Backstage: The Pale Bro (Patreon)

Here's what I wrote about The Pale Bro when it was still in concept phase:

I was talking with @sollidnitrogen yesterday about horror because he’s a big horror fan and I was kind of  using him as a sounding board for a problem I’m having, which is that I  would like to write horror using characters who in canon are godawfully powerful as subjects (not necessarily victims in the sense that  maybe I’d like them to survive it, but basically the protagonists.) And I was bitching about an MLP story I read where the Mane 6, Spike,  Starlight, and Discord go to a cabin in the wilderness, where a mysterious killer starts taking them down one by one.

He brought up that you can take away a character’s powers, but I said that  first, that was cheap, and secondly, Discord is physically bigger and  stronger than all of the ponies. “It’s kind of like if you have a bunch  of guys go to a cabin in the woods, only one of them is 12 feet tall and has claws like knives on his hands,” I said. And then it occurred to the both of us that this is actually a fucking hilarious idea.

And so the legend of the Pale Man and his Bros was born.

Five  perfectly ordinary and unremarkable dudes go out to a cabin in the  woods for a weekend getaway. Four of them are in the range of 5-6 ft  tall, with two eyes, a nose and a mouth each, and short fingernails. One  of them is 12 feet tall, faceless except for 6 random slits in the front of his head that contain eyes, and has long, sharp claws. Also, he likes to hog the entire couch, because he’s tall, okay? Dude needs some stretching room.

There’s a mysterious killer stalking the forest.  Will the bros go out to investigate one by one, and be picked off  individually? Or will they ask their bro the Pale Man to go check it out on the grounds that if there’s a mysterious killer, odds are their 12 foot tall eldritch pal can handle himself? Hey, they may like beer as much as Brett Kavanaugh does, but they’re not stupid.

Currently I am leaning toward Steve, Mason, Dave, Trevor and the Pale Man as names.  (I know the Pale Man is also the name of the villain in Pan’s  Labyrinth, but I’m not sure what else to call a guy with paint-primer white skin and hair so black it makes Vantablack look shiny who happens  to have no face, six eyes, and be 12 feet tall.) The joke here is that  he has one of those horror-style names like Slenderman or whatever, but  he wears Hawaiian shirts and beat-up Vans and sometimes a baseball cap covered with Supreme stickers (actually, Sollid’s recommendation was  that his sneakers are from Kanye West’s company, whose name I forget, but come on, even an eldritch horror can’t be that tacky.)

In the end, Steve and Trevor were names that made the cut, but Dave and Mason were replaced with Evan and Harrison, and "The Pale Man" was replaced with "The Pale Bro". Also, in my effort to create a comedic plot, it turned into a romcom where the five bros meet five girls, and there are no easy pairings because every guy is into a girl who is into one of his bros. 

I love this story. Took me a long ass time to write it, which ended up contributing to my falling off the wagon in November 2020 and failing to stick to one a week (that, and the story I started trying to finish and then realized it was way too long to finish in the time I had). I am not sure I will ever come up with a plot to bring these characters back, or if I even should, but I love all of them.