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Fanfic / Songs of the Spheres

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sots_fimfic_cover.png
Cover by Spiralling-Vibrance. Used with permission.

Songs Of The Spheres is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between more than 20 different franchises written by GM Blackjack.

The multiverse exists and contains 10 quintillion universes. Some containing and inhabited by Type V civilizations, others inhabited by denizens much, much lower on the scale than that. The story focuses on a particular group of ponies led by Twilight Sparkle, who after finding a black sphere with the power to travel to other universes discovers the multiverse and all the good (and bad) that comes with it.There's a lot of good and bad.

As of April 20, 2020, this fiction is now complete, but there are others in the same multiverse, such as The League of Sweetie Belles.

Spoilers before the beginning of Arc 3 are unmarked. Proceed at your own risk.

    List of series that Songs of the Spheres includes or references 

Tropes in Songs of the Spheres:

  • Alien Non-Interference Clause: Turns out that the warnings about the Starcross Society are because, after their rather overbearing, fascist civilization fell apart, they (being the rebellion) really don't want to mess with anyone else in the universe, and think that any growing multiversal civilization will inevitably become like their old one.
  • Alliterative Title: Songs of the Spheres.
  • All There in the Manual: The SpaceBattles thread is chock-full of background information on the Multiverse and its denizens.
    • The Influence counts too, serving as the backstory for Vriska and Twilence.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: The more the protagonists expand through the multiverse, the more powerful antagonists appear, leading to cases where even some truly evil characters decide to throw in their lot with the white-hats for the sake of self-preservation.
  • Anyone Can Die: Oh yes. Over the course of the story, several major characters bite the dust, including most notably Twilight in Chapter 34 but also Sparky, Princess Celestia, Aang, Queen Luna of Lai and Joseph Joestar.
    • During the Collector arc, Lieshy is killed by Morty, despite having gotten through the self-actualization door in the Dark Tower.
  • Apocalypse How: Class X-3 happens temporarily to several of the original worlds, including Equis Vitis, courtesy of the University of Doors.
    • A major Class X-4 befalls a mirror universe of Equis Vitis in Chapter 34, taking with it Twilight and the population of that universe, leaving Twilight-X to carry on as Evening Sparkle.
  • Arc Number: 19.
    • Also 13 to a lesser extent. Thirteen arcs are planned, with thirteen chapters in each. Thirteen characters get most of the screen time.
  • Arc Villain: Ba'al serves as one for Arc 1. Then Majora takes over for Arc 2 and the University of Doors for arc 3, Brutalight and Siron become this in a duo for Arc 4, the Starcross Society for Arc 5, the Collector for Arc 6, and the Combine for Arc 7.
  • "Ass" in Ambassador: Valentine from the USM straight up threatens to kill the ambassadors of the Merodi to get his way.
  • Audience Participation: Sombra's Clipshow and it's sequel are chapters that are mostly written by the readers and editors, rather than the author.
  • Author Powers: Powerful prophets such as Stephen King, Andrew Hussie and GMBlackjack himself are some of the most powerful beings in the multiverse.
  • Birth-Death Juxtaposition: For a crossover that involves Avatar: The Last Airbender, it is a given. When Aang falls at the Bloodbath in 052, Corea is born with the avatar spirit. It symbolizes the birth of the Merodi, even if the Bloodbath hit it hard.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The End of Arc 4. The Merodi may now be a thing and Sirion is dead, but they have taken heavy losses at the Bloodbath and many of the older generation are also dead. Brutalight is still around and Eve has lost her mentor figure
  • Book Ends: Black Thirteen, the cosmic 'bowling ball' which kicked off the plot, keeps coming back until the end. It becomes the ammunition for Roland's gun, and shatters the Tower.
  • Came Back Wrong: There's about a 50% chance that anyone brought back from the dead, outside of Void natives, will be a soulless, pathological monster. For some of them, it's immediately apparent. For others... not so much, not until the knife hits your back.
  • Chase Scene: Starts with one.
