Fanfic / This Platinum Crown

Only one can wear the crown...

After the time-looped events of The Best Night Ever, Rarity's relationship with Prince Blueblood seemed to be a fairy tale come true. Perhaps so, but it was a fairy tale soon cut short. Her dreams and future position quickly earn her the attention of powerful enemies. Only one mare can bear the Platinum Crown of the Duchy of Canterlot and be heiress to its secrets and magics. The future of Equestria may well depend on that one mare being Rarity the Unicorn.

Can be read here or here.

---

This My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: Unicorn spells, especially the more powerful ones, use this. The level of alliteration is actually a measure of spell's power, going from one (or non-alliterative) to four (the maximum any modern-day unicorn can handle). Legendary unicorns of bygone times, as well as the Princesses, are said to be able to cast five-alliteration spells. in Chapter 47, we see Celestia bust out Iridium's Intense Incandescent Irradiation Imprisonment to annihilate a Changeling Queen. It is immensely impressive.
• Affably Evil: Lady Antimony is supremely agreeable and oftentimes downright amiable, at least when she doesn't have a metaphorical (or not-so-metaphorical) dagger at your throat.
• And I Must Scream: When Blueblood is replaced by a Changeling, they drug him and put him in an illusion that makes him think he's back in the "Groundhog Day" Loop from The Best Night Ever.
• Anti-Villain: Antimony may be a bitch, but she was legitimately interested in using her position as Baroness for the good of all, even if her family is brazenly corrupt. Ditto for the other mares vying for Rarity's position. They were played up to be villainous, as bad as Antimony herself, but they're all quite nice and share Antimony's goals towards helping their people.
• A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: Lady Euporie, as a titled hedonist, is renowned for throwing these. Chapter 26 sees Pinkie Pie attending one with her sort-of coltfriend, Pierce, though come the next chapter, she finds she doesn't quite like this sort of party. At least, not the way Euporie throws them.
• Arranged Marriage: Because Princess Celestia promised to reunite the Terre Rare and Blueblood family lines, Blueblood has suddenly become engaged to Lady Antimony. Antimony tries to soften the blow to Rarity's dreams of marrying Prince Blueblood by saying she'd make a fine First Mistress for the Prince.

• Big Bad Ensemble: After Antimony's defeat, Alpha Brass and Queen Chrysalis take over as the Big Bads. Though ostensibly working together it's no secret (at least to us) that they're both prepared to sell each other out at the drop of a hat.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Lord Cruciger and his children Polished Jewel, Chalice, Alpha Brass, and Antimony. Goes back to Arsenic, who was more than a little bit loony.
• Black Magic: Quite a few spells are mentioned that are officially banned in the modern era. "Old Magic", in general, seems to be purposefully forgotten... and for a reason. Chalice, for example, uses some Old Magic spell to become "Sagittarius", a sort of giant pegasus archer made of living stars (similar to the Ursa Minor and Ursa Major) which has an ultra-lethal Fantastic Nuke arrow that never misses its target and returns upon striking.
• Blood Knight: Ritterkreutz fights for the sake of fighting, and for the simple joy of throwing herself against powerful foes and knocking them down.
  Ritterkreuz: When I see a cloud, I want to fly up to it and kick it. When I see a wall, I want to break it down and see what’s on the other side. When I find a pony with a strong body and a strong will, I wanna fight them. Everypony and everything in this world is just another cloud or another wall to me.
• Calling Your Attacks: Ritterkreuz doesn't call hers aloud, but being an ex-Wonderbolt all of her attacks are named like airshow stunts, primarily the Galloping Grenadier. Dash, of course, has her Sonic Rainboom.

