Fallout Equestria / Tropes A to D

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Tropes E to M
Tropes N to Z

A

• Action Mom:
  • Xenith who spends a lot of the story feeling she is a failure at being a mother, and her daughter mostly agrees. It takes a while for them to reconcile.
  • Gawd has several children all of which are as insane, charismatic and dangerous as she is.
  • Eventually Ditzy Doo, by her adoption of Silver Bell.
• Affably Evil: Now Red Eye may be the most despicable mass murderer throughout all of Equestria's history-–what with how he enslaves thousands of ponies and subjects them to both torture and experiments of undefinable cruelty–-but gosh darn it if he isn't just plain likable.
• After the End: The story is set in a post-apocalyptic Equestria, suffering from the effects of what was effectively a nuclear war. In this case however, it was done with Balefire and megaspells, rather than nuclear missiles.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The AI in Stable 29, which due to a damaged and slowly deteriorating water talisman, gradually culled the inhabitants in an effort to reduce the load on the talisman. When the talisman inevitably failed, the AI acted accordingly and killed the remaining ponies, all in an effort "to preserve pony life".
• Alcoholic Parent: Littlepip's mother.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Littlepip notes that she herself—while not outright hated—never could fit in with basically anypony in Stable 2. She was treated like dirt in every recollection of her past with the residents, and pretty antisocial in most definitions of the term, which caused people to avoid her most of the time. When Velvet Remedy left the Stable, Pip was unfairly blamed and recognized even more as an outcast by the populace. When she leaves the Stable to go after Velvet Remedy, she's even told that they will not let her back in under any circumstances, despite having stated earlier that they planned on sending a search party out for the more important Velvet. Later in the story, when the Stable is then being sacked by a group of murderous Steel Rangers, Littlepip and her troupe pull a Big Damn Heroes and save it anyway, ignoring how badly it treated her in the past. In a downplayed version of the trope, Stable 2 is actually kinda grateful for the rescue.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The Hellhounds. It's suggested a few times by Velvet Remedy that they might actually be a subversion. Turns out Velvet was right- most Hellhounds are viciously territorial, but neutral packs exist. Chapter 42 reveals that Hellhounds believe ponies are this.
  • Raiders. Just like in the game, their only purpose is to torture and kill everypony they see For the Evulz.
• Ammunition Backpack: Battle Saddles in general.
• And I Must Scream: The fates of Fluttershy and Celestia immediately following the war. Both are made to watch as the country they love becomes a horrifying mockery of itself. By the end of the story they are considerably better off. The first gets to live out the rest of her life in a recovering Equestria while the other has willing company for the foreseeable future
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Littlepip narrates the entire story in first person, with the exception of the epilogue and afterword. The former is a radio broadcast and the latter is told from Fluttershy's perspective ten years later.
• Anticlimax:
  • Calamity finds the confrontation with his father to be nothing like he ever imagined, and in fact it's fairly amicable on Calamity's end. It shows his growth as a character.
  • Admitted by Red Eye when Littlepip threatens to just shoot him and end his tyranny.
  • One of Littlepip's primary goals is to find new bearers for the Elements of Harmony so that the Gardens of Equestria can heal the world. She finds four bearers, but Gardens isn't activated during the story and the bearers of Magic and Generosity are never named. The only acknowledgement of Gardens' activation is a retrospective mention in the afterword.
• Anti-Hero: Although Scootaloo is the earliest example of this, SteelHooves and Littlepip constantly seem to ride the line between this and Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Anti-Mutiny: Realizing that the Steel Rangers had warped their original philosophy of protecting the innocent from harmful technology to protecting technology from the innocent, many decided to break off and form the Applejack's Rangers to follow their true goal.
• Anti-Villain: Red Eye. He preaches a lot about rebuilding Equestria, returning the country to its former glory, everyone being safe again, and all that good stuff. For the most part, he means it. Unfortunately, this new world is built on the broken backs of thousands of slaves.
• Apocalypse How: A Planetary Collapse, caused by a war similar to the one seen in the Fallout series.
• Apocalyptic Log: Considering the setting, there are a few examples.
  • Stable 24's logs, leading up to the point where everyone gets killed or poisoned by the chimeras.
  • Also Stable 29 giving details up to point of its occupants' mass extinction.
  • The logs in Maripony showing the origin of the Goddess.
  • Diamond Tiara's audio records, which show her gradual descent into insanity as she turns to suicide to avoid running into raiders.
