The End of Ponies is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic by shortskirtsandexplosions.
A horrible cataclysm has turned all of Equestria into a wasteland of barren ash and twilight desolation. The Sun and the Moon have been destroyed. Everypony has died — including Princesses Luna and Celestia. But one pony miraculously survives; she is a lone wanderer, the last of her kind, surrounded by menacing creatures that hate her. She navigates the Wastes in an airship and scavenges off the blighted landscape to keep herself alive.
Then one day she meets an old companion who grants her a gift: the chance to go back in time to Pre-Cataclysm Equestria, when her friends were alive and well. How far will the last pony venture into these joyous days of Equestria, even if she fully knows that there is no way to change the horrible fate of everypony she loves?
It can be read at Equestria Daily
or FIMFiction.net.
This fanfic contains examples of:
- All Trolls Are Different: They are creatures made by Discord in the First Age to wage war, they are purely hateful beings, and sunlight turns them to stone but twilight restores them.
- Apocalypse How: Class 3. Excluding the protagonist, ponies have gone extinct.
- Bittersweet Ending: Multiple times. The time travel arcs have well-earned and cathartic happy endings, especially the Fluttershy and Dredgemane ones. Then you remember that Everyone Dies a few months later anyway.
- Broken Ace: Years of living in the Wastes have given the protagonist a large repertoire of abilities, such as her engineering skills.
- Broken Bird: The protagonist. Years of living in the Wastes have jaded her, and even her life before that, as a homeless orphan in Ponyville was tough.
- Call-Back: In the first chapter of the story, the Last Pony is seen hunting a Phoenix in order to harness its natural flame. The bird in question is sent into a frenzy from her attempts, and in its delirium, nearly kills her a few times. Twenty chapters into the story, she has a flashback where Fluttershy tells her that it's a bad idea to anger a phoenix. She replies with a good-spirited "I'll be sure to never do that."
- Child Soldiers: Dredgemane employs underage guards.
- Corpse Land: Dredgemane, even before the end; it was the Grave of Consus, father of the Goddesses and first being to die in Equestria, and life there remains harsh and short.
- Crapsack World: Goes without saying; there's no sun, no moon, almost all of the surface is blanketed with snow/ashes and inhabited by mindless beasts, etc.
- Cultured Badass: The Last Pony; amazing warrior, survivor of the apocalypse and lover of classical music, Octavia’s in particular.
- Determinator:
- The Last Pony lived through the apocalypse at the age of eight and survived in the wasteland for 25 years before the story starts.
- Spike, if the years he's put into experimentation and research is any indication.
- Door Stopper: As of the end of chapter fifty-two, The End of Ponies is longer than the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And it's still incomplete.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Referred to as "the Cataclysm"; discovering how it happened drives the plot from Chapter 5 onward. As of Chapter 30, the Cataclysm may also be called (or have something to do with an event called) the "Onyx Eclipse".
- Evil Matriarch: Fluttershy's boss and mother.
- Fantastic Racism:
- Most of the survivors of the end hate ponies, blaming them for the loss of the Sun and Moon. The Last Pony is commonly referred to as a glue-stick.
- Dinky, as a half-pegasus ("half-wing") is subject to prejudice, which is why she's home-schooled.
- Bishop Breathstar towards Zebras
- Fantasy Pantheon: Seven Goddesses, including the Princesses, who were the only ones not to leave Equestria for the Heavens.
- Epona, the Mother of the Goddesses.
- Celestia and Luna, the goddesses of revolutions.
- Goddesses of Elements: Princess Elektra, the Goddess of the Land, and Princess Nebula, Goddess of the Firmaments.
- Goddesses of Law: Princess Gultophine, the Goddess of Life, and Princess Entropa, the Goddess of Time.
- There is also Consus, the dead god and husband of Epona.
- Freudian Slip: Harmony grew up without stallions around. It shows.
- Geometric Magic: Runestones form a special way to cast magic without a horn, a mostly lost art.
- Good Is Not Nice: Harmony is rude, violent, and a loner who is also determined to reduce the suffering in the world.
- Go-to Alias: "Harmony, Canterlotian Clerk" for the Last Pony.
- Graying Morality: Inverted; the Last pony starts off trying to sell Phelmonia for cash, and loots horns from dead bodies, but she slowly regains her faith in harmony and gains hope for the future.
- I Call It "Vera": Pinkie names the Infernite healing machine Alex.
- Irony:
- The hunt for Royal Grand Biv inspires the ponies of Dredgemane, more than Biv alone, despite the goals of Haymane.
- Harmony lied to Applejack, was harsh to Fluttershy, and dour with Pinkie, and learned about the strength of their elements instead.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: The description of the fanfic implied that time travel is involved in the story, but that doesn't come into play for the first few chapters. Other than that, the protagonist is Scootaloo and therefore a pegasus, and the "old companion" of hers mentioned in the description is Spike.
- Lightning Bruiser: Harmony, due to her borrowing a part of the power of Entropa, has more than enough Strength to buck over a healthy tree without even trying, and also resilient enough to Tank an entire horde of Trolls for several hours until the Sun rose up and still be alive and well, as well as eaten by a Hydra and go... ALL the way through... And be none the worse for wear. However, while she's certainly capable of taking a lot of punishment, there's only so much otherwise-fatal damage she can tank until the Magic anchoring her to the Past starts to fade, which can fling her back to the Present.
- Mystical Plague: Infernite Poisoning, contracted by in contact with the dead god Consus' blood dried blood, and is incurable. until Harmony came in.
- Non-Indicative Title: The titles of chapters 31-52 (the Pinkie Pie/Dredgemane arc) are all references to the titles of films, books, and episodes of television shows, edited to include "Pinkie", "Pink", "Pinkamena" and/or "Pie". Any relation between these references and the contents of the chapters is not immediately obvious (with some exceptions, such as "The Moon is Hollow and I have Touched the Pie", where Pinkie Pie's mortal remains are literally buried under a hollow chunk of the moon).
- Noodle Incident: An event from Pinkie's past is literally called such.
- Older and Wiser: Spike, thanks to his experiments with time travel, is 300 years older than in canon, even though only 25 years are stated to have passed since the time of the show. He serves as a mentor and ally to Scootaloo, and provides the means of her time travel.
- Our Goblins Are Different: Some live alongside Ogres on the edge of Equestria.
- Scenery Porn: Pre-Cataclysm Equestria, to the protagonist, at first.
- Shipper on Deck: Pinkie for Harmony and Deacon Dawnhoof.
- Shout-Out: At one point, Pinkie Pie finds a book titled "Suis tsbd" (most likely from being Pinkie, she read the title upside down).
- Star Power: Capricorns and Ursa Majors live in the aether and descend to reproduce.
- Straight Man and Wise Guy: Pinkie Pie as Wacky, Harmony as Straight.
- Title Drop: The protagonist often refers to herself as the End of Ponies, as she is the last one alive.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Fluttershy to Harmony over most of her arc, in particular her unwillingness to care about the fate of Dinky.
