Ponidoxical Outcomes · 8:41pm Nov 8th, 2020
Yes, folks, it's the moment you've been waiting for! Unless you weren't paying attention to the Most Delightful Ponidox contest, I suppose. 
In any case, time to see who made the most of people meeting themselves.
Before we begin announcing the winners, I'll let the other judges introduce themselves:
Kris Overstreet: Hello there, everyone. I’m fascinated by the concept of alternate selves meeting (I used it in a chapter of The Maretian), and I’ve had a couple of concepts in that vein kicking around in my head for quite some time. However, when the contest was announced I knew I didn’t have the energy or time, with the other things I’ve been doing, to put in my own entry. So, since I’ve never judged a MLP fic contest before, I wanted to give it a try. It’s been an interesting experience.
No name 13: Heyo everypony! I was excited to see the amount of submissions into this contest! I must say, each one was the most delightful than the last! As for me being a judge, this is my first time, but I’m sure I’ll do the best I can!
Polychromatic: Greetings, everybody. I’ve always enjoyed the concept of different versions of a same character interacting; it’s something I’ve written in the past and plan to write again. I’m also one of those authors who come up with ideas faster than they can actually work on them all. When I saw FoME announce this contest, I knew I unfortunately wouldn’t be able to take part in it myself due to a lack of time, but I thought it would be fun to take part in the judging process. I’m glad I did, because there were some truly great stories in there that I probably wouldn’t have gotten to read otherwise.
SirNotAppearingInThisFic: Hey, everyone! Here’s the quick rundown: I dabble in writing, have never placed in one of FoME’s contests (or any other), have never judged a writing contest before, live under a rock, have been accused of apparent omniscience regardless, and have appropriately appeared in zero fictional works to date. If you don’t have concerns yet, I tossed my name in the judging hat on a lark because I already have a list of stories to write that I’m putting off and figured judging would be easier.
Okay, I also genuinely thought it’d be an interesting and informative experience to be a judge, and it absolutely has been.
With everyone present and accounted for, let's begin with the honorable mentions:
FoME's Choice:
There were a lot of fantastic stories in the running, with some wonderfully clever takes on the prompt. That said, my HM has to go to one that went with the expected mirror portal. Where it shines is how it ties that together with a map mission plot and a number of creative spins elsewhere in the narrative. Cut From The Same Cloth explores the deeper consequences of Crystal Prep diverging the two timelines, especially when Suri Polomare was one of the background humans in Friendship Games. TCC56’s blend of innovation and extrapolation enriches the world to great effect, and like any good tale involving the Cutie Map, even the strangest elements make perfect sense in hindsight. In my own rankings, only the finalists outshone it.
Kris's Choice:
For my own purposes, I used a 1-100 scoring system to rank my choices, with half the points coming from the quality of the writing and half from the quality of the “ponidox”. This ended up being a bit unfair to Left Behind, which would have been in my top five and possibly my top three... except that the one ponidox scene was so totally stolen by the Great and Powerful Trixie that the two versions of Starlight Glimmer never really had a chance to interact. And despite that, it’s absolutely right and proper in the context for Trixie to do that. The entire scene- indeed, the entire short story- is an excellent piece of character writing by HapHazred, and I didn’t want it to go unrewarded just because Hap chose to uphold character integrity over contest restrictions. Therefore Left Behind gets my Honorable Mention.
No Name's Choice:
All of the entries were most delightful, but only one of them came out as my honorable mention is: Why don’t I have wings like you? By Thepinkiedwonder. Sure, all of them may have been interesting, but I loved the humor and interest it left me with. When it comes to humor, I take it very seriously. Humor is one of my elements that can’t be messed with, And this story was the one that gave me the most humor yet.
Polychromatic's Choice:
Once the top three were nailed down during the judging process, I knew what my Honourable Mention would go to. Mirror Match Inc. was possibly my personal favourite out of the fics submitted, and I do suggest everyone give it a read. Aside from my personal bias towards a story centred around a character I particularly enjoy (and written stunningly similarly to how I write them), with a style of comedy that lines up with my own, the fic still offers a lot.
It has great bits of humour scattered throughout the whole length of the story, and it expands on what we know of existing Equestria Girls characters in very enjoyable ways. I particularly enjoy how it handles Sunny Flare, given who she’s supposed to be. The main concept behind the story works extremely well, and everything the story manages to do with it is a joy to read.
All in all the fic is a great piece of high school comedy drama that manages to tackle its topics more maturely than the source material was allowed to while still remaining faithful to its characters, and a truly enjoyable read from start to finish that I recommend everyone check out if they haven’t already.