  • The crew behind the fanfic's radio play released the play’s prologue, which is the very definition of an Apocalyptic Log. Listen for yourself.
• Arcadian Interlude: The sudden pornographic scene in chapter 20.5 (a "deleted scene" chapter by another writer which is treated as potentially canon by the original author).
• Armed with Canon: Invoked and subverted. To prevent authors getting into these kinds of battles once Fallout: Equestria sprung off into its own Recursive Fanfiction universe, the official website, forum and wiki all bear the same rule: if it wasn't written by Kkat in the original Fallout: Equestria, it's not canon. This doesn't stop the existence of Recursive Fanfiction for spin-off fics that prove popular, such as Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons, but it makes things a little less intimidating for fans and newcomers.
• Artifact of Doom: The Black Book, a nigh-indestructible compendium of dark zebra magic. It's also sentient, constantly trying to tempt its owner.
• Artistic License – Military: The anti-machine rifle would be more properly designated as an anti-materiel rifle, as it is designed to counter mechanized units such as tanks and power armor.
• Ascended to Carnivorism: Most wasteland ponies have no issues with eating bacon, the village of Arbu survived by exporting radigator meat and took this a step further with their secret tradition of cannibalism.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Many believe that this is what happened to Celestia and Luna after their Heroic Sacrifice, now acting similar to more conventional gods. There's no evidence for it (and many pegasi dismiss it as bunk), but there's not really evidence against it, either until Littlepip finds Celestia's consciousness inside of the Single Pegasus Project.
• The Assimilator: The Wasteland Goddess and her Alicorns are a fusion between The Master from Fallout and his Super Mutants. The Goddess is a heavily mutated fusion of Trixie and Twilight that wants to convert all ponykind into alicorns, which can thrive in the radioactive wasteland of post-apocalyptic Equestria. Converts are physically absorbed into the biomass of the Goddess, their minds integrated into the Hive Mind, and then alicorns are extruded from the biomass as remotely operated drones, with the Goddess mind serving as the Hive Queen.
• Attempted Rape: Littlepip narrowly escapes a gruesome fate at the tentacles of a pony Centaur in Chapter 31.
• Audio Adaptation:
  • There is an audiobook project currently underway, with the author's blessing. New chapters are published (and available for download) on the overly-ambitious narrator's youtube page.
  • There is a full radio drama of the fanfic currently underway as well, courtesy of a nascent fan production group that calls itself the Equestrian Broadcasting Company.
• Award-Bait Song: The audio drama's soundtrack features a bonus cover of Boulevard of Broken Dreams that hits just about all the criteria.

B

• Babies Ever After: By the time of the afterword, the alicorns have managed to avert One-Gender Race. An alicorn filly makes a brief appearance. However, none of the main characters display any interest in having children.
• Bathos: The badass, steel-clad, pony cyborg Ranger of the party Steel Hooves, has his name revealed in the flashback. What's his real name? Applesnack. Not only does that sound cheesy and hilarious, but it sounds like something out of a kid's lunchbox. Rainbow Dash even lampshades the ridiculousness of the name. Making matters worse, he's paired with Applejack. A canon x OC couple where the OC's name is just the canon character's name tweaked slightly— also lampshaded.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Pulled off quite well when, due to some fast talking, Littlepip has both Gawd and Deadeyes in one room, and each think that she's going to kill the other for them. She kills Deadeyes, for what happened to Silver Bell's family under his orders.
  • Red Eye is planning one against the Goddess.
  • Both of those are blown away by Littlepip's plan to take down the Goddess. The Goddess can read minds, so Littlepip forms a plan to sneak a balefire bomb into their lair, telling everyone involved their part to play and nothing else, and then has her own memory removed (and stored) so that nobody knows enough to stop them. Then she leaves notes behind to manipulate herself into doing her part. Yes, she pulled a Batman Gambit on herself.
  • Red Eye's plan to achieve godhood is the best example yet. Realizing the need for a true alicorn 'template,' Red Eye, an earth pony, has decided to have both a unicorn and pegasus ascend with him, rather than the purely unicorn mixture that the Goddess was made from. However, as a precaution against the more charismatic Autumn Leaf gaining dominance of the persona, he tempts the equally strong-willed Littlepip, knowing that her overwhelming sense of justice would ensure the Wasteland's safety.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: Velvet Remedy gets one of these in Chapter 38. Velvet practically worships Fluttershy, and when the group arrives at her cottage, they find it taken over by raiders, who have kidnapped foals, after brutally murdering the parents, and sadistically forcing them to fight each other to the death for their parent's remains. At this point, Velvet, whose kill count is only in the single digits (all of them unwillingly as she abhors violence) simply snaps, readies her shotgun, and get's what is probably her most badass (and darkest) moment in the story.
