It Is My Fate To Enter Every Door · 1:34am Jun 23rd, 2013
This is a story I wrote quickly for Equestria Daily's "Father's Day" event. It suggests, obliquely, why Pinkie Pie is the way she is. Let's say, she comes by it honestly.
Have you ever read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (The Shadow of the Torturer, et al)? Writing My Little Pony fanfiction is like that, sometimes. You have this safe, familiar world that suddenly exposes vistas that everypony in the world understands except you. There you are, wandering happily around Ponyville, and then somepony casually mentions that Tartarus, Where All The Evil Monsters Dwell, is just over the hill there, past the lemon trees.
Dang. I'm still trying to figure out how Luna's bat-wings and the Quarry Eels fit into all of this. Equestria is a weird place, I tell you what.
Yeah, isn't it great!?
The worldbuilding on the show hits just the right balance between easy familiarity and deep strangeness. And it's handled very deftly, too; even Twilight Sparkle avoids info dumps most of the time, and the weirdness of Equestria - a land where the weather and the ecology are tamed and managed to the point that uncontrolled, random weather is seen as scary and unnatural, a land where monsters and mythical creatures lurk in the wilderness and while the ponies may be scared by them, they aren't surprised by them - is shown, frequently in an oblique fashion or just implied.
It's perfect fodder for fan elaboration and exploration!
It's a weird place, indeed.
Honestly, I can't decide if I like that or if I don't. I used to have a great time crafting my own fantasy worlds, writing guides where everything was listed and explained: The gods, the kingdoms, the species...
But in the recent years I've come to feel appreciation for works of fiction where the world is ill-defined and sometimes a bit confusing, of books like The Last Unicorn where you don't have a map at the beggining (at least not in the version I read); because I think that gives the world a bigger sense of wonder and magic, precisely because it's less defined. From the reader's point of view, anything can happen.
I'd say Equestria is in the middle. We have many things explained, and we even have a map now; but there are still some mysteries out there to explore.