IT ALL STARTED with Minecraft. Or at least, that's when my depression struck, and my depression was key to the entire Nocturnian affair: I used the depression as a justification for all of my actions and beliefs, as MLP was the "only thing" that had the sheer raw happiness and purity to fight my depression. But before I had any of those radical thoughts, I was...well, I wasn't normal, but I sure as hell was not as radical as during the Nocturnian Era (which is to say, 7/22/12 - 4/12/13).

 

I was a smart little freshman in high school who liked to play Minecraft with his friends in his spare time, and also played on a few sports teams as well as participated in his high school church youth group and his Boy Scout troop. Still, I wasn't quite a total goody two shoes--I stayed up several hours past my bedtime watching Youtube videos and looking up furry porn (yeeeah, no way to tiptoe around that one). Back then, if I had free time, I spent it either watching random Youtube videos or playing Minecraft.

 

I had started playing Minecraft in October 2012, when a school friend of mine introduced it to me. It promptly murdered my other creative interests and became my dominant interest, as I am easily sucked in to creative activities. After spending a while just building things in Creative Mode on my own, like the large city of Summerside, my same friend told me he was opening a server for my group of school friends to hang out on. I joined, and hung out with them on that server for about six months before MLP took over...but I will get to MLP's takeover in the next section, "The Nocturnian Revolution."

 

One day, when browsing the Internet, I discovered a creepypasta called "Herobrine" and thought of a deviously ingenious idea for a prank. I got my friend who was the admin of his server to join in, too. That prank was that I would travel to all of my friends' homes in the server and build the signs of Herobrine, primarily focusing on tunnels with deadly traps. They never figured out who was doing it, at least not until I told them. When I told them in early 2013, I was obsessed with becoming the magnificent bastard Herobrine. I changed my Minecraft skin to Herobrine as the Grim Reaper, and I spent all of my time in Minecraft learning to build ever greater and more complex deadly traps. My favorite song was

, as I came to love the idea of cheerfully blowing things up and general happy evil in Minecraft. My 'greatest creation' was a gigantic, fully-functional death labyrinth with a control room, many death traps, a reward system designed to give players a diamond but only one, path-switchers...my friends were impressed and thought it was very cool. So did I. I'll include a link to a map that I made during the labyrinth's creation--I didn't have room to put a few sections of the labyrinth on the map, and the picture's kind of fuzzy, but hopefully it can give you a general idea of the complexity of the project.

 

It was around this time that I first discovered MLP, sometime in March of 2012. I discovered it in a related video to a Youtube Poop, a short clip of Discord from The Return of Harmony. Interestingly enough, I could relate to Discord, and that was why MLP caught my interest. I knew, even then, that if I journeyed even further into MLP, I would become incredibly obsessed with it and it would murder my Minecraft interest. So, I put it to a decision: one day, when I was walking home from school, I flipped a coin to see if I would become a Brony or remain obsessed with Minecraft. When I flip a coin for decisions, I usually have Heads represent the Noble or Right option and have Tails represent the Selfish or Necessary option. Therefore, Tails represented Minecraft and Heads represented MLP. I flipped the coin.

 

It came up Tails.

 

From then on, I decided that I would not be interested in MLP:FiM, would not become a Brony, and would suppress any early interest in MLP that I had garnered.

 

However, at that point I failed to take something extremely important into account: Depression. I am actually extremely thankful for that depression (which I am still coping with), because it was the catalyst of everything in this post and effectively the catalyst of my teenage rebellion and subsequent maturation. Still, at the time, I closely associated Depression and Minecraft, mostly because of the situation in which the depression surfaced. At the end of the 2011-2012 school year and into July, my school friends were one by one leaving the server that my other friend, Nick Abbott, was the admin of. They hated him for his egotistical attitude--interestingly enough, he has an a Synthesian (the opposite of Nocturnian, E_TJ) personality type, but I would not discover that until over two years later (about a month ago, May 2014). So, in the beginning of Summer 2012, it was just me on the server, all alone, building new death traps to kill people who weren't even there. It just felt...empty.

 

And that is where the depression association works in: depression can basically be defined as a feeling of painful, consistent emptiness that leads to sadness and pessimism. I am not sure right now if Minecraft actually caused my depression--it seems unlikely, because I currently think that it is some form of Seasonal Affective Disorder--but that is how I perceived it at the time. Minecraft made me depressed...I had to cut it off and find something that was the opposite of Minecraft. I needed something that was extremely cheerful. I needed something that was idealistic and moral, something that would bring out the best in me instead of the worst. I needed something for which my interest was strong enough to overcome everything and anything related to my Minecraft interest.

 

These were the thoughts I pondered in my spare time at Boy Scout summer camp from July 15 to July 22. It was then that I conceived Night Shine as a character--no, scratch that, that the character and image of Night Shine came to me while I was daydreaming. I spent a lot of my free time at summer camp imagining my Minecraft interest (personified as the Herobrine Reaper) battling it out with my MLP:FiM interest (personified as Night Shine, who at that time was not yet named). After I saw the pony in my head murder the Herobrine Reaper, I composed a funeral march for my interest in Minecraft, "Casket for a Scythe." I would not finish that song until January 26, 2014, about two weeks ago.

 

"Casket for a Scythe":

http://soundcloud.com/night-shine-1/casket-for-a-scythe

 

Themes used:

-Skyfall. While the movie did not come out until late 2012, the song became a theme of despair for me which was inevitably associated with Minecraft and with depression.

-1812 Overture in Minor. Notice that, in minor, it becomes tragic rather than celebratory.

-Funeral March. This one should be obvious--the entire song was composed as a funeral march for my interest in Minecraft. However, there is more to it as well. During the 2012-2013 school year, my school band played an arrangement of Grieg's Funeral March, and practicing it in class became one of most depressing parts of my day.

 

I'll end this section with the lyrics I came up with over the past 20 months or so for the song, some of which were original and some of which were added only recently: