Story Ideas #3: Steelgriff · 3:19am May 14th, 2020
This idea is my reaction to a story I read on this site. As usual when this happens, I need to emphasize that just because I’m writing down my idea, that doesn’t mean that I think the original idea sucks. Just that thinking about one led to the other.
The story in this case is Comet the Colt of Steel. Comet was written to adopt Superman to an Equestrian setting. In this story, Comet is an alien colt from a dead planet adopted by the Apple parents shortly before their death. The story never gets past the Superboy stage, which I believe is a good thing—a full-fledged Superman in Ponyville would have no choice but to take over the entire series, as he could “settle” all of the crises much better than Twilight and her friends ever could. (And by “settle” I mean “smash them into oblivion”.)
In my opinion, a Superman adaptation should not be set in Equestria at all. For the story to work, Superman has to move into a city where crime is out of control, and no princess would allow that to happen in Equestria without interfering. Furthermore, all ponies have a super power in the form of their cutie mark, so that makes a superhero among them less special.
So instead, my “Superman” is a griffon, from the doomed planet Steric. His craft crashed into a remote Equestrian farm run by distaff members of the Apple family, and he was raised with Equestrian values of harmony. He then moved to Griffonstone in order to better carry out his mission of helping those that the Princesses are unable to help.
This story is set in the future of FIM, where the Griffon Kingdom has been reconstructed. The only available heir of the royal line is an infant, so a Regent tries to rule the land, hampered by multiple rivals. The Regent is a good griffon, and with the help of the newspaper The High Eyrie, he has cleaned up corruption in Griffonstone. The problem is that the prospect of instant riches has attracted the worst sorts to the city, causing crime to spiral out of control.
The point of view character would be the lead reporter at The High Eyrie, a thoroughgoing cynic that holds the too-pony-to-be-true Rex Trueheart in complete contempt. In character, this is obviously pre-reform Gilda, but there’s nothing in her backstory that would cause her to become a reporter. Maybe it’s her sister.
To complete the setup, we need a Lex Luthor character. This would be a pony posing as a philanthropist, funding multiple griffon businesses that are all failing for different reasons. The truth is that this character is a pony supremacist, scared that the rise of a griffon kingdom would spell the long-term doom of Equestria, as the griffons are advancing technologically far faster than ponies have since before the days of the Princesses.
Once Steelgriff becomes famous, it will attract the attention of the Princesses, and Rainbow Dash will be dispatched to try and track the hero down. This will be a comedy of errors, and she keeps missing him by the narrowest of margins.
As for Steelgriff himself, his powers need to be redefined. Both ponies and griffons can fly, so that would not be very remarkable. Instead what will be emphasized is his incredible strength, greater than that of almost any pony. And of course, there’s all of his other powers, which would be revealed one at a time.
Eventually sterictite (kryptonite) would come into the picture, and this eventually leads to the biggest twist of the story: the entire griffon race are Steritians, most of which left the planet as the result of a civil war thousands of years ago. The leaders of the group feared that the griffons would become tyrants if all of them kept their powers, and so engineered artificial sterictite and laced the soil of the griffon lands with it. Any griffon who moved to Equestria began gaining super powers without realizing it, and Steelgriff’s powers have been fading since the day he entered Griffonstone. The climax of the story involves some way of removing all of the artificial sterictite (Celestia comes out of retirement to use her sun powers?), and the unstoppable league of evil is conquered by hundreds of super-griffons. It is left to the imagination to see if this new nation of super-griffons indeed ends up becoming a threat to Equestria.
Equestria's nature as a kid-friendly death world aside, fascinating concept.
You could always subvert things and steal superpowers from other superheroes rather than Superman if you wanted something different. I mean beside the super strength.
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But Superman already has everybody else's superpowers!
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Heeey! True enough.
And if not, between the Changelings and the Unicorns, that's everybody ELSE's powers...
Do we have anybody who can change size? Grow giant!