Pony Fanfiction Thread

Why is he started to rant to begin with? What was the reason behind "losing it"?

edited 7th Jun '18 7:24:18 AM by VeryVileVillian

I really don't know. Like, three days before his breakdown, his blog shows him acting fine. He seemed to be looking forward to a new fic. Then he just went apeshit, deleted everything except commissions, and he hasn't been back.

Joke's on him though. The Fimfiction Archive account and Fimfetch are there for people to download and read his stories en masse, and apparently a lot of people have been using them.

If Equestria was a utopia, we wouldn't have a show about learning how to not be so shitty to other people.

A fundamental requirement of a show about people learning moral lessons is that your protagonists must, by definition, be people in need of learning moral lessons.

The show itself does this from time to time too. "Friendship is an inherently pony value and all ponies are naturally masters of it. But only if you ignore all of the other episodes where pony characters are shown to f*cking suck at friendship."

19 episodes spent learning how to share and then 1 episode whining about why the rest of the world has trouble sharing when it's so easy.

edited 7th Jun '18 9:18:21 AM by TobiasDrake

@Tobias Drake

While bits about the baby's origin will be revealed in further chapters, the lowdown is she essentially my own take on a very popular OC, Nyx from Pen Stroke's Past Sins.

What else did I want to point out to you...?

I bet fimfics' obsession with Blueblood must be confusing to you, huh?

Fimfic has an obsession with Blueblood?

@47224 Like I said: bonkers.

And most of Darf's stories were pedophilia and half of those were rape fantasies, so good riddance to garbage.

I don't remember a single one of Darf's stories being paedo OR rapey, and I'm not about to Fimfetch to confirm. I just remember a bunch of ones about Lyra, a human, Bon Bon, and a few others. Nothing terribly egregiously bad.

Oh then you haven't seen the real darf. He's written... things.

Incest.

Pedophilia.

Rape.

You know.

Things.

edited 7th Jun '18 10:09:44 AM by HextarVigar

A lot of the character un-development of the Realm of Iris from In Different Skies was the direct result of going into a human-dominated Crapsack World with this mentality. Being simultaneously convinced of their moral superiority and blind to their flaws, while also struggling with the neighbouring dictatorship of Axe-Crazy Fundamentalist Absolute Xenophobes, they eventually snap and become Evil Colonialists with a heavy, heavy dose of He Who Fights Monsters. (They get better in the end. Sort of.)

edited 7th Jun '18 10:26:53 AM by SantosLHalper

@Tobias Drake

Not the site itself, but he shows up unconscionably a lot in works. I think I remember you remarking how he gets brought up by the fandom more than he actually does in the show.

I might have. He only has one real appearance on the show, excluding background cameos. He's pretty much a one-off bit antagonist like Trenderhoof or Zesty Gourmand.

edited 7th Jun '18 11:10:44 AM by TobiasDrake

Not much of the contiunity in the show in that regard? Like i remember being quite annoyed by the fact that ponies tend to learn the same lession over and over again.

Well, incest ships tend to happen in a quite a lot of fandoms. So i wouldn't count that as "Super Disgusting" by fandom standards.

Pedophilia also tend to happen in quite a few fandoms, but it's on the other hand always VERY disgusting.

edited 7th Jun '18 11:26:01 AM by VeryVileVillian

I would point out that interpersonal problems seem to be the worst ponies have to deal with except Granny Smith apparently can't afford a hip replacement so their medicare system is also shit.

Either that or the Applw's business model is shit.

Blueblood's kinda funny because he's a perfect storm for turning into straw man. He acted like a jerk in his sole episode—and as fans everywhere know, jerks are infinitely worse than world-destroying villains. Villains are cool, but jerks are just the worst. And on top of that, Blueblood is a Prince—which makes him a perfect vehicle for writers to vent their anti-royalty or anti-authority feelings, without besmirching Celestia's or Luna's reputation. Do you want to set a story in Canterlot, or want to make a political conflict, but can't spare more than the bare minimum of thought and effort to come up with a believable antagonist? Just use Prince Blueblood!

As for Darf, I have no idea why he left the site (and speculating on it too much would be drama importation), but I have heard an interesting story about him and the importance of—for lack of a better term—"branding". What I've heard is that Darf used to have two accounts in Fimfic. The Darf account was exclusively for porn fics, and the other one was exclusively for his serious drama fics. Both accounts were really popular, but the Darf account was pulling in slightly higher numbers. So he decided to merge both accounts under the Darf name. Surely with the popularity of his drama fics and the popularity of his porn, he'd be more popular than ever, right?