• Cargo Ship: Invoked and Played for Laughs. When discussing Twilight's engagement to Alpha Brass Pinkie comments that she always thought Twilight would bring a book to life and challenge Equestria's marriage laws regarding civil unions.
• Chef of Iron: Pinkie skills during the Black Wedding arc have consisted of weaponizing baker utensils and goods.
• Cover Identity Anomaly:
  • The Changeling that impersonates Blueblood doesn't know about the conversation that he and Twilight had about his family's archives. It's not enough to break his cover, but it does make her suspicious.
  • It quickly becomes apparent to Rarity that the Changeling is not Blueblood, as it lacks many of Blueblood's Character Tics. What ultimately proves to be its undoing is lack of knowledge of what Blueblood first said to Rarity on the morning after the Gala: "You're still here."
• Culture Clash: Between the Unicorn nobility and commoners. The most obvious is Rarity's insistence on becoming Blueblood's wife, rather than mistress, but it's hardly the only one. Twilight, being a minor noble with No Social Skills, seems to have generally filed any dissonance she's noticed as Eccentric Townsfolk.
• Darker and Edgier: With all the death duels, conspiracies, scheming nobles, psychotics, adult themes, it's much more serious than its predecessor.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Pinkie hopes for this between Rarity and Monee. It took a while, but it seems to slowly be happening.
• Door Stopper: Nearly 850,000 words as of Chapter 60, and still going. For reference, that's about 50% longer than the novel War and Peace.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Raging Storm, Vice-Captain of the Wonderbolts. She's serving with an active unit, but the constant abuse she showers on her subordinates places her closer to this than Sergeant Rock. Per chapter 30, this is why Spitfire was made Captain instead of her.
• Duel to the Death:
  • When a duel between unicorns ends in a tie (with neither one being humiliated) and the two sides still cannot let go of their grievances, they can choose to duel à outrance (or in English, to the death).
  • Ritterkreuz expects that this is how her fight with Rainbow Dash will end. It doesn't.
• Evil Can Not Comprehend Good: Though more like "Ambition Can Not Comprehend Love". During their duel, Antimony can not grasp why Rarity would want to marry Blueblood for reasons other than power.
• Evil Power Vacuum: Sort of. Not really evil per se, but when Rarity defeats Antimony, this allows all of the other mares that Antimony defeated previously for the right to marry Blueblood to remake their claim by challenging Rarity.
• Eye-Dentity Giveaway: The eyes of individuals under Changeling mind-control also apparently turn green.
• Family Theme Naming: The Terre Rare family continues the pattern of naming their daughters after metals begun with their ancestors in the ancient unicorn royalty. Besides Antimony, historical members of the family include their founder Lady Arsenic and her children Bismuth, Neptunium, and Kamacite.
• Faux Affably Evil: Alpha Brass is extremely suave and likeable, able to easily manipulate those around him, but he is seriously screwed up. Even Queen Chrysalis finds him disturbing and crazy, noting he's so messed up his emotions are completely inedible.
  Author: The tricky prospect with Brass is that his weapon is his charm and the fact that he is, or appears to be, likeable and reasonable. His strength is literally in the ponies he surrounds himself with.
• Foil: Quite common. The honorable Shining Armor is a foil to the charming but a bit unscrupulous Prince Blue Blood. Rarity, who wants to marry Prince Blueblood for love, is the foil of Lady Antimony is trying the same, but solely to acquire power. Pinkie Pie is the foil of Lady Euporie; both like good jokes and fun, but Euporie's frequently delve into cruelty and depravity.
• Freudian Excuse: Blueblood's aversion to flying cake seems to be a result of watching his father's death in a duel as a colt. Or it might be because he was frequently hit in the face with flying cake during The Best Night Ever.

• Go Mad from the Isolation: Antimony mentions having done this to others before. When she tries it on Rarity, Rarity turns it around on her by pointing out that Antimony had created an entire illusionary copy of Equestria completely empty of any other pony, where Antimony herself poses as an Alicorn.
• Gravity Master: Seems to be Cruciger's specialty. To the point where Colony Drop is a favored tactic of his.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Spike. While some soul-searching is involved, this is the reason he destroyed Blueblood's message to Rarity when the prince discovered his engagement to Antimony.
• Green Thumb: Naturally, an ability common to Earth ponies, but Lady Yumi takes it to the point where she can induce Everfree Forest trees to turn into Timber Wolves.
• Hammerspace: Pinkie Pie frequently finds and keeps assorted items in her tail or mane. Once, while having some trouble finding a pink brush, she notes:
  Pinkie: There sure are a lot of hammers in here.
• Happily Married: Cruciger and Twinkling Star Light are madly in love.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
  • It's implied that the Mane Six's levels in badass are a result of their connection to the Elements of Harmony; more directly, the Magic of Friendship is what allowed Rarity to defeat Antimony's illusory world.
  • Rarity's time as a seamstress has given her an eye for detail, skill at illusions (to aid in the presentation of her products), and helped her develop her telekinesis to very precisely manipulate many objects at once. It turns out that these are all very useful skills outside her boutique, too.

• Hidden Depths: Pinkie acting in a serious opera.
• Humanity's Wake: Lyra has a personal theory that humans existed long in the past, and that modern species built their civilizations based on their long-gone predecessors'. Twilight, and orthodox scholarship in general, thinks that humans are just fairy tales based on misinterpreted data, albeit with perhaps a disturbingly large amount of corroborating evidence.
  Lyra:Now I'm not saying it was humans, but just maybe it was humans.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Chapter 30 displays that Ritterkreuz was using only one wing for her Galloping Grenadier the whole time.
• Lethal Joke Item: Unicorn duels are fought with pastry in lieu of actual weapons. Sounds crazy at first, but they can use their magic to modify the pastries, effectively turning them into mind-controlled cannonballs smeared with paralysing venom (a numbing agent is an official ingredient in duelling pastries, to ensure that a hit duellist can't feign that they weren't).
• Master of Illusion: Antimony specializes in creating extensive and extremely life-like illusions, which allow her to trap foes in illusory worlds where she controls everything, from sights and sounds to physical sensations to the passage of time.
• The Mistress: Since there's such a high ratio of female to male ponies, it's apparently a quite acceptable practice for stallion to take one wife and have any number of mistresses. The children of the wife are the only ones allowed to inherit anything from said stallion, though. Apparently, this tends to differ in parts of Equestria; it's mentioned that in Southern Equestria, such as where Sand Dune comes from, illegitimate foals are legally just as valid as legitimate foals. This is one of the reasons why she's willing to form an alliance with Rarity, without striving to be Blueblood's mistress, if Rarity will let her conceive a foal by Blueblood.
• Mythology Gag: Twilight's freaking out about being sent back to "Magic Kindergarten" in "Lesson Zero" is explained here as a reference to one of Celestia's kookier training ideas; Twilight was wrapped with the illusion of being a kindergarten-aged filly and sent to a unicorn kindergarten, where she had to sustain the illusion perfectly over the course of the day or else be humiliated when it broke. This was Celestia's way of helping Twilight hone her stamina. Twilight then does something similar to help Rarity train for her duel with Antimony, though in Rarity's case she just has to blend into Cheerilee's school.
• Never Gets Drunk: Cruciger, despite spending an entire night drinking with Pinkie Pie, remains totally lucid throughout. He claims to be extremely hung-over but shows no sign of it.

• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Twilight, despite having her copy of Dueling for Dummies on hand, prefers to use a demonstration to show just what Rarity has gotten herself into.
• Parrot Exposition: Pokes a little fun on the readers.
  "Hey, Twilight." Dash suddenly seemed to think of something. "How do they pick the Daring Doo authors anyway? Can anypony just write a Daring Doo story and send it in?"
  "I think the publisher owns the rights to it, but there's always fanfiction."
  "Fan-fiction?"
  "Fanfiction."
  "Fanfiction..."
• Power Incontinence: Antimony keeps her eyelids at half mast because people who meet her gaze get caught in her illusions.
• The Power of Friendship: It's implied that the Mane Six's levels in badass are a result of their connection to the Elements of Harmony; more directly, the Magic of Friendship is what allowed Rarity to defeat Antimony's illusory world.
• The Power of Love: An effect of Cadance's magic is that she can increase the powers of a pony that she loves, and who loves her in return.

• Red Baron: Cruciger is also known as the Black Duke.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Blueblood's responsibility as Grand Veneur.
• Save Scumming: Using time magic, Lady Sand Dune creates an anchor point that she can then travel back to, having experienced the intervening future and going back to the anchor.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: It's been hinted that there's some sort of evil unicorn who was impossible to kill after Princess Platinum gave her life sealing his magic. What the pre-classical ponies did to him after that would have qualified him for a Rasputinian Death, if he had actually, y'know, died. Eventually they just ended up giving him something that amounted to cement shoes and diverted a river onto him.
• Serious Business: The scary, dangerous duels of the unicorn nobility involve magically pelting each other with soft pastries. This is done as a way of ending disputes in a non-harmful but embarrassing manner, giving the winner the satisfaction of having bested and humiliated their opponent and the loser nothing worse than public embarrassment and a mess to clean up. However, if the combatants aren't willing to accept this outcome, duels can and do turn lethal.
• Shout-Out:
  • Rainbow Dash is currently reading through "Daring Do and the Ocarina of Time." She also makes a passing reference to "Daring Do and the Temple of Doom".
  • Twilight tries to invoke the Konami Code, taught to her by Pinkie. Later in the same conversation, she rolls a natural 20.
  • "Big Apple! Show-time!"
  • Pinkie Pie sings an adapted version of "Sloprano" during a truly epic food fight.
  • Twilight relates a Noodle Incident in which Pinkie discussing Spike being "friend-zoned" quickly derails into her talking about The Twilight Zone.
  • "Perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything."
  • After splitting her body into three to deal with the effects of poison and mortal wounds, Luna says that reabsorbing them would make her Complete, Perfect even.
• Sibling Yin-Yang:
  • Eunomie and Euporie, who are suggested to be the halves of a single pony, split prior to birth; one is serious, straight-laced and no-nonsense, while the other is an irreverent hedonist.
  • Who would have thought that the violent Blood Knight Ritterkreuz is Fluttershy's half-sister?
• Something Else Also Rises: Scootaloo has trouble folding her wings after reading some of Rarity's more adult-rated love letters.
• Squick: In-Universe. Neither Rarity nor Sand Dune takes it at all well when they confirm that Blueblood has been replaced by a Changeling in chapter 34.
• Space Is Magic: Taken quite literally. The medium of outer space is essentially condensed magic.
• Stone Wall: Shigure's primary fighting style is to just sit there and tank the shit out anything his opponent throws at him, including (at least in Pinkie's Imagine Spot) a Giant Mecha. He meets his match against Chalice's alternate form, "Sagittarius", though.
• Taking the Bullet: Or in this case, the arrow. Shigure throws himself in front of an arrow from "Sagittarius" to save Lady Yumi, which sees the previously Nigh-Invulnerable and immovable Earth Pony blasted away into a hillside... which is then the site of a Fantastic Nuke as the arrow explodes inside of him.
• This Means War!: Rarity's response to the news of Blueblood's arranged marriage: Ohh. It. Is. Definitely. On.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Sure, there's the obvious one when Rarity challenged Antimony to a duel, but for sheer gumption it doesn't come close to looking into Antimony's eyes during the duel, after Rarity knows what that means.
• Time Master: Lady Sand Dune and her clan have access to time magic.
• Time Stands Still: Sand Dune is said to be able to stop time over quite a large area for a very long time, which she once used to stop a fire from spreading until the ponies inside a burning building could be rescued.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Rarity learns the fine art of unicorn dueling from Twilight.
  • Applejack takes a level in Bare-Hoofed Monk, Pinkie does some damage with weaponized fun, and Twilight is more Archmagey than usual.
• Trickster Mentor: Rarity is initially excited to be trained like Celestia trained Twilight. But the Princess operated in the fine tradition of Zen masters everywhere, either by giving Twilight impossible tasks for the day so she'd come up with ways to succeed, or by throwing things at her when learning to teleport. Twi pays the confusion forward to Rarity.
• Villainous Breakdown: Antimony has one as her illusory Equestria is destroyed by the magic of friendship.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Antimony's major reason for making her claim. She's very put out when her father, Lord Cruciger stops observing her duel with Rarity. May or may not be tied to Alpha Brass' motivations as well.
• Wham Episode:
  • The wedding and aftermath in general, but particularly Chapter 58. Twilight meets Arsenic, she casts a five-point alliteration spell (becoming the first pony of the modern era to do it) that genderbends everyone across Equestria. Celestia reveals that she may be unable to feel a connection to the Empyrean Vault (the place where alicorns ascend to), and the logical conclusion that Twilight has ascended.
  • The reveal that Brass is working to replace Celestia and Luna with Twilight on the throne.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In Chapter 38, Sweetie Bell calls out Cadance for arranging for Blueblood to be captured by the Changelings (long story).
• Wizard Duel: Unicorn nobles have these when they have a dispute they cannot otherwise peacefully resolve. First a time, a place, and a type of weapon (a variety of baked good) are selected and treated with a contact sedative. Then, each unicorn attempts to cream the other with said baked good until either one hits the other, humiliating them, or each pony runs out of ammo. If both run out of cake, cupcake, pie, or what have you, then they can either decide to walk away amiably with their honor sufficiently defended, or go for a duel à outrance.

• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Celestia says this when a pair of courtiers get too uppity in Chapter 36.
  Celestia: My little ponies, if I hear one more word of my subjects fighting one another, I will be terribly upset. I assure you, you would not like me when I am upset.

---