Genre Take: Tragedy

Tragedy is about making a mistake that leads to great misfortune in the end. The misfortune must be a direct consequence of the hero making the wrong decision. We also should be able to humanize the reason why the hero made the wrong choice. When a hero kills the princess to take the throne, we should sympathize with the ambition that drives with the hero, but also recognize what they did was wrong, that ambition taken to the extreme can make us do horrible things.

In fanfiction, tragedy is probably the most abused genre. The formula for tragedy you will see on fimfiction is generally: the Main Character begins in the story with something really horrible happening to them and then they spend the rest of the story dealing with the fallout from that. The world attacks the hero for no fault of their own. The hero lacks agency in his misfortune. Sometimes he even lacks agency in his own redemption, leaving that work to the pony that falls in love with him. (I use him because 90% of the time it is a He in fanfiction.) For instance, a human is changed into a changeling and all the ponies hate him for the first arc of the story. After that, the hero deals with the traumas of being misunderstood and all the female leads fall in love with him, happily-ever-after.

While a tragedy wouldn't be tragic without misfortune, mere misfortune is not what makes tragedy. The hero must make the moral mistake and the gravity of the mistake is taught through the misfortune. The world doesn't happen to the hero, the hero happens to the world. In other words, the hero is the agent, affecting the world with the power of his decisions. In Classical tragedy, the hero is a great person of well-known merit like a noble or a superhuman blessed by the gods. They have some character flaw like ambition, pride, greed, etc... and they act on that flaw leading to their death or their fall from grace.

A modification on the Classical formula is the Tragic Comedy which employs enough comic elements to lighten up the mood and can have a happy ending. For instance, a man of low birth desires to marry the princess. A maid, our hero, helps him meet the princess by dressing him up as a noble, but he doesn't realize that the maid loves him. Antics ensue as the maid continues to lie to the person she vowed to serve. As more nobles start asking about the noble's origins, the maid becomes further entangled in her treasonous dishonesty. Nobles start investigating the maids claims and she eventually is forced to take an extreme action: She confesses her love for the man. She loses her job as a maid but she gains a husband. It is a relatively happy ending.

For fanfiction, tragic comedies are popular. Again, the only mistake they tend to make the hero the world's punching bag. While there is nothing particularly bad about these kinds of stories, they are popular after all, they lack any weight. You can't learn a lesson from the world beating up the hero. No hero isn't showing us what we should or should not do. The reader is just entertained, which is fine, but it isn't tragedy.

In my story, The Pony Dialogues the hero is afraid of harming zir daughter to the point of not doing the right thing. This leads to all the misfortune in Ei Rikr's arc in the story. This is not a comedy and not a romance. People will die, things that should change don't change, and the hero falls from grace all because ze refused to do what is right.