Bon Bon's voice is funny, and that's about all that anypony who meets her notices, as her marefriend Lyra soon steals the spotlight with her explosive personality, strange obsessions, and curious beliefs. And why not? Bon Bon is, after all, a perfectly ordinary, boring pony in every way but two: her voice, and the carefully kept secret that she isn't really a pony.
Mendacity is a 2012 My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic by Dromicosuchus. It can be read here
. It retells the story of "A Canterlot Wedding" from the point of view of beloved background characters Lyra and Bon Bon.
This My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic contains examples of:
- The Ageless: It is a major point of pride for the Fae that they never age and can expect to live forever, unlike mortals who are born with timers counting down to their deaths. However, it turns out to be quite wrong — they age and die just like anybody else, and appear ageless only due to spending so much of their lives in the timelessness of Tír na nÓg. Under the right conditions, they experience the same slide into decrepitude that mortals do; it's just that their belief in their immortality is so strong that the aged Fae that do turn up are considered to be entire secondary species that try to mimic true Fae with outrageous lies.
- Bindle Stick: Bon Bon uses one of these, despite the logistical problems of using one when you're a quadruped — to hold one, a pony needs to hobble along in a very awkward three-legged gait.
- Blessed with Suck: The Bugul Noz explains that Discord created the Fae this way, as a cruel joke, by giving them immense power while making them fatally vulnerable to the most common metal in the world and subject to various weaknesses and bans from a variety of arbitrary and common animals, plants, objects.
- Chekhov's Gun: Bugganes, Bon Bon's iron poker, and Lyra's Fing-er are all introduced offhand early in the story and come to play important roles in the climax.
- Cold Iron: The touch of iron is agonizing to the Fae. Bon Bon tries not to let it in the house and can't wear iron shoes. The reason they're so vulnerable to such a common metal is because Discord thinks that he's very funny.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Not tea, but Bon Bon and Aldrovanda have a reasonably polite conversation with an entity who refers to Discord as its nephew.
- Deadpan Snarker: Bon Bon and Aldrovanda spend much of their time together trying to out-snark each other, with Bon Bon preferring understated acidity and Aldrovanda going for a constant stream of abstruse insults.
- Edible Ammunition: Bread is one of the many things that repels the Fae.
- Eldritch Location:
- The homeland of the Fae, Tír na nÓg, is an extradimensional space made of stolen time.
- The swamp around the Canterhorn is unnaturally natural, thanks to the Bugul Noz's influence.
- The Fair Folk: The Fae are alien, cruel, and wicked beings, who delight in tormenting ponies and each other and seek to one day rule the world as they did in days long gone.
- Gentle Giant: The Bugul Noz is a towering, monstrously powerful being, but is also very restrained in how he uses his powers and personable towards strangers.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: The changeling Queen Chrysalis is an important antagonist, as in the episode on which this story is based.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Bon Bon wants nothing more in life that to leave her past among the Fae behind, never have to think about Tír na nÓg again, and live the quiet, happy, boring life of a confectioner.
- Insecure Love Interest: After her hidden nature puts Lyra in danger, Bon Bon is convinced Lyra will be better off without her.
- Interspecies Romance: Lyra and Bon Bon, although Lyra doesn't seem to realize it. Lyra is a unicorn, while Bon Bon is a changeling pretending to be a pony.
- Involuntary Shapeshifting: Bon Bon's voice, as part of a Mythology Gag, varies randomly between tones, pitches, and accents because she has trouble keeping her vocal cords in a stable shape.
- Jerkass: Almost all of the Fae, and Aldrovanda in particular, are spiteful, backstabbing, and cruel as a matter of course.
- Large Ham: Aldrovanda. She has a particularly inflated opinion of herself and enjoys hearing herself talk, and tends to fill both conversations and her constant idle talk with complicated insults, grandiose self-compliments, and long off-topic rambling.
- Lower-Deck Episode: The fic retells the Season 2 finale from the point of view of a fan-favorite background character.
- Mage-Hunting Monster: Bugganes are Fae creatures resembling enormous blind moles. Like all Fae, they need magic to live, but cannot produce any of their own and get instead by hunting down and eating other magical beings. Spells are effectively useless against them, and other Fae fear them immensely.
- Meaningful Name:
- Bon Bon's birth name, Mendax, means "liar" in Latin.
- Aldrovanda the kelpie is named after a type of carnivorous aquatic plant.
- Mind-Control Eyes: Changeling mind-control tints its victims' eyes green.
- Mix-and-Match Critter: The Bugul Noz looks like Discord taken up to eleven. His skin is a patchwork of hair, feathers, scales, slick skin and chitin from hundreds of animal species, his head and neck are crowned with dozens of horns and antlers, and two of his wings are chimeric mixes of bird, bat and insect limbs while the third appears to be a whale fin.
- Mythology Gag: Bon Bon's inability to control her voice is a nod to how her appearances in the show each tended to have a different voice actor.
- Our Kelpies Are Different: Kelpies are a type of fae resembling aquatic horses with manes made out of water-weeds. They're ambush predators that wait in lochs and swamps for ponies to pass by and then use glamors to tempt them into touching them, at which point their prey sticks fast to them and is dragged underwater to drown. Their skin will adhere permanently to any dry object; usually this is just their prey, whose remains will rot away in time, but as Aldrovanda spends more time on dry land she begins to accrete a steadily growing coat of pebbles, branches, and assorted junk. There are also shellycoats, which claim to be old kelpies covered in their own coats of detritus — normal kelpies hate them, because the idea that Fae can age and die like mortals is considered an insulting heresy, but it turns out in the end that Fae can in fact age, and that the kelpies' insistence that the shellycoats are deluded liars is, itself, only a willful delusion.
- Painting the Medium: The narration describes the realm of Faerie in long paragraphs of run-on sentences, distinct from the rest of the story.
- Poor Communication Kills: Bon Bon is very aware that her refusal to tell Lyra the truth puts her in danger, but has difficulty working past her fear of rejection to bite the bullet and own up to what's going on.
- The Power of Love: Bon Bon helps Lyra to resist Chrysalis' Glamour by reminding her of their love. Off-screen, this is also what eventually defeats Chrysalis.
- Reality Warper: The Fae's magic works by twisting and altering reality, and, as it turns out, reality tends to fight back when the Fae do this too often. The Bugul Noz is the exact opposite — he removes strangeness and alterations to make reality more real to an uncanny degree.
- Red Right Hand: Aldrovanda can't alter her eyes when she shapeshifts.
- Shout-Out: One of the... things... that Bon Bon sees when she almost passes into Faerie appears to be a ponyfied Slender Man.
- Shown Their Work: The fic incorporates numerous references to real-world mythology and folklore.
- Summon Bigger Fish: Bon Bon's solution to Chrysalis is to rouse a buggane, a feared magic-eating monster, and to lure it towards the queen.
- Tempting Fate: This happens to Bon Bon often enough that she is utterly unsurprised to find out that the universe literally does have it out for her.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Many of the Fae can either shapeshift or use glamors to the same general effect. Bon Bon has never been much good at it.
- Weaksauce Weakness: The Fae are vulnerable to "the most common metal in the world" and to "randomly chosen plants, creatures, and objects". According to the Bugul Noz, Discord created them this way as a cruel joke.
- You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Aldrovanda usually calls Bon Bon by her Fae name Mendax. She only calls her Bon Bon when she's really desperate to get her attention.
