Fanfic / A Witch In Broad Daylight

A Witch in Broad Daylight is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Adventure/Comedy/Horror Alternate Universe Fic by Epsilon-Delta.

There's no end to the monsters that lurk in the dark.

Ghosts, werewolves, mad scientists, cultists, mutants, zombies, vampires, aliens and more lie in wait in the dark corners of Equestria, terrorizing the night. But the most infamous and dangerous of them all is the legendary witch Twilight Sparkle, with a five hundred million bit bounty on her head.

Seeking fame and fortune, Rainbow Dash sets out to defeat the legendary witch and collect the massive reward. The one thing she wasn't counting on was Twilight being less evil than she expected.

There are two side stories in this alternate universe: A Ghost of a Chance and A Skeleton in the Closet.

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A Witch in Broad Daylight contains examples of:

A-D

• Absurd Phobia: Fluttershy has a crippling fear of ghosts despite being one herself.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Justified, there was once a religion that built massive underground labyrinths to worship mole people that allegedly lived at the center of the planet. When this was disproven the religion dried up and they were converted to sewers instead.
• The Ace:
  • The elite four are the top ranking members of the Slayer Association with the highest kill counts. They command the most respect and political power in pony society, above even the actual government.
  • Twilight is the greatest magic user in the world, to the point where society at large regards her as the source of all witchcraft. The witches that not even the top ranked slayers can challenge get all their power from Twilight's stolen spellboooks, each of which is merely a fraction of her current one.
• Action Girl: The majority of the cast are both mares and powerful combatants.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: The cast of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic gets dumped into a Crapsack World full of every classic monster imaginable. Of course this would happen.
• Adaptational Badass: Happens to basically the entire cast due to the fic being far more action-oriented than its source material.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Once Rainbow Dash finally returns to Ponyville after having been kidnapped by Twilight for months, she finds out she's been evicted because she missed her rent payments.
• Adaptational Heroism: Aria Blaze and Sonata Dusk were straight-up villains in Rainbow Rocks here, they're mind controlled slaves of the ghost of crater cemetary. When Pinkie Pie inadvertently frees Aria in their fight, she turns around and offers the heroes valuable information in exchange for rescuing Sonata.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Flash Sentry, Twilight's love interest from EQUESTRIA GIRLS, is now Twilight's deadbeat ex who stole the spellbooks which would eventually fall into the hooves of the witches and accidentally unleashed the curse of undeath.
  • Lyra Heartstrings, who while never outright heroic was always shown to be kind, now runs an obviously exploitative alien cult, and is willing to sell out to said aliens when they come to conquer and enslave her planet.
  • Raindrops goes from a voiceless background pony to Rainbow Dash's bully.
  • Filthy Rich in the show was a kind and loyal business partner to the Apples. Here, he's a standard Corrupt Corporate Executive.
• Adaptational Wealth: This version of Pinkie Pie. She bought 5% of an eight-year-old Filthy Rich's lemonade stand just to be nice, then he turned it into a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
• Adaptational Wimp: Rainbow Dash. While this is mostly due to everyone else getting the Adaptational Badass treatment, she still lacks her cannon counterpart's ability to break the sound barrier.
• Animated Armor: Battle dolls are empty suits of pony armor specifically designed to be possessed by ghosts for combat purposes. They come in various sizes and are equipped with a variety of weapons. They're best suited for use by poltergeists, the type of ghost best at controlling inanimate objects.
• Animorphism: Witches can transform into any animal they're sufficiently familiar with. The most common choice is a murder of crows.
• Arboreal Abode:
  • Twilight's house is a hollowed out tree hidden deep in the forest, with windows and doors carved into the trunk.
  • The city of Oaken Field has many similar buildings, except much larger. The trees are the size of miniature skyscrapers.
• Artificial Intelligence: Sweetiebot 9000 is just as intelligent as a real pony, although an extremely violent one. She can feel love, fear and aggression, but no other emotions. Older intelligent robots could only feel aggression and were capable of nothing but indiscriminate violence. Sadness is the most difficult emotion to replicate and no one has ever successfully made a robot that can experience it.
• Ascended Extra: Derpy Hooves, a background extra turned minor character in the show, is now a main character (the second one introduced) and Rainbow Dash's oldest friend.
• Backstory Invader: Scootaloo uses her reality distortion field to retroactively become Rainbow Dash's sister. Everyone within range acts like this has always been the case and nothing is wrong. It only works within ten miles of her, anyone affected that gets farther away goes back to normal and remembers none of this.
• Bad Moon Rising: During a blood moon, the normally slow, harmless zombies become fast and extremely aggressive, with more rising up out of the ground at any moment. Most ponies barricade themselves indoors until it ends.
• Barrier Warrior: Both magic users and psychics can create energy shields. Witches can create barriers of whatever element they want.
• Befriending the Enemy: This is Rainbow Dash's backup plan when she accepts she stands no chance of subduing the witch Twilight Sparkle by force. It works perfectly, but not in the way Dash expected. She ends up sympathizing with Twilight and joins forces with her, becoming her student.
• Big Bad Ensemble: While the witches are initially presented as the world's biggest threat, the heroes eventually run afoal of even more dangerous creatures all vying for the title of big bad. Right now, its a toss-up between Starlight Glimmer, the ghost of Crater Cemetery, and maybe the Darklord.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Monkies are an extinct species. Dash jokingly takes Twilight hunting for one after Fluttershy finds some mysterious tracks. They turn out to belong to a yeti, which regularly roams the area during winter.
