The Most Horrible Fanfic EVER! · 7:23pm Nov 3rd, 2022
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these denouements for one of my stories. I don’t believe I did one for Candy Mare Goes to Hell, in the end, as that story was pretty self explanatory and most of its influences and references were pretty plain and easy to identify. (For those that may have skipped that story, it was influenced of course by Jason Goes to Hell, DOOM, Dante’s Inferno, Hellraiser, Sandman, Bastard!!, and Berserk.) Also Candy Mare Goes To Hell was kind of a goof off story, at the end of the day, that I wrote more for myself than anyone else, so devoting even more words to it (at the time) felt kind of self-indulgent. I figured I’d let it stand on its own as either the end of the series or a jumping off point for a new beginning and see what happened later on.
Aaaannnnd then I decided to ignore it and do another prequel instead! Because of that and because it’s been roughly two years since I made a blog post here at at all though, so I figured I’d redirect the practice and discuss my most recent work and how it came about.
Starting off, the origins of the story are pretty simple - over and over I would see commenters saying that they wanted to see the battle between Princess Luna and the Candy Mare and how exactly Luna managed to defeat her. The usual questions were how come Candy best Luna at the end of the first story of Luna had defeated her in the past and why exactly they had chosen to seal the Candy Mare inside statues instead of destroy her outright. Etc. Etc. Most of that I had answers for, but since they were not directly in the story I’d see these questions come up again and again, so I figured I’d finally put them to rest and just do a sequel to Home Sweet Home where I showed the Candy Mare being hunted down and defeated and what led to that. The thing was - for me - this was actually a very short and boring story about the good guys beating the bad guy with hardly any horror or very much action to speak of…
So that’s why the story you got was originally a wrap around for a completely different story I spent 2021 writing and then gave up on halfway.
Let me explain…
So I originally DID want to do a story that followed on from Candy Mare Goes To Hell. There was going to be a short fluff story where Candy got banished from Heaven (complete with her rising from a crater in the ground back in Equestria and yelling ‘That was a cheap shot!’ at the sky) only for her to discover she was in the Pony Life universe which she would then tear to pieces because ‘why not?’ (Which was basically that shows philosophy) before finding her way back to the universe that was featured in Curse of the Candy Cult. There the Candy Mare would meat up with that universes Pumpkin Patch and at first it would seem like they were going to have an epic show down, but it would turn out that this version of the Candy Mare was investigating anew toy factory that had been opened in Trottingham - what was so interesting about this toy factory? The pony running it would turn out to be the version of Lemon Drop that had ALSO escaped from Hell. It would turn out he was building an army of toy slave soldiers with the stolen souls of ponies who worked in his factory to both defeat the Candy Mare and invade the rest of Equestria. That was going to be the ‘A Plot’ while the ‘B plot’ would be jumping back and forth in the timeline to the Candy Mare’s first defeat when she faced Princess Luna. Does that sound convoluted enough for you yet?
Long story short the ‘A Plot’ only got so far before it ground to a halt. There were just too many chapters devoted to explaining prior lore, dialogue between characters that were essentially the same character, and while I had an ending that I thought would make a good parallel to the ending of the ‘B plot’ it was not in and of itself a good ending. Meanwhile the ‘B plot’ continued to grow in both detail and complexity and I eventually figured out that it was the story I really wanted to tell and not whatever Daedalian mess I was crafting over in the ‘A Plot’.
So the title was changed to ‘The Most Horrible Hearth’s Warming EVER: A Candy Mare Tale’ and made into a true prequel with its own more irreverent holiday themed wrap around. Since the first prequel had more to do with Hearth’s Warming than Nightmare Night I thought I’d stick with that theme. I also decide to include the Guardians Of Harmony and their falling out with Stygian as a bit of a parallel to Luna’s evolution into Nightmare Moon to highlight the different choices that led them each to their fates.
Influences on this new version of the story were Dead Snow, Silent Night Deadly Night, Dracula, 30 Days of Night, As Above So Below, The Ritual, Evil Dead 2, Re-Animator, The Descent, Gremlins, and Invader Zim - that last influence being mainly for the title and the wrap around, which was actually a lot of fun to write on its own.
Previously I didn’t much care for the idea of writing the first showdown between the Candy Mare and Luna. I get a lot of requests for stories where the Candy Mare fights some other villain or supernatural entity, but I really don’t enjoy these sort of Death Battle’ stories. They’re really basic, with not much to them, and the outcome would vary depending on the author anyways so none of them can really be taken as conclusive or definitive outcomes in any event. But the more detail I put into how Luna would be feeling and what would drive her to face the Vandy Mare alone the more I could identify that there was something there - the core of the driving force that drove her to become Nightmare Moon in the first place. A lot of people dismiss Luna’s transformation as being driven by envy or petty jealousy, but at the core of it is fear… and not JUST fear but the defiance of fear, the denial of fear. Nightmare Moon is the more confident and capable version of Luna that she wanted to be, but she was created out of Luna’s anxiety and self-doubt. That ended up being a fun concept to explore and an interesting parallel to the Candy Mare who was also born from the very primal depths, the nadir of fear, but rather than defy what she feared she embraced it, along with the madness and the rage that it brought. In the end having the original inspiration for the holiday of Nightmare Night throw down with the boogiman of the holiday was both a satisfying conflict in and of itself with an enjoyably suspenseful build-up and a fairly gratifying pay off.
I still have that half finished original A-Plot in my back pocket and may rework it into a future story, but for now I hope you have had a chance to enjoy one more Candy Mare Tale and that you might look forward to maybe one more before all is said and done.
Oh, trust me mr. WE WANT MORE CANDY MARE
No idea why but the candy mare is one of my favorite mlp horror fan characters ever. Maybe I’m just twisted but just the mixture of candy and gore really appeals to me lmao