Abandoned Story Ideas

Folks, I'm going to level with you; I've written a lot of crap over the years. The one advantage of not having enough time to get things done means that while I'm churning ideas around in my brain, I can discern the good stuff (or at least the decent stuff, in my case) from the bad stuff. There's lots of ideas for pony stories that I'm going to do, and two that won't happen. One's because of Rainbow Rocks presenting me with more interesting options, but the other...well, it would've sucked.

I'll talk about the second one first. Back before I started work on "An Act of Random Kindness", I was toying with the idea of an MLP story. The premise was that an Earth pony mare would arrive in Ponyville...by falling out of the sky near Sweet Apple Acres. Found by the Cutie Mark Crusaders and tended to by the Mane Six, she'd wake up, but they'd discover that she was an amnesiac. For lack of a better name, they dub her 'Shooting Star' based on her cutie mark.

The idea changed over time, but the finalized version had her being pulled there by a being called "The Authority". I had it as personal head-canon that, following the founding of Equestria, the three tribes created a neutral third party to lead them, a being of Order. Said being, the Authority, did its job too well, and found itself controlling and reshaping ponies for what it thought was their own good. They dropped him in favor of something else...that something else being Discord...and we all know how that went. The Authority wasn't turned to stone, however, but shunted to another realm, and used Shooting Star as a way of getting back, and started turning ponies into uniform, mindless horses, lacking in personality or that pesky thing we know and love as 'free will', save for the alicorns and, surprise surprise, Shooting Star. Authority got its butt kicked and all went back to normal, including Shooting Star, who turned out to be...well, a human character I have in other stories.

Didn't do it because Shooting Star sounded way too much like a Mary Sue, because canon stuff came along and screwed the idea (specifically, the Journal of the Two Sisters and the Season Four premiere), and because Quiver Quill came into my head as a far more interesting character. Plus I wanted to write stuff with Sunset Shimmer. So she saved us from something else that was horrible! Yay!

The first idea was a post-Equestria Girls story, conceived before Rainbow Rocks but after I started work on "The Sun Also Rises". The premise was simple; somehow, Twilight Sparkle's consciousness had been swapped with that of her human counterpart. While she tries to calmly figure out how to deal with her counterpart's life in the human world (including having a best friend in Human!Sunset Shimmer), her counterpart would be freaking out over A, being a pony, B, being surrounded by talking ponies, C, having to deal with a dragon who has the same name as her dog, and D, not knowing what the heck was going on. It would've eventually led to the revelation that the two portals (the official one and the one I came up with in "The Sun Also Rises") had been flipped, and would've concluded with Pony!Sunset Shimmer returning to Equestria and the two Twilights meeting and getting their minds swapped back. Abandoned this because it was too complicated; seeing Twilight's human counterpart at the end of Rainbow Rocks was the final nail in the coffin.

If someone else thinks they could make these ideas work, feel free, but I ain't touching them.