• Blob Monster: The self-replicating molecule is a mobile, translucent red blob that dissolves any organic material it touches to make more of itself. If damaged without being completely destroyed it quickly evolves a resistance to the attack.
• Bowdlerise: In universe, Nailbat's supporters want to change psycho zombies back to the original name of Whimbleshire Zomzoms because they feel the former is offensive to the mentally ill.
• Brain in a Jar:
  • Sweetie Belle was decapitated by a Sea Monster attack at the beach. Rarity kept her alive by putting her brain in a life support tank.
  • The leader of the Mad Science Cartel, Dr. Von Bolt, is one of these. Rarity once begged him to share the technology for Sweetie Belle. He responded by sending her five pages of hahaha. Handwritten.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: At the beginning of Chapter 1:
  A chilling wind blew, a few leaves were already orange, a swarm of zombies had swept over the entire town and pumpkins were out on sale.
• Brutal Honesty: A sincere, well-meaning version from Derpy.
  Derpy: And I wanted to say I'm sorry about constantly doubting you for all these years. It's just, you know, for years and years your life was an endless train wreck of unmitigated failure and bad luck!
  Rainbow Dash: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Thanks.
• Calling Your Attacks: Trixie does this with all of her spells. She stops once she finally realizes that Twilight is a serious threat.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The youth gummies Dash steals from Twilight to prove that she found the witch end up saving her life twice. First she uses them to restore Pinkie's youth so she can defeat Aria. Then she uses the last one to defeat the giant alligator that attacks Rarity's castle, which had rapidly grown due to super radiation.
  • The lucky coin. It can allow the user to guarantee any event, no matter how unlikely, but it will always somehow get lost and subsequently be found by the worst possible pony for the previous user. Trixie used it to gain several superpowers and discover that Applejack was immune to curses. Then Rainbow Dash found it and used it to bring Twilight to completely destroy her. 23 chapters later, it gets picked up by Sonata Dusk, who uses it to set off the chain of events that lead to Pinkie Pie getting captured and Rainbow Dash being alone while ambushed by an army of assassins.
• The Chosen One: Applejack is the chosen one of the Darklord, with the ability to pass into the shadow realm at will. This is less impressive than it sounds as there are about six thousand chosen ones at any one time, all serving different gods with conflicting goals and prophecies.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Demon cultists have a very hard time controlling the demons they summon. The archfiend Judicar the Betrayer has that name for good reason, going so far as to intentionally avoid harming bystanders while slaughtering his summoners.
  Cultist Lackey: We couldn't control Stampedor the uncontrollable. Bloodhowl the slaughter king tried to slaughter us. Gorbtar the all-devouring tried to eat us. This is the fourth time this exact same plan has failed in a row!
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Merging with the Element of Faith grants Starlight Glimmer the ability to do anything others believe she can do. By founding a cult and becoming a member of the Elite Four she has absorbed enough faith to become one of the only beings in the world potentially capable of challenging Twilight.
• Cloning Gambit: Witches can transform into a murder of twenty crows. As long as at least one survives to cancel the spell the caster will be unharmed and gain the memories of all the other crows. They often take advantage of this by using the extra crows very recklessly to scout or distract threats while one stays behind in safety. The downside is that the witch still fully remembers the pain of their deaths afterward.
• Collectible Card Game: Summoner Knights, a card game with a cartoon based on it. The cards are enchanted to create illusions when played. Rainbow Dash became obsessed with it shortly before the fad ended and couldn't convince anyone to play with her until she met Twilight.
• Combat Clairvoyance: Psychics like Pinkie Pie use their powers to react to attacks before they happen.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Filthy Rich has no qualms about using a monster that could end all life on the planet as a means of cheaper toxic waste disposal. He doesn't expect to be alive in forty years when it becomes a problem anyway. Only bringing up his daughter changes his mind.
    Filthy Rich: You know, you’re literally the only person on the entire planet I’d put before profit. And yes, that includes your mother.
  • His main competitor, Snap Allgood, is an even worse example. He is horribly neglectful to his adopted daughter Scootaloo, exploiting her reality warper powers for profit and refusing to ever call her by her name. When she runs away, he doesn't notify the authorities, who were paying him a considerable sum to watch her, to save face. He then sets up a device that drives the parasite berserk in the middle of a populated area in order to discredit Dash and regain custody.
• Crapsack World: The world is slowly filling with endlessly reviving zombies, witches torment the weak, countless monsters lurk on the fringes of civilization and the government and corporations are corrupt. Things aren't much safer for the monsters, who are hunted by ponies whether they're evil or not. Slightly downplayed as, despite all this, the Equestrians are doing a good job defending their territory and their standard of living is actually quite normal as long as they don't stray too far from civilization.
