With the series winding down, four members of the ensemble cast toast to a job well done… and are approached by another background pony wanting their seasoned advice.
Upbeat and sentimental short that chronologically takes place two weeks before the finale. No prior knowledge of these characters is necessary to enjoy this fic; they all are well defined in-story.
Teen rating for alcohol consumption and the crude but lighthearted banter to which it leads. Profanity tag for some reminiscing in the second chapter about older, edgier fan depictions of the featured characters.
Chapters (2)
Vinyl? I am in. Lyra also best pone and Screwball is rate too. No idea about blossom doh
Edit
Huh. Much meta than I thought.
Interesting.
Now that's new. Vinyl and a stutter.
Still like the rest doh
This was so sweet!
Reminded me of my favourite Blossomforth story
- MLP: FiM
- Comedy
- Slice of Life
Blossomforth and her friends visit a souvenir shop.Oddly enough, just today I was wondering about reading Background Pony. Have now added it to Read it Later!
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I specifically chose Blossomforth cuz she’s obscure even by background character standards. All ponies deserve a salute, especially at the end of the show. And now I have a new fic to read that features her!
EDIT: Huh. Upon reading, I’m surprised to find someone beat me to the very specific punch of “Two-chapter story where Blossomforth is a member of a club where she complains about her obscurity in a very meta way.”
As for... the other fic mentioned, be warned: My depiction of Lyra doesn’t call it ‘traumatizing’ for nothing.
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When it became a trend in canon to portray Vinyl as a non-talker, I tried to come up with an interesting explanation for it. I decided her appreciation for music that stutters on purpose was her way of coping with having a voice that stutters involuntarily.
I dunno, maybe that doesn’t work, but at least it made it easy to indicate when she was the one speaking in the story.
I can think of plenty of fics that were far more abusive to Lyra than Background Pony (by the same author, even), but considering how most of those managed it in far fewer words, I can see why she might be traumatized by the sight of a swell hoodie.
honestly, I'm surprised that this occurred to you at all after seeing her, which i guess proves a point.
and honestly, if i were Lyra i'd own the hoodie image myself, but i s'pose i'm not.
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Truthfully, this fic was me taking a Meta-style framing device and just kind of sandboxing it with characters I liked. Since I already decided Unnamed’s core conflict would be fear of how the fans would treat her, I decided Lyra could function as a contrasting voice. The one who advocated embracing human attention, both good and bad, because it was better than the alternative that Unnamed was considering: not wanting attention at all.
After that I had an “oh crap” moment, realizing Background Pony was really high profile counterpoint to the Lyra’s “our legacies matter” argument. So I had to have Lyra acknowledge that fic as something Unnamed should not emulate.
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Well, I can't think of anyone better to be the most knowledgeable of the outsider perspective of her. Good story op.
Silly background ponies, thinking they're misconstrued in fanfics, when in fact their lack of canon personalities means that fanfics are what give them their personalities to begin with. They're just not meta enough to realize it.
The alliteration seems to work against the intended anti-analogy.
I guess Blossomforth gets really bad at analogies when she's drunk.
Heh.
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Whoa. Been a hot minute since I got any traffic on this particular fic.
I wrote this one loose and light, treating it more as a doodle session with words than I did my previous work. Alliteration crept up in random spots cuz I’m just a fan of the trope. The silly simile you caught is tied with “Discord’s defective debutante daughter” for my favorite quip in here. In hindsight you’re definitely right about the thematic misfire, but for a strange story about stranger horses, I suppose mangled metaphors are fairly fitting.
Speaking of which, someone finally noticed the intentionally inaccurate buckball line! Even though her initial appearance was doing track and field, it’s pretty clear Blossomforth was always a pretty hopeless athlete. I wanted to give a nod to that here.
Judging by your engaged comments, you had fun perusing the fic. That kind of success makes me happy.
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I know you from Reddit, and you seemed like the kind of person who wrote good fan fiction, so I looked for a FIMFiction user of the same name, and bam.
I did. It reminds me a little of Wodehouse's Drones Club.
I just recently finished reading Background Pony, and while it was definitely dark, it was, in my opinion, a "woah" kind of dark as opposed to an "ew" kind of dark if that makes sense.
One of my earliest exposures to Lyra were some fanfics that had her as a faerie pony (as in the old world sense of the word) and one where she was writing letters to Bon-Bon every single day. There was of course some of the "edgier" stuff, but while I won't deny that I enjoy some of the more adult aspects of the fandom, I do my utmost to steer clear of the really bad stuff.