When a strange mansion appeared out of nowhere in the outskirts of Ponyville, the Mane 6 are invited to a housewarming by Specter Yield, the owner of the mansion. Hours after they leave to attend the party, the Cutie Mark Crusaders crash land their paper airplane during their latest misadventures to get a cutie mark in the area around the mansion. Sweetie Belle finds herself alone in the forest, separated from the rest of the CMC, and eventually comes across the mansion and the owner’s butler. After being invited to stay in for the night, Sweetie wakes from a nightmare to find a ghost attacking her and just before the ghost takes her, Sweetie is saved by an old pony with a strange vacuum who turns out to be none other than Twilight Sparkle.
When Sweetie is brought into the safe room, which is a strange laboratory, Twilight explains that she and the rest of her friends were attacked by the ghosts in the mansion and she barely got out of it alive. Since then, Twilight has been trying to save her friends but has become too weak and old to keep doing this. Sweetie eventually convinces Twilight to let her save her friends instead and after giving her a few pointers about ghost hunting with the Ghost Capture Device, GCD for short, Twilight reluctantly sends Sweetie off into the mansion to figure out the mystery of the mansion, save her friends, and most important of all, find her sister Rarity.
Sweetie’s Mansion is a semi-crossover fanfiction that is based on Luigi's Mansion, where Sweetie Belle, just like Luigi, has to search a mansion filled with ghosts to find their missing sibling. But this fanfiction takes a unique spin on it where no Mario characters appear, there’s a bigger mystery to be solved and all of Sweetie’s friends, save for a few, are turned into ghosts that want to kill her. Basically unlike Luigi's Mansion Sweetie must defeat her friends in order to save them. The question is can she really do all of that when she’s just a young kid? The only way to find out is to read the fic here.
Not to be confused with another story about a Crusader busting ghosts.
This story contains examples of the following tropes:
- Advanced Tech 2000: The Poltergust 3000 is called the Ghost Captor Device here, GCD for short, and it’s an automated machine that upgrades after each portrait ghost is caught.
- A Glitch in the Matrix: Sweetie would have walked out of a window to her death if the lighting didn’t snap her out of Ghost!Twilight’s illusion spell. She later uses this to help her defeat the ghost she was hunting.
- Amplifier Artifact: Sweetie was given this by Madame Fleur when she was searching for her GCD. It gives her a temporary power of an Alicorn. Sweetie uses this to help her completely revive Twilight, Applejack, and Fluttershy from their painting forms.
- And I Must Scream: If Sweetie takes a picture of a ghost she can read their minds. Most of the time, these pictures contain the victim’s real mind desperately trying to do everything they can to help Sweetie defeat their ghost selves. But Princess Luna has the worst of it all after she becomes a ghost later in the chapters, all she can do is struggle to warn Sweetie of her ghost self’s next move and can barely hold it back from attacking Sweetie before the ghost starts laughing through her. However it doesn’t stop her from helping Sweetie in another way by getting Gilda to look the other way when she knew exactly where Sweetie was when they were searching the room.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: After Chapter 17, we get Intermission chapters starring an Original Character who is a unicorn royal guard named Busby Sword and which shows what the royal guards are doing during the main chapters and how he and the Wonderbolts got to the mansion.
- Apocalyptic Log: Sweetie finds and read journal entries written by Specter and Madame to find out what they did before they died and finding out the other ghosts' weaknesses. Most particularly about the ones who were possessing the rest of the CMC and Spike.
- Apologetic Attacker: Ghost!Fluttershy is this. When Sweetie tries to catch her, since she’s the Element of Kindness she doesn’t attack Sweetie directly, Ghost!Fluttershy freezes Sweetie in place so she can turn her into a ghost. Luckily she was saved by Apple Bloom in time.
- Any of the Portrait Ghosts that helps Sweetie after she takes a picture of one of them and temporarily becomes her Spirit Advisor will become this as well when they try to help her beat their ghost selves.
- Luna on the other hand has more of the horror version of this trope since unlike the others who were “mostly” unconscious about what their ghost selves are doing.
- Bad Guys Play Pool: Twilight and Rainbow Dash stumble upon this room full of Mooks and Gilda while they are looking around the mansion after they took Sweetie’s GCD from her. This results in them getting kidnapped.