• Crazy-Prepared: When she can’t just flee, Minuette uses her portal network to lure her opponents into an absolutely ridiculous amount of death traps scattered across Equestria. During her fight with Twilight, she uses an underground lava chamber, heavy artillery, a portal miles under the ocean, an escape rocket, an army of a million griffin zombies, an unkillable psycho zombie, a portal next to an orphanage for a convenient hostage, several oil tankers filled with explosives meant to be dropped from orbit, and a hidden stash of stimulant so powerful it gives her a stroke after 5 minutes. And if anypony manages to survive all that, she can open a portal to the moon to strand them there.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: The Slayer Association posts bounties on monsters to hunt, artifacts to recover and various other dangerous missions. The elite four, their highest ranking members, hold the most political power in Equestria.
• Creepy Crows: Witches often transform into crows, so they're seen as a bad omen. The saying goes "Never harm a crow, because you never know which one is a witch."
• Cult:
  • There are many, worshipping old gods, demons, aliens, nature spirits, chaos gods and various other things. Most are banned in Equestria but the more dangerous ones like demon and chaos cultists aren't tolerated even among the criminal communities in the Everfree.
  • President Starlight Glimmer is also the founder and leader of an influential cult worshiping her as the prophet of an outer realm god called Cosmos, whom she claimed to have met in person. Starlight's followers believe she's the only pony who is truly real and that when they understand her philosophy she'll make them real as well. Then she'll bring them into the outer realm to live forever. Unbeknownst to the cult members, Starlight and Cosmos are now the same being. "Cosmos" was a name used by the Element of Faith, which Starlight merged with years ago when she visited the outer ream. There is no longer a distinction between the two.
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • Rainbow Dash's first meeting with Twilight Sparkle. She gets caught looking through Twilight's window, throws down smoke bombs and tries to fly away. Twilight gets rid of the smoke immediately and pulls Dash back toward herself with magic. Rainbow Dash turns around and flies straight at her for a punch, boosted to sonic speed by the spell. Twilight blocks by raising a rock wall out of the ground between them, causing Dash to break her own leg, and casually turns her into a frog while she's lying on the ground in agony.
  • Twilight fighting anyone almost always results in this. Special mention goes to her fight with Trixie, where she invoked this trope in order to refute her might makes right philosophy. It works.
• Curse: A curse can do almost anything, but it's only effective if the caster tells the target what the curse does and the conditions for breaking it. If the victim doesn't know, the effects will be minor and easily removed by any psychic. Twilight describes curses as largely psychosomatic.
• Cursed Item: Every magic artifact created by the Darklord is incredibly powerful, but with a horrible downside that makes it not normally worth the risk. The Darklord made a wishing orb that grants your wish, but causes something proportionally worse to happen as well. One pony wished to become better at baseball. The magic bat he received was so powerful it destroyed him and most of the audience the moment it hit the ball. Nailbat managed to use the orb to become immune to the bat and is now the only pony that can safely wield it.
• Cute Bruiser: Applejack is both adorable and brutally effective in unarmed combat, especially in her werewolf form.
• Cute Machines: Rarity's robots are designed to look like her little sister Sweetie Belle. Sweetiebot 9000 is a very convincing copy, even having the same voice as the original. The older models get increasingly more robotic looking and sounding the farther back you go. Sweetie Belle herself eventually gets a Sweetiebot 9000 as her new body.
• Cute Witch: Twilight Sparkle, an adorable lavendar unicorn wearing a witch's hat with little bells dangling from it.
• Dark World: The shadow realm is a parallel world where you can see the true shadow of everything and things that only exist as shadows. Light works the opposite of how it does in the real world, the sun is a black hole that sucks up all light it reaches, leaving shade the only places lit enough for normal creatures to see. This dimension is what ghosts are actually seeing into with their "darkvision." The shadow realm serves as the prison for an ancient alicorn called the Darklord. The other alicorns allegedly locked him away there as punishment for first creating shadows.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: The witch Twilight Sparkle starts off completely asocial because the last pony she trusted was manipulating her to steal her spellbooks. She cares only about practicing magic and goes to great lengths to prevent outsiders from finding her house. She starts to warm up slowly after befriending Rainbow Dash.
• Determinator: Nothing will make Rainbow Dash give up on a goal, no matter how risky, or dangerous, or downright suicidal it is.
• Disaster Dominoes: A banshee's wail places a death curse on anyone that hears it. The victim is repeatedly targeted by an elaborate chain of unfortunate events that ends in their death. The sequence can be broken by intentionally getting hit by one of the early (and less fatal) steps, but this doesn't remove the curse.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • According to Starlight herself, she started the cult worshipping her as a god and became president of Equestria because she got a B- on her philosophy paper in seventh grade.
  • Witches seem to be fond of this. In one instance, a witch created a curse preventing everyone from eating popcorn because she lost a sock (or at least that was implied to be the reason, as finding the sock was the condition to lift the curse).
• Do You Trust Me?: When Rainbow Dash asks Twilight to let her go into town alone.
  Dash: So do you want us to be like you and your master, or do you want us to be friends?
  Twilight: Well. I don’t know! What would I have to do to ‘be friends’ with you?
  Dash: Take off all the spells you have on me.
  Twilight: But you’ll leave forever if I do that!
  Dash: Oh, come on! Do you really not trust me yet?
• Dracolich: While not more intelligent than the average zombie, zombie dragons are extremely dangerous. They regenerate quickly from any injury short of being burnt down to a skeleton and breathe purple miasma that knocks out any pony that touches it.
• Dream Weaver: The Darklord can manipulate ponies' dreams and talk to them this way. He uses this often to advise his follower Applejack.

E-L

• Early-Bird Cameo: Applejack briefly appears in chapter 1, and is mentioned to be missing in chapter 3. She doesn't appear again or become relevent to the main story until chapter 15 when we find out she was kidnapped by Trixie.
• Elemental Powers:
  • Witches have a wide variety of elemental spells, including fireballs, lightning bolts, hurricane-force winds, and pillars of rock.
  • The stronger types of ghosts have powerful ice magic and can create magical darkness that induces overwhelming fear.
  • Some ghosts, called elementals, that were killed by a specific element have the ability to manipulate that element at will. Lemon Zest is a lightning elemental.
  • Some pegasi can also manipulate lightning. Lightning Dust uses this to bypass her nervous system and increase her reaction time.
  • Spitfire is a pegasus that can create fire. It's unclear if this is normal or an ability unique to her. She uses this to protect her team from a giant disc of ice falling from the sky.
• Enemy Mine: Flash Bang and Moondancer are conspiring against Starlight Glimmer, despite absolutely despising each other, because they consider her that much of a threat.
• Enhanced Punch: Psychic energy can be used to boost physical attacks. This can be used to touch (and thus attack) ghosts which are normally intangible.
• Escaped from the Lab: Scootaloo was raised in an Allgood Corporation lab to study her reality warping powers and keep her under control. Despite being her legal guardian, Snap Allgood only cared about using her for personal gain. He wasn't even willing to use her name, instead calling her "subject two." She eventually ran away and used her powers to create or steal whatever she needed.
• Establishing Series Moment: The fic begins with Ponyville being overrun by a swarm of zombies. Rainbow Dash takes note of this as though she's observing bad weather and casually trots past them. The townsponies react with mild annoyance and continue going about their day.
• Everyone Can See It: With everypony considering Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle perfect for each other and suggesting they already are together. The only reason they can't see it is because of their own psychological hang-ups. Twilight is still recovering from the fallout of her last failed relationship and has only recently come around to the idea that others can care about her, while Dash feels that no one will ever value her because she's not a strong fighter.
• Evil Gloating: Trixie loves to do this because she's justifiably confident no one can stop her. She even leaves prerecorded gloating messages that play whenever her booby traps go off in case she isn't there to gloat in person. The entire reason Twilight and Rainbow Dash decide to go after her is because she announced her Evil Plan to turn into a Were-Ursa in front of an entire auction house.
• Evil Luddite: The witch Minuette and her predecessors believe that ponykind will destroy themselves if their technology is allowed to progress much further. Only they are intelligent and wise enough to have such power and everyone else must be forced back into the dark ages at all costs. She creates curses that prevent certain technologies from being used and even resorts to bombing laboratories and factories. Her most infamous curse prevents authors from writing any science fiction that isn't a cautionary tale about the evils of science.
• Exact Words: Lazy Eye does this when asked if he's running a murder motel.
  Lazy Eye: Oh, I've never murdered anypony in this hotel.
• Familiar: Rainbow Dash agrees to be Twilight's familiar and witch-in-training.
• Failsafe Failure:
  • Trixie keeps her collection of Twilight's possesions behind a magically sealed door bolted with a nigh-indestructible arcanium bolt. Twilight simply melts a hole in the wall.
  • Minuette kept a portal near an orphanage in case she ever needed to take a hostage. When she tries to use it against Twilight, she finds no one because the heroes had issued a disaster alert to the entire country ahead of time.
  • Sunset Shimmer is attempting to invoke this by destroying all the failsafes left behind by Golden Feather so that she will be summoned back into the world.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The basic premise of the fic is to combine as many classic monsters and supernatural creatures into the story as possible in a way that still makes sense. Often follows a Monster of the Week pattern, with the protagonists encountering something new in most chapters.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Twilight Sparkle is a centuries old witch who spent her entire life in isolation, with a curse preventing anyone else from finding her house. She knows so little of the outside world that she's surprised to find out more than one town exists. Twilight is understandably bewildered by the technology and culture Rainbow Dash exposes her to.
• Fluffy the Terrible:
  • Happens often, which is unsurprising considering this is a horror setting with My Little Pony naming conventions.
  • Twilight's disturbing looking scarecrow that she often animates as an attack golem is named Smarty Pants.
• Forced Sleep: Witches can put their target to sleep with magic. Rainbow Dash uses it as a sleep aid.
• Forced Transformation: Witches can turn ponies into any animal they're sufficiently familiar with. Twilight turns Rainbow Dash into a frog and a horned owl.
• Fountain of Youth: Twilight Sparkle invented reverse aging gummies. Each one you eat reduces your age by five years. Pinkie Pie eats almost an entire bottle and reverts from sixty-eight to thirteen.
• Freudian Excuse: Trixie became an evil witch because she was bullied for years when she was weak. She fantasized about becoming friends with Twilight Sparkle and being powerful enough to be as cruel to others as they were to her.
• Friendly Ghost: Despite being a specter, the most powerful and feared type of ghost, Fluttershy is friendly, cowardly and pacifistic. She is unwilling to feed on the heat of living things, even animals, insisting on fires instead. Other ghosts bully her for her timidness despite being much weaker than her.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: Rarity builds a nearly indestructible robot body for Sweetie Belle's disembodied brain. She's surprisingly unfazed by this. She enjoys being robotic so much that when she's later temporarily turned organic again she's horrified by her own body and begs to be changed back.
  Sweetie Belle: You were so unwilling to let go of me that you spent eight years delving into the forbidden depths of madness to claw me back from the dead and keep me alive against the natural order?!
  Rarity: Well. Yes?
  Sweetie Belle: Wow! You really do love me! You’re the best sister ever, Rarity! And I always wanted to be a robot!
• Fusion Dance: The Elements of Harmony, some of which are fully sentient beings in their own right, perform this with ponies in order to grant them incredible power.
• Genre Savvy:
  • When Rainbow Dash tries to get home on time before Twilight assumes the worst.
    Dash: I've read enough comic books to know exactly what will happen if I don't get home on time. It's going to lead into this horrible misunderstanding that will spiral out of control until I'm staring down at one of the outer gods devouring the planet and I need to give some big speech about friendship I'm not nearly prepared for.
  • Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon immediately expect a murder mystery to happen at the creepy, run-down Lazy Eye’s Hotel and Motel. They try to leave only to be stopped by a sudden storm outside. Then a murder mystery happens.
• Ghostly Glide: Ghosts float in midair at all times.
• The Glomp: Rarity tries to tackle hug the newly cyborgized Sweetie Belle to the ground, but she's too heavy and doesn't budge.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Gazing upon the outer gods for more than eight seconds causes a pony to go mad. Doing this is illegal and punished by banishment from Equestrian society. "On the eighth" is an in universe expression for crazy.
• Good Luck Charm: The lucky coin. There's a catch, it doesn't create luck, it takes your luck from the future. The more luck you give yourself now, the worse luck you'll have to endure later on.
• Good Witch Versus Bad Witch: According to Twilight Sparkle, witches are supposed to follow a philosophy of isolation and self-improvement, never interfering with the lives of outsiders. While she spent the last several centuries hidden away, paying no attention to the outside world, other witches disregarded this and committed countless atrocities with her stolen spellbooks, many of which Twilight received the blame for. When she learns of this, Twilight sets out with Rainbow Dash to fix her bad reputation by defeating the evil witches and recovering her stolen artifacts.
