Who Crossed Over My Little Pony?: And The Winner Is... · 1:42pm Apr 22nd, 2022
This contest had a starting date, an entry deadline, and a defined finish line. Let's shock the world and stick with the originals on all three.
So how successful was the contest, in terms of generating entries and interest?
We wound up with sixteen stories submitted. I don't consider this to be a poor showing, especially given the subject matter and some of the rules I established for submissions.
When it came to public reception, every story which had a visible rating wound up with a positive total. (One author chose to disable votes.) A number reached the Feature box, which generally indicates that someone is reading them.
However, public opinion did not factor into that of our panelists. (Just to remind you: our judges were FanOfMostEverything, Masterweaver,Dawnbreez, Tipper, and CCC.) I was told that one panelist didn't even look at author names, because knowing who'd written something could prospectively have an influence on their opinion. The final winner reflects their feelings on the stories involved, and nothing more.
And for my part? I did what I promised in the original announcement blog. I stayed out of it -- completely. Want a little confession? I have yet to read a single entry in the contest, because I'm the one who hosted the server channel with the judges' discussions. I didn't want to chance coming into their debates with an unwelcome 'But I thought...', and that's why I'm going to go through the lot in May. When it's safe.
Sixteen stories. It's a lot to for the judges to sort through. There have certainly been more popular contests on the site and I could have made a few tweaks to send this one into the stratosphere., but I just didn't want to focus on you've seen prior contests: take a wild guess.
So how did they do it?
After some discussion, the judges quantified each story along four lines:
Creativity: How original is it? How much imagination was part of this? Is the plot so threadbare as to make Rarity scream for a patch job?
Character: Is everyone faithful to their toon incarnations? Can you believe that they'd actually react this way?
Quality: How's the writing? Any particularly good lines or standout moments? Everyone spellchecked and then edited to make sure the code didn't screw up, right?
Worldbuilding: Was the environment fully established? Are we learning anything new about any party involved? Does it all fit together?
And then they debated.
Everyone had different favorites. Separate ideas on how to score. But they had to find some way of reaching an agreement.
I told the judges that I wasn't going to go quoting them in this blog. It's their discretion as to whether they want to discuss their own choices and how they felt about the entries. If they decide to go public on it, they'll use the comments section.
But they came to a decision. And we do have a winner.
There was only one prize. (Unsurprisingly, no one contacted me to sponsor extra prizes. If the contest topic had been did you really just fall for this again?, someone would have.) But I'm still announcing the top three.
Third Place:
Breach Of Contract by JudgementalHat.
It’s official. Derpy Hooves is off the air. Hasbro doesn’t want her. The good news is, she’s not the only pony er-only one in this situation.
Ponies believe in friendship, and Derpy isn’t the kind of pony to leave her friends in the lurch. There may be obstacles in the way, but if they try… if they really truly try, they can get back on the air. Right?
Comedy is tragedy plus time. And the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
(Toon: Betty Boop.)
Second Place: Tirek Season by TheDriderPony.
Tirek is a juggernaut. A nonstop bullet train on the fast track to becoming the sole source of magic in Equestria (and it's de facto ruler).
But what happens when this unstoppable force meets an immovable will?
A will that's more than eager to resort to cheap tricks and humiliation tactics to balance the karmic scales?
At that point... it's open season.
Tirek Season.
(Toon: who do you think, Doc?)
First Place: Rarity In Slumberland by BotchedLobotomy.
Rarity is a successful fashion designer slowly growing to hate what she's doing.
Gertie the Dinosaur is one of the first cartoon characters ever animated.
Winsor McCay is her creator, a pioneer of early animation.
...At night, the three of them dream together.
(Toon: see above -- and below.)
I sense that at least one person's about to raise a fuss, because I'm the party who had to deal with all of the people looking for entry loopholes and rejected pretty much every last one of them. And I know who that character list on the winner includes: Winsor McCay. So I'm going to cut that one person off right here.
As with many of the people who were trying to find ways of including their desired characters, BL contacted me before the story was written. And it was pointed out that Gertie, as the star of what's arguably the original animated short, was essentially in a vaudeville production. Winsor stood on the stage as the projector played, narrated events and, at the 12:58 mark, steps into the picture. He became the first human to exist as a toon.
The judges and I discussed the matter and, after some debate, they decided to let it go through -- again, before seeing the resulting story. It's an interactive production, and BL had found the one loophole which worked. Winsor could not be readily separated from Gertie.