Sir Not-Appearing's Choice:
I couldn’t bring myself to put it in my top five because the ending didn’t work for me (and that rush job kinda showed at the edges); instead, I grant my honorable mention to How To Train Your Evil Doppelganger.
This story was funny. Like, really funny (as long as you don’t try to take it too seriously). Few stories actually elicit a chuckle out loud from me, but this was one of them. I haven’t even read the first story in the series (yet) and, with no context beyond this sequel, I could see how the first story won FoME’s Villain Exchange Program contest (a contest that I missed entirely, sadly). Even if the thought never crossed your mind, if you’re even vaguely open to the idea of secret agent human versions of Chrysalis, Tirek, and Cozy Glow making snarky jokes about the ambitions and competence of their pony-world counterparts, this story delivers.
And now, without further ado, the finalists:
Third Place
Daring Do and the Ditzy of Infinite Possibility
by Antiquarian
Ditzy Doo thought it was pretty weird when she stumbled into a Daring Do adventure involving Caballeron, the vicious griffons of Talon, and some kind of magical Goblet. Then she bumped into herself, and things went downhill from there.
FoME: A Ditzy Doo harnessing different iterations of herself from across probability space...
Look, I never said I was immune to pandering. 
In all seriousness, this was a fantastic, frenetic acid trip of a story. That’s not to say it’s incoherent. The internal logic and threat factors keep it coherent and relatively grounded even as the world threatens to unravel. Plus, Friendship is Magic’s Indiana Jones equivalent gets to fight Nazis, which is always a plus. It may be a sequel to an AU story, but it makes sure you have the needed background data before really flying off the rails. My only complaint is a reference near the end that even I thought was gratuitous. Still, the end result is a chaotic delight that Discord probably keeps in his home movie collection.
Kris: This story would not have suffered one iota had all of the references to Homecoming been excised, especially the first-section as-you-know-Bob internal monologues. But once you get past that section, the story becomes a mine cart ride with the brakes off, with adventure and comedy that might be equalled but not excelled. And the elegant simplicity of the resolution is in itself a thing of beauty. Kudos to Antiquarian for an excellent story!
No name: This story had me wondering around the place like Wonderland! Multiple Ditzies? Awesome! I loved this story just a little, but not too much. I was happy to read this story, but honestly, I was hoping a lot more out of this, so I would understand why this story came out in 3rd place. Still good, but a bit too confusing. (Also, yay for Daring Do!) Also, I was surprised to see EqG Ditzy. That was something I was not expecting! But, this is a paradox, so it makes a lot of sense for them to be in the story.
Polychromatic: It would be unfair of me to say I don’t like this story. Mostly because it’s not really true. I greatly enjoyed most of it, it’s an hilariously written piece of action and comedy with some rather smart bits of writing along its length, a creative premise that doesn’t feel out of place within the world of Friendship is Magic and that is used in very enjoyable ways throughout the fic. And yet, I still have problems with it.
I’d like to pretend they’re of the objective kind and point at the number of typos and other small errors it suffers from, but that’s only part of the problem (that and almost every single fic that I considered for my top spots suffered from a lack of polish, seriously people proofread your stuff). The real issue is a more personal one. There is one section of the fic that is not only drastically different in tone from the show, but also from the story it’s actually in. The mood whiplash soured my experience.
However, I can recognise that other people are clearly capable of looking past that, and once you do you’re left with a delightful rollercoaster of the kind of hijinks one can expect from a Daring Do and multi-Derpy story. It’s great comedy and action throughout, centred around a well utilised premise that perfectly serves the contest’s prompt, and it deserves its spot in the top three.
Sir Not-Appearing: Time travel and the EqG portal? Those are the low-hanging fruit of ponydox facilitators. A Daring Do artifact capable of pulling in alternate versions of the pony who activated it as they’re generated, or at least acknowledged as a Possibility…?
I haven’t read any of the related content for context, so this setting might as well be any other to me. It didn’t really matter, anyways. This starts off (well, after introducing us to the inevitable Ditzy) as a somewhat-standard Daring Do adventure, albeit with higher stakes, and it just goes off the rails when Ditzy crashes the party. As the Ditzy Dooplication situation escalates, Antiquarian doesn’t squander the hilarity of the situation. In the end, this all gets wrapped up in a brilliantly simple and very Ditzy-esque manner. It may not be the best-written piece in the contest, but it is my favorite.
Second Place
Apples in the Mirror
by Rune Soldier Dan
In the human world, Applejack’s parents are alive. She has to meet them.
