rights, and it’s not like Sonic’s reputation can get much worse, so there’s not a lot to lose. That puts it on the heads of the studios and distributors to turn the movie into a profit-making venture, so the movie gets a big boy budget. Nothing too extreme? But like, it’s about the same budget that Shazam got.
Meanwhile, the objective of the MLP movie is first and foremost, to sell toys. The value of the movie is how many playsets it sells. As such, how good the movie is is a secondary concern, behind how many views it converts into toy sales. Add to this that they basically went with the same crew in the same studio, and you’re looking at what Dan Olson calls a Made-for-TV-Plus movie. A lot of the budget has probably gone towards getting the big names into the recording studio for like a day each (Sia’s time must have been very expensive), and the animation crew got paid for a long TV episode. Some comparable budgets include the Ouija movie and Air Buddies.
What I’m trying to communicate here is that the purpose of these two movies is different and that explains why their budgets are so different. As for “doing more with less”, well, you can probably blame some decision-making at Blur Studio for what they’ve ended up with, but I’m less interested in that. My big point here is that the MLP movie is a poor “bang for your buck” example because its shoestring budget really shows if you look closely. I don’t want to completely ruin it for anyone who doesn’t want to know, so all of that is in the section below, and nothing else.
The switch to Toon Boom and the use of some frame-by-frame animation in the hero scenes in the movie, together with some tactical 3D, charming writing and the general creativity of the settings do a lot to paper over the shortcuts taken in the animation. However, it’s pretty clear that a lot of the budget went to these really important scenes, and some of the scenes got only just enough attention to get them out the door. (Princess and the Frog had a $105M budget. They didn’t spend that all on champagne and truffles, kids.)
In a lot of crowd shots you’ll see duplicated animation, you’ll see background characters hold still for very long periods of time, and a real tell of puppet animation is characters sticking to the same few angles. Toon Boom’s deformers help with smoothing in and out of them and avoiding the snap you see in the Flash-made show when characters have to turn, but you can still kiiinda see it. It’s there when characters slide into frame holding a kind of musical-theatre 3/4 tilt, it’s characters running just very slightly out of angle with where they’re supposed to be going, it’s the awkward floaty bobbing motion of background characters, it’s the same mouth shapes showing up again and again and again.
This is to say nothing of the TV-like cinematography that bleeds in in a few places. When the movie’s being intense or dramatic or awestriking, it gets very cinematic - lots of close-ups, big sweeping long shots of dramatic prog rock backdrops (painted stills, natch), tight angles close to the ground, that kind of thing. But then when it doesn’t need to do that, we’re commonly back to simple wides and holding on the same frame just slightly uncomfortably too long.
I think the best thing I can bring for my case is the sequence for the We Got This Together song. With the exception of Twilight’s flyover bridge, the sequence is full of these kind of in-between shots that don’t know how to be interesting, plus plenty of background characters really looking like puppets and just... lots of things that I’d get retaken to me at work if I let them slip? It just really strikes me as a sequence that they didn’t have the time to finish. Like I don’t think it’s the animators’ fault, it’s just unreasonable to expect more from the budget they were given. Also some other sequences did fare better (Time to be Awesome is one).
If there’s two things I love, it’s being a huge nerd, and having way too many concurrent projects. And on that note to I have some useless information for you! See, the thing about having like 200 blogs is that a few of them fall into inactivity after a while. I’ve also been periodically recording follower counts for all my blogs since January 2015. This is obviously back of the envelope math, but it gives me a good stab at answering a really trivial mystery:
Where are those unfollows coming from?
I’ll save you a click and just tell you straight up: on average, under normal circumstances, a dead blog loses about 0.2-0.4% of its followers per month. This is in effect the Tumblr entropy rate - people closing their accounts, people getting banned, people purging their follow lists. My dataset is imperfect and the chosen blogs aren’t huge, but it’s a useful approximation nonetheless. Well. For certain measures of useful. For the super dorky among you, the math for how I got here is below the cut.
I won’t name the blogs I’ve used for this calculation to avoid disrupting their later use for these studies, but neither of them have posted anything since about 2015. These blogs are dead af. In August 2015 they had 896 and 345 followers, and at the time of posting (February 2019) they have 787 and 290 followers. This gives an overall loss of 109 and 55, which over 42 months is about 0.28% to 0.37% loss per month. Simple enough, right? Exceeeept... We had that thing last December where Tumblr decided that banning adult content was a good idea, and a huge number of people left the site. This creates a statistical freak for us. Fortunately the granularity of my data allows me to go one better. (It turns out not to matter, but indulge my nerdery for a moment.)