...so naturally, that's what won.
Each judge picked their three favorite stories, then worked it out from there. Rarity In Slumberland appears on four of those lists.
In a contest full of comedy, hijinks, and the occasional Slice Of Life, the drama won. Because the man who helped birth two mediums reached out across a century and let us know he was there. That without him, there is no us.
Welcome to FIMFic, everybody.
Sixteen entries. A lot of upvotes. The comedic, the dramatic, and the one sci-fi entry is our Honorable Mention: there was no one who didn't have fun with AugieDog's offering of Quantum Schlep. But we have an winner. I'm about to contact that party and ask for their drop address, so I can mail out the prize.
And with that, I consider this contest to be concluded. (In my opinion, it was at least a moderate success.) I have thanked the judges, and I want to do one more thing. I want to thank everyone who entered, because I know how hard it is to put your dreams into a forum of judgment. There's a certain courage involved in that, and it has to be honored.
Thank you all.
Maybe we'll do this again, with a new theme in play.
Because I have another, different steelbook title.
And it wants to find its way home.
I was trying to follow this contest, checked the "new" list daily & managed to miss over half the entries
-including 2 of the 3 winners. Thanks for posting a link to the complete list.
Windsor McCoy's comic strip "Little Nemo" was published only on Sundays. They were collected and published in book form. Probably the most expensive thing I've ever bought outside of a few cars. Worth it & if you have a LOT of money I'd suggest buying them. Or read them in your local library.
I'd rate WM as the third most influential animator of the 20th century, behind Disney & Hanna/Barbera.
Big difference between today & back then was the quality of the artwork. I remember the Dick Tracy comic strip occasionally mocked Charles Shultz' work (having Tracy read a comic strip called "Sawdust")
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And everyone else mocked Tracy.
comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/9/99729/2421493-1.jpg
When Fearless Fosdick got shot, he stayed shot.
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True. I liked Lil Abner.
Still, IIRC, Tracy was half detective half Sci-fi. IDK if he lived long enough to have the last laugh about 2 way wrist radios. (AFAIK, he invented the idea.)
If you'd told your grandparents that someday people would pay good money to voluntarily carry a device that would let the government track your movements.....
& I saw on 60 Minutes that VW is working on flying surfboards. Close enough to those hover cars they used.
For the record, this was a hard contest to judge. There were several REALLY good comedies on the list--I personally recommend Nyardaffotep--and in a nicer world, I would have been able to nominate awards in two categories instead of picking a single winner.
That said, Rarity in Slumberland hit me right in the heart. Not only is it a well-written, well-paced drama--and one that strikes at something I find deeply important--it's also exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see from this competition.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was a story that nobody expected. It was hilarious, sure, but it was also very much a dramatic noir detective film, with tragic heroes whose personal failings were as much the antagonist as the killer himself. It told a serious story through the absurd lens of cartoons.
I was hoping we'd see something like that, here--and there were a couple of contestants that delivered. For me, it was a toss-up between Slumberland and Quantum Schlep, and it was a damn tight race, because where Slumberland's death of a fashionista played my heartstrings skillfully, Quantum Schlep surprised me with a wild re-interpretation of one of the earliest episodes of MLP, one that felt like it fit perfectly even though it was deep in the epileptic trees. (Please understand, I say this with nothing but respect: I was NOT expecting to get such a detailed explanation for Fancy Mathematics.)
This is why I love fanfiction. I love fanfiction so fucking much. Where else could you find Rarity having her Great Gatsby arc, or Dr. Horace Horsecollar playing the role of accidental background hero throughout the entire multi-tooniverse?
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TvTropes says they downplayed the sci-fi later on. Killing off the alien wife and just not mentioning the antennae that the half-alien child was hiding with her hairstyle.
*shrugs* I tried. No hard feelings, and congrats to the winners.
This was a fun contest, either way. <3
Tirek Season was my top pick, being the story that I felt best captured the spirit of the contest. It hit all the right notes of a Merry Melody while still preserving the sense of tension and peril inherent in fighting a well-fed Tirek. Neither part of the crossover overshadowed the other; instead each allowed the other to reach new heights.
That being said, Rarity in Slumberland was just barely behind it on my slate. Tirek Season was the best fulfillment of the prompt, but Rarity in Slumberland was the best written story. Its message works on multiple levels of fiction and metafiction, and the message from one of the founding fathers of animation to one of his distant descendants is one that likely resonated with every judge. I know it did with me.
