Friendship is Ambient Drone Music · 1:48pm May 5th, 2021
brb getting this tattoo'd on my forehead
Some follow-up for you!
The cover is a crop from Francis Bacon's unnerving painting, "Head VI." Love the cube in that picture. Very good angles. Lots of strong vibes.
In addition to the story itself, we have nearly 45ish minutes of ambient drone music to round out the reading experience! I can't say I know the individual associated with this song's creation due to a risk of doxxing, but if I JUST SO HAPPENED to know him, I think he would say that the vibe of FiO stories go along with ambient drone music like peanut butter and ASCII jelly. That and he's been teaching himself how to use ableton during the lockdown and he just HAD to show off some work he's been doing with his default synth banks.
Reading all the new FiO fics over the past few days has led me to branch out into a few notable contributions to logic puzzle-style fiction outside of bronydom, mainly in the form of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality." That fic is only the tip of the iceberg, and I'm no expert in AI-based fanfic, but strolling outside the brony fandom and reading other fics has clarified a position I've held for quite some time now but haven't really been able to articulate to its fullest extent: brony fanfics are waaaaaaaaaay different than any other fandom. It could be simple things, like the older skew of our fandom's demographics leading to more mature writing styles, themes, etc. But there's more to it than that. The flavor's just different. Could it be a wider spray of stylistic influences? Maybe it's the fluff? I still have no clue, but I'd love to hear your thoughts! How does brony fanfic compare to other fandoms' offerings?
I think there are a few reasons.
The first is that fanfic, in all its forms, relies on a well-realised and expansive world, in which all kinds of different characters and stories can live. The more variety you have in the stories you can write drastically increases how much you can flex your creative muscles, and MLP is unmatched by other fandoms that produce fanfic. This, coupled with the sheer volume of fans, means that the volume of good fanfiction is just so much higher than any other fandom, even ones like Harry Potter, which have an EXTREMELY limited world by comparison.
The second, relatedly, is the flexibility of the setting that lends itself to so many different alternate timelines and universes with next to no additional context needed. We're never confused when we're thrown into an MLP fanfic that's clearly very different from a canon setting, even to ridiculous degrees: the aesthetics are so strong, and the themes so universal, that we can be thrown into a scene with Princess Luna talking to Sunset Shimmer about the threat of Eris' student Dusk Shine and we're like "oh okay so AU where Luna became sole ruler instead of Celestia, took Sunset as a student, didn't fuck that up, and now gender-reversed Discord and Twilight are the antagonists" without even thinking about it. There's no need for this stuff to be explained, it's just obvious, we don't even blink.
Other stories, ones with partly or mostly OCs, are similarly easy to swallow: their names tell us something right off the bat; every bit of the scene gives us so much thematic context, and the world is so large that any story can exist. There are absolutely no barriers whatsoever. Want to write something about star-crossed earth pony and unicorn lovers in an Equestria with heavy racial segregation, where the princesses were overthrown by unicorns who are now at war with the griffons? Great, who need canon characters or a fluffy setting? Fucking rock on! Ponies!
Which leads me to the last thing immediately on my mind: ponies are cute. Call it juxtaposition, call it thematic complexity, call it whatever you want, but they're *ponies*. Look at their little hoovsies! Their fuzzy ears! Ponies are just humans but better. Everything is given this... this veneer of simplicity and wholesomeness, even in the darkest of settings and in the bleakest of stories. The world the ponies live in is simpler than ours in terms of society, everything that makes stories about humans really hard to build worlds for. There's a reason the fantasy genre is so overpopulated; simple settings make it easier to focus on what matters. Throw some natural cuteness into the mix, and something magical happens. No matter how crazy the AU gets, unicorns and pegasi and earth ponies are always a little bit different to each other. Alicorns are always important. And they always have cute boopable noses.
Other fandoms can't compete because the world will never, ever, feel as big as this one. Never in a million years. The world of MLP spans so many alternate universes, so many different takes on the same formula, so many different ways to mix the MANY MANY MANY characters, even without OCs, and all of it is always easy to digest.
It's pure magic. This fandom is a gift not only to fanfic as a medium, but the world of writing as a whole.
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Way late to responding to this but your thoughts are super informative. I never really thought about why pony characters are so much easier to write than human characters until I read this. Their character is literally in their name/tattoo'd on their butt. And they're cute.
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ugh friggin STAHP