My formula here is something like this:
Where f_n is the follower count at data point n, f_n-1 is the follower count on the previous data point, and t is the number of months between the two data points. Running that for all of my data for these two blogs gives me this handy dandy chart:
So now we have our background rate over time! That spike on the right of the chart is December 2018. Obviously this is a fairly small sample and I’m not sure what’s going on with June 2017, but interestingly, these two blogs’ follower loss rates track together pretty well. They’re not completely independent - they’re both blogs i’m involved with after all - but in the absence of any bump for literally years - that’s a pretty good correlation.
Anyway that’s about it! Just a random bit of useless trivia.
So, I was doing some research for a podcast I’m gonna be on later this week. I was re-reading Fallout Equestria for it, and the thought occurred to me, because it’s explicitly stated in the story that Tenpony Tower lives off of scavenged food. Could it really? This seems to be an assumption that Fallout 3 runs off of too, and I wanted to put it to the test. So below is a sprawling epic of back-of-the-envelope maths. You have been warned.
Let's abstract a pony to be roughly equivalent to a human. A human needs around 2,000 calories a day. They can survive on less but can't really do any work, such as general survival stuff like travelling and hunting and scavenging. 100g of Cap'n Crunch, which we'll use as a shorthand for Sugar Bombs, contains 400 calories. That's pretty calorific and calorific is good when you're trying to survive. Also breakfast cereals tend to be fortified with vitamins which is good for dietary balance. Cap'n Crunch doesn't have every vitamin in it, but other cereals do have wider spreads of it, so let's assume that you're not going to die of scurvy by subsisting on Sugar Bombs.
A 20oz box of Cap'n Crunch is 560 grams, so each box contains 2240 calories. That's a little bit of excess that is good for doing work. So this means that doing regular wasteland survival, you will need to eat a whole box of cereal every day. That's 365.25 boxes per year, per person. A conservative estimate of the population of Tenpony tower would be... 1,000? It's a gated community but it's also not a video game and they don't have to convey the impression of an entire settlement using like 12 people, and it’s described as a pretty large tower, so I think 1,000 is low-balling it. So that's 356,250 boxes of cereal every year. You can see where this is going, right?
If we assume that Tenpony tower has been inhabited for the last 100 years, that's 35,625,000 boxes of cereal that you need to find in the Manehattan ruins. That's with a population of 1,000 - every additional person in the stable population raises that number by another 35,625. Figures for how much cereal there is in for example, the New York metro area, is not something most sources keep track of, but we can make some educated guesses. There would be in the area enough groceries to feed a population of 20 million, BUT only for the shelf life of the produce in question. Let's say that 40% of the produce is perishables, and another 15% is contaminated by the blast and spoiled by exposure, and let's say all of the rest is Sugar Bombs.
Cap’n Crunch has a shelf life of about 2-3 months in a dry room. Let's say that because this is the future, the preservatives make it live forever, and 3 months is just how long stores will hold on to it before throwing it out. 93 days, optimistically, to make up 45% of the diet of 20 million people. The average American, according to National Geographic in 2011, eats 3,641 calories a day. That works out to 1,360,500,000 boxes of cereal.
Great you say! That's enough Cap’n Crunch to feed Tenpony Tower for 3,800 years, right? Except Tenpony Tower is hardly going to be the only settlement scavenging from the Manehattan ruins. Just from the story, we know the Manehattan area contains Gutterville, Bucklyn Cross and Friendship City, and there are raiders on top of that. To account for this, we can deduce that there is enough cereal in the Manehattan area to feed one pony for 380,000 years. There are 380,000 pony-cereal-years in Manehattan. That is a sentence that I just typed.
When you rearrange it, the maximum population you can sustain for 100 years on that amount of cereal is 38,000. This ignores population growth, and doesn't count the 100 years previous to that, which we'll just say was too dangerous for regular settlement to take place, but still might have had some small-scale scavenging. So ultimately it comes down to how big you think the population of the Manehattan ruins is. For a little perspective, 38,000 is slightly more than the number of people employed by JFK Airport. I don't think it's too hard to see that many ponies in the Manehattan metro area.
Next we have to consider the estimates for the food ratios. I pulled the 40% and 15% numbers out of my ass. The proportion of perishables is probably higher, and the proportion of food that's otherwise unusable is probably going to rise over time as more of it gets destroyed from fighting, rendered inaccessible by crumbling buildings, eaten by animals, or just plain rots on its own.
