Ideas I will not be writing #1

While I’m working on my own story, (Just getting through the initial setup of the plot is taking so long, that I might as well start publication after the season finale) I had an idea which would be a waste to waste, so to speak. But I won’t be writing it myself, and it doesn’t fit the themes of my own opus, so… Let’s post it here in hopes someone stumbles on it and makes it a fabulous oneshot.

The derivation is from an old tabletop RPG prank/campaign idea I found somewhere in the bowels of the internet years ago, which basically goes like this:

1. Playing Over the Edge, or some other game where the character can experience mental shocks and have a rule mechanic for it, get one character to go insane and end the session there. Get all the players of the other characters to cooperate.
2. Start the next session by handing out say, Call of Cthulhu character sheets, with the same characters adapted to the new setting and game system. Congratulate the victim on his successful recovery from a psychiatric hospital.
3. Play Call of Cthulhu for a session or two until the character succumbs to insanity once again and end the session there. Go back to Over the Edge, or whatever game you started with, and start the next session by releasing the character from a mental hospital.

Done right, this can be very shocking, and you can probably see where this is going. So here’s the idea as applied to technicolor equines…

A human (works better with a brony, or at least someone with significant knowledge of series canon) wakes up (possibly, having recently experienced something traumatic) and finds out they’re a pony in Equestria. Have always been a pony. The hero(ine) has a family and a circle of friends/acquaintances/coworkers/whatever, all of them suddenly regular ponies with pony jobs, pony histories and pony everything. Almost all details that can be matched up, match. Others get blatantly censored, inexplicably missing, or altered in a bizarre fashion.

Trying to be rational about it, instead of the expected and typical “Aaaaaa this can’t be real!” or even more expected and typical “Woo, I’m finally in Equestria, let’s go stalk Twilight!” the hero(ine) tries to figure out what happened, (which probably does involve stalking Twilight) or at the very least what changed, (as far as anypony can tell, nothing, and the human memory discrepancies are simply false) and it takes them a while to run afoul of the canon discrepancies and plot holes, which eventually do drive them to gibbering insanity.

And then they fall asleep in a padded room, and once they wake up, they’re a human, everything is “back to normal,” and all the other characters have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the hero(ine) was absent for a period of time.

Comments

[theGECK]

Looks like Eakin has did something similar to this idea in 2012: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/22202/what-dreams-may-come