  Velvet Remedy: I’ve never killed a pony before.
  *BLAM*
  As far as I’m concerned, I still haven’t.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Red Eye and The Goddess, for the majority of book. After Littlepip kills the Goddess, Colonel Autumn Leaf takes her place.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The Ministry of Morale/Pinkie Pie. FOREVER.
• Big Damn Heroes: The main characters serve as this for many of the wasteland dwellers, saving ponies being chased by raiders or shooting a dragon with a tri-barreled magical plasma cannon.
  • Cruelly subverted throughout Chapter 34. Littlepip's killing of bandits who are implied to know about Arbu's secret cannibalism, and her needless slaughter of skittish Brotherhood of Steel members at the bridge, are in unknowing defense of a village that's quite blackly evil. The dead bandits and their motivations also serve as a dark Call-Back to how Calamity and Littlepip met: shooting someone who looks evil and only later asking questions.
• Big Freaking Gun:
  • Some Battle Saddles are in this vein.
  • The magic cannon that Calamity uses against Topaz is literally bigger than him.
  • Spitfire's Thunder is so big it needs to be packed up and then reassembled before battle.
  • The B.E.L. in Chapter 36 is the equivalent of Fallout's Fatman.
• Bittersweet Ending: In a parallel to the ending of Fallout 3, Pip plugs herself into the Single Pegasus Project, going into an induced coma in order to bring new light and hope to the Wasteland. Mitigated by the idea that she can still communicate with those she loves from the inside, and by the fact that the SPP's hibernation chamber keeps her alive for longer despite the various toxins that have shortened her natural lifespan (though a mutation from exposure to taint did grant her an increased lifespan already). The 10-years later epilogue shows that the last two Element Bearers have been found, Gardens of Equestria has been activated, alicorns have become a viable pony species, and the New Canterlot Republic is a stable government.
• Bloody Hallucinations of Guilt: Littlepip discovers that the town of Arbu has been killing caravaneers, travelers and bandits so they can eat them, even feeding them to their children. Littlepip and her group of adventurers had "dinner" with the citizens before she discovered this. The revelation is so sickening and horrifying that she breaks down and murders every pony in the village bearing a 'mark of Arbu' (which signifies they've killed and consumed a victim)- in the chaos, she might have inadvertently or purposefully killed a child as well. Afterwards, however, she's sickened and horrified with herself and how far she went, unable to see herself as anything but a monster covered in blood.
• Bloody Murder: A form of dark magic, allowing the wielder to form blood into weapons.
• Bio-Augmentation: The ghoul doctor attempted this with his patients and manticore poison sacs. The Zebra Alchemy perks "Bone-Strengthening Brew" and "Zebra-Augmented Pony" are more benign examples (and count as mututaly exclusive perks to the cybernetic enhancements).
• Body Horror: What happened to most of the ghoul doctor's experiments in Chapter 17.
• Body Surf: Twilight is able to survive the Goddess' destruction and jump into a nearby alicorn, later coming to Littlepip's rescue. However, since the body was already occupied, Twilight (apparently) dies soon after.
• Bond One-Liner: "Gawd sent me."
• Book Ends: If I’m going to tell you about the adventure of my life — explain how I got to this place with these people, and why I did what I’m going to do next — I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.
• Boss Battle: Littlepip has one near the end of almost every town or city that she visits, and always almost dies.
• Brain Uploading:
  • A possible action with the Crusader Maneframes, put there in case they ever went rogue.
  • Elder Cottage Cheese also tries this, but is stopped by Littlepip.
  • The ultimate fate of Celestia.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Pinkie Pie, as always, except here she is able to break the fourth wall of the fanfic, by interacting with Littlepip through the memory orbs. Since this fic is Darker and Edgier, she can only do this when it serves the plot, not for Rule of Funny like usual.
• Breather Episode: Arguably Chapter 32, which takes place mostly in Tenpony Tower and includes Xenith going on a shopping trip, all real action only taking place inside memory orbs and Velvet and Calamity doing... Things.
• Broke the Rating Scale: Similar to how Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) is the only fic to get the "GRIMDARK AS FUCK" tag on Equestria Daily, Fallout: Equestria is the only fic to get the "LEGENDARY" tag there.
• Buffy Speak: Littlepip's thoughts on why one of Calamity's plans isn't, because "Plans have...plan stuff".

C

• Call-Back: The night before the final battle, Spike cajoles Littlepip out of bed to join a festive party much like he had tried centuries beforehand with Twilight Sparkle on the eve of Nightmare Moon's return. Spike lampshades this.
• The Call Has Bad Reception: Littlepip isn't the Chosen One, and she's not the first band Watcher has tried. Spike realizes that although Littlepip isn't a Bearer of an Element of Harmony, her role as the ''spark'' to make everything possible proves her role is the most important of all.
• Can Not Tell A Lie: Monterey Jack, who would rather confess a crime and be executed for it than lie.
• Cast from Lifespan: Due to exposure to radiation as well as insane amounts of violence that nearly kills Littlepip several times over, it's made clear that if and when her quest ever ends, the damage she's taken trying to free the Wasteland will catch up with her, causing her to die young. Then she gets exposed to taint, enough that her lifespan increases dramatically, so it more or less evens out.
• Catapult Nightmare: Diamond Tiara, causing the prisoners to become aware of her existence and therefore indirectly causing her death.
• Character Blog: Littlepip and Red Eye, both on Tumblr. Warning: Since the answers are based on information directly from the story, there are many spoilers abound.
• Chekhov's Gun: An armory's worth. The author has mentioned that this is her favorite literary device to set up. Just to name a few:
  • Littlepip's mother's tendency to alcoholism is mentioned in the prologue and summed up in Chapter 19, where Dr Helpinghoof gives it as a reason for Littlepip's tendency to addiction.
  • The magical plasma cannon which is undergoing repair in Chapter 10 comes back in Chapter 12, where it helps Calamity blow a large hole out of the dragon, Mr. Topaz.
  • In Chapter 13, Littlepip decodes a recording left by Trixie that said she was going to help Twilight with an important scientific experiment. In Chapter 29, we learn both what this experiment was and its end result. This one gets bonus points for Littlepip outright stating it's nothing special.
  • The red wagon Velvet Remedy uses in Chapter 18 to pull supplies, is then used to transport an unconscious Littlepip to the clinic.
  • The Balefire Bomb found in Silver Bell's home is later used by Red Eye to gain leverage over Littlepip. After that, it's used to destroy both the Goddess and the Black Book.
  • Littlepip finds a special little book by the name of "Supernaturals" while in the Shattered Hoof Correctional Facility. It is stated offhandedly and not mentioned again, until they find Fluttershy, transformed into a tree by killing joke, in the Everfree Forest. At which point, Littlepip comes to the revelation that she read about a cure for poison joke in an old book she found and they use it to cure her.
• Chekhov's Skill: Littlepip's lock-picking. Significant in the fact that she seems to be the only one capable of doing it to any sufficient level in the entire wasteland. This is also an example of a Mythology Gag, since the player's character in any of the Fallout games will constantly find supplies that appear to have been locked up since the apocalypse several centuries ago.
• Chest Burster: Chimeras and Hospital Horrors (the local equivalent of Centaurs).
• Clarke's Third Law: Magic and technology go hand-in-hand so much that it's hard to tell where one starts and the other ends.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Doctor Glue elevates swearing to an art form. Understandable, since his cutie mark is a blasphemy.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: Ohthere's quite afew
• Cooldown Hug:
  • Velvet Remedy gives Silver Bell one of these in Chapter 9.
  • Littlepip does this to the sea-blue pony in Chapter 17. Before that, the latter was smashing the ghoul doctor to a bloody pulp out of rage.
• Combat Pragmatist: Anyone in the wasteland, given half the chance. Credit goes to Littlepip for levitating a boxcar, using telekinetic magic light to hide its shadow and then using it to smash an alicorn to a thin paste.
  • Although in some cases they are mutually exclusive. When Littlepip gains the Zebra augmentations it is explicitly stated that they are mutually exclusive with cybernetic enhancements.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Mint-Als seem to pop up in the most inconvenient of places.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Alicorns come in three colors; blue, purple and green, each with their own unique abilities.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Most of the Ministry of Technology, to the point of trying to assassinate Applejack at least once for attempting to rein them in.
  • It's not entirely clear whether Scootaloo, head of StableTec was this or a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Crapsack World: Equestria is now a desolate and unforgiving wasteland, with mutated creatures and the like all trying to kill you, and 'Taint' and radiation making everything else worse. This is made even crappier when you catch glimpses of what used to be.
  • Crapsaccharine World: The war quickly turned Equestria into this.
• Cyborg:
  • Red Eye and his dog Winter.
  • The epilogue mentions that Calamity needed some implants.

D

• Darker and Edgier: Obviously more so than MLP:FiM, but surpasses the Fallout series with gore and depravity by leaps and bounds.
  • The Canterlot Ruins, which borrow elements from the Sierra Madre (Dead Money), reflect this well, as many of the already deadly threats are ramped up to even nastier levels. The original Cloud would sap your health; the Pink Cloud is not only faster but threatens to warp flesh and fuse you to equipment or furniture or the ground. The bomb collars were mostly a puzzle and harmless as long as you turned off the speaker or got out of range; in Canterlot, their necromantic effect means you start suffering and dying as soon as you get into range, making it that much harder to get away.
• Darkest Hour: Let's take a count, shall we?
  • The megaspells launch, wiping Cloudsdale completely out of the sky. The Pegasi seal themselves away above the cloud cover.
  • The megaspells hit Canterlot, forcing Celestia and Luna to combine their powers into a shield to protect everyone. Unfortunately, the zebras had already moved the Pink Cloud megaspell into the city, killing the Princesses and everyone inside while also turning Canterlot into the most lethal place in the Wasteland.
  • The megaspells hit Splendid Valley. Good news? Twilight Sparkle thought to protect the facility, and no one dies from the nuclear explosions. The bad news? Trixie falls into a vat of a concentrated magical formula, turning her into a monster that kills everyone inside anyway, becoming The Goddess. Oh, and the Diamond Dogs get coated in magical waste, becoming the most lethal creatures in the Wasteland.
  • Applejack is sealed inside Stable 2, pregnant, never able to know what happened to her friends or family; Pinkie Pie was minutes away from preventing a balefire bomb from going off in Manehattan, but fails; Rarity teleports Fluttershy and Angel away from Canterlot, getting killed by the Pink Cloud in the process, only for Angel to become petrified and Fluttershy to turn into a tree; Twilight Sparkle is dragged into a vat of chemicals by Trixie, being trapped inside of her consciousness for centuries; and Rainbow Dash is a complete mystery, though she's all but confirmed for dead.
• Deadly Gas: The Pink Cloud in Canterlot.
• Death by Irony: The Killing Joke's modus operandi.
• Death Is Dramatic: Subverted. SteelHooves' death, while foreshadowed, is abrupt and realistic.
• Death World: Think of the Equestrian Wasteland as a typical Fallout Wasteland mixed in a bit with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In Fallout, few creatures have energy-based attacks, Super Mutants don't have the ability to generate extremely sturdy protective shields or fly, and Deathclaws aren't intelligent enough to qualify as a faction on their own, with enough wit to reverse-engineer firearms for their own uses, plus being able to dig fast enough for it to be a viable combat tactic. Even the background element of F.E.V. is incarnated as an active environmental threat. Likewise, the environment offers relatively mundane challenges, including permanently cloudy weather due to the Enclave which brings massive rainstorms, and the dangers of the decaying structural integrity of the ruins Littlepip and friends end up exploring. On the plus side, the magic in the wastes is mostly stable and the deadliness of it is (at least somewhat) offset by the fact that the heroes have access to spells and telekinesis, flight and such. Also, despite the condition of the world and the time since the missiles fell, Littlepip and her allies never find themselves struggling for basic resources like food or water, thanks in large part to Calamity's obsessive scavenging.
• Deconstruction Fic:
  • Not much from My Little Pony gets this, but several aspects of the games (and, to some extent, those who play them) are given a good look through this lens. The Party-Time Mint-Als are an excellent example: a player would merely be annoyed by the stat drop caused by addiction, but seeing how it causes a schism between Littlepip and Velvet that indirectly ensures the death of Monterey Jack from the addict's point of view is a very sobering experience.
  • Killing, even in self defense, is intensely deconstructed as well. Both Littlepip and Velvet have extreme difficulty coming to terms with the fact they have to kill to survive, even in self defense, to the point that Littlepip goes into an extended period of self loathing after wiping out a cannibal clan, and Velvet has a nasty BSOD after gunning down a tribe of Raiders, despite the fact they were both threatening innocents and desecrating her idol's home.
