The AU Overview: Fall of Equestria · 1:11am Apr 5th, 2016
Hello, everyone! The world of FIM fanfiction can be a convoluted, insular, sprawling mess. With so many sub-fandoms and variations, it can be daunting for new fans to get up to date, and even older fans might have trouble keeping up with everything.
In this blog series, I provide a quick overview of different Alternate Universes. Whether you're a new user looking for information or an old hand looking for the basics, hopefully these concise overviews will help you out.
Name: Fall of Equestria
Medium: Fanfiction/fanart Alternate Universe
Authorship type: multiple independent
Major Deviations from Canon: * Misogynistic caribou invade Equestria. They subjugate the populace without any significant issue or resistance.
* Every female character becomes a sex slave.
* Every male character becomes a slave owner.
* Everyone is Out of Character: females either become submissive slaves (or in rare cases ineffectually indignant), males become misogynistic and collaborationist (or in rare cases ineffectually indignant).
What attracts people to this? How will I know if I might like it? This AU mostly focuses on wish fulfillment and pornographic scenes. s/M and bondage is common. Slavery and Torture Porn are nearly universal central themes. Storyline is limited to Excuse Plot.
What dissuades people from this? How will I know if I should I avoid it? See previous. The quality of the written fanfic is generally pretty bad: it makes a lot of the same mistakes that most amateur erotica/porn makes. The quality, rating, and subject matter of the fanart varies wildly, depending on the artist.
Miscellaneous/Other notes: The series tagline is "Abandon All Hope." There is a sub-sub-fandom about the females fighting back, then counter-enslaving the males, but I don't think it is prolific enough to have a name.
This is probably the most detached and neutral blog post that has ever been made on FoE.
3848668 And probably will hold that record for a long while. Wasn't there a fairly big FoE fic written as a plausible story once upon a time?
Edit: I was thinking of "Though Hell Should Bar The Way" by O
3848668 A testament to my impeccable journalistic skills, naturally
Certainly nothing to do with the fact that FoE is so terrible that it speaks for itself.
3848712
This series of blog posts is off to a good start, then. :D
It is pretty awful.
Eh, depends on the writer. I was of the opinion that it was universally horrible at first, but here and there you get stories that are much more like horror stories with a fetish theme than fetish stories with a horror theme. From a different perspective, it's a punishingly brutal exploration of the horrors of slavery and a society that endorses it in a way that really couldn't exist anywhere else. Again, not great literature, but it's impressive in the cases when someone can take such a terrible premise and spin something genuinely touching out of it. A couple of the satires are good too, though the ones that know what to do with the premise are just as rare.
Not that I would know anything about this, of course, since I would never read stories like those.
3853568 Yes, I'm sure it was just your friend reading it, and they told you all the details
Well I did say "generally bad": there will be exceptions to anything if enough authors participate in the verse.
3848696 mentioned a serious FoE story, for instance.
That raises a question, though. If you're going to make an attempt at a serious story, then does working in such a ridiculous setting really have enough advantages? The absurd premise of the 'verse--particularly the assumptions it makes about military logistics and Stockholm Syndrome--severely hampers willing suspension of disbelief. Is dealing with those aspects worth the deconstructive and subversive value of reimplementing the setting?
Personally, I don't think it is. The Conversion Bureau fic I wrote tried to do just that, and the preexisting setting worked against it for multiple reasons. I'm also of the opinion that dark fic has most impact-most value--when it extrapolates and expands on canon, rather than simply spitting in its face.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it would be both difficult and risky. Plus, the end result wouldn't necessarily reward all the effort needed to make it work.
3853721 To me, that's something inherent to fanfiction, though. One criticism we often get is that for the amount of time and effort a fanfic writer puts into their stories, they could have written something original and publishable - which is not always true or even relevant. People write the stories that they most want to write, regardless of mainstream appeal, with the art being more important than the success. And sometimes the story that's burning at the back of their mind, the one that their fingers are itching to get onto the page, is a story that can only exist as fanfiction. FoE or The Conversion Bureau, for instance, wouldn't have had nearly the same impact if they'd just cold-opened in an original universe, since they're first and foremost about subverting something that already exists.
As a friend once said to me, nothing's ever a waste of time as long as you're making someone happy. No, these stories may not have mainstream appeal, and yes, in some extreme cases there are arguments for why they shouldn't be on this site (I was immensely glad when foalcon was finally banned), but as long as someone's enjoying them, I can't bring myself to hate that they exist.
Of course, I'm the idiot who's spent a year writing a novel-length Flash/Light romance, so maybe my priorities are a little different than yours.
3854374 Yes, that is something inherent to fanfiction. A pre-existing setting and pre-established characters have their pros and cons, and some stories require that pre-existing familiarity for their impact.
I'm not applying the argument that broadly, though. I'm applying it to Fall of Equestria fics, not fanfiction as a whole. If I was applying it to both, that would be saying that the quality of the setting and characters for Fall of Equestria is the same as Friendship is Magic.
And let's not get into a game of "worse authorial judgement" chicken. Because I would easily win that