Also, not all of it is going to be breakfast cereal. (I don’t know any city where 45% of the food is breakfast cereal.) This isn’t too important, since 2000 calories of beans is as good as 2000 calories of breakfast cereal, and there should be roughly as much of it around based on how I worked out how much cereal there was, but it does bring up that there will be inefficiencies. Some days you’re just going to eat more than you need and burn through food faster than you should be to make it last. Particularly when it comes to drinks like cola and alcohol - that’s a lot of extra calories that if they were rationed could really extend survival time, but people tend not to ration drinks on their calorie content. Nor do they ration food on calorie content, really - people eat when they’re hungry. There will be other inefficiencies in terms of finding food that may counteract these, and some settlements will have other sources of food, but given the pains the story goes to to tell us how hard it is to farm, ultimately I think they balance out, though the proportions of perishables and contaminated and lost food are going to be the strongest levers on how much food there is left.
In conclusion, I think having Tenpony Tower subsisting entirely on scavenged food is vaguely plausible. To have it as portrayed in the story, as a comfortable place where the food is expensive but plentiful, is a stretch. Based on these numbers, I would say that Tenpony Tower should be in the middle of a food crisis as the stocks of remaining food run out, and they have to buy from scavengers further and further afield. After all, you can only plunder the Super Duper Mart once, and those Sugar Bombs are gone.
Now that I have your attention with a clickbaity title I’d like to take a detour from not reading Past Sins and procrastinate on things I’m supposed to be doing today to write a short essay on the premise that the rock operas Moonrise and Fall of an Empire are in fact, the same story. Now, before people come at me with pitchforks, let me just say that I really like these albums. They’re pretty good power metal and really scratch the itch for melodic metal concept albums with a story, not unlike Gloryhammer or Twilight Force, if a bit less tongue-in-cheek. But this just means I’ve listened to them through enough times to notice that they kinda cover the same story beats. The stories from the show they’re based on are pretty similar (bad crazy magic person gets banished for 1000 years), so they were bound to have similarities, but I feel like the similarities extend beyond that into the execution. Anyway, I’d highly recommend listening to them before/while I babble about them.
Also, L, if you’re reading this can you please not list the artist name as “The L-Train presents the Royal Canterlot Symphonic Metal Orchestra (Ro.C.S.M.Or)“? Because Bandcamp includes the artist name and album title in the file name, it means that the file path for any given song is “.../The L-Train presents the Royal Canterlot Symphonic Metal Orchestra (Ro.C.S.M.Or) - Fall of an Empire\The L-Train presents the Royal Canterlot Symphonic Metal Orchestra (Ro.C.S.M.Or) - Fall Of An Empire - 14 Prologue- The Tale Of The Crystal King (instrumental).mp3” which is longer than the file path length limit for Windows by itself. Just a minor bugbear. I had to rename the folder just so Winamp would even attempt to play the files. Love the music. Please make it more straightforward to open and play on a computer.
Below the break is a very long ramble about these two albums of horse music.
Okay so, let’s go through them beat by beat.
Part 0: The Introduction
Not much to say here. Moonrise’s “Scene 1: Prelude” is an instrumental which foreshadows some of the motifs in the album to come, Fall of an Empire’s “Prologue: Tale of the Crystal King” gives us some backstory on King Sombra. Different in content, but they both have an introduction as a conscious decision as opposed to just jumping right into the action. We can also see the naming conventions for both of them springing up, where Moonrise uses theatrical naming and FoaE uses literary naming, but they’re both titling their songs using the partition names of another medium, which is another conscious decision. It’s worth mentioning that both albums use a narrator who pops up from time to time to cover transitions, Moonrise’s narrator in the songs themselves, and Fall’s narrator in separate interludes. I’m not particularly fond of Fall’s narrator (the singing is a bit flat), but eh. What can you do.
Part 1: WE ARE AGGRESSIVELY HAPPY
This is what really convinced me to write this. Moonrise’s “Scene 2: Harmony” and FoaE’s “Chapter 1: Welcome to the Empire” both strike this slightly odd tonal dissonance where the lyrics have the characters exuberantly singing about how happy they are, while the music some of the most energetic on the whole album. But it’s not... the happiest instrumentation. The choruses are certainly grandiose and upbeat, but large parts of both songs are in a minor key and have this kind of aggressive growl. It’s quite effective at setting up the feeling that underneath this happy exterior something isn’t quite right.
This is much more pronounced when you listen to the instrumentals. The verses on Welcome to the Empire have instrumentals that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Metallica track, it’s really quite the contrast with lyrics that are basically pleasantries. In Harmony, some of the builds and swells have this organ behind them before it breaks into the chorus that make you feel like Dracula is about to burst in. It’s a really effective contrast, they clearly establish the baseline of the story, and both tracks are really fun to listen to, but both of them do basically the same thing.
