Another episode of "Things that Never Were"
The first is Ash and the
polluted field. In that scene, Ash comes upon a field of vegetables that are hardly growing. She quickly discovers that the field is probably not doing so well because the soil is too Alkaline. Immediately after typing that, I had a story in my mind: the field was too alkaline because somepony had been burying dead bodies in the field, and covering them in lime - a very alkaline substance - to try to degrade and decompose them. This would immediately suggest a serial killer, or at least a single murder, or maybe a number of deaths do to negligent handling of a disease outbreak, or something. While I liked this idea, I knew it would immediately become extremely serious and would overshadow almost anything else, and would require a mystery to be set up, which I had no real plans for. The alternative, that it was the result of a typhus outbreak or something, could make the orphanage look worse than I was wanting to portray them at that time. Still another option was to make it be a mass grave from the war, although that might call into question how ethical the Blackhooves were with POWs and civilians, and given that they were and are the protagonists, they needed to be more likable. The plan I eventually went with was a call back to a line spoken by a nun many threads before, where she said the other property was "sold to a paper company." So I figured I would look up methods of paper manufacture, and sure enough, the Kraft Process of a paper pulping makes use of Lye, which is extremely basic. That particular process became very popular around 1940 as a way of recycling the "white liquor" became available. Thus, the quest became about pollution from a paper mill, rather than the original plan.
The second one is
Silver's Dreams. The first dream I had for him, the "sepia tone" dream during the period that he was asleep was inspired by a film clip of the coronation of King George V in 1910, which almost eerily showed Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Alexander I, and I believe even Fraz Joseph attending the coronation together, just a few years before World War 1 and the Russian Revolution. Of course Silver's player freaked out at the proposition of his character sleeping at that time because of fear of being abducted by changelings, so I had to cut it short. Silver's player inexplicably entirely lost his fear of changelings the next time he started to sleep...
The second dream sequence, which was also cut short, featured Silver having a picnic with his long dead wife and separated children. I had intended the song "And the Band Played On" to play in the background, or at least, o have it's lyrics come through, as Storm Warning was described as feeling strange upon contact. The song "And the Band Played On" is a jovial sounding song from 1895, which was to represent a feeling of Nostalgia. The "Gay 90's" as they were then called, or the period of the 1890s, was the typical subject of Nostalgia round about the 1940s, as the Gay 90's were thought to be a simpler, innocent era, before the horrors of the World Wars and Great Depression. The fact that the only recording of "And the Band Played On" I can find original on Youtube is from 1941 shows how that song figured into nostalgia in the 1940s. Meanwhile, Storm Warning was supposed to be described as feeling unusual, as she would feel more or less the same as Blue Skies - who Silver was in physical contact with as he was sleeping. Of course, Silver never tried to hug Storm Warning, and I had to cut the whole thing short, so all that was abandoned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8wujySB4CE