FoME: This has what may be the best characterization in the entire contest. Twilight needing a TED Talk to tell Applejack her human counterpart’s parents are still alive? Brilliant. The human AJ having shades of Apple Bloom’s hero worship as she meets her older, more experienced counterpart? Ingenious. Pony Applejack falling face-first into the Uncanny Valley when she actually sees these creatures who simultaneously are and are not the ones she lost years ago? A precisely aimed shot of pathos. This one hits hard, cuts deep, and will make you thank it for the experience.
Kris: I have to confess Apples was not on my top five list, for two reasons. First, I felt the AJ-on-AJ interactions in the story were not quite at the center of the story. We only see one side of them—pony-AJ’s side—and the story would have been a little stronger for balance. More importantly, Rune Soldier Dan does an excellent job of establishing environmental cues and conveying character emotions... but he tends to overdo it, going into full-bore exposition that adds little to nothing to the story. Fortunately the emotion of the moment, and the note-perfect presentation of grief, make this a story worth reading.
No name: Not gonna lie, Apples in the Mirror was sorta interesting to me, but not 100%. Sure, Applejack lost her family, but does she really have to go over to the human world just to see her parents? While I do like it, it was a bit weird to read. At least, I would be saying that if not for the climax of the story. The emotion hit me with sadness right in the middle of the story. Not gonna lie, I did cry a little. I understand why this story did so well.
Polychromatic: When Apples first came out, at a time where people weren’t yet dumping 100k words in a single night and I could still keep up with the contest entries as they came out, I immediately put it on the top spots of my list. Despite some details that really clash with my own interpretation of the Equestria Girls world, I still thought it deserved to be up there. When I was done reading everything else that had come out, I went back to it, curious to see if it still held up. Given it’s here, you can probably guess what the answer was.
The fic’s premise is simple, but properly executing on something like it is anything but. The author manages to deliver on capturing and showcasing the tangle of emotions Applejack goes through, doing great justice to a concept that could have very easily been mishandled. It is true that the story ends up focusing a lot more on one Applejack’s emotional journey than on the interactions between her and the other her, but the quality of the execution still firmly earns this fic a top spot as one of the best stories submitted to this contest.
Sir Not-Appearing: How do you make sure the judges read your story twice? Post a top-notch piece of work as early in the contest as you can. For as early as this story had been submitted, it held up very well against the stories that could take advantage of the entire submission period to construct and polish.
The idea at play here is very simple: things are a little different on the other side of the mirror. And then the author nails the Apple Family hospitality, general character, and the feels that follow. We judges did disagree a bit on how effectively the story conveyed everything, but it ultimately boiled down to differences of opinion, and it placed quite favorably in our rankings regardless; your experience reading this story may differ, but it’s absolutely worth a shot.
First Place
World of Colgates
by TheDriderPony
Colgate wakes up and blacks out repeatedly, saving the world in the process.
FoME: This was nuts in the best way. Time travel stories have to walk a careful line, lest their own logic tear them apart. This one, as far as I can tell, was perfectly consistent throughout, Colgate (who is Minuette’s sister) criss-crossing her timeline in a knot of misadventures and bootstrap paradoxes that, like a temporal Nazca line, is best appreciated when looking over the whole thing from a distance. The further wrinkles and revelations elevate it from a clever curiosity to a truly brilliant tale.
Kris: I didn’t give any story an absolute perfect score, but this came closest. Time travel is tricky—you can write it seriously, or you can write it for laughs. This story manages to do both at once without so much as a bobble. TheDriderPony sets an entire platoon’s worth of Chekov’s guns on the mantelpiece, and with methodical precision he sees to it that every single one gets fired off. And yes, repeatedly punching your temporally displaced self counts as “interaction”, and the way it’s done could not be more perfect. There’s one reveal at the very, very end I didn’t see a setup for, and it felt a little contrived... but it was the setup for the last line, which was so glorious in context that I couldn’t help but forgive the contrivance. Excellent, excellent work.
No name: Ah yes, the possibility of time travel. This story was very good, considering that it’s a time where the dentist herself is going through a wild time travel experience. This story sent me flying was I felt the many places she went. I could almost feel as if I was there! The big reveal was something I was not expecting, considering who was involved. A real wild experience indeed. 10/10 in my case.
Polychromatic: The moment I was done with this story I knew it had to go in the top spots of the contest. Anything else wouldn’t have felt right, for how well executed the whole thing is. It’s not perfect, it does have one (very minor and irrelevant) inconsistency with the show and a couple of points throughout that are definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, and it only barely fulfills the prompt with what’s maybe its least memorable scene (but the bar is so high that that scene is still rather good on its own), but the quality of everything else elevates the fic and makes those flaws seem almost irrelevant.
