In the EQG Holiday Special, Sunset figured out that Anon-a-Miss was actually Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle and Applebloom.
But what if things happened differently?
What if Sunset never figured out who Anon-a-Miss really was?
What if her friends refused to listen after her little chat with Twilight?
For those who haven't seen it, the comic can be read here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-MMfsFt2NE

It was just a week before Christmas. Sunset Shimmer has finally broke. The anonymous cyberbully a.k.a. Anon-a-Miss has exposed the private secrets of her HuMane Six friends on MyStable, friendships have been broken and severed by these claims, lives have been ruined, and all the evidence that coincided with the HuMane Six's secrets are falsely pointed at Sunset Shimmer. What's worse is that everyone in the school, including her friends, have turned on her, leaving her alone and despondent. What's even more worse is that Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria hasn't opened the breach between both the equine world and the human world.

Feeling lower than her defeat during the Fall Formal Incident earlier that year, Sunset Shimmer has given up all hope of trying to talk things over with her former friends, and decided to end it by walking in the December blizzard alone, hoping that the cold would calmly put her out of her misery. Walking along the highway with nothing but her warm clothes and her dreams of friendship crushed, Sunset finally succumbs to hypothermia and sleeps. When she woke up, Sunset knew that she didn't perish. Instead, a kind and generous soul had saved her from salvation, a kind and generous soul who hides a dark past within his memories. When Sunset asks him why he couldn't have let her die in the blizzard, it only took a few sentences out of him to make her realize that he wasn't so different after all. That he was a kindred spirit much like her own.

That's when Sunset decided to spend her first Christmas with her savior, which unfolds into a tale of how two distant yet kindred souls could change their lives for the better. What can more be said for Canterlot High when the scandals of Anon-a-Miss continues to spread through the hallways like an infectious virus, or when some unsavory figures from Sunset's savior's past decided to rear their ugly heads?

Rated T for suicide attempts.

I do not own any of the characters.

All rights preserved to Hasbro, Inc. and Lauren Faust.

Cover art by DNKovic

Sunset Shimmer has been worrying her friends of late. It had started off as her talking around the subject of home. Then outright avoiding it.

It isn't that her friends want to have a sleepover at her place, or have her host a Pinkie Party. They're just worried. Sunset does have somewhere to call home right? A roof over her head and a warm place to sleep?

EQG. Set after Friendship Games and before. Takes plot points from the comic special. Notes per chapter as needs must.

Just a story I wrote trying to escape writers block on other projects. It sort of ran away with me. Name comes from this track, but it didn't have much influence on the story. In need of cover art if anyone can point me to something good.

Now with cover art from Novel-Idea, designer of the fine image now applied.

After pictures from her phone get posted online, that human five confront Sunset with the information. After discovering that she and the others had very different ideas about how to confront her, Rainbow Dash finds herself defending Sunset from the rest of her friends.

Rainbow siding with Sunset didn't change all that much. Sunset was still successfully framed, Sunset still lost most of her friends, Sunset will still go back to being the most hated student at CHS, but she won't have to face any of it alone, and that will make all the difference in the world.

Meta stuff follows.

Let's talk about combinatorics.

There is one way for none of the five to remain on Sunset's side, there are five ways for one of them them to side with Sunset, there are ten ways for two of them to do so, there are ten ways for three of them to do so, there are five ways for four of them to do so, and there is one way for all of them to do so. Out of these thirty two possible configurations, almost every Anon-a-Miss story sticks to the first one.

I did a tally once upon a time and what I found was that 96.9% of possibilities were almost never explored, and 87.5% were never explored at all (no "almost" necessary.) These figures get rather more abysmal if you're looking at who did or didn't side with Sunset from the start. The rare stories that have one or more of the five side with Sunset tend to have the initial confrontation go down pretty much canonically, and then have someone have a change of heart later on.

So, in the interest of stuff, here's a thing where Sunset has someone on her side from the very start. Most of the first chapter was released two months early on my Patreon page, for subscribers only, as you might imagine.

Unable to convince her former friends she isn't Anon-a-Miss, and out of contact with Princess Twilight, Sunset gives up on everything and tries to end it all. Instead a new chapter in her life begins when she's helped by total strangers, two of whom have familiar names and faces.

As she recovers from surviving her suicide attempt, she rebuilds her life in a new home and at a new school, though lingering forces from her past refuse to allow her a fresh start.

[Do note that the self-harm isn't shown directly, and is limited to the prologue. The story is about recovering.]

Meta notes, abridged version:

Moon-Lite gave me permission to do my own version of Fall of Harmony / Like the Phoenix / Flaming Sun. This is that story.

I asked for permission to do a version because Moon-Lite is not going to do a straight-remake and the old versions are gone, thus leaving no version whatsoever on Fimfiction. I want there to be at least one version on Fimfiction.

Moon-Lite's own new story, which he described as the straight-remake being reworked --kinda-- in a very abstract way, is Phoenix.

For the longer version of the meta stuff I'll make a blog post at some point and put a link to it here when I do.