  • Creator In-Joke: Several characters and worlds appear that originate from the author's other works. Twilence and the Collector are the most prominent, but Seskii is a character from an unpublished story of the author's, and so her rare appearance often has the audience asking, 'wait, where did she come from?'.
  • Deadly Environment Prison: Nautica is used as one. It doesn't turn out well.
  • Death Is Cheap: Flutterfree dies in 055. She returns just fine. Subverted when someone Comes Back Wrong though.
  • Doorstopper: All 12 arcs are about 2 million words in total.
  • Doppelgänger: All too common with the more common universes like Equis and Earths.
  • Eagleland: The United States of the Multiverse is a dead ringer for a type 2.
  • Enemy Mine: First Ganondorf joins up with Link and Zelda to protect against a Goa'uld assault, and then Ba'al actually joins forces with the good guys.
    Colonel O'Neill: I know Ba’al. He’s willing to cooperate right now. It always happens when a bigger fish shows up. He can manipulate and deal with us in many creative and vile ways. He cannot deal with Majora.
  • Exact Words: Twilight will not outlive her friends.
  • The Federation: After 052 and the Bloodbath the Alliance becomes this in the form of the Merodi Universalis
  • First-Person Perspective: Shows up whenever Twilence appears.
  • Flashy Teleportation: One of the most frequently used unicorn spells, having flashes at destination and origin.
  • Godzilla Threshold: In order to defeat a mighty foe, Equis Cosmic's Twilight is imbued with the full might of the Tree of Harmony. It works, but it comes with the cost of the other species (Griffons, Dragons, etc.) going extinct.
  • Honor Before Reason: When Princess Luna takes Starlight and Trixie in stealing technology from Earth Tau'ri she immediately drags them through the portal, derailing the diplomatic attempt that Twilight has going.
  • Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Jotaro Kujo and Pidge after they get together towards the end.
  • I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: This is what kicks off the plot. The Black Sphere is what first enables the ponies to travel to other worlds.
  • Irony: There are only 12 books of 13 chapters each, despite 13 seeming to be the Arc Number. (The author decided that it couldn't be extended any further.) This led to some confusion when the Prophets became aware of the plan.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: 056. Well, not so much leaning on the Fourth Wall as completely demolishing it with TNT
  • Lemony Narrator: Rohan and Twilence have a tendency to fall into this.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover: The core concept of the story.
  • Meaningful Rename: In order to distinguish themselves from other versions of themselves, parts of the main cast take other names. eg. Starlight Glimmer -> Nova and Sunset Shimmer -> Corona. It is also used when something very impactful happens, like in 034.
  • Me's a Crowd: While they're all at least kind of unique, and have their own powersets, Sweetie Belles, Rarities, Pinkies and Twilights eventually come up with associations which include variants of themselves from all across the multiverse. The League of Sweetie Belles is at least a neutral good variant, while the Rarities are all about profit and fashion, the Pinkies are all about parties (quelle surprise), and the Twilights decide to create the biggest library commune ever. A lot of the Skaia ghosts wind up doing this, too, when they're not engaged in trolling one another.
  • Mind over Matter: One of the most widely used spells that unicorns can do.
  • Mood Whiplash: 022 bounces from really dark to overwhelmingly silly and back again multiple times, as befits the madness that is 'Esefem'.
  • The Multiverse: The characters travel between multiple different universes.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Brutalight
  • Omnicidal Maniac: Majora seeks to either exterminate or corrupt life in the universe and eventually in the multiverse.
  • One-Steve Limit: Also a part of why prominent characters take different names. With so many different incarnations of themselves, there's a good chance that they will run into themselves.
  • Order Versus Chaos: This is a big sticking point between Merodi Universalis and the United States of the Multiverse: they both emphasize freedom, but in different ways. And that's to say nothing about the Combine or the other high-class societies. By the end, it turns into something a lot more: whether to let the Dark Tower continue to screw with the multiverse and all of existence, or to wipe out the Tower's influence upon everything and start anew from a single universe.
