The Known World Universe, created by Prince_Staghorn, is a massive world-building project surrounding several fics. It is best described as a mix built out of several franchises, with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic being the main base.
The main setting is a universe where the changelings — thanks to Chrysalis' son Staghorn — made peace with the ponies several weeks after the Canterlot Invasion, but that is one of only the smaller details that separate it from the show.
The stories can be found here
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The fics themselves are divided into several sub-groups. The published works are:
- Peace at Last — takes place during and after the show's setting, mostly focusing on the exploits of Prince Staghorn.
- Peace at Last?
- Peace at Last Side Stories: Back in Neighpon
- Peace at Last Side Stories: the Prince and the Queens- Book 1- Ambrosia
- Peace at Last Side Stories: Cantelot Madness
- Peace at Last Shorts: Taking Time Off
- Tales of Old — These stories take place before the show, establishing the history of the Known World Universe.
- Tales of Old: The Princess' Mistake
- Tales of Old: The Gardener's Tree
- Tales of Old: Dragon Slayer
- Lyra's Voyages — These take place during the show, and focus on the exploits of Lyra Heartstrings.
- Lyra's Voyages 1: Small Beginnings
- Lyra's Voyages 2: On Strange Tides
The rest of the universe is fleshed out in an accompanying side blog.
This Fic Contains Examples Of:
- Action Girl: Double, in spades. Some mention also go to other females within the established universe.
- All Trolls Are Different: They're apelike synapsid mammal-reptiles, to begin with, and include both sapient species and animals. Animalistic trolls include gugs, rakshasas, and frost trolls, while river, night and island trolls are sapient.
- Bears Are Bad News:
- In addition to the Ursa seen in the show, the Known World contains the aggressive but herbivorous Cave Bears, the exclusively carnivorous Dire Bears, aquatic Sea Bears, and a variety of other species.
- Special mention goes to the Oniguma, a Neighponese bear that can move rocks that 10 stallions together can't push, and a taste for equine flesh.
- Also, D&D's owlbears make an appearance.
- Bee People: Done literally with the Bumbles, as well as the Beebras.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Dolphins are known for their child-like innocence, and at first seem quite cute and cuddly... until you realize that this innocence leads them to classify things solely as either 'fun' or 'not fun,' with murder and rape falling into the former category.
- Bilingual Bonus: Peace at Last Side Stories: Back in Neighpon has this, with text in Japanese (Neighponese), Vietnamese (Ib'xian), and Swedish (Poatsi). The world-building site also has Macedonian (Griffonese).
- Crossover: My Little Pony meets Dungeons and Dragons meets World of Warcraft meets hundreds of other things. Additionally, it crosses several fandom universes in with it, including Past Sins, Ask King Sombra, and Ask Fluffle Puff.
Word of God even describes the universe of the Known World as a "dump" universe, which freely mixes elements of various other things - Cthulhumanoid: D&D's Mind Flayers exist here, as do the Moon Things of H.P. Lovecraft.
- Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Subverted and invoked. While the Dragons here are stated to be descended from varanid lizards, making them closer to the marine reptiles known as the mosasaurs, certain dinosaur species can actually breathe fire, and more than a few species of dinosaurs have foregone feathered wings in favor of bat-like wings. However, most characters in the setting seem to know the difference between the two.
- Elemental Embodiment: Elementals are a kind of ethereal being, and varieties exist for all six in-universe elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Void, and Aether.
- The Fair Folk:
- Changelings and their relatives were called "Fairy Folk" centuries ago, and most fit the bill for being mysterious. Subverted in the fact that now they're known to be fairly common.
- Case in point is that Breezies are mostly carnivorous. Sure, it's small things, but they're still predators!
- In a similar vein, in Neighpon (the setting equivalent to Japan), all magical beings besides kirin and changelings were lumped together as "yokai"; earth pony and pegasus explorers were given the same classification as well before the two races made formal contact with one another.
- Flying Seafood Special: A great deal sea life seems to have adapted for life in the sky.
- Airborne whales include Mirrorcas from the IDW MLP comics and sperm whale-like airbeasts straight out of Leviathan.
- There are quite a few species of flying sharks as well, including massive ones that hunt the aforementioned air whales and smaller ones that generate lightning.
- Frazetta Man:
- The Yahoos, a family of mostly bipedal apes found all over the planet and descended from a line of australopithecines that never developed sapience, definitely fall into this trope. Although none of them are actually sapient, a large number of them can be quite dangerous to sapient species.
- Eoanthropes, a sapient species of bipedal and carnivorous apes native to Stirrope, are an even better fit. They are an entire species of violent sadists, relishing the pain they cause their prey and caring for nothing but for their survival of themselves and their tribe, and regularly engaging in murder, rape and cannibalism. They have no advanced technology — stone tools and some limited use of arrows and blow darts are the most they have — and their vicious natures are why they have never developed civilization, despite being fully sapient. They are also a deliberate callback to the use of this trope in pulp fiction.
- Full-Boar Action: Numerous species of aggressive suids exist, including ferocious dire boars used as war beasts by the griffins, and various species of predatory entelodonts.
- Hobbits: They were a species of dwarf earth pony, and died out 1,000 years ago or less for unknown reasons.
- Horny Vikings: An amusingly literal case with the reindeer of Tarandroland, who used to be Vikings and raiders in the past, as were their caribou ancestors.
- Kraken and Leviathan: Literal krakens and leviathans are both present in the setting as, respectively, a giant squid that creates whirlpools and preys on anything it can catch and a large, aggressive baleen whale. Besides them, there's great variety of various other giant squids and whales.