As Estee noted, Quantum Schlep was also a hit. Wildly inventive, blending together Disney, Hasbro, and more by implication into a vast multiverse wherein Horace Horsecollar must set right what once went wrong in the Bakulan tradition, all while building drama of its own in the slow reveal of its own world building. Outstanding work there, and narrowly taking the bronze among my finalists.
That's not to say that Breach of Contract doesn't deserve its spot. Anything but; it makes brilliant use of the animated actors trope that saw surprisingly little use given the source of the prompt, along with an ingenious parallel between its co-stars. Moral outrage ruins the best characters, doesn't it?
There were plenty of other outstanding entries as well. Dawn's already mentioned Nyardaffotep's eldritch comedy. How to Do a Cartoon Crossover flawlessly captured the tone the classic Goofy "instructional" shorts, with bonus characterization points for the disembodied narrator. 5652566's Strong to the Finnich would've won the Best Crackship award if there were such a thing. I could easily keep going, but I think you all get the point; this was a strong field throughout.
Thanks to everyone who entered and to Estee for arranging it. This was a delight to judge.
ooh, some names you don't always see in the contest finals :D
~One skim through discord later~
Well... at least I made it on somebody's top three.
As I said in my entry, this story wouldn't have been possible without the existence of this contest, so I have no grudges if it didn't meet expectation.
It would've been nice to win to get others invested into checking out the fanfics that I've placed more effort upon, but I got at least 5 big names into reading a story of mine. It was never about the prize for me, it was all for the publicity.
Though, I feel that I need to address something to 5652561. You said my story 'reads like an ESL story.' You're incorrect as English is my first language, but I still agree with you that it reads like a ESL story. 'English as a second language' is probably the best term to use for describing the communication skills of an autistic person.
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Ah, I getcha. For the record, I meant it in the most respectful way I can think of. It was a good story--it just felt like there was a language barrier. You knew what you wanted to say, and you did your best to say it, and I could see what it was, but I had to work through some unexpected word choices to get there.
I'll have to go look at Final Filly Fantasy. I'm something of a JRPG fan, and I'd like to see how you handled that crossover.
Whenever I enter:
One of these contests, I always wait till I've got my story in before I start reading the others. This way, I can keep stacking stories around mine as I go along. Sometimes, my own ranking is wildly off the actual ranking, but this time, yeah, essentially 4th place was where I saw mine falling, too. Some really nice pieces hereabouts.
Mike
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Don't sweat it, just wanted to clarify. Coincidently, it's also Autism Awareness Month, so irony was calling out for me to speak up.
I was looking for this post in “Recent Threads” and completely missed when it popped up in the blog here.
Ah well, I gave it an honest try, though I never figured it’d get very far given it wasn’t especially inventive premise-wise (indeed, the only judge that mentioned my story ripped me to shreds over that). But it got me to finally write an FiM story instead of EqG for once, so that was neat.
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I think the best place to look for inspiration, if you want to do another story along the same "Cartoon animals show up in the Everfree, Fluttershy has to deal with it" lines, is A Lesson In Kindness. It didn't make the top three, unfortunately, but it played with a similar idea: a Toon crashlands in the Everfree, and ends up stuck with Fluttershy for a day.
The thing that it does right is: It uses this as a vehicle to ask and answer questions about what happens next, beyond what would happen in the show. What would an excitable, curious young horse like Peter do when presented with Fluttershy's cottage? He'd want to know more. What happens when Fluttershy meets a young horse who wants to know more about veterinary care? She'd teach him. What happens when that young horse decides he wants to care for animals? Well, there's a couple different paths forward, but he could follow along with one of the med students in Ponyville...
The fun part of a crossover, to me, isn't just seeing familiar characters in familiar places--it's seeing the fireworks that happen when two different settings collide. And, more than that, part of what I love about all fanfiction is the times when it explains something better than the original show ever could. This is also why I enjoy Who Framed Roger Rabbit? so much; it's dedicated to crafting a 'behind-the-scenes' world that answers the question, "What if cartoon characters were actors, just like how live-action shows have actors?".
In short, what you want to do is explore the weird intersections between the two settings, where something unusual happens because of one character meeting another.
(For the record: I'm writing all this because I want to help. I want my criticism to be encouraging.)