• Happily Adopted: More like happily kidnapped. Rainbow Dash and her friends decide to let Scootaloo live with them illegally rather than turning her in to the government. This becomes official after Starlight Glimmer makes Dash Scootaloo's legal guardian.
  Scootaloo: So you’ll really kidnap me? For real?
  Rainbow Dash: Eh. Yeah. Looks like it.
  Scootaloo: Oh, thank you so much! This is the nicest thing anypony has ever done for me!
• Haunted Fetter: Ghosts can possess dolls, which Fluttershy does often with her teddy bear. This even works on taxidermized corpses, including the ghost's own body if they had the forethought to preserve it in time.
• Headless Horseman: Dullahans, a type of ghost, are a headless suit of armor. They can't see normally but can see through any jack-o'-lanterns nearby and often wear one as a head.
• Healing Hands: Twilight Sparkle has healing magic that wraps the target's body in green light.
• The Heart: Rainbow Dash. She makes allies out of most of the main cast simply by caring about their problems. She's a bit of an odd case in that she doesn't realize that this is her role, constantly feeling like she is of no use to the group even though she's the entire reason it exists.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Sweetiebot 9000 (later renamed Saccharin Belle) genuinely loves Rarity while advocating the destruction of just about anyone else. If not for Rarity's orders she would likely turn on the group immediately. This is almost always played for laughs.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Most of the main cast are unwelcome in Equestrian society for various reasons.
• Hostage Situation:
  • Minuette keeps one of her portal destinations next to an orphanage for this exact reason. Subverted, the city is empty when she retreats there. Twilight and Rainbow Dash had the entire country take shelter in safe rooms before the fight started.
  • Minuette tries holding Sonata Dusk at gunpoint, unaware that she's a banshee possessing a lifelike doll of herself. Sonata, completely immune to bullets, just tells Minuette to shoot and then screams in her ear.
• Human Popsicle: Rarity was able to preserve Sweetie Belle's brain because her decapitated head landed in a cooler full of ice.
  Sweetie Belle That makes scientific sense. Even I know ice makes you unable to die. For ten million years, even!
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • Lyra is the leader of a cult dedicated to leading humans to the planet so that they can be taken to Earth, which they believe to be an idyllic paradise. The humans that arrive don't believe in magic and assume they can easily conquer the planet by bombarding the ponies' cities with nukes from orbit until they surrender.
  • Subverted with Earth itself, where humans apparently evolved beyond all petty differences and no longer experience war, poverty or disease. The humans that arrive in Equestria are the distant descendants of a splinter group that left Earth 100,000 years ago.
• The Idealist:
  • Derpy is optimistic, relatively naive and oblivious to government corruption.
    Derpy: They wouldn't trust such an important job to somepony that irresponsible, would they?
    Pinkie: Oh, the system's totally corrupt. Of course they'd be that irresponsible!
    Derpy: What? But-! But-!
    Pinkie: But there is a plus side. The system is completely corrupt, meaning I'll probably get away with whatever whacky, illegal thing I'm about to do. Hurray for corruption!
    Derpy: Whoa, whoa! What? Breaking the law? You can't break the law. That's illegal!
    Pinkie: Ha! You! I bet you had a pretty good life growing up, huh?
  • Rainbow Dash is this to a lesser extent. While she can be cynical and snarky about her less than stellar (at first) place in a crapsack world, she never loses hope that she can succeed and that things can be made better. She's also willing to reconcile with her enemies, most notably Trixie. Its one of the reasons Laughter likes her more than most ponies.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Mixed with I Just Want to Be Normal. Because of her dangerous powers, Scootaloo was raised by a corporation. None of them really cared about her unless paid to do so, even her adoptive father. They were only interested in exploiting her abilities for money and power. She came to believe all adults only care about that. When Scootaloo spends four days as Rainbow Dash's fake sister, she's genuinely shocked by how nice everyone is to her and becomes guilt-ridden about manipulating them. She desperately wishes she could be Dash's sister for real. She gets her wish after Dash becomes her legal guardian.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Combined with I Just Want to Be Badass. Rainbow Dash is so desperate to become a rich and famous slayer that she resorts to near-suicidally dangerous plans to make it happen. As of the story's beginning none of them have worked and most of Ponyville considers her an incompetent fool. Her new scheme to rise to the top by finding evidence of Twilight Sparkle's location doesn't quite go as planned. Even after helping defeat Trixie and being promoted to S rank, she still struggles with feeling like the weak link of her group, as well as believing she's taking advantage of Twilight.
• Informed Deformity: Because of her madness, Rarity considers herself disfigured by a scar on her face too small for anyone else to see without getting very close. She wears a mask that covers the left half of her face to hide it.
• Innocently Insensitive: Twilight, who is completely new to the outside world, doesn't understand that the profanity she heard is offensive.
  Twilight: I think they said you were, uh, you're one of Flash Bang's, um, I think "lapdog bitches" was the term?
  Fleetfoot: Guh! You don't pull punches, do you?
• Intangibility: Ghosts pass through solid objects, but psychic energy and some magic can be used to touch them.
• Intergenerational Friendship:
  • Between Rainbow Dash, who is a young adult, and Twilight Sparkle, who is ancient but keeps her body young with alchemy.
  • Their friend Pinkie Pie is sixty-eight but de-aged to thirteen by the same method as Twilight.
  • Fluttershy is a sixty-nine year old ghost.
  • Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo, a child.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Happens in-universe with Trixie, whose generally insufferable personality and propensity for forcing her opinions on others have earned her more ire than witches with actual body counts.
  Rarity: I don't know if she's the evilest pony in the Festering Scar, but she's certainly the loudest! If we're being honest, being unignorable earns you more enmity than being evil.
• Knight of Cerebus: Trixie. The fic began more episodic and contained, with most of the focus being on Twilight and Rainbow Dash's developing friendship. Once the duo decided to hunt down Trixie, a large-scale plot began to take shape and the stakes raised dramatically.
• Lack of Imagination: Twilight's attempt to create an illusion of a merpony from imagination alone is crude to say the least.
• Lima Syndrome: Lampshaded by Rainbow Dash after she starts to like being forced to live with Twilight.
  Pinkie: What have you been up to?
  Dash: I kinda got kidnapped. For like two months.
  Pinkie: Oh! Did you want me to rescue you?
  Dash: Nah, I think the Stockholm syndrome is kicking in. It’s fine.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Rainbow Dash ends up becoming this for Twilight, giving her the courage to interact with society and form attachments despite centuries of isolation.
• Living Shadow: Witches have a spell to detach their shadow from their body. They can move their shadow around freely and physically interact with anything else that casts a shadow as well as ghosts.
• Loony Fan: Trixie is completely obsessed with Twilight, much to the latter's discomfort. She went to great lengths to collect as many of her stolen items as possible, even stealing one of Twilight's used socks that was being auctioned off. The barrier around her castle is also made to allow in anyone carrying an item that belonged to Twilight. Unfortunately for Trixie, the real Twilight is very different from she imagined and rejects her ideology outright when they meet. Trixie doesn't take this well. Even after being defeated, she still constantly seeks Twilight's approval.
• Loophole Abuse: Curse Tech's business model revolves around finding and abusing loopholes in Minuette's curses preventing the use of technologies.