  • Remember the shooting range James sets up in the Vault 101 reactor chamber in Fallout 3? The same story happens in Stable 29, but with a tragic ending: one stallion did the same thing for his son, who accidentally shot the water talisman (the heart of the water purifying system), which doomed the complex to being murdered by the artificial intelligence programmed to control population levels by any means necessary so that they remain proportional to the amount of resources.
• Defector from Decadence: Dashites are pegasi who have ditched the Enclave in favor of helping the ponies on the surface.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Littlepip considers the very concept of an eclipse to be blasphemous and obscene. Apparently, Celestia and Luna never had such things occur while they were alive.
  • Littlepip reacts badly to Stables with differences in design and society. The first one she encounters had a patriarchal society, initially prompting Calamity to question if she had an issue with males in authority.
• Demographic-Dissonant Crossover: The fic's story is a mashup of the grim and dystopic Fallout with the bright and cheery My Little Pony, transplanting the themes and tone of the former into the latter's setting.
• Despair Event Horizon: Littlepip comes to believe that, rather than simply being born evil, ponies become Raiders after the Wasteland destroys every last shred of hope they have inside them.
• Deus est Machina: Celestia puts herself in a Soul Jar so she can ensure no one misuses the Single Pegasus Project, even if her body dies. It works, but she spends the next two-hundred years watching senseless death and pain throughout the wasteland.
• Did They Just Buck an Ursa Major? Yes they did, and they top that later by nuking the Goddess/Trixie.
• Dirty Business: How Littlepip sees killing and looting. Though in later chapters, she questions whether it's becoming too normal for her.
• Distant Finale: The epilogue takes place a few weeks after the final chapter. The afterword takes place ten years after that.
• Distant Sequel: The story takes place hundreds of years in an alternate Bad Future, after Equestria has been blasted into a ravaged hellscape in the magical equivalent of a nuclear exchange. The Mane Six are still recognized for what they did in the years of the war prior to the apocalypse, although not all are remembered fondly. Civilization has had time to rebuild itself in rather unusual ways, and the only characters from the show still around all achieved biological immortality through ghoulification or... more peculiar means.
• Divided We Fall: The Ministries driving apart the Mane 6.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: The Enclave hijack DJ-PON3's broadcast to announce their return.
• Doorstopper: Hoo boy. As of its completion, Fallout: Equestria reached approximately 608,000 words — longer than War and Peace (560,000 words). Fo:E is one of the longest, if not the longest, MLP:FiM fanfiction. Forty-five lengthy chapters, not to mention the numerous fanarts, game mods (mostly for Team Fortress 2) and Recursive Fanfiction about it. If you had the time, the paper, and the ink, this would literally be a novel, if not several. The author has identified the points where it should be broken to make either a trilogy or a 5-book series. The Recursive Fanfiction Project Horizons exceeded the original in length while only past the predicted halfway mark. The completed version rivals the length of A Song of Ice and Fire.
• The Dragon: Deadeyes is the leader of the Shattered Hoof Raiders, and acts as a "second in command" to his to employer Mr. Topaz (Ironically, Mr. Topaz is literally a dragon).
• Dramatic Irony: After listening in on a bugged Crusader conversation in chapter 19, one nameless memory orb recorder comments that he 'hopes those mares die in a fire'.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Littlepip does this by accident when wearing raider's armor, causing Calamity to mistake her for one and nearly kill her.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Diamond Tiara, in one of the Apocalyptic Logs. Chilling.
  • Also, Monterey Jack's confession and subsequent execution counts as this.
  • And it was suggested this was the fate of Fluttershy, but that was later shown to be incorrect.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: SteelHooves' death is sudden, unexpected and wholly ignoble. It just comes out of the blue and is over before you register it happened. A fitting reminder of how cheap and pointless death actually is in the Wasteland.
• Drugs Are Bad: Littlepip's crashes after taking Party-Time Mint-als and addiction to said drugs do not bode well. Especially considering the eventual fate of Pinkie Pie.
• Due to the Dead: Averted for the most part. There are weathered skeletons and defiled corpses galore in the Wasteland. Almost none of the pre-war characters receive any sort of burial. SteelHooves, however, gets a proper send-off from his friends and co-workers. Red Eye gets a particularly gruesome aversion that sickens even a horror-inured Littlepip.