  • Out-of-Genre Experience: By and large, the movie-length chapters (those with 30k+ words) are this.
    • Chapter 47, which covers the temporary capture of the protagonists by the SCP Foundation, consists entirely of a Foundation article.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: While Sirion and Brutalight are beaten back at the Bloodbath it comes at a ‘'very heavy’’ cost: Celestia, Queen Luna, Aang and many, many other fall in the Hub. Cosmo is reduced to a crystal skeleton too.
  • Portal Crossroad World: Several of these exist, the Dark Tower being the largest and the main one for the Alliance and later the Merodi being the Hub.
  • Recursive Fanfiction: There are a few laying around on the SpaceBattles forum.
  • Reference Overdosed: Oh god yes. There's references everything from Friendship is Witchcraft to Frostpunk.
  • Rule 50: The raison d'etre of the whole story.
  • Running Gag: The good ship Austraeoh keeps getting blown up, disintegrated, piledriving a lava floe, et cetera. By the end of the tale, they're up to 19 of them. The universe still can't kill suction-cup pony, though.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Combine are Straw Nihilist conquerors who own a large chunk of the E-Sphere.
  • Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness: Varies depending on the character. Fourth Wall Breakers and Prophets tend to be more towards the No Fourth Wall side while other characters tend to lean to the other side.
  • Show Within a Show: Multiversal Heroes, a fighting game starring many notable dimensional travellers.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Just about any notable multiversal society, the Seats being the prime examples.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Monika straight up looks through a computer screen at a reader in 048
  • The Meaning of Life: 048. 19
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Pinkie gives a particularly brutal one to the SCP Foundation at the end of Chapter 47.
    Pinkie: I was going to leave a silly remark, just to make you wonder, but you know what? I’m not going to. I’m going to be serious with you for the first time since you captured us. Strange, since we’re not captured anymore! Heehee!
    We’re gone. You can keep the dimensional device. Do whatever you want with it, we really don’t care. You already had objects that could do similar things anyway, though you’ll find that ours is much safer. Might even be able to solve a few problems for you!
    But we’ve left, and I don’t think we’ll be coming back. Why? Because you were horrible. You treated us like objects, as little things for your hands to play with, to see what it did. Some of you genuinely thought we needed to be contained, but the rest? You just had to scratch that itch in your mind. Had we stayed much longer, you would have traumatized us. As it is, you merely angered us. Angered some of us to the point of wanting to kill you.
    You want us to stay away. Because if we come back, it won’t be as friends.
  • Theory of Narrative Causality: This is basically what ka runs on...People with the abilities of a Prophet can manipulate this, some better than others.
  • There Is No Higher Court: The trial of the Gem Vein. Justified, as it is a special court convened solely for the purpose of that trial.
  • Title Drop "We are the Melody of our Worlds. "Songs of the Spheres." Music of Universes. Merodi Universalis."
  • Time Skip: Happens between arcs and also in arcs. By this point, several decades have passed since the first chapter.
  • Unexpected Successor: No one had expected Toph to be the successor to Queen Luna of Lai.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Rohan, having read his source material, knows what happens when other people know about the plan ahead of time.
  • Wham Episode: Chapter 034. Twilence shows up, the Multiverse is even more bendable than first thought and to top it all off, Twilight dies and a new Twilight, Eve, takes her place.
  • Which Me?: To prevent confusion, and to show off the fact that they've broken free of who they used to be, most of the ponies (and several other characters) come up with their own semi-unique identities, replacing their 'standard' names: Flutterfree Asquall, Evening Sparkle, Renee Jackson, et cetera.
  • Your Magic Is No Good Here: Universes without magic (arcane or spiritual) do exist.

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