M-P

• Mad Scientist: Happens when a pony goes mad from looking at the outer gods for more than eight seconds. Many of them live as outcasts in remote bases after being banished from Equestria. Rarity became one intentionally after normal doctors couldn't do anything to save her sister Sweetie Belle and now lives in a castle in the Everfree Forest. She is a member of the "Mad Science League", a post-money communist utopia whose members rarely meet in person, preferring to interact over the internet (a forbidden technology of mad science.)
• Magic Cauldron: Twilight has multiple cauldrons in her home, using them for both potion making and normal cooking. She can swap between them by swiping her hoof, causing the cauldron to fly to the side, vanish, and get replaced by a different one. She later gifts one along with some potion notes to Rarity as a token of their alliance. Twilight later agrees to teach Apple Bloom to brew potions as well.
• Man-Eating Plant: To deter visitors, the area around Rarity's castle is covered in carnivorous plants large enough to swallow a pony whole.
• Mecha-Mooks: The outdated Sweetiebots before version 9000 have almost no intelligence and are considered expendable by Rarity.
• Might Makes Right:
  • The new generation of witches believe power is the only moral that matters and the strong have the right to do whatever they want to those weaker than themselves. This is in opposition to the old ways Twilight Sparkle follows, which emphasize isolation and seeking power for its own sake, never using it to interfere with the lives of outsiders. This is eventually deconstructed. Believing that the strong can do whatever they want to the weak has left them paranoid of anyone potentially surpassing them. As such, they withold knowledge from their students, leading to the order steadily growing weaker over the centuries.
  • The Slayer Association operates on this, with its strongest members having the largest influence on Equestria's government. Political debates consist of canidites shouting at each other continuously for days on end while being shot with increasingly powerful tranquilizers.
  • Deconstructing this trope is one of the story's central themes. It goes to great lengths to show how horrible a society that runs on this would be, especially in a world where might is gained primarily by winning the superpower lottery.
• Money Fetish: The witch Screwball is massively wealthy and revels in it. She wears thirty necklaces, seven crowns as bracelets and has a throne made entirely of hundred-bit bills next to her normal gold one. She sometimes tosses money out the window for no reason, makes snow angels in it, or even burns it in front of orphans.
• Mood Whiplash: The story is a mix of horror, friendship, humor, serious drama and over the top action. It switches between those aspects very abruptly, often multiple times in the same scene.
• Mummy: Mummies are one of the few classic monsters that seemingly don't exist in this setting. Those who believe in them are mocked as conspiracy theorists. One pony tried dressing up as one to scare everyone away from his buried treasure. This backfired horribly, attracting massive crowds looking to find the "mummy." He was eventually unmasked by a group of kids.
• Mundane Utility: Twilight uses her magic for various mundane things. Among these include magic windows that emit natural sunlight, sleep spells for insomnia, magic cauldrons for normal cooking and infinite void toilets. When she briefly considers taking over the world, one of her proposed policies is replacing the sewer systems with the latter.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Played for Laughs with most of Sweetiebot 9000's dialogue.
  Rarity: Wait! We only want to pacify her!
  Sweetiebot: Death is the ultimate pacification!
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The chosen one of the demon cult of Lux Lucius is named Demon Summoner. He summons demons.
• Necromancer: Moondancer, one of the most influential ponies in the Everfree, was banished from Equestria for practicing and teaching necromancy. She has an army of reanimated skeletons under her command.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Trixie is half witch, half psychic, half vampire, half robot, half mad scientist and half mutant. She later adds were-ursa major to the list, a more than fifty story tall magic bear.
  Derpy: That’s like, what, six halves?! That adds up to three-hundred percent power! She’s a serious opponent for anypony. If Trixie becomes half-werewolf too then it’d be even sillier! Nopony would even take me seriously explaining this anymore.
• No OSHA Compliance: Rarity disposes of radioactive waste by flushing it down the toilet. It ends up getting absorbed by a sewer aligator that grows giant and destroys half her castle.
• Not Always Evil: The world is filled with dangerous and terrifying supernatural beings, but many are actually quite reasonable if approached peacefully. Most ponies aren't willing to take that risk.
• Not Quite Dead: Rainbow Dash knocks Sweetiebot 9000 into a vat of acid. She climbs back out completely unharmed as soon as Dash turns around.
  Sweetiebot: No! Big sister! I. Love. You.
  Dash: Huh. I guess she was't that invincible after all.
  Sweetiebot: Actually! It turns out I am that invincible! Hahaha! You have fallen for prank.exe! You are less intelligent than me! Hahaha!
• Older Than They Look: Pinkie Pie is sixty-eight with the body of a thirteen-year-old. Twilight Sparkle is a much more extreme example.
• Our Ghosts Are Different:
  • Ghosts see darkness instead of light, rendering them nearly blind during the day. They can't smell anything but heat, which they feed upon. While they can feed on any heat source, the body heat of living things tastes the best, but the victims quickly freeze to death in the process. Hot metal smells intensely disgusting to ghosts and is often used by the living to keep them away. More powerful types of ghosts have strong ice magic, can cause intense fear in the living and can control weaker ghosts by asserting their will over them.
  • Specters are the most powerful type of ghost. If more than a thousand ponies die at once, one of them becomes a specter. They can create echoes of the disaster that killed them. They're usually the rulers of lesser ghosts.
• Outlaw Town: The Everfree Forest is home to mad scientists, cults, necromancers, and various other outcasts banished from Equestria. Many of them live in small free cities in the region, which are very unwelcoming of normal ponies.
• Out of Focus: Applejack gets significantly less attention compared to the rest of the main cast.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: While she's a competent fighter by ordinary pegasus standards, Rainbow Dash is completely outclassed by the supernatural beings she teams up with. Twilight is training her to be a witch, but the power gap is still massive.
• Parody Sue: Trixie. She's a witch mad scientist psychic mutant vampire robot who boasts about being the only witch worthy of Twilight Sparkle's approval. Her freudian excuse is that she was bullied for being weak as a child, and she would cope by imagining herself as a Villain Sue who would be rescued by Twilight. Her witch training gave her the power to make it real.
  Moondancer: She’s like something out of a twelve-year-old’s power fantasy fanfic. As someone who used to write those all the time, let me tell you there’s no possible way we can take her.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Fights between witches cause massive collateral damage. Twilight tells Rainbow Dash and the others to evacuate the hostages before she confronts Trixie because it isn't safe for anyone else to be even remotely nearby. By the end of the battle Trixie's castle is in ruins and much of the surrounding wildlife is dead or fleeing.
• Photo Op with the Dog: Rainbow Dash's plan to avoid a war between Twilight and the world is to have the former defeat the witches and other dangerous monsters under an alias to generate goodwill before revealing herself.
• Police Psychic:
  • Played for Laughs during one of Pinkie Pie's psychic shows.
    Pinkie: Okay! So, before we begin the show— one, two, three — That guy killed his wife! Get him!
    Unnamed Murderer: Dang it! I knew this was going to happen too! Why did I come here?!
    Pinkie: And amazingly that holds up in court!
    Pinkie: And now we come to the part where all of you get nervous that I’m about to arrest the entire audience. Well, no need to worry! If I did that every time, nopony would come to these shows! I’ll just let all of you off on a collective warning this time.
  • It's later revealed that motel workers are psychicly scanned five times a year to check if they've committed murder, and that since the establishment of the Psychic's Guild, the murder rate has plummeted to the point where serial killers are basically nonexistant.
• Power Floats: Witches and psychics can use their powers to levitate. Ghosts just float by default.
• Power of the Void: Twilight can create "true void," an area of pure nothingness. Time, space, matter, energy and the laws of physics don't exist within.
  Dash: But there’s nothing there. I see nothing.
  Twilight: Yeah, that’s what I just said.
  Dash: So, you’ve accomplished literally nothing?!
• Psi Blast: Psychics can project blue energy as a direct attack.
• Psychic Powers:
  • Psychic abilities sometimes manifest from surviving a near death experience. The closer you get to death the stronger they are. Pinkie Pie gained extremely potent ones from being trapped underwater in a frozen lake for forty-five minutes when she was eight.
  • Rainbow Dash attempted to gain her own by biting into a live wire when she was a teenager. It didn't work. So many ponies tried this that Equestria started doing "Don't electrocute yourself" PSA's. It actually worked for Trixie, thanks to the lucky coin.
  • Psychic energy and a ghost's aura are actually the same thing. This is why psychics and ghosts can easily sense each other's presence.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Screwball is a murderous psychopath with the demeanor of an unstable child. She used her witch powers to gain a legion of slaves, a harem, and build the world's largest amusement park on her private island. After being disappointed by cartoons getting cancelled or going downhill in the last season she enslaved an entire animation studio to make whatever show she wants. One of her thrones is really just a pile of her custom plushies.

