Regardless, I had already made up my mind that my original plan for Pipp the Poltergeist to take place before MYM Chapter 5 but afterMy Top 10 Worst MLP Stories/Mistakes as a Writer · 9:38am Sep 15th, 2023
The list is finished now, you can read it on here and on DeviantArt.
My Top 10 Worst MLP Stories
I’ve been a writer on the internet for a long time, longer than ten years now. Like virtually every writer/artist/content creator on the planet, I like my later works better than my earlier works that were written at a time when I hadn’t found my niche yet. When I first got into the MLP fandom and started writing MLP fanfics, I wasn’t even trying to write stories that were good. I was trying to write experimental stories, parody stories, and nonsense stories that had intentionally been written badly as a joke.
Although I do enjoy how some people found the stories I was writing at this time to be entertaining, it is a phase I’m happy to have moved on from. Regardless, even stories I didn’t write just to be total nonsense taking nothing seriously, I’ve come to reflect upon in a negative light. I have been in the habit of making notes on my old stories saying that they do not represent how I write my stories today, but I definitely feel my older content has a varying degree of quality. Some stories, I don’t feel were bad for the time I wrote them. Others, I never should’ve released them as they were. These are the ten stories I’ve written over the years that I look back on as the worst…
10. Lightening Fluttershy’s Dark Sky
Spoiler alert, Fluttershy’s Dark Sky and Transcending Fluttershy’s Dark Sky are on this list. Awakening Fluttershy’s Dark Sky and Spiriting Fluttershy’s Dark Sky are the only “good” FDS stories in my eyes. That’s because the first three are all full-on experimental nonsense stories that fall short of their effort to be “so bad, they become good”. The third, LFDS, however, is the least bad of the bunch. I actually tried to tone down the nonsense in it after the first three chapters because I was just not enjoying writing stories in that nonsense story style anymore. It’s still not a good story by any means, especially at the start with how it was following in the footsteps of its worse predecessors, but I do at least like how I can look back on most of my work on it as a step in the right direction.
9. Lyra’s Human Weiners
This is the most recent of the stories I’ve written that I find the worst, coming out in early 2019. Experimental nonsense isn’t the only thing I’ve moved on from writing. I’ve also moved on from writing raunchy gag stories, and if you couldn’t tell from the title (“weiners” refers to “sausages”, just clarifying), this is one of those raunchy gag stories. It’s stupidly over-the-top with its explicit themes, and even though it was done in the name of humor, it’s the kind of humor I lost interest in writing for the better. The reason it’s fairly low on this list is because it does have some jokes I still find amusing and was at least written with a good intention of making people laugh. Not that I’ve ever written anything with malicious intentions, but there is stuff higher on this list that I wrote while being in a worse mindset…
8. Pull the Tail on the Pony
This story was my first attempt at writing a “family-friendly” MLP story. It wasn’t good. It’s very forgettable. Out of every story I’ve written in the past, this is always the one I most often forget that I wrote. Considering the fact that all of my stories now are written for viewers of all ages, you’d think my first story written for general audiences would stand out among my other older works, but it doesn’t. While I don’t find anything in this story to be that bad, it’s still just a bland execution of a stupid premise. At least Pinkie Pie gets to be Sans in it though!
7. Fluttershy’s Dark Sky
Already spoiled it, can’t put this one too high on this list for being my first MLP story. Still, I do regret trying to write a parody of grimdark fanfiction as my first MLP story. I wrote this back when I had recently read Cupcakes and had a dumb, gross fascination with reading every story that’s now considered a “sin of the brony fandom’s past”. I also had this bizarre fascination with an infamous trollfic, My Immortal, and trollfics in general at the time, and threw everything together in a blender to make this giant joke I don’t find funny at all anymore. Despite my regrets with Pull the Tail on the Pony, I wish that had been my first story as opposed to this. Trying to write something good and failing just does not fill me with the same embarrassment nowadays as trying to write something “so bad, it’s good” and failing.
6. The Turnabout Cloud/Ace Swift Wasn’t Evil
Oh, Turnabout Storm…you deserved better. You and NeoArtimus both. Yes…this is a trollfic I wrote as not only a parody of Turnabout Storm, but as a joke submission for a contest that NeoArtimus had back in 2013 for “writing a bad ending”. I was pretending at the time to be one of the people who didn’t understand that the bad ending was supposed to be a sad ending, not a poorly written ending, thus I wrote the worst ending I could possibly write where Phoenix Wright ends up dying and becoming Maya Fey. …Yeah. Since I was also in this phase of laughing at old 4Kidz dubs of anime shows I watched when I was little, I even milked my silly trolling by making a joke edited version of the story, the version I posted on FiMFiction.net. I don’t count that version as my “first all-ages story” and if you’ve read it, you’ll see why.