- Big Good: Madame Fleur fills this role and the role of Madame Clairvoya in Sweetie’s Mansion and like Clairvoya, she is the only ghost that wanted to help Sweetie Belle in her endeavors. She’s also the one responsible for lighting the rooms after all the ghosts are caught in there for Sweetie, but she can’t light an entire zone of the mansion due to it always changing around every few minutes.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Once you become a ghost, your soul belongs to the Specter. He’ll manipulate you into enjoying the evil things he gets you to do while you laugh manically about it as well. Anybody who was snapped out of this when they were rescued will be deeply saddened by the actions they take while they were ghosts.
- But he doesn’t have complete control over the ghosts and their actions, the ghosts do carry out their orders but how they carry them out is up to them , although only Ghost!Pinkie seems to be abusing this loophole.
- Also Ghost!Fluttershy just becomes an Apologetic Attacker.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: As usual from the show, Pinkie Pie can do this even when she’s been turned into a ghost which makes her somewhat Genre Savvy as well when she’s Sweetie’s enemy. When Sweetie Belle catches Ghost!Pinkie she starts to gain some of those abilities as well when she off-handedly calls out the author’s direction in the story while she was in the Dream World Spiffy trapped her in.
- Came Back Wrong:
- The revived ponies have no cutie marks after they’ve been brought back from being paintings.
- Sweetie worries that Specter did something to her backup data in the GCD before reviving her. She's obviously right, but compensating for that isn't good for her sanity either.
- Chaos Architecture: The mansion Sweetie Belle is in always changes around for her and other characters who aren’t ghosts, everytime someone leaves the lab. She has to rely on a special map that keeps up with the changes in the mansion. That is until Gilda destroyed it.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Ghost's speech and some other things are colored based on who and what they are.
- Interface Spoiler: Colored text suddenly appearing is frequently the first clue that something is horribly wrong.
- Darker and Edgier: Luigi's Mansion was a fairly lighthearted take on the Survival Horror genre. The fanfic, however, plays it quite seriously. Throughout the story, there's a genuine ambiance that something is going to pop out of nowhere (which, given that this is a ghost story, might as well be literally) which never goes away even after Sweetie finds a means of defense. On top of that, the ways that the ghosts attempt to kill or discourage Sweetie are much more brutal compared to the games, such as possessed Apple Bloom going after Sweetie with a knife in her mouth, Sweetie almost getting burned to death a couple of times, and even suffering serious injuries like from jumping off a tight rope in Ghost!Pinkie’s Circus of Fear that resulted in Sweetie breaking her leg and Sweetie running into a corpse of Scootaloo, which was thankfully a fake.
- Death by Pragmatism: In one of choices for the Gamebooks style of the early chapters, realizing immediately that Scootaloo is possessed and trying to make a break for it gets Sweetie killed, resulting in a game over.
- Demonic Possession: As it shows on the current title cover(depicted on the page image) Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Spike are possessed by ghosts of Specter’s children and his butler. Unfortunately Sweetie also gets possessed by the butler as well, but her Heroic Willpower and determination worries Specter the most.
- Despair Event Horizon: Implied that this is what happened to Luna when she was turned into a ghost and what Specter needs to do in order to the same with Celestia.
- The Determinator: Despite being in a huge mansion filled to brim with ghosts, ghost versions of the mane cast and her possessed friends constantly telling her she sucks and trying to kill her, Sweetie continues to press forward to save her sister. Even more so when she breaks her leg after falling off a tight rope in Ghost!Pinkie’s Circus of Fear.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: As the title image suggests Specter somehow defeats the princesses and controls them as well and Luna broke and turned into a ghost first. Princess Celestia is next.
- Duck Season, Rabbit Season: Sweetie uses this in order to get Ghost!Applejack to reveal her weakness: telling a lie.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Early chapters had a simplistic Gamebooks-type thing going (green "O" advances plot; red "o" leads to death scene); this was ceased in response to protest round about capturing AJ.
- Enemy Without:A part of Twilight that was separated from her when she survived the first ghost attack is the ghost that was manipulating some parts of the mansion itself. It was later reunited with the real Twilight when she was taken by Apple Bloom.
- First Kiss: Spike kissed Sweetie when they were separated with the rest of the CMC, which unfortunately gave the ghost butler that was possessing Spike some control over Sweetie as well.
- Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Applebloom, Scootaloo, and Spike all have yellow eyes when they're possessed.
- Human Popsicle: Pony Popsicle: Ghost!Fluttershy does this to ponies who have fallen for her stares which slowly freezes them from the ground up. Ghost!Rainbow Dash on the other hand freezes ponies from the inside out after she flies through them.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Old!Twilight invented a really useful item called “Heart Candy” which is supposed to be like the hearts that heals Luigi in his game. For Sweetie Belle though, she has to eat them to recover any injury she has even a broken leg she got while fighting Ghost!Pinkie. But it takes a while to make a lot of them and when Twilight was about to bring that much to Sweetie Belle, she was suddenly attacked by ghosts and had them all stolen from her save for one. Since it’s too dangerous for Old!Twilight to make some more, Sweetie has to rely on finding them around the mansion and since they only can be used once and are rare, this makes the heart candies be more like herbs of Resident Evil.
- Implacable Fillies and Dragon: Sweetie’s possessed friends are this for her. Until she figures out a way to exorcise them, they will continue to hunt Sweetie down right after she meets each one.
- It Amused Me: The only reason Ghost!Pinkie is helping Sweetie catch Ghost!Rainbow Dash and Ghost!Twilight. She doesn’t even care if Sweetie gets killed or not along the way, but is always impressed with her when she does survive the ghost encounters. She also occasionally messes with Sweetie from time to time before she catches them.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Sweetie gets trapped in one while Spiffy the butler controls her body on the outside to trap the unsuspecting Royal Guards and the Wonderbolts.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everypony in the safe room/the lab when Twilight reads a letter that Specter received from Discord from a long time ago.
- More than Mind Control: Almost all of the ghosts suggest they are this when it really isn’t true. But Sweetie is starting to think that this might be true for Rarity during her first fight with her ghost.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Each of the revived Mane Cast has this reaction when they change back from being ghosts. They apologize to Sweetie a lot about what they did to her when they were her enemy.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Happens at least twice. The first being that Sweetie felt something was off with Apple Bloom when she first rescued her but didn’t tell the semi-revived Applejack and Fluttershy with Old!Twilight about it which resulted in Twilight becoming a full-fledged brainwashed ghost by being merged with her ghost half. The second one happens after 5 of the mane cast are revived, they knock Sweetie out when she is being too stubborn to stop hunting ghosts. Twilight and Rainbow take her ghost capture device to go after Ghost!Rarity by themselves, Sweetie wakes up and leaves with the CMC, Spike, and Pinkie to go after them while leaving the corpse of Specter behind with the others. Because of this everypony gets captured by the ghosts. Twilight and Rainbow make a wrong turn and run into a room full of Mooks and Gilda. Sweetie and Spike are mind controlled by Spiffy while the rest of the CMC are surrounded by ghosts; and the so called corpse of Specter comes back to life and shuts down the only safe haven the main characters have.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: It doesn’t take long for Sweetie to find out whether her friends are possessed or not after her first encounter with Apple Bloom. But what really makes this trope is that Sweetie realizes that something is very wrong with Spike when he doesn’t seem to care that much about Rarity, when everyone knows he loves her and he starts hitting on Sweetie Belle instead. This is especially after Sweetie caught the ghost children possessing Apple Bloom and Scootaloo, while the butler possessing Spike left after he jumped out of the balcony during the Sadistic Choice.
- Power Copying: Remember each time Sweetie catches a Portrait Ghost and she gets shocked with lighting? It turns out that it was because the ghosts’ cutie mark talents were transferring into Sweetie Belle. This helps her out in the fight against Ghost!Pinkie.
- Race Against the Clock: Sweetie has a gut feeling that if she doesn’t save everyone in time, something bad might happen in the morning. She’s right, Specter is trying to cause an eclipse by using the princesses's powers to bring eternal darkness over Equestria and bring back Discord.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: All of the ghosts and Sweetie’s possessed friends constantly tell how bad of a sister she is to Rarity and how she ruins everything for her, just so they can break her motivation from defeating the ghosts and saving her friends.
- Revival Loophole: The method Twilight has to use to bring back her friends from being ghosts. The reason Twilight has to capture ghost version of her friends and turn them into paintings is so she could use her magic to bring them back to their normal selves out of the paintings. However since Twilight became old by the time the story starts she can only get half of her friend’s body out of the painting and they’re just left hanging there.
- Once Twilight gets caught by the ghosts it becomes Sweetie’s responsibility to revive them, but thanks to Madame Fleur giving Sweetie an Amplifier Artifact, she was able to revive Twilight, Applejack, and Fluttershy all at once.
- There’s a chance that the revived ponies are not completely back to normal because neither of them have their Cutie Marks. Especially since during Sweetie’s fight against Ghost!Pinkie she ran into the mane casts’ corpses (being controlled by ghost dogs) that have their Cutie Marks and it was established in that same chapter that a pony is dead if their Cutie Mark is grayed out.
- Reality Warper: Ghost!Pinkie apparently can do this and even set up all kinds of elaborate traps in Specter’s ever changing mansion, though the traps work both ways. Also this is how Ghost!Pinkie puts Sweetie in another world, like what the normal boss ghosts do to Luigi when he fights them. Princess Celestia managed to make the hallway towards her prison room tiny when Gilda was trying to bring her to where the captured mane five are despite being in a weakened state due to being in this mansion.
- Sadistic Choice: Sweetie ends up running into one by Possessed!Spike and her possessed friends. If Sweetie doesn’t exorcise her friends in time then Possessed!Spike would jump off a balcony while hanging on to a rope that is connected to Possessed!Scootaloo’s neck. At which point Sweetie will then have to choose between cutting the rope off and let Spike fall to his death or let Scootaloo be choked to death which barely leaves enough time for Sweetie to save them both. Luckily she manages to save them all in time by taking advantage of most of the ghosts’ weaknesses.
- Sanity Slippage: Sweetie is cracking under the pressure in later chapters. And she's aware of it, which makes it worse for her even as it lets her function longer.
- Slasher Smile: The ghosts have this expression when they are coming after Sweetie Belle and when they hit her. It gets especially creepy in the nightmare sequence that Sweetie has, when her friends are staring at her with this expression in a campfire in the middle of nowhere and Rarity holding Sweetie with that smile while telling her that everything's fine.
- Ship Tease: Whilst Spike is possessed by Spiffy, he hits on Sweetie Belle — which is how she realizes he is possessed, since she knows about his crush on her big sister. After Sweetie Belle exorcises them, it is revealed that Apple Bloom likes Spike in this story, but Spike, who was originally crushing on Rarity, really has become interested in Sweetie Belle as well. This eventually becomes a love triangle between the three.
- Shout-Out: The intermission chapter references Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), as a horror novel Bubsy Sword read once, and the Princess Molestia meme when he's contemplating being punished for negligence.
- Spanner in the Works: Sweetie eventually becomes too much of a problem for Specter that he decides that it’s better for his ghosts to kill her instead of making her into a ghost through their usual means.
- In later chapters, the heroes begin to doubt that this is the case anymore (if it ever was), and decide that finding a new spanner is their only hope. Sweetie tries to find an exploit in the mansion's Chaos Architecture, while the guards hope there's something about them as individuals (rather than their roles as he'd have prepared for them) that could trip him up.
- Take Up My Ghost Catching Device: Because she’s old and too weak, Twilight has no choice but to let Sweetie Belle be the one to catch her ghostified friends despite her better judgement in letting a kid do this.
- Tap on the Head: Sweetie keeps getting knocked out a lot, mostly by Ghost!Pinkie to get Sweetie to play one of her deadly games. 5 of the Mane Cast do this to Sweetie as well to get her to rest and stop pushing herself, so she can leave the rest of the work with them too bad this method ended up getting everyone captured, especially since they brought the body of Specter into the safe room/lab.
- Visions of Another Self: Sweetie sometimes end up having visions of the past about Specter and Madame when they were alive.
- Younger Than They Look: Twilight became an old pony after the ghosts attacked everypony and turned them into ghosts. She only escaped from them by using a burst of light from her horn, but they took out most of her energy from their encounter. This caused Twilight to become the old mare hiding in the safehouse.