Q-Z

• Reality Warper:
  • Alicorns, also called great old ones, have the power to rewrite reality as they see fit. They used this to create the world and the laws of physics. Most of them ascended to become the outer gods that inhabit the outer realm. Other monsters from the outer realm can distort reality as well.
  • Because of a comatose outer realm parasite (originally an alicorn feather) in her brain, Scootaloo can distort reality within a field that extends out to ten miles away from herself. She uses this often to create objects, such as food, or retroactively change her relation to others, convincing ponies to help her because she's "family." She needs a constant supply of a special medicine to keep the parasite asleep and causing her too much anger, distress or injury can wake it up. If it were to awaken it would use the reality distortion field to defend its host by destroying anything nearby. After Scootaloo gives the feather a name (Guardian) and accepts it as a part of herself, they begin to share thoughts and cooperate instead of fighting for control.
• Really 700 Years Old: Twilight Sparkle is more than six hundred years old. She stays young because of the reverse aging gummies she invented.
• Remote Body: Sweetie Belle can remote control Sweetiebot models. If the robot is destroyed in the process she simply reverts to her main body unharmed.
• Ret-Gone: The village Scootaloo came from was wiped out by brain-eating monsters from the outer realm. They had reality distorting powers that retroactively erased their victims from existence. Only Scootaloo and Lilymoon survived.
• Retired Badass: Pinkie Pie is a sixty-eight year old mare, retired S-rank slayer and former leader of the Psychic Guild. She was one of the most powerful psychics in the world when she was younger, with a long list of dangerous missions completed. She becomes a filly again, thanks to Twilight Sparkle's alchemy.
• The Reveal: The identity of the dreaded Ghost of Crater Cemetery, kept a mystery throughout much of the story, is revealed to be Nightmare Moon.
• Robotic Psychopath: Sweetiebot 9000 threatens almost everyone that isn't Rarity, is nearly indestructible and is equipped with more than a hundred weapons with which to make good on that threat.
  Sweetiebot: I love my big sister Rarity so much I would reduce the entire world to ash for her!
  Rarity: Oh, okay! I admit her enthusiasm is set a tad high. Here, I’ll turn it down fifteen percent.
  Sweetiebot: I would reduce eighty-five percent of the world to ash for my big sister Rarity!
  Rarity: I’m working on it! Tell me that’s not a step in the right direction.
• Robot Me: The Sweetiebot 9000, a robot copy of the original Sweetie Belle and prototype of her eventual replacement body. Later repainted and renamed Saccharin Belle to avoid being confused with the original.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Played for drama with Twilight, who spent her entile life (over 600 years) doing nothing but study magic, to the point where she had never gone more than 30 feet from her house. While this made her one of the strongest ponies in the world, it also left her without any social skills or meaninful relationships. She's getting better thanks to Dash.
  Twilight: I feel like I’m frozen in time all of a sudden. Years and decades went by so fast when I spent all of my time training and developing spells. I have barely any memories from those hundreds of years. It’s just major breakthroughs every so often that I can recall. But then you showed up and suddenly it’s like I’ve spent half my life with you. I don’t feel like I’m six hundred, I feel like a few years were most of my life! All of my memories are from the short time I’ve been with other ponies. And the only things I look back on without regret are… memories of you [Dash].
• Scary Scarecrows: Smarty Pants, Twilight's vaguely pony shaped scarecrow with long claws and fangs made of wood. Twilight converses with it regularly, but no one but her can hear it reply. Nobody knows if it can actually speak or if she's just hallucinating from centuries of isolation. She sometimes animates Smarty Pants as a golem, it attacks by extending sharp roots to impale its target. It secretly holds a fragment of the Element of Magic which has bonded itself to Twilight.
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: Gazing upon the outer gods for more than eight seconds causes both brilliance and madness. The resulting mad scientists are banished from mainstream society.
• Ship Tease: Between Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle
• Show Within a Show: The Summoner Knights cartoon based on the card game of the same name.
• Shrine to the Fallen: Bordering on being a Stalker Shrine. The room Rarity is keeping Sweetie Belle's brain in is covered in commissioned portraits of the filly, the brain tank itself is surrounded by a field of flowers changed daily by robots (all designed to look like her) and the last photo taken of her rests at the base, flanked by a pair of candles.
  Sweetie Belle: But do they all have to look like my twins? Or my bazillionuplets? It’s kind of creepy how much of me is around here. You went all-in on the whole ‘me’ theme.
• Sibling Murder: The psychotic witch Screwball has a massive number of half-siblings because of her incredibly promiscuous pirate father. She generally leaves them alone unless they claim their dad actually loved them. Screwball kills anyone that dares to say he loved anyone but her.
• Sinister Subway: Boss Rattler and his gang of ghosts haunt an abandoned subway tunnel connected to the Ponyville sewers.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Twilight Sparkle is one of the most dangerous and feared beings on the planet, but centuries of isolation have left her uncomfortable with basic social situations. She shows no fear in a fight, but gets nervous when asked by Rainbow Dash to accompany her into town.
• Soul Jar: A lich's life force is contained in their phylactery. They can't be killed unless it's destroyed.
• Spell Book:
  • A witch's spellbook is made of mind fibers which force their spells into the mind of anyone that touches the book, no reading necessary. Normal ponies can't handle such a flood of information and pass out, remembering none of it when they wake up. Witches undergo intense focus training for decades before being able to use one.
  • A much smaller amount of mind fibers can be woven into a necklace or similar item, giving the untrained wearer knowledge of a limited number of spells.
• Spider-Sense: Psychics can sense imminent danger.
• Spoof Aesop:
  Rainbow Dash You know, I learned something today. Keeping your mouth shut pays way better than an actual job.
• Stealing the Credit: Downplayed, as Twilight is completely onboard with Rainbow Dash being the center of attention, and only cares about the money and fame because it makes Rainbow Dash happy. However, feeling like she owes all her success to Twilight isn't helping Dash's severe self-worth issues.
  • This ends up landing Dash in hot water when Screwball discovers she's not as strong as she claims and decides to target Dash in order to psychologically break Twilight.
• Stock Slasher: Psycho zombies quickly regenerate any injury and are relentlessly determined to kill ponies, following their victim for years if they have to. They move slowly when observed but seem to teleport when the target looks away. The only way to stop one is to seal it in a lake with magic. Sawmill wears a sack over his head and wields two rusty chainsaws attached to long chains.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Ghosts can create a wall of darkness that causes intense fear and hopelessness.