- Mix-and-Match Critters:
- Discord, for being made up of an alicorn (unicorn (kiang/narwhal/mammoth/yak/chiru/rhino/walrus/orangutan)/pegasus (bird/horse)/earth pony), a manticore (lion/bat/scorpion), a dragon (lizard/alligator/bat/wolf), a goat, a peryton (wolf/deer/eagle), a griffon (lion/eagle), and an Asian dragon (camel/clam/tiger/carp/rabbit/snake/cow/eagle), making Discord a mix of 32 creatures total.
- Unicorns are a mix of kiang/narwhal/mammoth/yak/chiru/rhino/walrus/orangutan because the author knows the extensive history of the unicorn enough to know the various base animals that started the myth.
- Our Elves Are Different:
- They're equines related to changelings, coming in the usual High, Dark, and Wood varieties, along with Orcs, Falmer-like cave elves, cliff elves, desert elves, and "gully elves".
- Certain types of deer, such as elk, eldar and the now-extinct megaloceri also fit the "elf" role. In fact, a thread detailing a war that began their fall from power is pretty much a Shout-Out to The Silmarillion.
- Our Fairies Are Different: They're intelligent humanoid butterflies, ranging from pony-sized to a foot tall, that came in two broad varieties, air fairies and flightless ground fairies. The first kind included various typical sprites, in addition to species resembling The Greys and The Flatwoods Monster. The second variety included leprechauns, goblins and brownies among others. There were also sea fairies with lobster-like tails, including the 18-foot-long umi-bozu. For reasons unknown, they went into decline around the time of Luna's banishment, and are now though to be extinct.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: They're enormous ponies taller than trees. There used to be several species, but all except Forest Giants, Frost Giants, and ten male Lastrygonians died out for various reasons, although one species may have survived in the peninsula of Brobdingrag.
- Our Gnomes Are Weirder: They're based on the Gizmonks of My Little Pony 'n Friends, and are a race of technologically savvy steampunk monkeys.
- Our Goblins Are Different: They're short, four-armed, carnivorous, wingless butterflies the size of an average pony, and they love making complicated weapons and traps.
- Our Orcs Are Different: There are two kinds. One is a type of elf, and has a strict honor system. By contrast, the Orks are a type of pig based on those in Warhammer 40,000. During the War of the Deer, two further varieties were created by crossbreeding the first type of Orcs with bicorns to serve as soldier races; the fierce but isolationist Urgals and the vicious Uruk-hai.
- Polluted Wasteland: Boardor fits this to a T: a homage to all manner of dystopian or post-apocalyptic franchises, from Fallout to Half-Life to Team Fortress 2, it's a massive area filled with irradiated wasteland, various mutated plants and animals, and the ruins of an ancient deer civilization.
- Sand Is Water: A number of beings, including sand worms, leviathans and giant sharks, swim through sand as if it were water.
- Sapient Cetaceans: Many sapient cetacean species exist. Sapient dolphins are completely innocent, dividing the world in "fun" and "non-fun" (as applies to them, individually) and being unable to distinguish "right" and "wrong", which leads to fairly strained relations with their sea pony neighbors. Sapient whales also exist, have more a more developed moral sense, and are extremely protective of sapient dolphins.
- Sea Monster: Plenty. The Known World's oceans are teeming with giant, aggressive sharks, whales, squid and octopi, sea dragons and prehistoric sea reptiles of every description, including a great many from other works of fiction.
- Shout-Out: There's a tree in Boardor that grows lemons which burst into flame when disturbed, a squid-like beast in Equestria that's essentially one giant homage to Ed, Edd n Eddy, even an abandoned griffin fortress known as Brodubiena, or as it's translated from Griffonese... Boatmurdered. Yes, THAT one.
- Stop Worshipping Me: The general stance most Draconequi have on cults dedicated to them. Exceptions exist, like Shub-Niggurath, but most are uncomfortable with being thought of as true deities.
- Take That!: The land of Tricornucopia from My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic exists here as well... as a tiny peninsula of swampy, nearly totally worthless land ruled over by an egomaniacal expy of Grand Ruler Celesto, who has set up a cult of personality in the same vein as Mao Zedong, except with, you know, absolutely zero power. To add insult to injury, the tricorn species itself is stated to be on the road to nonsapience.
- Threatening Shark:
- The Known World has megalodons of various types, hyper-aggressive wolverine sharks, two-headed sharks, and isonades from Japanese myth, among others.
- There are more unconventional kinds of shark, including various land sharks, sand sharks and sky sharks, all quite aggressive. There are also some varieties of shark that can generate lightning or fire as added bonuses.
- That said, this trope is subverted in a number of sharks species that are portrayed as small and timid, like many real life sharks.
- Too Dumb to Live: Yes, Furcifer, of course you can trust Reiziger to take the city of the elk in your name! That'll end wonderfully, won't it!
- Winged Unicorn:
- In several types! There's the normal alicorn, but also the Buraq (3 horns and 8 wings), the Isomnequus (bat winged), the Alimaricorn (alicorn in front, hippocampus in the back), War Alicorns (spiky, reptilian tails), a species that is labeled as [REDACTED], and Necromorphs (similar to "Marksaline" of Ask Fluffle Puff)
- These are downplayed, describing Celestia and Luna as magic prodigies for being able to nudge the sun and moon slightly. Most have the magical ability of a normal unicorn.
- A Wizard Did It: Any "impossible" evolutionary changes — such as Sea Ponies and Changelings — are explained by "Magic-fueled evolution", which basically says that ambient magic can cause a sudden mutation in unborn offspring, but only kickstarts it, letting natural evolution do the rest.
