My Little Pony's end in October 2019 caused the Decline of Civilization.
Lyra and Bon Bon wallow amid the dying days of the PonyPox pandemic. Enjoy(?) suffering with them as they confront conflicts compounded by years of isolation and emerge from simple nursery rhymes of good times into the cold realities of a future without "Friendship is Magic."
Featured on Equestria Daily's 2023 Lyra/Bon Day in the Drama category! Thank you!
Content Note: Bon Bon lights a cigarette! 
; addictions touched on lightly; the era of PonyPox. 
Review and Honorable Mention in a Contest:
[W]ithin the story's Equestria, My Little Pony is a children's TV show run by profit-minded executives, and Lyra and Bon Bon are at the same time former actors on that show, fans of it, resentful of how it ended, and watching the sequel on their TV as they wither away to death in PonyPox quarantine. and through it all, their conversation meanders through dense references and cultural worldbuilding as the grim details of their situation seeps in around them. out of anything i have ever read on this website, reading this fic comes the closest to the feeling of watching an experimental play, which left me feeling very Art. —Bicyclette
Index to my works by show season.
Image: Rights to the base image (only) are at this link. I further modified the image with colored text and the breaking news.
always very art to start with a line that is also a commentary on the story itself! not to mention the theme-setting preface
is it called "hygienic paper" to stay agnostic about how pony bathrooms work?
this reference would be jarring coming from any other character than Lyra, but Lyra totally is the kind of character to make references in a conversation with no care for being understood
love the efficiency in exposition here. there is a delight in its deliberate overstuffedness
what are carousels in a world of talking horses anyway?
aww, they were made for each other!
looks like Lyra's picked up some of that argot
the sad result of pony culture's insistence on furniture designs meant for bipedal creatures for some reason
i guess this is the pony equivalent of stockpiling fish antibiotics? haha
huh, i thought horses didn't need bidets! i guess pastel ponies are different?
oof! the hints of whatever awful thing the world is going through coming together
hehe this is fun
well that's intriguing!
agreed entirely with this footnote
do love the phrase "mare's share". also sad to see Bon Bon being the pony version of Americans who think only people who don't look like them are immigrants!
ooh, love that a pony would read Lyra's famously odd sitting position as being like a dog's! that makes too much sense
if Lyra was trying to argue against stereotypes this was the worst possible thing she could have mentioned haha
very good point! it makes more sense that non-pony species have at least something similar to earthpony magic than somehow not being magical at all and yet living in the same civilization
and oof, that is very disquieting! starting to understand the nursery rhyme at the beginning...
aww!
huh, that is a gap in the English language, isn't it?
yeah "Seed" is a lot more marketable
this brings to mind so many questions!
yeah, dental work makes the most sense
love it
oh, so that's what happened!
brilliant use of Roseluck here
ah classic repetition gag. great contrast with the dark moment right afterward
symbolic imagery!
love the shift here in the ending: a nursery rhyme unchanged from its source, which even compared to other original nursery rhymes is so anodyne that it wraps around to feeling sinister.
i feel like i just got done watching an experimental play, and appropriately enough, i think i will need more than this one reading to fully "get" it.
the matter-of-fact bleakness was well-done, with the way the characters' dialogue meandered contributing nicely to it. i found the state of the world here difficult to parse, though. it feels like none of the many elements are meant to be taken literally, because they don't really intersect with each other where they should, and the whole thing just feels dreamlike. and it feels like it is all of it is meant to come together to be a thesis about the end of the show, but doesn't really state a definitive one, like it's pulling its punches somehow.
i would definitely love to know more about what you were going for here and the many things i feel like i missed! i did really like a lot of the elements individually, and of course there was more of the great cultural and linguistic worldbuilding and wordplay that i always enjoy. thank you for it!
Indeed she did! Who knows if Bon Bon should get in trouble for letting leak that state secret. It's hard to keep secrets when you're muttering things around a clever pony like Lyra.
Thank you for thinking about it. Some thoughts I had (there may be others):
1. This is about the rocky evolution of a relationship (Lyra and Bon Bon)
2. This is about the "PonyPox" in real Earth world and in Equestria
3. This is about the show's end.
Preface. The nursery rhymes recall simplicity and fairy tales and an easy unexamined, relatively unthreatened life and relationship--the calmness and love of a good cartoon TV show. The initial quotation by Twilight Sparkle was added near the end of writing to bundle up concepts and to make them more obvious--it ties in with the end paragraph and sets-up the beginning.
- Lyra and Bon Bon had a good close relationship. But time passed... and the isolation of the PonyPox created stresses. In this story, the sweetness of My Little Pony and its community was tainted. In the real world, the show ended and the dire virus emerged one month later...after the magic of the show was gone.
1A. Specifically about their relationship: The first nursery rhyme is from "Jack Sprat Could Eat No Fat; His Wife Could Eat No Lean" inspiration. The two of them complete each other and they are parts of a whole. This connection has a darker literal side though, with the eating choices that menaced them due to the PonyPox as they both had breakdowns due to isolation and the terrible things that happened. One could even argue their relationship is... going down the toilet...
2. PonyPox travails they suffer directly parallel real-life ones--the toilet paper hoarding, shady supply acquisition, questionable medical stockpiling, the Flower Ponies' sickness, Lyra and Bon Bon's isolation to protect themselves, political stress/weirdness, bizarre amateurish home improvement projects (black painted door also as a metaphor!), etc. Ring Around the Rosie was originally about the Black Death, and so it felt right to adapt it here.
1B. Relationships are harder when they are tested, and throughout this story, Bon Bon and Lyra's relationship is tested in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways. Bon Bon's getting crankier and more paranoid and has been increasingly less willing to put up with Lyra's eccentricities while Lyra continues to be weird but also more fearful and nervous. The show itself is a metaphor for their relationship. It brought them together. But greed burned the show down. (Literally). Greed from the exterior (executives) and the interior (the actors themselves) and fate (the show just got too big) [Note: I'm not sure if any of these reasons brought down the real show, although I have heard some of them as internet arguments. That said, they certainly brought down the show in this story]. The two of them were brought together by the show, but paranoia and fear brought them down, just like paranoia and fear caused stresses and strains for some in the real world during the lockdowns.
3. The show ended. See 1B above for part of the explanation of what it means as a metaphor for Lyra and Bon Bon. But although the show ended, something new could come out...Generation 5, and so Bon Bon and Lyra decided they needed to go out and face the world--their fears--and now that the danger is less than it was, they needed to try to make connections to others again because they were tearing each other apart and breaking down. Similarly, the pony community seems to be moving past mourning generation 4, staying at home and not in-person interacting with each other (since conventions and meetups are less risky than they had been!), and it has the opportunity to get out and be kind again to all the world (of course, that may not happen; however, either way the community won't be what it was before, just like Lyra and Bon Bon can't go back to what they had before--something needs to change for them).
Epilogue. The last nursery rhyme indicates that life is but a dream... dreamlike... but also it will end in death, just as the story ended. It's more of a 'normal' rhyme than the other adapted ones because we're returning to normalcy. Hopefully we can get through the river of life merrily. It's intended to be a hopeful, but worrying beat. Life is hard for Bon Bon and Lyra, but now they have decided to try to move forward and live.
I... don't think I understand.