That's how you reshape destiny...
A cross-over fic between Alan Wake and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.There is a shadow to all of existence, a place that all worlds are shielded from by a thin veil. A Dark Place, where a single presence plots and struggles to consume all creation with its darkness. The author Alan Wake is one who has defeated this Dark Presence, but to save his wife and his world Alan had to remain trapped in the darkness.
Now, through his struggles to return to his wife, Alan has unintentionally released the Darkness and an old villain upon Equestria. To fix the mistake, Alan starts a new story with Twilight Sparkle as the protagonist. Can the unicorn find the strength to face the darkness, or is all of Equestria doomed to be the victim in the dreadful horror story?
Can be read on Equestria Daily
or FiMFiction. Can be enjoyed without actual knowledge of Alan Wake.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- 11th-Hour Ranger: Thomas Zane appears to give Twilight helpful tips while Alan's out of commission thanks to his Heroic Sacrifice, and eventually ends up serving as the ponies' guide through the Dark Place.
- A Bloody Mess: During a fight, Twilight gets hit in the back of the head with something and feels a sticky substance dripping down the back of her neck. She fears it might be blood or even brains, but when she goes to check, it's just grape jelly.
- Alternate Continuity: To the authors' later My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic Past Sins. Both stories share the common element of Nyx, but are otherwise completely unrelated to each other.
- Author Avatar: Sort of. To summarize the first chapter in a nutshell, Alan Wake is suffering from writer's block and gets fascinated by My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, becomes a brony and then writes fanfic about it. Does that sound familiar? And then if that was not enough... He writes himself into the story as a pony. All this is done realistically and completely in-character.
- Balance Between Good and Evil: The Dark Presence is especially stringent about enforcing this, as the one time Alan underestimates the balance, he finds he's quite literally missing a piece, with part of his body being replaced with Darkness once he returns to the Dark Place.
- Big Damn Heroes: How Alan fully enters Creeping Darkness's narrative — by firing a flare gun that dispatches the Taken surrounding Twilight and her friends. The seventh chapter, "A Writer Races the Shadows" tells the story of how he ended up there in the nick of time.
- Call-Back:
- Enforced. Alan initally writes himself into Creeping Darkness as a Zane-like mentor figure that appears in Twilight's dreams and points her in the direction of the Old Gods of Asgard, appearing to her in a manifestation of the Andersons' farm. The chapter following this vision has Alan detail that this was more for his own sake than for Twilight's, as it reminded him of the real world, and what he was fighting to get back to.
- Alan's pony form comes with a "flaming eye of Mordor", a detail which Alan explicitly credits Barry for.
- Alan directly quotes his internal realization from the last game about how the Dark Place works when finding out what it would take to bring Twilight back to life:
There’s light and there’s darkness, cause and effect, guilt and atonement. But the scales must always balance. Everything has a price... and usually that’s something that works against us. But, this time, it’s a truth that has a silver lining. When everything has a cost, everything has a price. It is possible to write Twilight back to life, there is some price that can be paid. - Canon Welding: Implied; in his opening journal, Alan mentions writing short stories as an attempt to test the limits of the Dark Place, explaining the events of the DLCs as well as American Nightmare.
- Crossover: Between My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Alan Wake.
- Darker and Edgier / Lighter and Softer: A bit of both. Being a crossover, Creeping Darkness is much darker and edgier than My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, but at the same time, is much lighter than Alan Wake. Alan even Lampshades this when pointing out how innocent and childish Equestria is compared to his universe.
- Equestria Daily's entry on it Lampshades it by tagging it "Grim Light".
- Dark Is Evil: A trope carried over from Alan Wake. However, night is not evil, only the darkness it brings.
- Death Is Cheap: By the end, Twilight ends up dying... temporarily.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Not only did Alan manage to end his story on a happy note, but it's hinted that he has gained the inspiration to finish "Return".
- Also, Everybody Lives. Not even Nightmare Moon dies... sort of.
- Enemy Without: Nightmare Moon is treated as this, and has her own friend without with her inner child Nyx.
- Exact Words: To circumvent the "life for a life" policy and bring Twilight back, Nightmare Moon exchanges her experience — "a life lived, but not the spark of life itself" — which proves a good enough substitute that the Dark Presence accepts it.
- Frying Pan of Doom: Applejack's weapon of choice.
- Greater-Scope Villain: While Nightmare Moon starts out as an entity separate from the Dark Presence, the Presence eventually starts wearing her face as it did Barbara Jagger's.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Alan performs one, holding off the Taken assaulting Twilight, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy with the fireworks he stole. He's brought back once the story ends, at the cost of Twilight's life.
- Light 'em Up: Twilight's main weapon is her ability to use magic to create light.
- Lock-and-Load Montage: Alan Wake gets one as a pony. Then he immediately trips over his new body.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Averted — the first chapter serves as a recap of Alan Wake, acclimatizing those who aren't familiar with the property to the rules of the world.
- Mythology Gag: The story's logo, as depicted in the page image, once again has Alan standing in the middle of an "A", like in promotional materials for the first game.
- Only Mostly Dead: They're not dead, they're Taken. Getting them back won't be easy, though.
- The Power of Friendship: Used both for creating giant laser beams and making friends.
- The Power of the Sun: Celestia has this. And because the narrative calls for it, it still doesn't save her.
- Private Eye Monologue: It's Alan Wake, it comes with the territory.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Applejack, early on in the story, is taken by the Darkness per the rules of the genre. This gives Alan no end of grief and does not earn him any favors with Rainbow Dash.
- Sequel Song: "Writer's Folly", the new song written by the Old Gods of Asgard for this story, explicitly indicates that it serves as a sequel to "The Poet and the Muse" in its first verse. It also shares the same general structure and rhyme scheme.
- Take a Third Option: Alan writes himself into a corner, with the Dark Presence demanding that Alan give up both his humanity, as well as his ultimate control over the story. He fulfills both requirements by writing himself into the story as a pony.
- Troperiffic: Creeping Darkness is very self-aware. To start off it's about Alan Wake, a thriller novelist, becoming a brony and writing My Little Pony fanfiction - all while trapped in The Dark Place. Alan explains certain narrative devices that he has to use in order for the story to "work" and be contiguous with its own logic. At the same time he tries to keep things as light and fluffy as he can in order to keep the innocence of the protagonist and in-universe setting.
- The Worf Effect: Justified and in-universe. The two strongest characters with the highest chance of being able to defeat The Darkness all on their own ( Celestia and Luna. The former having the power of the very sun itself!) are defeated off-screen at the very start of the story. Alan Wake Lampshades this as being necessary for a horror story, which is the only kind of story The Darkness will allow. He states that unless the protagonist is put in a bleak and hopeless situation, then it just wouldn't be horror."Any good horror story requires that the protagonist be out gunned, over powered. The reader has to believe there is an honest chance the story will end poorly, as some horror stories do. The situation needs to be almost hopeless. If the protagonist could fight back and have a good chance of victory, then it wouldn't be a horror story. It'd be a fantasy story or adventure novel."
- What The Hell, Author?: Delivered by Rainbow Dash to the ponyfied Alan Wake after he enters the story to try and help out Twilight and the other ponies. Given that Dash thinks that Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie are all dead or worse, it's somewhat justified. And his words to her, Fluttershy, and Twilight only make it worse:"This is all happening because I brought you here."