5. Celestia’s Story Spirit
What can I really say about my short trollfics? They’re short and intentionally terrible, they provoke little discussion. However, I can still say that I regret writing them, especially short trollfics like these that I wrote to “test myself” to see how quickly I could write a trollfic. I have no clue what this story even was besides one of those “tests”. It’s not even entertaining to me. At least The Turnabout Cloud was trying to be imaginative with so much stuff happening that was so off-the-walls insane that I could get some laughs from it. This is just…a parody of Celestia having an episode? Seriously? This is just boring and forgettable. And at least Pull the Tail on Your Pony was a boring and forgettable story that I put time into trying to write competently. This is just complete gibberish I rushed out.
4. Snowdrop Double Rainbooms the Dawn!
Like Celestia’s Story Spirit, another boring, forgettable, rushed way of “testing myself” that proved to be even more embarrassing. What makes this story worse than Celestia’s Story Spirit is the fact that it’s one of the most painfully unfunny things I’ve ever written despite the fact that it’s so short. It’s a “parody” of what were the three most well-known fan-animated “original MLP:FiM episodes” at the time, Snowdrop, Double Rainboom, and Dusk’s Dawn. Everyone has their own opinion on those fan animations, they’re understandably divisive, but did they really call for me to make something like this? Even Dusk’s Dawn, “the brony fandom’s The Room”, didn’t deserve this mockery. Seriously, POW-YOURMUFF GIRLS?! What was I ON?!
3. Transcending Fluttershy’s Dark Sky
The worst Fluttershy’s Dark Sky story by far and the worst story I’ve ever written that went on for longer than five chapters by far. Following up a parody of the grimdark fanfiction genre…with a parody of the Human in Equestria fanfiction genre…two genres that have nothing in common…what was I thinking? And on top of it, I was also trying to make it a parody of a bad sequel while trying to literally make every line in it funny. It’s astounding how many levels this story fails on. From thinking outlandish, nonsensical similes and exclamations of randomness are the pinnacle of comedy, to thinking “subversion” is synonymous with “wit”, to completely failing at being amusingly edgy, especially in the third chapter...
Believe me, I’ve ALWAYS hated how this story turned out. I even tried to give it the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment once back in the day, that’s how much even my past self regretted it. Meanwhile, my present self is just like, “…Who would’ve thought after this that my most popular and well-received story by far would be a subversive Human in Equestria story?”.
2. Descendant Friendly
This is a story that’s so bad, it’s the only MLP story I won’t post on any site besides Fanfiction.net that went on for more than one chapter. My reason for writing it back in the day was to try and make a parody of the first Resident Evil game in an MLP story as a way to celebrate Halloween at the time. The nonsense plot of this story is that Chrysalis taking over Equestria leads the Mane 6 to become police officers, which in turn leads them to investigate a place filled with talking farm animals, where “hijinks” about food and Big Mac being fruity ensue, LEGIT.
It’s in every way the peak of my crackfic storytelling and humor failing to be entertaining. The first Resident Evil game is rife with corny goodness that I could’ve lampooned in a fun way, and the best I could come up with was, “DOODLE DERP DO A DERPY DRAWING”. I wasn’t even having fun writing this story, I completely forced myself to rush out an ending to it, I just couldn’t believe how badly it turned out. TFDS is at least something I felt I put a lot of effort into coming up with creative ideas for, this was just so half-baked and a complete failure of a project.
1. The Princess Molestia Stories
Out of all the stories I regret writing, the ones that fill me with the most shame are the two stories I wrote about Princess Celestia being a lecher, Princess Molestia Wants Cake and The Dogs of Princess Molestia. These were obviously inspired by John Joseco’s Ask Princess Molestia comic series, and as you’d expect, they were stupidly over-the-top with how inappropriate they were. I was never a stranger to writing stuff that was stupidly over-the-top and inappropriate back in my “edgy” phase. So what was different about these stories? They were essentially clopfics, badly written ones I was writing to satisfy my odd cartoon shape-changing kink and posting publicly.
I’m sorry to be getting personal here…but it’s important for context. I had a rough upbringing that screwed me up. There was a time when I had virtually no filter on the internet and believed that having weird kinks was cool. Even as I never explicitly made my kinks public and only talked about them privately when someone else brought them up, I should’ve never made stories about them public, let alone MLP stories like these. I absolutely regret this phase of my life. I feel it’s a product of the mental damage that was inflicted on me throughout my life by abuse.
Again, I don’t like getting too personal here, but I want people to understand that I was weird for a reason. I was confused since my hormones first started developing when I was twelve years old and I was even more confused after I got taken advantage of sexually when I was fifteen. That deeply ingrained confusion combined with my autism is why I lacked awareness of how weird I could come across as. I’m still without excuse for the way I used to be, even though I have been completely done with my “weird phase” for years, happily outgrowing it. I like writing clean content best now, I honestly no longer feel a drive to write wildly vulgar and edgy stories. This is also how I want things to stay.
That is the end of my list. I’m fine with however you agree or disagree with my opinions, I just thought making this list was a good way of sharing thoughts that I’ve wanted to share for a long time in addition to explaining why my writing has changed the way it has over the years.
