Pony Fanfiction Thread

Yes. Fimfiction defines its "Human" tag quite broadly.

If it has humans, it gets the human tag.

Hi E has many problems besides the diversity of its protagonists

Such as? That are actually intrinsic to the idea?

I'm not going to get baited into another one-sided argument with you, Seraphem

An issue doesn't have to be intrinsic to the concept of a story to an issue. Ideas are cheap to the point of being worthless. Mind you, I take onus with certain things leading into FOE myself, but I, too, am not particularly interested in having that "discussion".

Who was it that wanted to write about Celestia inviting the yaks to the Grand Galloping Gala? Because someone already wrote something very similar: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/278352/6/yak-to-the-future/episode-98-make-new-friends-but-smash-the-old

That was me. That was amusing, but I feel like you could get a lot more out of the premise.

So, tried giving Diaries of a Madman another go.

You think it's a reasonable acknowledgement of Twilight's reach sometimes exceeding her grasp if she states that she just files the library books wherever she thinks they should go and the POV character ends up teaching her the Dewey Decimal system, or just Character Derailment?

I have that story on my Read Later, mostly for curiosity's sake.

Is it worth it?

Considering one of Twilight's major character traits is her adherence to protocol, it sure sounds like Character Derailment.

On the other hand, she's often been pretty airheaded about searching for stuff in the library. that said there's a difference between searching lazily and organizing lazily.

edited 17th Jul '15 10:27:30 PM by kegisak

She does actually demonstrate some pretty terrible librarian skills in the show, but I'm still not going to believe a Twilight Sparkle who doesn't organize.

I could buy Twilight coming up with her own organizational system that nobody but her and Spike understand, but I can't buy her not being organized at all.

@Unknown: Personally I dropped it/put it off at that point (middle of chapter 1), but that's such a minuscule sliver of the wordcount that I hesitate to answer in the negative and instead suggest deciding for yourself.

It's actually a setting derailment. Not a character one. Te Dewey Decimal System is not standard practice in Equestrian libraries. We know this from episode two "It was under 'E'!" as well as the fact that Twilight canonically reshelves and reorginises the library (this indicates that Equestrian library system has no standard orginisation method. Which is actually terrible)

Well, the point is the protagonist who brings it up is human (somewhat segueing from the earlier HIE discussion).

It's probably strange that I consider short chapters(short, in this case, being defined as <4K words, give or take) to be a turnoff from a story.

It's not like, Red Flag levels or anything, but it just strikes me as... lacking. Do all those things need to be different chapters? Can't you string them together? Those are scenes, not chapters!

OF course it could easily be argued I have the opposite problem(With chapter in excess of 16K words at times), so it's likely just a matter of taste, but still... it's odd what things will wind up giving me pause.

3000–5000 words is about as long as a chapter in a normal, printed novel though.

I admit that I generally prefer shorter chapters, updated more often.

edited 18th Jul '15 10:03:15 AM by Unknownlight

Doesn't matter to me, just the overall story. Does make sense for fanfics though, lets you get chapters out faster.

I can usually get multiple scenes out of ~3000 words. I tend to be a bit direct and spartan at times, though.

@Kegisak: It's one of those "there's no accounting for taste" things. I've seen some people who view chapter lengths of less than 5K words to be a red flag, and I've also seen people who say that a chapter should be at least that long. Some people just like to read it differently I guess.

So after re-reading Reflections, I had some new story ideas based on it. One of them is a one-shot. I have what I think is probably the first third or half of it done right here.

Basically the premise is that after the events of "The Crystal Empire" and the main-verse Sombra is destroyed, the alt-verse Sombra collapses.

The other story I had is more suited to an ongoing story - it takes place in the aftermath of the comic story and follows the characters trying to pick up after Celestia and Luna are reformed and Sombra, well...

edited 18th Jul '15 2:57:15 PM by Pannic

I generally pay more attention to total story length, rather than chapter length. Chapter length does affect the pacing, to a degree. I think total length is a better indicator of the story's execution and goals, though. This is especially true with web fiction, where the idea of chapters is so loose to begin with.

So I had an idea for the conclusion of If You Came to Conquer/Inexcusable. Some time after Nightmare Moon revealed herself to Celestia by attacking Tirek, she has a bad dream one night. She dreams that the Celestia from her original universe has come back to life, and somehow found her way to the current timeline.

She wakes up, and finds a Celestia with an obvious chest scar waiting at the foot of her bed. Celestia claims that Discord sent her over because he got bored, and she wants to eat Nightmare Moon's heart and take her place.

The original Celestia pops in, and this sets up the conflict of the story; how does Celestia respond to her obviously unhinged counterpart? Does she choose to kill her, let her die, or to actually let her kill her not-sister? And in the case of the former two options, would it make her understand what Nightmare Moon went through, or only make her resent Nightmare Moon more?

It came to me in that not-quite-dreaming-nor-awake state, so I'm not sure if it seems more feasible than it actually is. Plus I'm still not sure that story needs any more. The number of people who enjoyed the open ending were somewhat higher than the people annoyed by the vagueness. It is marginally less cliche than the other idea I had, about Nightmare Moon wiping her own memories to prove something to Celestia or whatever.

edited 19th Jul '15 4:22:42 PM by CleverPun

I hadn't thought it needed a sequel, but then I hadn't thought the first part did either.

Me either, but more than a few commenters made some cogent arguments otherwise. Plus, writing Uncanny Valley Celestia would be fun. I guess I'll revisit it after my current projects

Speaking of, have any of you ever had a moment where one idea gave you insight into a completely separate problem? The above idea made me realize what is wrong with that Culture Clash story; I made Sylvia the protagonist and tried to force change on her, even though that goes against her character. I need to rewrite it so that Lambent Dewdrop is the viewpoint character; s/he actually learns something, and Celestia's speech would be more poignant delivered to someone who will listen to it.

Don't know why I didn't realize that earlier. Maybe I was skeptical of making Lambent the main character because s/he is kind of generic, but the same could be said of Sylvia.