JUSTIFY YOUR (fanfic's) EXISTENCE. · 3:53am Jun 12th, 2018
WHELP.
Another Monday night has rolled by. I've been ... mildly productive, if not as productive as I could have been. I'm currently working on a NON PONY project, blasphemous as that is. I'm hoping to have it finished by the end of June, and then polished into a presentable form by mid-July. So, uh, yay for deadlines? I don't think I've really pulled a deadline-chasing all-nighter since college, so ... uh, yeah.
But that's not why I'm writing this post! Y'see, I find myself in a vaguely academic mood, in that I feel like overthinking ... uh, stuff. And seeing as of how you guys probably don't want to hear me ramble about current trends in kung fu movies, I figured I'd let you ramble, instead.
About ponies, that is. Unless you're familiar with the work of Tsui Hark or Chang Cheh, but I digress.
So yeah! I am pretty terrible, in that I write a lot of fanfic, but I don't read much fanfic. Oh sure, every now and again I'll read something that catches my interest (and in the case of folks like Carabas, or Horizon, or Cold in Gardez, or a bunch of other folks, is a lot better than my work). But it's still a rare occurrence! I'm basically the Garth Marenghi of pony stories like that.
(now that I think of it, there's a bit of a physical resemblance too).
Still! I've hung around this website long enough (read: too long) to notice certain, uh ... trends, in pony fic. But since I'm such a stubborn iconoclast, I figured I'd turn to the whole twelve of you reading this blog to explain the appeal. Or something. So here we go!
Fallout Equestria: Right, so. Fallout, only with ponies. I probably shouldn't look at it TOO askance, since I've combined ponies with everything from Transformers to Harry Flashman to Chuck Tingle. The thing that gets me is that the 'foundational' story is literally longer than Tolstoy's War & Peace. And who's got time for that? Which leads to more questions-- are any of the 'spinoff' meta-fanfics any good? Is KKat still writing stuff, pony or otherwise? Just what makes a good F:EQ fic? Is F:EQ even the proper acronym?
... I may have the vaguest of ideas for a post-apocalyptic (postaponyliptic?) fic of my own, but ... that's a long way off. So let's move on!
Displaced Fics: Seriously, where do these come from? Like, as best I can figure, there's a 'formula' in which the Author stand in (almost always a dude) cosplays as a video game character or whatever at a convention, and then a mysterious merchant sells them the last bit of their costume, which ... sends them to Ponyville? Where presumably they kiss Princess Luna and save the day and do some other bullshit. Like ... are there any good Displaced fics? (Apart from, you know, Displaced In the Butt: A Human In Equestria Story, which you should all go read right now). Where does the formula come from? Is there an Ur-example of the form?
Anon-A-Miss: So, like, this stems from an issue of the comic book, right? And then somehow the fanfic revolves around everyone thinking Sunset Shimmer gossiped about them so they beat the shit out of her during Christmas break? Am I getting this right? How is this a thing? Just what makes an 'Anon-A-Miss' fic, anyway?
(Again, I may have some vague ideas to run with this, but it'd just be running with the title and a stupid joke and that is what I do.)
Beanis: ... actually, y'know what? I don't wanna know. I mean, like. I get it. Vegan dildo jokes. But ... seriously? That's a thing now? Does it really need its own group and stuff?
Ultimately, I suppose my general befuddlement and disdain of these various pony sub-genres comes from the fact that I will likely never write a foundational work of fanfic-canon to inspire reams upon reams of spinoff/reboot/coffeeshop AU/whatever fanfic. Which ... is likely for the best, all things considered. As I'd probably ruin such a trend by swooping in and yelling at people "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG."
But I should at least be allowed to do that. I mean, I'm an artist, dammit.
Best sub-genre was created by Iceman with Friendship is Optimal, and many of the spin-offs are excellent. It's not a crossover of anything in particular except for the general concept of an AI singularity. It appeals far beyond the fandom and I've been told that it is even more chilling for non-brony readers.
As far as the others you mentioned... well, the only reason I read FO:E was that I was a newly-minted fan(atic) when it first came out and I was reading any pony fic I could get my hands on. As for the others... I can honestly say that I have no idea what the heck "beanis" is all about and am perfectly okay with that.
So, us justifying the appeal of all of the above to you? I'll give it a shot.
Fallout Equestria: some people just love long stories. Having read it, the specific appeals of the original FO:E are Kkat's remarkable ability to write a story that feels like playing a video game, with an extremely proactive protagonist who's reliant on scavenging for consumables, has to frequently choose between pursuing different cool goals, wanders off to explore places just because... Each chapter tends to map to a self-contained, level-like area that usually has its own story tangentially related to the main plot. The plot itself is also a good example of how to handle two parallel storylines that take place two hundred years apart. Finally, it takes an extremely dark setting and uses it for contrast in telling a tale of positivity and optimism in the spirit of the show. It's dark, and doesn't pull punches, but is about light in the darkness, not the darkness itself. I'd imagine that parallels how a good number of fans see pony in their lives as well, both now and at the time it was written. As for other things, I haven't seen anything from Kkat recently, but know she spent a long time running FO:E roleplays.
