Story Ideas #8: [Untitled] · 2:03am May 16th, 2020
The name of this story is the name of the main character. The obvious name for this character happens to be the same as that of a prominent brony. If I used that name as the title, then you would all think it is about him instead of about my original character. Since I suck at names, that means this story is called [Untitled].
What I’m addressing here is the stream of self-insert “human-turned-into-a-pony” stories that are still going strong to this day. Most of them require the main character to have an eye-rolling tortured past as a human, and have some completely unbelievable mechanism for being the first such human/pony in Equestria that doesn’t make any sense, like dying in a car crash. What I am providing is the perfect solution: he has a past, he got sent to Equestria and turned into a pony, but I, the author, am not going tell you the details on either of these! Mwa, ha, ha!
...Ahem.
So I had an idea that I thought was neat, that I wouldn’t ever use myself. Have fun with it.
In the wake of the Royal Wedding in Canterlot, Princess Luna organizes a strike force, to gather information about the mysterious changelings. Their movement is tracked backwards from their arrival in Canterlot to a sleepy suburb of Manehattan, where all of the inhabitants had been systematically replaced.
Under the town is found the abandoned hive of the changelings. And inside the hive are found cocoons containing the pony victims. They were made to dream about their loved ones in danger, and the changelings then fed on that love. Cadance had been put through a similar procedure, and it was in this way that she had been tricked into revealing the information that Chrysalis used to impersonate her. But this method has a flaw: after repeating these dreams enough times, the pony figures out they are being manipulated, and then they resist and can no longer be used for feeding. When this happened to each of the victims, they were put in suspended animation and abandoned.
One cocoon was different than the others. It was located in what was obviously the Queen’s chamber, it looked much older, and the hoof of the pony inside was glued to a thin spot in the cocoon’s wall, allowing it to be touched. On being awakened and asked for his identity, the pony inside claimed to be one of the other victims, despite looking nothing like him. His dream was like that other pony’s dream, but more exaggerated, including family members that the original pony never had. Under hypnosis, he then provided other names he claimed as his own, all matching those of other victims. It appeared that this pony had an incredible power of empathy, to identify with other ponies so strongly that the other pony’s identity had overwhelmed his own. This had been used to turn him into a love battery for years, perhaps even decades. This latter guess was supported by the fact that he had no cutie mark. Since this poor pony could not remember his original identity, he came to be known as [Untitled]. It also turned out that touching a pony that was experiencing a strong emotion would trigger his memory overwrite ability, and every time this happened, he lost more and more of the few fragments of his original memory that remained.
[Untitled] is taken in by the other victims, in part because he knows some of their deepest secrets due to his ability.
And that’s all of his backstory that you’re going to get. Maybe Chrysalis found him in a pod, the last survivor of the humans who died to make way for the changelings. Or maybe she was attempting some epic spell, but it backfired and brought this guy over. But Chrysalis isn’t talking, and the human barely remembers anything.
Oh, and another thing: [Untitled] is not moving to Ponyville, because that would be too easy. The author taking up this story gets to populate this original pony town with original pony characters, and all of them are emotionally traumatized as well—I’m sure some of them have vivid memories of being brutally betrayed by a loved one that turned out to be a changeling.
[Untitled] thinks that he needs to discover who he really is, maybe even what he is considering his unique abilities and some of his stranger memory fragments. But what he really needs to do is invent himself from scratch, and thereby transcend his past. I suppose he has to confront Chrysalis at one point, but that’s anticlimactic. The true climax would be when he uses his powers one last time to help a pony, and loses the last piece of his humanity.
And…that was my last one. It looks like “My World Is Empty Without You” got enough interest (and a co-writer), so I’ll tackle that one first. But I’m definitely going to get “Dreams of the Pony Planet” out…in the next year, considering all of the research I’ll have to conduct by myself.
...Blank Slate. The main character's name is Blank Slate. But the last thing the current owner of that name needs is a tragic backstory.
Definitely an intriguing setup. Thanks for sharing all of these.
That's an intriguing set-up, and also one that sound really ambitious and would need a lot of planning to pull effectively. That kind of emotional journey and all the psychological scars involved in the other victims... dang...