One fateful day, a simple man is ripped from his comfortable bed, and is swung across realities into a world not his own and a body eerily familiar to him.

He now has the eldritch powers of a certain pink earth pony. What will he do with said power? Only time will tell.

The shitposting and references have been doubled!

Thanks for the feature! 7/5/24 - 11/5/24 And nearly the top of popular!
Holy moly, featured again right after posting chapter 2. Thank you.

Here's the link to the original cover art image

[This will be randomly updated whenever I feel like it]

Twilight is called on to be a political Emissary to the far northern kingdoms. Due to the attacks from Tirek and the others, the land borders have been altered. Several miles of land that was once considered to be a part of Equestria is now within the borders of their northern neighbors. It is ruled solely by a pony that is as unwavering as steel. Twilight is tasked with being an emissary to this kingdom and try to negotiate to have him withdraw his claim to the territory. Meeting him is going to change everything she knows about how an Overlord rules his ponies. She finds out just how politics works for him and how he treats his subjects. She reminds herself to keep an open mind and treat him as she would any other. She is not prepared for what she finds. A stallion that rules alone. One that is more complex than she realized. One that if offended could spell disaster for Equestria itself. Hunter Flame is about to make her realize that nothing is as simple as she thinks it is.

Story is loosely based off the Overlord Video Games By Triumph Studios

Cover art by https://www.fimfiction.net/user/228967/Little+Tigress

Featured on Front Page 3/9/2019! OMG! Thank you!
Featured on Front Page 3/18/2019
Featured: 6/4/2019
Featured: 5/16/2021
Featured: 9/4/2022

Tanya Degurechaff gets tossed into Equestria and transformed into a Changeling Queen. It's a nice retirement from modern warfare as an aerial mage. Then Queen Chrysalis attacks and forces her out of retirement. Historians refer to this as 'a bit of an oopsie.'

Ganondorf, King of Thieves, Lord of Darkness, Master of Evil and Wielder of the Triforce of Power, had long since grown thoroughly and completely bored with the path the gods had decreed for his destiny.

Time after time it was always the same, try and unite the Triforce, plunge the world into darkness for a time, search out and then kidnap Princess Zelda, watch his minions be defeated one after another and then finally battle Link for supremacy. Rinse and repeat.

All the while knowing that regardless of winning or losing, that no matter what he did or didn’t do, that in the end everything would end up repeating itself in another time and place afterwards, again, and again and again, in an utterly pointless never ending cycle.

Having decided that enough was finally enough, and refusing to continue to be a simple pawn at the hands of the gods, he vowed he would find a way to escape from his cumbersome destiny, a way to start anew far beyond the meddling grasp of the gods, a way to reach a realm upon which he could be the master of his own fate.

And after years of careful planning he had finally succeeded.

Sure, the fact he had to drag the know-it-all Princess and the green obsessed Hero along for the ride for his plan to work was a minor inconvenience, but he knew that sometimes sacrifices had to be made. And the fact that this new realm apparently decided to turn him and his two unwilling companions into miniature pastel colored ponies upon arrival also wasn’t exactly part of the plan, but he could cope.

After all, that was a negligible price to pay in achieving his deepest wish: freedom.

In this story Ganondorf, having grown sick of following through the motions his destiny placed before him as the eternal bad guy to be defeated time after time, seeks out to escape from his fate by breaking through the void between dimensions and running away from Hyrule to another realm entirely, Equestria, all the while dragging both Link and Zelda along for the ride.

Arriving long before the founding of the country, back before the events of Heart’s Warming Eve and at the highest point of the conflict between the Three Tribes, he and his two new companions will have to deal with a whole new world and it’s wonders and dangers. All the while this new magical world will have to learn to deal with its three new strange inhabitants in kind.

Just a warning: This is NOT a Displaced fic. All three main characters are the actual characters from the Zelda series that have been taken to Equestria due to Ganondorf’s master plan, and not humans turned into them.

Beta Reader: The Amazing Emtu!
Cover Art: The Incredible swagmu!
Proofreader: The relentless TranquilClaws! (From chp I - XXV)

Featured for the first time! 07/06/2018 to 07/11/2018

Now with a TvTropes page!

Edit: Crossposting at Royalroad where I have the same username.

Pandinus Imperator (You can call him Pan, he won't mind) is knocked back in time during the Canterlot Invasion, and accidentally kills King Sombra on arrival. Instead of being executed, the changeling is surprised to find himself being hailed as a hero, and is promptly put on the throne as the new monarch, the Crystal Emperor. However, Pan now faces a great many problems, among them Celestia and Luna, who seem certain that the changeling is secretly up to no good, as well as several political factions secretly plotting to undermine his reign. There's also the tiny problem of the constant snowstorm that threatens to cut the city off from the outside world permanently.
The Crystal Ponies need a hero now more than ever before. Why did they get a changeling instead?

