About "The Invisible Alicorn" · 3:07am Apr 13th, 2017
Over the years I’ve gotten occasional comments to my stories on this site regarding my use of mind control as a plot device (especially that one chapter in Best of All Possible Worlds where Celestia admits her fault in practicing it on not only her ponies, but on herself).I was even told once that I had triggered a reader with that chapter.
I had no idea that any of my readers were recovering victims of brainwashing.
The core of Chapter 6 of what became The Invisible Alicorn was my response to these objections—a statement of my belief that brainwashing was the next logical step in the way ponies controlled their environment: Ponies raised the heavenly bodies. Ponies changed the seasons. Ponies [Pinkie Pie, and perhaps all party ponies] controlled the laws of physics. Ponies [Fluttershy at the very least] controlled the minds of animals. And finally, ponies controlled each other. This would make a good contrast, I thought, with humanity, who as a species act like a bunch of juvenile delinquents who will never obey any rule no matter how sensible without being forced to: “Humans engage in child abuse. Ponies can’t engage in foal abuse.”
While that scene was waiting for a story to be placed in, I ran across “Destinies”, a FIMfic by Sharp Quill. In that story, a bunch of ponies travel to Earth (our Earth or perhaps one close to it, a world where Friendship Is Magic is an actual cartoon) after Twilight discovers that the very existence of this world is threatening to end all magic in Equestria forever. She befriends a couple of bronies and then tries to approach the American government, which absolutely refuses to publically acknowledge the existence of ponies for a reason that seems a bit silly: if the government put up a video of the President meeting with Princess Celestia, everyone would to say that the pony footage was CGI, and the U.S. government would be mocked instead of applauded. Eventually, the ponies track down a government project which nobody knew was causing problems for other-dimensional worlds, and the problem is resolved. At that point, with the story marked as “Complete”, the ponies had every reason to leave, but Twilight still wanted to establish trade relations, by going over the head of the government.
To me, this ending opened up the possibility of an entirely new form of Pony On Earth fanfiction: Instead of one or more ponies making contact with a single human, who has to keep them secret to keep them safe, instead you have ponies landing on Earth and interacting with as many humans as possible, because you can’t “CGI” a pony who is standing right in front of you. I even had a name for this brand-new POE: Ponies Are Trolling Ol’ Innocent Earth, or PATOIE for short. I had a whole set of these stories planned, starting with Luna’s dream therapy of a child whose nightmares came from her only friend moving away, which is resolved by the girl taking Luna in for show-and-tell and thereby making new friends. Here are the other ideas:
* Lyra and Bon Bon go to a human Cineplex and get so annoying commenting on all the ads and the movie that they get kicked out. Not sure which movie it would have been, although Guardians of the Galaxy would have been a good candidate.
* Vinyl Scratch and Octavia go to a Fry’s Electronics store and start playing with the electronics. Not sure if the story would have ended up different enough from the Lyra and Bon Bon story to be worth writing.
* Princess Twilight visits the New York Public Library and is ejected for squeeing too loudly. A high school history professor befriends her and asks her to put on a demonstration of her magic for his students. She refuses (afraid of disrupting human society too much by introducing teachable magic), but does agree to put on a chemistry demonstration. Unfortunately, she isn’t used to the high purity of chemicals in a modern human society, so the tiny explosion she planned instead nearly takes out the whole classroom, and Twilight is forced to use her magic after all.
* Trixie confronts a Los Angeles street magician, offering to do any of his tricks better than he can. The magician forces her to agree to carry out the challenge without using her unicorn magic, and she wins anyway.
* The Apple family visits a state fair. This one could practically be a novella all by itself. (By the way, if any of you are thinking of stealing one of these story ideas to write yourself, please let it be this one. I don’t think that I could really do this idea justice.)
* Rainbow Dash visits an air show. Now this scene has actually been written before in stories by other authors, for example in “Ponyville U.S.A.”, so I’m not sure how I would make my version stand out.
* I have a note that says “Rarity at the Franchise Expo.” I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that, but a stream-of-consciousness story of her reactions to corporate mascots would be pretty funny.
* I don’t have stories for Fluttershy, Spike, Celestia, or Cadance and Shining Armor. If I worked on the idea long enough, I’m sure each of them would have gotten a story.
* The final story in the series would belong to Pinkie Pie. During the San Diego Comic-Con, Pinkie suddenly appears in the room where a panel had cancelled. (I’m using the Comic-Con instead of Bronycon or any of the other pony-cons, because Comic-Con is the only big convention I’ve actually gone to so far.) She puts up a sign for a Pinkie Panel, with the door wide open so anybody can see her sitting behind the table on the stage, and waits. Now the reason this is the last story is because by this point, the moment word gets out that Pinkie is there, everybody believes that it’s actually her. The cast and crew of Friendship Is Magic, who were hosting from the biggest hall at the convention, agree to let her take over their hall to answer questions and be herself. This leads to a very interesting scene between Pinkie and Andrea Libman. And then comes the Q&A session, which is there as an excuse to show off my head-canon on her character: that she’s so optimistic that she’s completely impervious to any attempts to break her spirit through criticism (she can be broken, IMO, just not through the words of total strangers). And of course she ends the panel by cheering up and/or befriending absolutely everybody.
While I was planning all of this out, Sharp Quill decided to update his story, so that the American government did want to do business with Equestria after all. And that’s how PATOIE went kablooie.
But on reflection, I realized that this actually freed me up. “Destinies” had very strong rules about how Equestrian magic worked on Earth (which I totally screwed up on with Twilight’s story, by the way). Without tying my series to “Destinies”, I could work out my own rules, and my own American government.
And then the 2016 Presidential Election happened. The story wrote itself after that.
Man I like those PATOIE ideas though, they sound fun!
You could always group these and a few others under the title "Background Ponies Get Kicked Out of Places" as a single series of vignettes that all end the same way :p
Maybe Trixie should just upstage some famous magicians instead?
Donald Trump Grabs Celestia's Pussy is a good one.
"Magical reeducation for a better Equestria!"
"Dream the dream of your dreams at Luna's Dream Shack!"
"Get your brain scanned today! a healthy mind is a magical mind."
just some old timey mind magic slogans that came to mind
Yeah, I agree about the mind control thing, its benefits are too useful to get rid of. Using It to treat ptsd alone would be worth it.
4494693 It is in fact the best one.
Many of those PATOIE stories do seem promising. I hope you expand on them; it seems like they'll be a lot of fun.