Part 2a: Luna Is Happy And That’s Terrible
Okay, so we’ve established the baseline for the story. We have our major characters, and their relationship is pretty good. So now we settle down into a quiet and tender ballad, where Luna is really happy about something. In Moonrise, this is “Scene 3: Nightfall”. I’ve numbered this part 2a because Moonrise only has half as many tracks as Fall of an Empire, but they still cover the same story beats anyway (in fact Moonrise might even cover more), so where Moonrise covers multiple points in the same track I’ve numbered them with a number and a letter. Anyway.
In Nightfall, Luna is just overjoyed to make the night sky. However, because Luna is by herself here and her anguish is more interesting than her passion, Nightfall has to crush this point and the next into the same song, this lasts for all of a verse, which is punctuated by these growling, sinister guitar stabs. More of the song is in part 2b, but it still covers this tonal beat of the quiet expression of Luna really liking something.
This mood gets more fully expressed in Fall of an Empire’s “Chapter 2: Crossroads of Life”, which is a full-on soppy duet between Princess Luna and King Sombra. It almost manages to go the whole way from the two of them sneaking off to getting engaged in this tone, but then there’s a big sinister metal stab near the back half of it to remind you “hey don’t get too comfortable now”.
Both of these seem to come with the implication that Luna isn’t allowed to be happy. In fact that’s basically the byline of these two operas. Whenever Luna does what she wants, bad things happen. Which brings us to...
Part 2b: Someone Goes Crazy and It’s All Luna’s Fault
Oh boy. In Moonrise, we don’t even get the whole way through Nightfall before Luna starts losing the rag. So incensed is she that people are going to bed instead of looking at this pretty sky she’s made that she goes mad and decides to bring about eternal night. It’s a little childish, but A. this is a rock opera, people don’t need good reasons for doing things as long as the emotions flow right, and 2. this is a mythic-style story where larger-than-life characters do extraordinary things for petty reasons.
These points also apply to Fall of an Empire, where in “Chapter 3: Heavy Is The Crown” Celestia convinces Luna that marrying a mortal is a bad idea, and Luna dumps Sombra fairly abruptly. Sombra, a rational person, decides that he should become immortal (”Chapter 4: At Any Cost”) and take over the world (”Chapter 5: Regents Of The Darkness”).
It’s kind of understandable that Fall of an Empire takes three songs to cover what Moonrise does in less than one, because this story beat involves three times as many characters. In Moonrise, Luna goes nuts basically apropos of nothing. It almost feels a bit rushed, and Fall’s more drawn-out and careful coverage of this decline is far more interesting, by giving competing intentions different voices. It makes the story feel more emotionally complete.
It’s more musically distinct too - where Chapter 3 provides what I’ll call the Heavy Is The Crown motif, which reappears later on during expressions of regret, when Luna is forced to take actions for the greater good that are against her personal wishes. There’s more room across the three songs with three characters to convey more nuance in the emotions, like Luna’s quiet promise to cure Sombra of his madness at the end of Regents of the Dark (this actually matches up with something else later). By contrast Moonrise just devolves towards the end of the song into atonal clanging, which isn’t really to my taste and feels a little out of place in a metal symphony. Regardless, these are quite clearly analogous beats of the story.
Oh boy this is gonna run long.
Part 3: Luna is Intransigent, Bad Things Happen
The part where Luna is intransigent is kind of coincidental, because they’re for different reasons, but it is an interesting commonality, that it seems like Luna is just this world’s butt monkey. Really makes you feel bad for her, particularly in Fall of an Empire.
In Moonrise, this is “Scene 4: Lunar March”, where Luna, now Nightmare Moon, is staging her coup and bullying her subjects by asking them “if the moon is not to [their] liking”, in that kind of way where it’s hard to tell if she’s mocking them or being hysterical, and then Celestia turns up and confronts her. This brings up two components that happen in this story beat; the ideological conflict between the major actors is articulated in preparation for the final confrontation, and the impact of this conflict on the mortals beneath them is mentioned. This is in stark contrast to the harmony and happiness of the first song, and I feel like it could do with twisting and subverting some of the motifs from that song. Particularly in Moonrise, Harmony brings up a very strong main theme motif that comes back in Harmony Restored, but it could have really added something to Lunar March to show off a contrast.