Wrong. Darf lost subscribers after the merger, and he started getting consistently fewer views and upvotes on all his stories. Apparently there was very little overlap between the fans of Darf's two different types of stories. People looking for Darf's porn didn't appreciate having to sift through his non-porn fics, and vice versa.

(And that's also why the often-repeated credo, "Need pageviews? Write porn!" is an extremely short-sighted plan.)

I actually do have some porn ideas, well just one actually. I'm just pretty sure it'll turn into comedic farces like the rest of my writing. I don't want to write it for the page views, I want to the write it because it's in my head and wants to get out. A lot like a sadfic I've planned as well.

...

Blueblood!

So, interesting thing about Blueblood I've noted: There used to be two extremes with him, the jerk or the secretly competent prince, I suppose as a backlash to the former. Especially popular with those who wanted to take swipes at Rarity, call her a gold digger and say his behavior was planned and justified.

Lately, a more moderated view of him as emerged. Blueblood: Hero Of Equestria is a recent one, a conceptual crossover with Warhammer 40k, specifically Ciaphas Cain, that paints him as blueblooded snob that nevertheless rises to the occasion when he needs to.

The Best Of All Possible Worlds is my favorite and the interpretation I'm using whereas Blueblood is part of a long line who take upon the self-appointed task of acting like snobs so they may be Celestia's scapegoats. The latest Blue is teetering dangerously close to Becoming the Mask.

I've got two accounts, myself. One where I write the serious stuff, and one where I write just what you'd expect for an alt account. But this is why I attached my usual username to one of them and left the other one as a different name.

My favorite reinterpretations of Blueblood are:

• Blueblood's Just Zis Guy, You Know?, an anthology of vignettes where Blueblood is actually a really nice guy, and there's some alternate explanation for why he was so irritating at the Gala. Such as, he's incredibly socially awkward, had no idea how to behave at the Gala, and was slavishly following an outdated etiquette book. Or Blueblood's actually a super-spy, and he thought Rarity was a fellow secret agent, and all their dialogue was overly elaborate Spy Speak.
• The Rummy Business of Old Blooey, a Jeeves and Wooster pastiche which manages to make Blueblood vaguely well-meaning, but incredibly stupid. At the Gala, he was actually trying to charm Rarity, and was too dim to realize how he came across.

The comics have a couple interpretations, one of which I'm particularly fond of for its comedic value: it's a "what if?" scenario where instead of Twilight, Celestia chooses Blueblood as her star student. This entails going to check on the Summer Sun Celebration in the same way. Turns out that Blueblood is such an extreme, unrepentant jackass that he accidentally causes Nightmare Moon to give up her evil ways because she gets compared to him and it makes her feel so bad that she goes to talk things out with Celestia. If the comic itself wasn't such a "one and done" kind of deal, I'd almost be tempted to write a little something around that interpretation. Which is saying a lot, since I'm otherwise 99% sure I'm not going to write anything else after I'm done with From Dusk to Night.

The other interpretation is that he's a bit of a lout, but it's sort of a necessity of his profession. That is, his brazen personality is the kind that's required to do well in the diplomatic tug-of-war. That one had a pretty good story around it, too.

I'm a huge fan of Capn_Chryssalid's The Best Night Ever and its sequel This Platinum Crown for what it did to Bluey, myself.

I haven't done anything with Blueblood. I imagine if I ever did write him, I'd probably just make him a pompous doof. I can't imagine doing anything that really focused on him.

...

Well, actually....

I didn't really have any plans to write any more stories in the parallel Equestria from "Lessons in Chaos" once this one's done, but now I'm thinking. Part of the alternate history is a two-year war with the Changelings, because Twilight went back to Canterlot after the Nightmare Moon fiasco and so Chrysalis was able to account for her and avoid detection in her Cadance guise until it was too late.

Under that history, there might be an amusing story in the idea of Blueblood somehow doofing his way into inadvertently impersonating a changeling impersonating himself.

I always read him as more dense than truly malicious in any way.

In fact, that was actually kind of the core idea behind The Colour You Bleed. I wanted to take Blueblood exactly as he was presented in the show, and see how far I could push things before people found it uncomfortable.

Which I ultimately didn't do that good a job of, I think, considering it was the first chapter that did it for most people. Chapter 1, 4 and 5 were the big points.

Are there racist fanfics within the fandom? You know which got "Alt-Right feel" in them.

I've seen a few. They usually get downvoted to hell on Fimfiction real quickly though. The overly preachy or political ones always seem to.

And then there's the ones who coat-tail tragedies.