Every little detail in the story is there for a reason, and the author manages to tie everything together even while dealing with the constant moving of the plot. The story is packed, always going places, but the pace never feels like it’s too fast. It’s the kind of story that leaves you happy and excited not for its contents but for how well planned and executed it was, that those contents are also hilarious is only a plus.
Everyone who hasn’t already should go read this story right now, and everyone who has will probably agree it’s worth reading again. It’s an absolute gem of a fic and totally deserving of its ranking in the contest, and I’m glad I chose to be a judge if only for the fact that it meant I got to read it.
Sir Not-Appearing: So here we have time travel: Colgate saves the world by going to the past to solve a problem that started in the future. Several times. The timeline is only mostly causally locked, so you can still expect everything that happens to have a payoff (because it does); this story takes advantage of every moment twice, at least on average. World of Colgates made more out of a time travel ponydox than any other story.
Ultimately, everything resolves in a mostly sane manner, or as close as you can get with closed timelines that still leave something behind. Despite the odd twist, statements, and implications that made up an interesting ending that I’m not sure if I like, this story struck exactly the right balance between silly and serious for everything to remain wholly enjoyable.
And there you have it! Thank you again to everyone who entered and to my fellow judges, especially for the latter's patience with my intermittent Discord presence. Here's hoping the prompt inspired many others to explore the possibilities of making ponies confront themselves in a very literal fashion.
Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you to all the judges and writers for their time.
I'm glad I decided to give this contest a try, and congrats to Antiquarian, Rune Soldier Dan, and TheDriderPony for winning the bronze, silver, and gold!
Personally, I liked Mirror Match Inc. more than Apples in the Mirror, for both originality and fulfillment of the prompt, but I agree 100% that TheDriderPony deserves the gold here.
For those who didn't place at all, don't get too down on yourself, as all of you accomplished something special just by putting pen to paper (metaphorically) and bringing a story to life, which is more than I can say about myself for this contest. Mine was going to be a recursive fanfic, but I abandoned the idea when it turned out said fic's author already had a far superior idea for the character I wanted to focus on.
Congratulations to the winners! And now to add more things to my Read It Sooner list...
(Also, I can't read Polychromatic's purple text at all on dark mode.)
Congratulations everyone. I had fun participating.
Congrats everyone! Thanks for hosting this!
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone for the excellent stories.
A good set of choices. Congratulations to the winners.
Wow, first place. I can honestly say that I did not see that coming! Thanks to all the judges for their kind words and undeserved praise, and congratulations to everyone else who placed or even just participated.
Also! For those who are still curious about the title, World of Colgates, it's a reference to the short film World of Dentists; an old favorite of mine from the early days of youtube which my story draws much inspiration from.
Excellent choices and congratulations to all! This one had to be rough to judge just because of all the quality entries. Wonderful work, everyone.
I'll be real my dudes, but an HR is probs a bit too good for me! I struggled massively hard with this one.
That said, supremely glad that Kris enjoyed it. Many congratulations to the winners!
Grats peoples! A wonderful bunch of stories from a wonderful bunch.
Congrats to the winners and all the participants!
5394776 It was a good exploration of a problem Starlight Glimmer is always going to have. And you did an excellent job with her and Trixie. It wasn't really conclusive, but with that theme I wouldn't expect it to be.
One thing that really stands out here is the diversity of the judges' opinions... which speaks very well to both their selection (that's exactly what you want with judges) and to the overall quality of the submitted stories.
But even WITH that diversity, I cannot imagine many of them disagreed too vehemently with World of Colgates at the top.
Thank you all! It is an honor! I had a great time writing it, and I'm pleased it came together.
5394797 I've come to like Starlight a lot. I really enjoy her ex-bad-guy vibe; there's something kinda precious about someone who's something of a bad person deep down, but is aware of that and doesn't really want that to be them.
That's my reading, anyhow. Her and Trixie are great fun to write.
Oh boy, I can't wait to read all of these in probably a year and change. :'D
Thank you to the judges for your time, and to the other authors for contributing!
I kinda wanna run a contest of my own, sometime. :3
Well, here it is.
And of course you didn't warn us you were posting the blog.This was loads of fun to be a part of, and I want to again thank all the other judges, FoME in particular for organising the contest, and the participants for participating. I'll get working on that blog of sparse thoughts I mentioned tomorrow, I'll probably link it in the group too. Oh, and looking over this, props to Sir for being the only one who actually used the introduction space as an introduction. And I do apologise for being overly wordy in my sections.5394722
I was torn there. I consider Apples to be the better story, but on a personal level I love Mirror Match with every fiber of my being. But I also recognise my extreme bias towards pretty much everything the fic does.
