Pinkie Pie

The blog was written with reference to Chapter 6: Respite of the Humans in Equestria Club.

So I thought I’d take a moment to talk about Pinkie Pie this chapter; more about her place in the fannon than in my story, but I’ll probably wander into my representation because, hey, it’s my blog.

Pinkie Pie fills a really odd place in many fanfics, there a range in behaviour in a lot of the characters as you’d expect but Pinkie seems to get the worst of it, as in many fics she doesn’t seem to have a personality at all. This is not a small claim given Pinkie Pie is probably the most easily identified character in any story, but I feel many authors don’t bother to actually give her any motivation because ‘it’s just Pinkie being Pinkie’.

That’s is fine for a lot of stories, she acts as a comedy relief background without seriously impacting events, which if we’re going to be honest is her role in many episodes. It’s starts to jar though when this off-beat randomness starts to seriously impact events, which is where I feel you start getting the ‘Pinkie is an extradimensional horror’ trope popping up. When used for Deus Ex Machina, she becomes an unpredictable god, and suddenly any characterization starts to evaporate. She goes from, quirky, to mysterious and dangerous, and because this will happen in stories where she is just background, it will never be explained.

This doesn’t have to be the case. Pinkie is a complex character, lots of the MLP cast wear their hearts on their sleeves, but Pinkie definitely doesn’t. I get the impression that Pinkie is always on stage; her personality, her quirks, her broken speech, it’s all there to make other people happy and not herself. Indeed it’s when she fails that we tend to see who she really is. A very smart, very observant mare, though one without much self confidence and a somewhat desperate need to other people smile. She takes things that shouldn’t be serious, very seriously, but she’s not random in this, it’s all there because it makes people smile. There probably some deep seated irony that the only character that knows she’s in a cartoon, knowingly plays the clown.

In HiEC Pinkie is definitely on the low end for crazy, but then she’s a main character and the mane six as a group play little part, so she needs to be capable of standing as her own character. You may have noticed a slight undercurrent of sadness to the HiEC Pinkie, and this is very much intentional; she’s seen and done a great many thing in saving the world that can’t be laughed off, but she is happy despite them.

Comments

[RanmaChaos]

Your Pinkie is excellent.