The AU Overview: Steamquestria · 7:58pm 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 the basics or an old hand looking for information, hopefully these concise overviews will help you out.
Name: Steamquestria
Medium: Fanart/Webcomic/Ask blog
Authorship type: Single
Major Deviations from Canon: * Equestria is a Victorian-style magitek world. Ponies are replaced with humans.
* Technology has advanced in uneven ways: Robotics and cybernetics are very advanced, airships and quills are still common, etc. Pretty standard for the steampunk/X-punk genre.
* Twilight Sparkle is still Celestia's student, but is a Mad Scientist. She is a cybernetics prodigy rather than a magician.
* When ordered to "make friends" by Professor Celestia, she elects to build five robots.
* The "species" of characters varies. As previous, the main five are robots. Spike is a robot, Cadance is a robot, etc.
* Characters have differences in personality, but the archetypes and general details of their characters are largely the same as canon.
* Luna is sealed in a vault instead of the moon. As of this writing, other details of her backstory have not been revealed yet.
What attracts people to this? How will I know if I might like it? This AU mostly focuses on whimsical adventure and reinterpreting the characters, with slice of life elements. The art varies: many characters have detailed portraits made for them (whether they are involved in the comic’s plot or not), there are sketches, and the answer/comic pages are somewhere in-between (flat coloring with a looser/less-detailed style). Despite this variance, the art is consistently of high quality.
What dissuades people from this? How will I know if I should I avoid it? Due to the author's professional obligations and other time constraints, the story updates come very infrequently. Character portraits and other splash pictures outnumber the "story" pages by a significant margin. The ask blog aspect and comic/story elements do not always mesh organically (it is framed in-universe as Twilight receiving questions from other researchers, but this explanation is a hand wave at best). Since the blog updates infrequently, a lot of story details are mercurial as the author adjusts them.
Miscellaneous/Other notes: Egophiliac does various art/blogs besides this one. One of her previous blogs, Slice of Life, went on "indefinite hiatus" after receiving so many updates. It covered a future AU which starred older versions of Pound and Pumpkin Cake. Pinkie Pie was a major supporting character, and the other main six were secondary characters.
There’s also Inconvenient Trixie, a blog which repeats the same joke in different contexts and is a minor fandom meme.
Yeah, Steamquestria is cool, but not my favorite of Ego's stuff.
Not that she seems to do anything anymore. :C
3850562 I chose Steamquestria because it seems to be the only thing she updates at the moment. I also never actually read Moonstuck.
3850947
GO READ MOONSTUCK YOU HACK
3851309 NU I IS ALLERGIC TO MAYMAYS
The main story arc is over now, maybe it's time for a revision?
4444530 Probably. That raises a few questions, though. Since the story wasn't finished in a "traditional" way, is it fair to judge with the same standard as the rest of the story? Since it is basically an outline with some sporadic images, is there enough content there to summarize/critique in the first place?
I'd rather just leave it as is, rather than make it more awkward by trying to update it. But maybe I'll think of something someday.