5394728
That's what you get for using dark mode.I'm sorry about that. But I'm not sorry about going for Best Worst Pony's mane colour.5394798
I'm fairly sure Colgates was the only story picked as a candidate for top spots by every single judge. Also, I know I already put it in the HM, but thank you for writing Mirror Match Inc.. The world needs more Sugarcoat, and also more of everything else that is in that fic.
If anyone else's got questions they'd like to ask me as a judge, I'll happily answer them. Assuming FoME doesn't shoo me away from his blog.
5394869
Do you like penguins? 🐧
(I figured it was maybe 50/50 that that would be available as an emoji, and am glad it came up heads)
5394874
I do.
But we might not want the comments to be clogged up with questions unrelated to the contest. Otherwise FoME would have every right to kick me out of here
and I would have to resort to blackmail.5394869
Thanks! And now the big question: Do I actually go back and revise the stuff I ran out of time to do for the contest (make it clearer what I was after with Applejack/mirrorSugarcoat; bring Cadance back near the end so her thing doesn't just disappear and to improve the timing of Sugarcoat's development), or just let it stand as a freewheeling contest deadline piece?
This Apples/MirrorMatch comparison actually highlights a huge thing here. Because if someone just wrote synopses, or technical aspects of "what kind of story they are," they wouldn't seem that different. But good god, even if I hadn't written one of them, I wouldn't even know how to compare one to the other. They're just not even in the same worlds regarding tone and style and intention. And some of these stories are off in other galaxies. I'd have NO clue how to be a judge with this sort of thing.
(I tried to think of a way to say Mirror Match is oranges, but I couldn't think of how to word it so make the joke yourself I guess)
Ah, yes. At least I see that I'm not the only judge caught off-guard by FoME posting this suddenly.
I made the decision to leave a comment on every entry in the contest (I mostly succeeded*), and I won't lie: some of you got more out of that deal than others. Turns out thoughtful comments are hard and even simple ones take me way too long to write. Somehow, FoME manages to leave such things on basically everything he reads, and we all know how much he reads. It's impressive, really.
*Aside from two nigh-meaningless responses that I left in the absence of more developed thoughts, one entry did not receive a comment from me (you know who you are).
5394776
I fully second Kris' choice and the reasoning behind it. That was some great Starlight and Trixie banter, just not enough Ponydox (specifically for the purposes of the contest).
Congratulations to the contest winners and honorable mentions!
5394904 I would say that, since you're not writing this for publication, don't look back. If you have a really solid idea and a burning need to put it into the work, then sure... but too many creators, especially fanfic creators, get caught up in revising and revisiting their old work at the expense of making new stuff. I'd say go forward and apply what you learned to your next inspiration.
5394869 I only kept track of four of us five judges' responses- we all posted our top five entries for purposes of picking the winners- but out of the four, World of Colgates is the only one we all included (1 top-of-list, 2 2nd, 1 4th). Ditzy of Infinite Possibility and Apples in the mirror each appeared on three lists, as did one of the honorable mentions. I don't think I'll go into any more detail, except to point out that, leaving those stories out, not fewer than seven other stories got listed by us judges as finalists. So even those of you who didn't get mentioned deserve credit for producing some quality work.
Now I wish I’d waited before posting the results for my roleswap contest. I was biased towards earlier entries because I’d given myself more time to form an opinion on them. Maybe next year...
5394904
You could have made a joke about mirrors instead. It's right there in the titles!
I'm going to actually disagree with what Kris said. Partly, at least. Yes, it is true that you should move on instead of overrevising a fic, art is never finished and all that. But this is a contest entry written on a deadline. FoME, myself, and a number of other notable writers on the site have a habit of going back and touching up on those when they feel the time constraints meant they didn't get to work on them as much as they would have otherwise. Mirror Match was right on the edge in both word limit and submission deadline, so I'm in favour of you going back to it and improving on it at least once. Don't work on it forever, but do give it the added detail and polish you would have put in it if you weren't forced to post it there and then.
5394904
5395002
5395085
Congrats to the winners and honorable mentions!
For my part, I was writing my entry in the spare moments while finishing up a long, non-Pony novel and couldn't give the story the final polish that I wanted. So that's on my list of things to do early this week before finally letting go of this Spike idea once and for all.
Mike
Thank you for allowing me to get into this contest and back into writing.
Well, just poppin' in to say congrats to the winners. I'll have to check out the stories when the dust settles some more.