SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!

I’ve been trying to figure out why I wrote this terrible story “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”, and how I should have ended it. My problem is that, as Ghost said, there's no point to the story--no explication of character, no lesson learned, just hopelessness.

AugieDog suggested giving Twilight a pony-world epic quest which she plays out in the real world to disastrous results. That would put a complete dramatic narrative in the story, but I don’t see how it would add meaning to the story. Completing the dream-world narrative would present a red-herring story closure that would compete for attention with whatever direction the real-world narrative took. But working towards it would give time to take the real-world narrative somewhere conclusive.

But where?

I remembered some Charles de Lint stories I read recently that are similar to my story:

“Freewheeling”:

Zinc is probably insane. He gets arrested by the cops for “setting bicycles free”. He claims that he cut the locks and they rode themselves off to freedom. The story never tells you whether he’s hallucinating, or whether they really go free, and gives you strong clues both ways. In the end he’s killed by a police officer, and his friend Jilly reflects on… some crazy shit about how he isn’t dead, or the magic isn’t dead, I don’t know; I don’t understand this story. It has the same elements:

- main character who’s batshit crazy and hallucinating an alternate world

- the crazy person keeps getting in serious trouble

- sane character tries to keep him out of trouble

- sane character can’t keep him out of trouble

The difference is that it’s dipped in a vat of new-age/hippie “the crazy people are the only ones in their right mind and that’s really cool and far-out”, so you’re supposed to come out of it feeling good about the crazy kid, his crazy friends, and their crazy self-destructive lifestyle choices.

I didn’t want to romanticize clinical insanity as spiritual insight. If I’d wanted to go in that direction, I’d have subverted the trope, and had Fluttershy romanticize Twilight’s insanity, then end with something terrible happening that is indirectly Fluttershy’s fault for not reining (heh) Twilight in. But that Sixties trope is already so dead, it hasn't even got a tvtropes page.

“Coyote Stories”:

Albert is a ne’er-do-well homeless Native American who tells stories about Coyote, confusing himself with Coyote. Albert’s craziness allows him to stay truer to the old Native American spirits and ideals than other people who are distracted by reality.

I think of religious extremism as something like that. It makes some of my friends & family crazy in some ways, but also admirable. To go in that direction, I’d show Twilight’s insanity benefiting others, by (for instance) bringing them together and making them see themselves in a positive light. That’s what I did in “Friends, with Occasional Magic,” but with optimism rather than out-and-out insanity.

But I don’t think I could easily or sincerely do the same thing starting with insanity, even as a metaphor. I know only one person who has the kind of gentle selfless insanity portrayed in “Coyote Stories” or in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and his real-life saintliness led to a horror-show of familial dysfunction and suffering that isn’t over yet. (I also have some inside dope on Mother Teresa from someone who worked in one of her convents that’s just as bad.) And the precedent here for using benevolent insanity as a metaphor for religious extremism is Puddleglum's defense of Christianity in "The Silver Chair", which some of my Christian friends have quoted approvingly:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

Artfully written, but it's a possibly-valid justification for altruism, love, and morals, which are in so little need of defense that C.S. Lewis manages to gets mileage out of it only by abusing it as a defense of religion. For me to take this approach, I'd have to make insanity a metaphor for say, friendship, and, well, just making that metaphor would be bleaker and more depressing than anything I've written.

The only way I can think of for me to use this theme together with insanity would be something like “Somewhere Only we Know” (which Solitair brought up). In FWOM the healing optimism is justified because it’s still sane and may improve reality. In SOWK, the healing belief in the dream-world is justified because the real world is inescapably horrible, and so insanity is crazy-sane. But SOWK is the optimal version of that story for ponies. I’d just be retelling the same story, but not as well.

“In Which we Meet Jilly Coppercorn”:

This story says that we cannot see things (it uses goblins, but it could just as well be unicorns) until we first take their existence on faith. This is a truth (what you expect affects what you see) simplified past mere absurdity (different people inhabit different worlds) to the point of being a falsehood (fact and fantasy are the same). That would require ending the story with some kind of mind-fuckery showing that “unicorns are real after all, if you believe in them”, except that first my keyboard would short-circuit from the vomit.

So maybe this is what happened: Its events parallel those of many powerful stories closely enough that my subconscious grasped onto it. Given my conscious beliefs, I was unable to conscientiously complete it in any of the possible ways presented by those models. But because there were so many different ways of completing the basic pattern, I could never recognize that I had rejected them all except by consciously enumerating them. Instead, I vomited out the basic pattern common to them all, as if it were a story.

Or maybe it is a complete story. I still don't know. I like Twilight's optimism and caring attitude in the story. Does that make it a character study? Could it be the point, if the story went on a little longer, say to a scene where Twilight showed compassion on Rarity?

I don't think I'd feel comfortable with that. That, and all of the six different things done with this premise by the six different good stories I've mentioned above are positive spins on bad situations. I'm tired of positive spins on bad situations. Too often they're dragon tyrants.