In Fall of an Empire, we have the same two components set up, almost neatly demarcated into two songs. In “Chapter 6: Kingdoms Divided”, we get the side-by-side argument between Celestia and Luna, and Sombra preparing the Crystal Empire for war. I say “almost neatly” because this song doesn’t fully prepare us for the final confrontation.
Can I just say before I continue that Kingdoms Divided has one of the best moments on the whole album? The chorus is really cleverly worded:
We cannot stand apart
By kingdoms divided by
Your arrogant heart
So you’ll stand there and fight
Believing you really know
What is and what isn’t is right
This is most effective on the second chorus, just after a pair of lines each from Celestia, Luna and Sombra. All three of them sing the chorus, and you could reasonably imagine any one of them saying those exact words, even at the exact same time. This isn’t the only time that they have more than one character singing the same words and where it makes sense to them, even for different reasons (Heavy Is The Crown and Regents of the Dark spring to mind), but because it’s three characters here it feels really well executed.
Anyway where was I? Oh yes, the rest of our preparation for the final confrontation happens in “Chapter 7: The Calling”, alongside a fairly explicit intrusion of the commoners into the Princesses’ affairs when the crystal ponies make their appeal for aid with a really haunting chorus of “save us”. It’s only here that Luna is finally convinced to turn against Sombra. It’s also this moment that really sells Celestia as having Luna’s best interests at heart despite being cold and antagonistic so far, where she gives Luna the final say on what they decide to do (helped along by the return of the Heavy Is The Crown motif). Celestia could have easily badgered Luna into going along with her plan or ignored her, but they really are equal partners in this kingdom-running business. It’s a very sweet and also heart-breaking moment.
This is another place where Fall taking more songs to cover the same ground really helps with fleshing out more characters and greater emotional granularity. But it is the same ground.
Part 4: The Final Battle
This is probably where the disparity between the two base stories is the most pronounced. Moonrise’s “Scene 5: Battle of the Sun And Moon” is an instrumental, which is cool and all, but it kind of betrays how simplistic the story of Nightmare Moon is at its core. All of the complexity in it is in Luna’s descent into madness, and Celestia’s anguish at what she has to do for the greater good (”anguish for the greater good”. Hmm. Where did we see that before?), which means that the big confrontation between the two of them is... basically empty. They have nothing to say to each other at this point. The time for words is past, and it’s a magical punching contest now. This is thematically interesting, but only from a distance. In the heat of the moment, it’s... 2 minutes and 33 seconds of fast-paced instrumental metal. Not really anything more.
Meanwhile, Fall’s “Chapter 8: Heaven’s Fury” is an 8 minute saga. We open with this choral introduction of the “grand regent, unequalled, transcendent, eternal”, which for those who’ve been paying attention, we heard before in the Prologue, telling us how far Sombra has fallen. And just to ice the cake, the start of the song proper, after this little introduction, is the same instrumentation as the start of Welcome to the Empire. I love bookends. They’re great.
What follows is Sombra and Celestia having a metal duel and it’s awesome. Celestia’s singer hasn’t really had much chance to get the lead out until her chorus on this album, and you can really tell she’s giving it socks. She has some trouble hitting the high notes, but I can’t begrudge that too much.
And then, did you think they were done with the bookends? Think again! Sombra’s duet with Luna takes on the melody of Crossroads of Life, reflecting on their relationship, before Luna’s verse slides into her Heaven’s Fury chorus - implying that she is ultimately siding with Celestia here. Even the instrumentation and lyrics of the chorus retrace this transition - it starts off light, she talks about making it work somehow, heavy crowns, the choir jump in on the second line and then we’re back to the full metal instrumentation. It’s impressively layered songwriting and meaningful production.
Wow, I really nerded out about this. The rest of the song is more like Battle of the Sun and Moon, a few minutes of fast-paced battle music, with a little descent-into-atonal-madness bit at the end, which is less interesting, but it wasn’t really going to end any other way.
Part 5: Remorse, Return to a Lesser Life
Turning the tables, this story beat I think is actually done much better in Moonrise, probably because the final conflict had so little dimension to it, and all the interesting bits are in the aftermath. In “Scene 6: Daybreak”, the narrator tells us about the ruin left in the battle’s wake, before seguing into Celestia talking, one-sided, to her banished sister about her regrets over a piano. But what really sells this part is what I’ll call the Harmony Restored motif, which she launches into over a building choir and it just... I cried. I won’t lie. Even with Moonrise’s narrative simplicity, there is still a lot of emotional weight packed in here. It was this moment - these two lines of hope and determination in the face of just, bottomless anguish - that created the character of Celestia as she is in my head, and how she appears in Agents of HEART. All of the weight of her experience just hits you in this one moment.
Not content with that, Moonrise builds further on this denouement of its story in “Scene 7: Harmony Restored”, which revisits much of the structure and melody of Harmony - same introduction, many of the same riffs, but something’s different now - all while Celestia pleads to her citizens to forgive Luna. She’s basically trying to convince everyone that the person who just tried to destroy the world isn’t really crazy please believe me, and it’s tragic. This culminates in the fully instrumented chorus version of the Harmony Restored motif, which is basically the ending of the story. Then we dip into a motif from Nightfall, the narrator gives a little aesop lesson to see us out, and we launch into the Harmony motif and another Harmony Restored chorus and wrap up with the Harmony motif again. Fin. The end. It’s very complete, and maybe has too much in the way of an ending. The narrator giving us a moral is a touch on the nose, and the second Harmony Restored chorus might be overkill, but it’s awesome so I’m not really going to argue. Power metal knows not what this “overkill” concept is.
Meanwhile, in Fall of an Empire, we get... “Epilogue: The Fall of the Shadow’s Veil”. The narrator takes over and tells us what happens after Heaven’s Fury, gives us some of Luna’s anguish, a little note of vain hope, and delivers a moral at the end. It’s not completely without art, the Heavy is the Crown motif finds its way in there, but it’s very heavy on tell and very light on show. The reason Moonrise ended so strongly despite rushing through the middle was that we were shown all the complexity and depth of Celestia’s experience as it happened. Maybe doing that for Luna at the end of Fall would have it run on too long, or be redundant - or maybe L-Train caught on that a full denouement song would make the similarity of the story beats too obvious - but what we’re left with makes the ending kind of sudden, like the budget ran out. It’s kind of a shame with how strong the rest of the album is.
There is one highlight though - remember Luna’s quiet little aside at the end of Regents of the Darkness? Where she talks about how she’s going to sweep aside his darkness and get him back? That’s Luna’s Daybreak. That’s her Harmony Restored. It’s in a different part of the story sure, and only two lines, but it fulfils that same function, where it’s this expression of hope in the face of loss. Unfortunately for her, we know how that turns out, which only makes it go on to reinforce the “Luna isn’t allowed to be happy” running theme of this universe.
Conclusion
Wow I rambled a lot I have lots of other things I need to do lemme hurry up
In conclusion, we see here that both of these albums, even in the ways that both of them show mastery of songwriting, instrumentation and storytelling through music, are basically following the same story anatomy. We are happy but things are not completely okay, Luna is happy and that’s terrible, Luna breaks everything, Luna gets upset and bad things happen, there’s a confrontation, and then wounded by the loss everyone goes back to their business.
It’s worth noting at this point, at the very end where nobody’s going to read it, that this isn’t too far from the structure of most rock operas. Many of them are tragedies of some sort or another. The structure being so similar isn’t even necessarily a bad thing - it’s a very compelling structure, and the second time around fleshed it out in ways that made it much better (even if it did slack on the ending a bit).
So ultimately, both of L-Train’s Rock Operas are Identical, and That’s Okay.
PAST SINS in a nutshell - Part 1: Everfree Discovery
After a bit of unexpected delay I got around to the second first chapter of the story! Let's not hang about.
* * *
So we pick up the next day, Twilight's fine, all her friends are checking in on her, so far, so show-like. People keep talking about Twilight's ponynapping and the word just drives me up the wall. This may be personal preference but I feel like this is taking pony puns way too far - their use in the show was as a way to bring familiar places and characters into the setting by way of parody, with a few insertions into regular language to make the show's vernacular stand out. Of course the fandom gets its hands on this and takes it to its logical extreme without any regard for taste, and...
Eugh. I'm getting distracted. Let's just toss that brown M&M away.
So everyone's pretty in character so far. There's a few moments where season 2 lore like Discord and Shining Armor have been shoehorned in as afterthoughts, and a laundry list of random incidents are mentioned like Twilight's cockatrice encounter (CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW TWILIGHT VERY NEARLY DIED IN A SUPREMELY ANTICLIMACTIC WAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIRST SEASON)... Actually, this brings up another issue, which I might as well talk about because not much is happening in the plot at the moment.
There is this habit that fan fiction writers have with their first long story in something like the FiM universe, and that's to mention EVERYTHING, regardless of plot relevance, or else bend the plot over backwards to mention everything. I did it with my first horse story, and I noticed it in Fallout Equestria too. It's a bit more justified in FoE than most other cases because at times it's more of a world tour than a story, and it mixes it with a lot of wartime flashbacks, but there are still times when the show reference feels excessive.
It's a bit like the use of coincidence. If you use coincidence to get your characters into trouble, that's great. If you use it to get them out of trouble, that's cheating. Similarly, if you use source reference to set up the plot of your fan fiction, that's fine - your story has a solid anchor in the source material. If you're using source reference as a solution to problems in your plot, you haven't really set up a plot of your own, and it feels cheap. Even if you're littering reference around as set dressing, it still feels cheap, because you're importing events rather than inventing them. It comes across as not understanding the characters enough to think of things they might do off screen. Pinkie's party cannon is old the second time the show uses it, so it's going to be old by the time you use it in your story.
Okay, that was a lot of ranting and not-the-plot. I need to save some of the ranting for later, otherwise this nutshell is going to be very front-heavy.
So it turns out that Twilight was carrying some books with her when she was kidnapped, including some important and irreplaceable books that she had on loan from Canterlot. She's understandably uneasy about going back into the forest after a pretty harrowing experience yesterday, but she decides to anyway, because books. She has this locator spell that's kind of like a metal detector, beeping and flashing as you get closer to the target, but it just made me think of the Coolometer from Futurama.
She gets there, she gets the books, and there's something rustling in the grass. Twilight gets jumpscared by some lightning, hears someone crying, and when she eventually checks it out, she finds a foal caught in the thorn bushes. This foal has an uncanny resemblance to Nightmare Moon, particularly the snake eyes, and Twilight joins the dots pretty quickly, so she's hesitant to help her out in case it's a trick. Eventually she decides that if it was a trap, Nightmare Moon would have sprung it by now, and takes the kid back to Ponyville.
If this story is going to be pounding the trust-your-heart-over-your-head line the whole time I'm going to be so mad.
The ritual sucked all the magic out of the air so Twilight has to walk back with the kid on her back, which leads me to another thing, but I won't talk about that unless it recurs (and also so I have things to talk about later.) However, I have my suspicions, and the reason for this decision becomes clearer in hindsight.
Twilight gets back, hiding Babby Moon (Nightmare Woon?) on her back, Spike makes some dinner, Twilight gets the kid to the bathroom and they clean up, put on some first aid, Twilight asks for some extra food claiming it was a long hike while Nightmare Woon digs into hers. Then she goes downstairs and fills Spike in on the situation. They argue a bit, with Spike wanting to inform Celestia right away, and Twilight going "noooooo", Spike eventually relents, and Twilight goes back upstairs. She asks the kid some questions about what she remembers, and then bursts into tears upon being asked her name, because she doesn't remember anything. She cries herself out, then asks if she has to leave because Twilight looked angry when she first saw her, Twilight lets her stay, and hell, even sleep in her bed.
And here, we have a lesson in how the way you tell a story is as important as the events themselves.
Everything from Twilight rescuing Babby Moon from the bush to eating is described blow-by-blow, while Twilight's conversation with Spike is glossed over. Twilight's questions to the kid are also summarised, but we drop out of fast forward in time for her to ask if she can stay and sleep in Twilight's bed. The change of narrative pace is fine: if everything is real time the story will crawl, and if everything is summarised it'll fly by too quickly. You need to change gears every now and then to keep your story moving along while still providing detail where it matters. However, where you slow down and what you mention decides what you think is important to the story.
What the decision above says to me is that Pen Stroke has decided that Twilight mommying Babby Moon is the most important thing that happened in this chapter. More important than the conversation with Spike which could have been a really interesting argument about this development, and more important than detailing the kid's fragility about not even knowing her name. What the author has decided pretty firmly so far is that "aww wook at dem don't you just want to give dem a hug" is what he wants to write about, as opposed to like, giving us insight into the conflict Twilight now feels by giving voice to her rational mind through Spike, or illustrating why her compassion is being pulled on against common sense.
I don't know yet if the rest of the story is like this, but we're in chapter one, and it's supposed to be setting the tone for the whole thing. Sometimes openings are misrepresentative (cough Skyrim), but so far I am not filled with hope that after 20 minutes of play we'll finally be let loose into the Falkreath countryside.
PAST SINS in a nutshell - Part 0: Prelude: Resurrection
So this is the first part in a rambly blog series in which I read Past Sins and see what the fuss is all about. A lot of people seem to really like this thing but everyone whose opinion I value either reviles at the mention of it (or its principal character, Nyx), or asks "wtf is Past Sins", so I really don't know what to expect. Stuff below the page break!
