Post #85 - First Union
Wedding night! A special night for a lovely couple! A night that is just too big for one mere post. So, yes! I will do a follow-up post which continues this little tale of true romance! Likely it will not be the very next post—the as-of-yet-theoretical #86—but it will be done before long since I already have the idea together. Look forward to it!
Rarity and Spike have been rendered together by me before (post #56), and I'm more than happy to put them together again. Like I said in the blurb on the earlier post, it's just plain nice to see some canon romance. Nicer still to see folks that are just plain in-love. A little behind-the-scenes for you: the very first generations I experimented with for this post were with Princess Cadance and Shining Armor, since they're also a pretty choice canon-couple, especially for a post with wedding overtones. You can see that ‘in love’ was always part of the equation for me. In the end I wasn't satisfied with the initial results, in particular with Shining Armor, so I moved onto Rarity and Spike who obviously worked great. I'm sure that the prompts and models I was using for Shining Armor could have been tuned to produce more worthy results, but I just didn't want to take the time to do that right now.
On a tangent from canon romances: shipping! That is, ‘relationshipping,’ which I think is where the term is derived from. It's the act of the audience fantasizing about pairing off fictional characters in ways that the actual media doesn't necessarily do—and I'm being incredibly broad-stroked with it here. Shipping is something of an eternal fandom thing, because I've never not seen it in a fandom. But I'll be honest: I don't really get it. It's not my thing. It's not that I can't have judgments, opinions, or considerations about romantic pairings. It's just that I don't really have them, if the story doesn't present them. There is a side of myself that is very much about taking stories as they are presented. So where a story presents two characters as romantically entangled, I tend to accept it immediately without question, even if I'm seeing things that I feel wouldn't make them a good romantic pair. And in reverse, when a story presents no romantic engagement between characters then it just doesn't occur to me to insert it.
I have absolutely read/seen stories where two characters get together and I feel like they aren't right for each other. It's, for me, merely that thinking about who they would be right for occupies 0% of my time. I still just accept that the story is showing this couple to me, problems and all.
Look, I'm more than happy to have Spike bone down with other ladies, and I've already paired Twilight with each of the Mane Six, but fan pornography is from the get-go is light years removed from anything canon. It's kind of why rendering something more official is nice: it's getting things just a little bit more real with what the original story presented to me.
Nothing new to say right now about Illustrious, other then that even with the humps and hurdles of learning the new quirks of a new model, I'm still having an easier time with things than compared to Pony. Illustrious doesn't respond sometimes as I want it to—because I'm still learning how to best work with it—but it's definitely taking fewer generations overall to get things done once I've set my mind on what to do.
Twenty hi-res images here. Yes, even the whole wedding ones! You can find them in this post or in the Hi-Res Collection. Rarity is present, so this whole post is also found in the Rarity Collection. Take care, my friends!