Displaced: wish fulfillment. It's the primary point of fanfiction, after all; writing for yourself. If you're not doing that, you have no business writing in the first place. It's also an easy concept that allows you (not a self-insert, the writer themself) to be in Equestria as whoever they want and hang out with ponies, and sounds cool enough that it's probably easy to daydream about. That said, I don't read these and am not sure they serve any purpose beyond author appeal.
Anon-a-Miss: it's basically a drug. EqG canon has progressed a long way and changed a lot of things, but there are a few tenets of this one that make it easy to come back to for a large portion of the fanbase. It's essentially a free, quasi-canon license to beat Sunset up, turn her human friends and the entirety of Canterlot High into jerks, and then have Character X (or no one at all) stick by her and whatever. In tropedom, those are the core tenets of the hurt/comfort fic, which keep coming back because apparently it's addictive to make characters you like feel better when they're sad. I know I put my characters through the emotional wringer in stories I write. But Anon-a-Miss is a free setting in which that plotline is perfectly set up save for whoever's going to believe in her (or help her when she runs away, etc), so it's very easy to do this. There's also the added bonus of the large plot hole concerning the cast's character and where it takes place in the show: Sunset's friends behave as they were implied to pre-Rainbow Rocks, but Sunset has the journal to contact Twilight. That's like a free license to either write anyone out of character for the sake of drama, ignore continuity, or both.
Beanis: one hundred percent memes.
HISTORY TIME!
It's interesting to see how Displaced fics evolved. I'm pretty sure the formula found its beginnings in the "Chess Game of the Gods" trend from four or five years back, where everybody was writing stories trying to emulate 'Echo the Diamond Dog," which was originally unique for being an HiE story where the person involved became not a pony but one of the myriad of other races of the MLP setting. This was quickly followed by "Griffon the Griffon" (which I remember trying to read but I found it to be pretty lousy yet it somehow amassed a huge following), and then a whole slew of other fanfictions.
Eventually it stopped just being races native to the Equestria setting and started branching out into other fantasy creatures as well, and that's when the next stage of this trend's evolution happened. I remember towards the tail end of the 'Chess Game of the Gods' stories' prominence, there was one story that I think was simply titled "Cyndaquil." Cyndaquil was a story about a guy who got transported to Equestria and turned into... well... a Cyndaquil from Pokemon. I remember that this story was downright abysmal (even compared with the other Chess Game of the Gods stories which tended to be of questionable quality themselves). It broke a number of the cardinal rules of the Chess Game of the Gods trends too. I remember the CGotG stories habitually were set in places other than Ponyville or Canterlot and had their protagonists meet characters other than the mane 6 or princesses. "Cyndaquil" immediately bucked that trend by having him land in the middle of Ponyville to be fawned over by the Mane 6 within the first thousand words.
Frankly, the story was so bad that I'm not sure that it's even still on the site. I think the author might have removed it.
But this is where the story gets weird. Despite "Cyndaquil" being a steaming garbage fire of a story, I think it might have managed to inspire a trend, because it wasn't long after it came out that I noticed the first stirrings of what I think might have eventually become the Displaced stories. There was a time on this site, about three years ago now or so, that everybody was writing fics about people ending up in Equestria and turning into Pokemon. Again, I remember a bunch of these stories cropping up out of nowhere, starting with one with a boyfriend and girlfriend (I think?) becoming an Arcanine and Ninetales, one where a guy became an Aron, and a bunch of others. I suppose it's possible that this new trend could have been unconnected with the original "Cyndaquil" story, but the timing was suspect. My hypothesis is that that story got out, gained some traction because it was associated with the Chess Game of the Gods group, and people liked the premise of Pokemon in Equestria, but weren't impressed by the quality of the original story and wanted to give it their own go.
Of course, as such things go, that trend very quickly deteriorated as well. (In fact, for the life of me I can't remember a SINGLE one that was really all that good. At least with the Chess Game of the Gods story the original Echo the Diamond Dog was passable).
Which leads us to our NEXT stage of evolution... The "League of Humans Acting Villainous"... I BELIEVE this started with a pair of stories. One was "the Revenge of Darth Vulcan" or something like that, and the other was "Malitarius" or something to that effect. I literally don't remember the story titles exactly. They were... eh? I think one might have been written by a popular author but I glanced over the both of them back in the day and... neither of them were all that great. Anyway, these two stories spawned a TON of fics that starred humans entering Equestria and becoming villains for the setting in one way or another. What's more, it seems to have grown out of the Pokemon story trend. As the pokemon stories were dying down, these stories with very similar formats and setups started cropping up.
