Pony Fanfiction Thread

I'm honestly torn- I don't want to spoil it just in case folks disagree and (would) enjoy it, and it is relatively short. Let's just say it takes The Greatest Story Never Told a liiittle too far, and that, contrary to initial appearances, there's a good reason for the AU tag.

Or, if you prefer, the Elements of Harmony were a sham myth for distracting Nightmare Moon, and it was these unsung secret agent background ponies who rescued Celestia, purified Luna, and pulled the Mane Six's sorry, delusional plots out of the fire and made them Fake Ultimate Heroes.

Oh, FUCK that noise. I hate that fanfic trope so much.

Woot, that's an easy Read Later removal then.

And the ONLY. REASON. That piece of shlock has an overwhelmingly positive rating is because people just loooooove them some background ponies. Guarantee if you took them out and swapped them with OCs, it'd be hated. You won't even have the change the words, just the names.

Ugh. I hate stories that build up their protagonists by undermining the achievements of the canon heroes.

I use The Greatest Story Never Told in my story, but only by having my protagonist work in a completely different field from the mane six and solve completely new crises.

Mm. Not promising. But I suppose that depends on the portrayal of the canon characters.

An AU I can be fine with. Taking a dump on canon characters is another matter entirely.

Can anyone recommend a good one-shot? Something poetic and powerful, preferably.

We Had Today is pretty good.

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/167177/where-have-the-stars-gone

They aren't really "portrayed" at all, outside of a few snapshots of the events from the episode and an extra Rarity cameo. They aren't "dumped on" in the same way as in the Lunaverse (...Or So I Heard), they're just clueless in the larger perspective. Or, to misquote the Dude, "They're not assholes, they're just wrong."

Eh. That doesn't sound so bad, but I can certainly sympathize with the off-puttingness of it in general.

Take'er easy, Dude.

How funny would it be if FS had a plain' ol' horse in her cottage, one with the approximate intelligence of a chimpanzee?

• whinny!*

"Ah, Fluttershy, this thing's so big and scary!" said Applebloom.

"There there, girls, you just need to treat it with care. Here, give Speedy a lump of sugar, will you, Sweetie Belle?"

"Okaaay..."

"Now, be careful in the way you place your hoof, you must make it easy for him, otherwise he might bite right though! We wouldn't want that, now, would we?" Fluttershy says as she scratches the horse between the ears.

"Eep!"

"Man, look at those massive cheeks! Those jaws have power!" Scootaloo says, enraptured, as Speedy grabs his sugar lump and makes a happy whinny sound.

"Horses are beautiful creatures," Fluttershy muses. "You know, I used to draw those all the time as a kid. I had comics and everything." Her gaze turns wistful. "My favourite character was one clever whipper-snapper, the guile hero of the prairies... I called him James Baxter."

"J-j-j-aaaaaames Baxturrrph," Speedy approximated.

"Isn't it cute when animals try to talk?"

edited 22nd Nov '14 2:06:10 PM by TheHandle

When you say "Lunaverse", are you talking about Frigid Winds, Burning Hearts? Because that story was grade-A character assassination. I've never seen a story make Celestia out to be such a piece of shit.

I seem to remember a story told through Ask A Pony blogs where everybody was on a cruise ship, and Celestia wore a Santa hat for whatever reason. I can't recall the name, though.

edited 22nd Nov '14 2:21:54 PM by Jinxmenow

I think the issue in this case isn't that other people are doing things behind the scenes, it's that it retroactively make the Mane6's contributes mean nothing. The Greatest Story Never Told is fine when it's used in addition to canon accomplishments (i.e. like how Meta's fic has Derpy solving problems the mane6 aren't even aware of), but when it replaces them it's a problem.

I remember that one, the whole cruise was a death trap, and led to a haunted island resort, and the ask blogs got killed or taken out one by one.. it was an interesting idea but you could tell the people running it were overwhelmed and no one really worked out what they were doing and were overwhelmed by things.

This. See also the fic I Shall Not Name. Granted it does have an AU tag, but when you keep things SO close to the original while still altering them like that... might have worked better if in this case, Twilight never met the Mane 6 or they didn't go with her, so the BG ponies were going along behind Twi and saving the day to make up for that fact.

edited 22nd Nov '14 2:26:34 PM by Seraphem

Vocational Death Cruise? Fuck, I swear people were just making shit up as they went. Nothing made sense or connected.

I mean RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse. Though the other one is, perversely, also on my list to check out. Supposedly it used to be even worse but got revised, and I'm curious on the details.

Ah yeah that one. And yeah, they might have had some vague idea about what they wanted to do, but totally got lost by how many people were there, and so many things just never worked well together. Good idea, but they really didn't get things planned right.

Edit:

@Jinxmenow: No, this is the Lunaverse. It's an AU where Celestia fell to greed a thousand years ago, Luna banished her, and in the present Trixie is the Element of Magic with popular background ponies as the other Elements.

It technically began with Boast Busted, but Logest Night, Longest Day and its sequels are more what people think about when you say "Lunaverse".

edited 22nd Nov '14 2:54:26 PM by Unknownlight

As it turns out I find it fun to write
Zecora's inner monologue in the
blank iambic meter even though it
doesn't rhyme except by blindest chance.

It is a pain to write like that although
I hope with practice I will grow to be
at ease with such contrived kinds of speech.

Vocational Death Cruise? Fuck, I swear people were just making shit up as they went. Nothing made sense or connected.

As someone who participated in it I can confirm that was, in fact, what happened. The winners of various events got hints into the overarching story, I guess as an attempt to streamline things as people got eliminated? As time went on more and more story beats came up and people started to figure out a sort of real plot. I stopped paying as much attention after I dropped out, but it looked like it kind of splintered into a few blog-specific storylines after a while.

so, just read a pretty interesting fic: Supersymmetry. Long story short, Nightmare Moon is actually from an alternate universe Equestria where she rules with her sister, Solar Flare. Luna's corruption was NMM somehow being torn from her verse and forced to co-inhabit Luna's mind, causing both of them to slowly go insane. But with Luna's cleansing, NMM was finally freed and returned to her own verse after also having been gone for 1000 years. Except now there's a magical link between NMM and Luna, a link that can be followed...

what's really nice about it so far is that the author is doing a really good job at avoiding Stupid Evil with Solar flare and NMM, while still showing that they are what most would call evil.

edited 22nd Nov '14 10:32:57 PM by Blissey1

I've finished up the rewrites for the first chapter of Queen. I'd appreciate anybody who can take a look at it.

Anyone know any 'fucking METAL' fics?

I dunno about fics, but there's a fucking metal tumblr

too bad it's dead...

edited 23rd Nov '14 3:49:52 AM by Blissey1