• Superpower Lottery: The only effective way to accumulate power in this world. Survive a near death experience to get psychic powers, be mutated by super-radiation, learn ancient knowledge, etc.
• Swamps Are Evil: The Festering Scar is a large swampland to the south of the Everfree Forest filled with giant insects, monsters, cultists, curses, demonic spirits and more. It's a wound left on the land from an ancient battle between six master witches.
• Taken for Granite: Witches can turn their enemies to stone.
• Take a Third Option: Dash's default instinct is to attempt this whenever she's presented with a tough choice.
  Dash: Say what you will about my terrible education, but I’ve spent countless hours lying awake at night thinking of ways to break these monkey paw scenarios.
• Teleport Spam: This is the self-admittedly cowardly witch Minuette's main strategy. She avoids her enemies by fleeing through a massive portal network leading to various hideouts and death traps.
• That Came Out Wrong: Rainbow Dash and Twilight (in disguise) run into Derpy in the Ponyville Slayer HQ.
  Derpy: Really? So like what's the relation between you two?
  Twilight: Rainbow Dash is like my pet. She obeys my every command!
  Derpy: Whoa! You’re hardcore, Rainbow Dash! I didn’t even know you liked mares!
• They Call Him "Sword": Nailbat's weapon of choice is a magic baseball bat with a single nail through it.
• Tongue-Tied: Twilight places a curse on Rainbow Dash that prevents her from finding Twilight's house again, talking about the curse, or telling anyone she found Twilight. It can only be broken by finding one specific leaf in the forest Twilight lives in.
• Too Dumb to Live: Gremlins, a sentient space fungus that arrives in Equestria via meteors, are stupid, pathetically weak, easy to kill by almost any means and have no sense of self preservation. A great many of their deaths are self inflicted. The only advantage they have is sheer numbers.
• Tournament Arc: The Mad Science League hosts Madcon annually, a convention which includes a robot fighting tournament. The creator of the winning robot is eligible to be elected leader of the league for the next year.
• Toxic, Inc.: The Manehattan Electric Company, known by their Equestrian enemies as Toxco, joined forces with the witch Spatial Tear to create super-reactors providing near limitless low cost energy. The witch's true motive in creating the reactors was to cause enough pollution to collapse civilization. It was bad enough that Equestria declared war on Manehattan. The super-reactor in the city melted down during the fighting, killing Spatial Tear, every member of Toxco, and countless innocents. The irradiated portion of the city, called Old Manehattan, became a literal ghost town led by a specter named Meltdown.
  Rainbow Dash: Yeah, and now we’ve swung so hard the other way that failure to recycle can land you in prison. Happened to my dad.
• Tracking Spell: Witches have an aetheric imprinting spell. It creates an illusion of whatever living thing was previously in the area which then retraces its steps. This only works up to twelve hours prior to casting.
• Training from Hell:
  • Witch training in general. Twilight was taken from her parents at five years old and made to practice for seventeen hours a day. Her master cut her off from the outside world entirely and never told her about anything unrelated to magic.
  • The new generation of witches take desperate orphans as their students and force them to beat ponies until they lose their empathy for other living beings. Trixie tested if Apple Bloom would make a good student by tying her to the ceiling upside down until she figured out how to make a bit of electricity. She was hanging there for almost an entire day.
    Twilight: Huh. They got a lot easier with these tests.
    Pinkie: Easy? Then what did they make you do?
    Twilight: Oh! I was only five at the time, so I don’t remember it too well. But I was covered in magic-eating leeches that sucked all the power out of me, had my hooves encased in cement, and was thrown into the river behind my house. Getting out of that now would be easy, but at the time, let me tell you!
• Unfinished Business: Ghosts are tethered to this world by their unfinished business. Completing it gets rid of the ghost permanently. They have no interest in "moving on" as the mortals call it, simply viewing it as a death to be avoided at all costs. Ghosts get very upset when the living suggest it.
• Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Flash Bang, one of the elite four of the Slayer Association, advocates hunting down and destroying all supernatural threats indiscriminately. This puts her at odds with Nailbat.
• Vengeful Ghost: Parodied with Zephyr Breeze, who died a virgin and now seeks vengence on anyone who's ever gotten busy, but is too pathetically weak to actually follow through on it. Pinkie effortlessly vaporizes him after realizing he was just a smokescreen for Aria Blaze who is also vengeful, but for something that happened after her death.
• Villainous BSoD: When she finally accepts that the witch who defeated her really is Twilight Sparkle, who she spent her life idolizing, Trixie's worldview shatters. She becomes depressed, not bothering to lift her head out of the mud she's lying in and cooperates with everything the group asks of her.
• Wandering Culture: The Apple Family are a clan of nomadic werewolves that travel from place to place as a caravan, not welcome in any one city for long. They're worshipers of the Darklord as well.
• Was It All a Lie?: Twilight's relationship with Flash Sentry was this, which led her to assume that all relationships would inevitably lead to betreyal and that no one could be trusted. It takes her a long time to finally let her emotional guard down and accept that Rainbow Dash really is her friend.
• Weather-Control Machine: Rarity's castle has a perpetual thunderstorm machine which she uses to "create a drab atmosphere to match the darkness in her soul."
• We ARE Struggling Together: The Elite Four all hate each others' guts, especially Flash Bang and Nailbat, and the Slayer Association is highly factionalized between their supporters as a result, to the point where they regularly fight with each other. Nailbat is already preparing for an all-out civil war.
• Wonderful Werewolf: Applejack and her family are friendly werewolves... as long as they don't let their transformation go too far.
• Workaholic: Twilight became as powerful as she is by training as much as seventeen hours a day. Before meeting Rainbow Dash, she considered anything unrelated to magic a waste of time.
• Zombie Advocate:
  • Nailbat, another of the elite four, insists that some of the monsters are "merely harmless, oppressed minorities caught in too wide a net." He also wants to decriminalize mental disorders.
  • Rainbow Dash becomes this as well on behalf of her new friends. She wants to prove that not all monsters are evil and gain the political power to allow them to peacefully coexist with normal society.
• Zombie Apocalypse:
  • While the curse of undeath persists zombies can't be permanently killed, they just sink back into the ground to regenerate years later. Since ponies don't eat meat, pony zombies don't either. The normal ones are mostly harmless aside from causing famines by eating crops. The zombies become vastly more dangerous during a Blood Moon, however.
  • The Griffon Empire wasn't so lucky, being carnivores themselves. Their civilization was completely destroyed by the undead. The surviving griffons aren't allowed into other nations because they would introduce carnivorous zombies into any region they live in.

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