This was also where the whole "merchant" thing started. Every story had a similar premise, with the protagonist being a cosplayer at a con and getting a piece of their cosplay from a mysterious merchant and getting warped to Equestria, where they were quickly labelled as villains or actually did something to warrant a villainous label.
Which finally leads us to where we are today. See, a lot of the people writing their precious self-inserts into Equestria didn't want to be big bad meanies and have their precious OC's be labeled villains. They wanted to be heroes! And so the Displaced universe was born: A legacy of four generations of terrible fanfiction trends, all notable for a staggering lack of quality.
Eh. Not too interested in Displaced stuff, and the only thing I know about Fallout: Equestria is that the original is loosely based on Fallout 3. Other than that, I got nothin'. But what I can tell you about is Anon-A-Miss.
In case you didn't know, IDW (the same people that do the modern-day Transformers comics) have the rights to produce and publish comics based on My Little Pony G4's A-Canon material (Friendship is Magic, Equestria Girls, The Movie). This has led to the comics becoming well-established B-Canon that's rarely if ever overwritten by the A-Canon.
Shortly after Rainbow Rocks debuted, IDW released a Holiday Special set in the Human World during the holiday season after the events of the Battle of the Bands. To save you the trouble of reading it yourself, the story is as follows:
As you can see, a lot of people had some major problems with this. Most of the salt came from this taking place almost immediately after Rainbow Rocks, leading to unbelievable circumstances that would have had their unbelievable nature nullified had the setting been prior to RR.
Anon-A-Miss fics on the web revolve around fixing the problems with the original comic. More severe reactions from Sunset, a harsher punishment for the Human CMC, things to make the events more believable.
As for which fics I would recommend? Most of them are on-going, but I'd give these a try:
I hope you find some enjoyment in watching a young woman get broken into the smallest pieces and put back together again. Oddly enough, I have. It's always heartwarming to read those moments when Sunset finds her true self again. No matter how many times I read them. I'm a sucker for Sunnybun Shimshim.
I won't call it a good Displaced fic, but this is the only one that my name is smeared across, and it's about poking fun at the subgenre:
- MLP: FiM
- Comedy
- Random
A decidedly crappy take on the Displaced genre.Fallout: Equestria fics run the gamut from fascinating meditations on morality to "Wow, that sure is a lot of blood." Project Horizons manages to hit both ends of the spectrum. Pink Eyes does a much better job of exploring the emotional spectrum. The main story has its issues, but I did enjoy it as well. Of course, consider the source there.
Displaced is a self-insert crossover Mad Lib with mandatory interfic crossovers. Seriously, I'm pretty sure authors are required to incorporate at least one other Displaced story into theirs to qualify as part of the official canon. Displaced into Nothing is a fascinating take on the genre that looks at what happens when something goes horribly awry during the transfer process from Earth to Equestria... though it can get pretty darn dense at times. It's a story in the spirit of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, so most of the early "action" scenes are philosophical debates.
Anon-A-Miss has two schools, for and against. The "for" school buys into the premise, time paradoxes and all, and consists of either Sunset Shimmer torture porn or making the Humane Six "get what they deserve." Sometimes both. The "against" school rails against the stupidity of the concept, either directly or indirectly. An example of the latter is Not Another Anon-a-Miss Fic. If you read it, know that it's in Justice3442's typical "turn the absurdity knob up to 11, then break it off" style. (There's also my own Anon-a-Miss Tip, but that uses the Oversaturated World continuity, and that's a whole other kettle of fish.)
The Beanis Cinematic Universe started as a literary game of chicken between Majin Syeekoh and Fuzzyfurvert. Neither blinked, and the serial escalation led to a cast including a human Tempest Shadow who is Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash's daughter from the future, the ghost of human Somnambula, Applejack as a
maddebatably sane genetic engineer, and Midnight Sparkle lurking in the depths of Twilight subconscious as she slowly enacts a plan to conquer the world through an army of bean paste golems. If you can look past the constant sex humor, it's actually a lot of fun in its utter madness.(Disclaimer: FoME is the one responsible for dragging Flash Sentry into that mess, so he's not exactly an unbiased source.)
I love Fallout: Equestria as much as I hate it because A) post-apocalypse with ponies, B) goddammit that story needs to be rewritten from the ground up. I agree with FOME that Pink Eyes is p. great, and might be introductory enough in its construction to stand alone. Kkat has also written a second story that's a sequel/prequel to FoE, and it's extremely good and proooobably doesn't need the original to be understood either. Y'know, assuming it really is too long for you to read. :B I'm laughing because I've read Project Horizons, tho.
I don't know anything about Displaced, but I figure it's garbage.
Anon-a-Miss is definitely garbage, and that's why everyone has written a story about it, one way or another. :B
Beanis terrifies me, because I'm going to have to review it one day. D: