The AU Overview: RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse · 8:56pm Apr 6th, 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: Lunaverse (sometimes RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse in order to be more distinct)
Medium: Fanfic series
Authorship type: Single (main stories), multiple dependent (other episodes).
Major Deviations from Canon: * In the backstory, Celestia was the one to go mad with power and be banished.
* Trixie and five background ponies/side characters make up the Main Six. The characterizations of these characters are so different from canon that they are essentially Original Characters.
* Major characters from the show—like the original Main Six or the Cutie Mark Crusaders—do appear, but their portrayals vary wildly. They generally differ greatly from their show selves. The original main six in particular are very different.
* Like the show, the series is broken into “episodes” and “seasons”. Some stories cover events from the show (with the new cast and setting), others deviate from the show’s structure considerably.
What attracts people to this? How will I know if I might like it? This AU mostly focuses on adventure, slice of life, and reinterpretation of canon. Many of the major events from the show—an evil sister returning, a grand galloping gala, a visiting traveler with a high opinion of herself, etc—all occur, but their differing casts and dynamics cause them to have different outcomes. The broad strokes are the same, but many minor episodes revolve around original occurrences. The stories are generally decently written (on a sentence/grammar level) and also are internally consistent (likely because the main author maintains a “show bible”, to guide other authors). Due to the large number of authors, the universe also has an active sub-fandom and lots of content to digest.
What dissuades people from this? How will I know if I should I avoid it? While the sentence level writing and grammar is good, the series as a whole has problems with repetition and pacing. Different stories often repeat similar themes or plot points (both to the show and to other stories from the universe). The series also has issues with balancing plot arcs and stand-alone episodes: individual stories can be either too long-winded or too abrupt to get across their points. This is exacerbated by the series’ common stops at the Stations of Canon
The original main six also receive alternate characterizations that are very un-flattering. Anyone who likes the original main six, but doesn’t like the OC stand-ins that have replaced them, will find this series very unpleasant to read.
Miscellaneous/Other notes: The main author, RainbowDoubleDash, is very defensive when it comes to criticism. This makes discussing the series in “official” spots like the story pages or Lunaverse group awkward, because they often get involved. By the same token, this AU has a fairly large audience, and so finding others to discuss it with is not difficult.
Tell me, how many of these do you plan to do? I wouldn't think there are enough AUs in the fandom to make a particularly long series of, but I've been wrong before.
I am baffled by the impetus behind this AU.
TL:DR, Why???
3852493 its for people who want to see trixie as the element of magic.
3852486 Never underestimate the amount of content this fandom produces
There's enough semi-major AUs that I could do one of these every day for a year and still have more content available.
Of course, I'm not personally familiar with a lot of AUs, so that will certainly limit the size of this series. I'd rather leave something out than spread misinformation. That's why Fallout: Equestria may not get one.
I'd say ~10 of them, maybe more, maybe less
3852493 As I understand it, the series originally began as a single entry: Boast Busted. It was never intended to be a full series, and this can be seen in the way the story is structured (particularly the way it delivers exposition). After that entry received a lot of attention, however, the author chose to add more to the series (in that way many authors are allured by attention into making sequels).
As 3852511 said, I think that people wanting to see more of X character (be it Trixie or Carrot Top or whomever) does explain some of the series' popularity. A lot of FIM fanfics only exist to cater to fans of certain characters, and this AU fits with that mentality. The series takes so many liberties with so many characters, however, that I don't think that fully explains it.
I'd wager a large part of it is simply volume. People want content to consume, and the Lunaverse provides a lot of content. Oodles of content. Like any other voluminous franchise or sub-fandom, the quantity and reliability can outweigh quality, depending on reader tastes. Not being a fan of the series, this is all strictly theoretical.
TL;DR: the author likes attention, and thus produces a lot of content. People like lots of content, and thus consume it.
3852486
I was trying to come up with shared AUs, myself and not getting very many. The Winningverse, the Optimalverse, and the Conversion Bureau... uh... verse are the most well known, though I've probably spaced on a very obvious example.
But cp also included Steamquestria, which isn't shared, so that opens it up to damned near anything with an AU tag.
3852493 From a reader's perspective it has interesting stories and worldbuilding and, on account of the number of participating authors, a lot of content.
Now that said, I would agree with some (though not all) of Cleverpun's review. The AU as a whole does have some issues, IMO most frequently expressed in how the original mane six and their families are handled.
3852618
Non-shared AUs are indeed common as mud, but there must be more to it than that for them to be worth examining here. In fact, 3852578, could you shed some light on this? What's the selection criteria for an AU on this series, exactly?
3852902 There isn't any, yet. That's why I replaced "major alternate universes" in the initial description.
3852925
m8 u best b definin ur paramaters soon or ill fuk u up i swear on me mum
3852871
Thanks for the clarification. That last bit is pretty much a deal-breaker for me, though.
3852967 Well, again, it's more complicated than just "they're handled poorly". Some of it is poorly (IMO at least), but in other instances it is more mixed than just straight bad and in some it's not too different from canon. It is an AU that stresses the A part of AU, they're not the same characters and imagining that they have to be is going to give you have hard time.
Now when it has problems, though, those problems can be hard to look past, and since I've been reading the AU since Boast Busted I've experienced them in real time. There are a few things (*cough* the Gala story *cough*) that the verse has done that RDD is probably past tired of hearing me bitch about.
On the whole though I do not regret the time I've invested in reading it.
3853035 The verse does have some strong pieces though. The crossover story, for instance, was very well done.
The major flaw of the series seems to be the flanderization of the Mane in order to elevate the AU. The Alt Mane six seem fundamentally broken without their shared connection and purpose, which is really freaking weird given that they all have the same cutiemark's and thus were destined to meet. More to the point, five of them were still in Ponyville, so they should know each other very well.
I dunno, I guess I am just bothered because the show has done AUs now, and shown even without critical events, these ponies are still important even in the altered timelines. I'd sooner believe in the Lunaverse they were never born, to be frank.
3853550 In fairness, the flanderization issue is actually something that the group recognized was happening fairly early on and took steps to stop. It's still there in the early stories where it happened, of course, since they weren't rewritten, but my experience with more recent stories is that they're mostly leaving the mane six out of things or at least not making them minor story antagonists. There really is no need for AJ to be Carrot Top's personal antagonist, for example, so they aren't writing stories containing that plot line any more.
Found this while going through a Google spreadsheet. As a Lunaverse author, I had to read. :D Anyway... as someone who finds side-characters to be a lot more interesting than main characters most of the time, the Lunaverse drew me in on that. As someone who has found himself... really disliking a lot of stuff the Mane Six/Celestia have done over the years, I'm not entirely... broken up about them not being presented as perfect/awesome/insert-something-else here.
And I hate the implications in the Cutie re-Mark that only the Mane Six can be the heroes. Screw that. SCREW THAT!
4409310 I think that reinterpreting characters is a perfectly valid goal of fanfiction. Half my fics do it. I think, however, that tearing down the canon characters in order to make your OCs look better is bad writing. I don't necesarilly think that the Lunaverse took it that far, but I certainly understand why a lot of people took it that way.
For my part, I thought Twilight's portrayal as a naive, stupid, shortsighted egomaniac in Boast Busted was perfectly reasonable. It's the part where she became a(n ineffectual) fugitive who retained all those negative qualities that was a bit much for me.
Honestly, I really wanted to like the Lunaverse, but it was the big-picture problems that drove me away. The pacing, narrative style, and plotlines are what convinced me to stop reading, not the treatment of one character or another.
Also, point of order: the show has plenty of times where other characters are shown to be the heroes. After all, if even a fifth of Daring Do's fictional exploits are real/based on an actual adventure, then she has saved the world as many times as the main six have.
4416457 We didn't 'tear down' the characters. You're right there. What we did are showing them without the protagonist-centered morality the show has. And considering some of the shit they've pulled, I more than approve.
As for others being heroes, maybe small-scale, but when it comes to the big threats? It's only the Mane Six thanks to that horrible Cutie re-mark episode. No one else! To quote Sherman T Potter, horse hockey!