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So first let's look at the cover art, because this is gonna be most peoples' first impression of a story. This is the kind of cover you can only get away with in fan fiction. There's a lot going on here and some of it looks kind of spoilery. There's Nightmare Moon, Twilight about to be hanged, and some black foal being the centre of attention. Along with the tagline - "What else can you be when the world can only see a monster?" - the impression I'm getting from this is that this story is some kind of magical horse version of Afterschool Charisma (which if you're unaware is basically Clone High* played for drama rather than laughs). This has some the potential to be an interesting study on the ethics of cloning and the existential question of fate - like, if you cloned Hitler, would the clone go on to do the same things as the original?
However, we must remember that this is fan fiction, and everything that can go wrong probably will, no matter how many stars Equestria Daily gives it. So, on with the show.
*Clone High is a show with clones of historical figures in high school
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The first chapter is a prelude, which, if we're going to be pedantic it should really be a prologue, because a prelude refers to a musical form, but if music is going to be a motif then it could be kind of neat, and it's not a big deal anyway. Possible brown M&M (I'll explain that metaphor later on) but we'll move on.
It's early spring (early enough that there's still snow around) and this unicorn slathered in black grease paint is praying to the moon as he dons his Nightmare Moon cosplay. Apparently there are a bunch of cultists who want to use magic to resurrect Nightmare Moon for... shits and giggles, I guess? There's no reason given yet except "cult". Also in order to do it they abducted Twilight Sparkle and gashed her leg for blood for the ritual.
They start the ritual and magic happens all over the place. The blood drips off the dagger into the remains of Nightmare Moon (which are for some reason pieces of paper), and then the dagger gets thrown out hard enough to get stuck in a tree (that part I don't think is especially important, I just thought it was amusingly hazardous). Then SHOCK HORROR, they're raided! Celestia shows up and swipes away the cloud they're hiding under, guards turn up, everything turns into a battle and the ritual gets stopped halfway through. A bunch of the cultists get away through what looks like a teleportation spell but is later explained to be an invisibility spell, and everyone goes home. Apparently Zecora was responsible for the anonymous tip, and then a little black ball of magic from the ritual earlier just kinda pops out when nobody's looking and pulses and starts beating like a heart.
The content here isn't bad for a prologue. We have a setup for the plot and the pacing is alright. It does a pretty good job of setting up some atmosphere for some dark magic. It's not fantastically inspired, but it serves the purpose. However, what I have to take issue with, and this may just be a personal bias of mine from being spoiled by fine wordsmiths like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is the prose. The prose is so far is just... inefficient. This is a problem I had with Fallout Equestria too - it has little patterns of circular wording and unnecessarily flowery description that make me start to skim read. Like, when we have:
“She couldn’t try anything even if she wanted to. She’s got an anti-magic brace on her neck.”
... and then a couple of lines later, this:
However, not only had she been physically bound, but the metal brace secured around her neck kept her from making use of her magic.
I don't feel like my reading is making any progress. I don't need to be told things twice. When I'm told something twice I skip forward because I think I've spaced out and that I'm rereading a section. I had to use the audiobook to fix this with Fallout Equestria (also because of its length), but I'm not giving myself that option here because I need to be able to quote things.
Now, this story has no less than twenty one editors. I'm not sure what this says about the editing, whether it was too many cooks, the writer not listening, or that twenty one people just plain didn't see this issue (through ignorance or me being a prose pedant), but all of this may well be - to explain an earlier metaphor - what I call a brown M&M.
There is a (probably apocryphal) story that Van Halen used to include a clause in their rider (the contract between the band and the event organisers) that there be a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed in their changing room. While this is easily dismissed as rock stars being divas, it also serves as a test of the event organisers' attention to detail. If the band go backstage and find brown M&Ms in that bowl (or worse still no M&Ms at all), it means that the organisers missed that detail, didn't care enough to implement it, didn't take enough care when implementing it, or intentionally flouted that detail to spite the crazy rock stars. Now, the brown M&M itself is harmless - nobody in Van Halen is allergic to brown M&Ms. But its presence signals that the organiser may not have paid due attention to the rider (a large document indeed), which contains details on things like the weight of the rigging, and the pyrotechnics, and sound equipment, and stuff that if it goes wrong could stop the show or be a safety hazard, so it's important that they get everything right to the letter.
So when I talk about brown M&Ms in the story - things like calling the prologue a "Prelude" without any further sign of musical motifs, or the redundancy in the prose, or the 21 not very effective editors - I'm talking about the possibility that at some point further down the line, some characters are going to go quiet because a fuse is blown, a theme becomes dangerously detached and sprays fire everywhere, and the plot comes crashing down, killing several audience members.
Who knows. Maybe we won't find anymore of these things.