We Has A TvTropes.

While not truly a part of Bucking Nonsense's Changeling-Verse, the same rules regarding changeling abilities and society apply.

Cover image provided by gabapple, used with permission.

Have you ever just been having a regular day, then suddenly, BAM, you're dead? Well, no, of course you haven't. But what do you expect to happen after you die? If the answer was getting shoved into an overly pink copy of a pony princess, you'd be lying. Worse yet, she made me an alicorn just like her, which causes a whole new set of problems.

Unfortunately, she was adamant that I stay and become her twin sister. I ditched her immediately in my bumbling confusion and fear, and who could blame me? The last thing on my mind was being here! Ponies, princesses, and twin sisters? What kind of fantasy story was that? I was on the run, hiding from guard patrols, and fighting for my next meal. However, my own hubris caught up to me in the end, and her super powerful mother, Cadance, found me and made me see how stupid I was being. And Cadance, is an absolutely crazy powerful pony, with an even more powerful maternal instinct. So when it came down to her word against mine, she was really hard to convince, and she wasn't taking no for an answer.

(AKA, Super wholesome, fluffy, found family. And me having fun tugging on heartstrings.)
(Cover image by: me)

Formal Premise: The inventors of the Mirror wanted to create a device that could channel infinite magic and grant wishes. The hard part was making sure those wishes would never destroy the world. Showing a person their heart's desire is a sensible precaution to put into a wish-granting machine designed NOT to go horribly wrong.

The Atlanteans got close, even managing to imbue some amount of intelligence and morality into the Mirror. But they never finished their work; the Mirror never DID get to the point where it could grant wishes... at least, nobody believes it ever got to that point. But then, nobody has ever been trapped inside the Mirror and returned to tell the tale.

When the Mirror traps someone inside itself and outside of Time, that person and their consequences can no longer affect the world. In that circumstance, with a person fully under its power, the Mirror isn't limited in what it can do. Sometimes, it can even grant seemingly incompatible wishes.

But complex problems require complex solutions. In this case, the Mirror takes a few massive liberties about how, exactly, it satisfies the wishes of both Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. Namely, it sends them to a world of ponies.

Informal Premise: This is a crossover between MLP and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, not just Harry Potter. No matter how accessible I try to make it to those who haven't read HPMoR, those who HAVE read it will undeniably have an easier experience reading this story.

HPMoR is the second most popular fanfiction of Harry Potter, at least according to fanfiction stats. It involves Harry studying & dissecting the wizarding world with science. Not with technology, with actual science. That is, he uses the experimental method, generates and tests hypotheses, and in the words of his Occlumency instructor, "wants to discover the underlying rules of magic to become all-poweful".

THIS fanfic brings THAT version of Harry Potter to Equestria. It also brings that story's version of Voldemort.

If you want the best reading experience, please go read HPMoR first. It can be found on fanfiction dot net, or on its own website, or even on any podcast app, as it has its own fan-made audiobook with 30+ contributing voice actors, production quality, sound effects, music, etc. (which is more than can be said for most PROFESSIONAL audiobooks).

Link to HPMoR on fanfiction: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
Link to HPMoR on its own website: http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/1
Link to audiobook (though the website isn't nearly as good as podcast apps): https://hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=56

All forms of HPMoR that I've encountered are high quality, but that doesn't mean it's for everyone. You can probably read the first few chapters of HPMoR in thirty minutes or so. If it doesn't appeal to you, this story probably won't appeal to you either.

For those who haven't read Methods and want to read this story anyway, the first two chapters are going to be the most confusing. They're mostly housekeeping and stage-setting, barely touching the MLP universe beyond the new setting.

And I think the same advice Yudkowsky gave for HPMoR applies here. The story starts hitting its strides around Chapter 5, if not sooner. If you don't like it by Chapter 10, best just to give up and read something else.

Sunset Shimmer's life was good, she had plenty of friends and greatly enjoyed where she had eventually ended up in life. It's a shame then that reality had a different opinion on where she belonged. Now stuck in the past prior to first leaving for the human world, Sunset will have to figure out what kind of direction she wants to take in life this time around.

After all, the future she herself lived with her friends was not reachable without doing things that she now found appalling. Even so, she knows that staying in Equestria could very well doom the world to a much darker future. If she had time to draft a plan she could probably figure out something that would keep herself out of the way while also not affecting the timeline, it's a shame then that the two princesses of Canterlot would just not leave her alone!

Apparently this thing got feature mere days after publishing... somehow.

This story is a sequel to Changing Expectations

When ages are segmented and divided in the annals of history, it is done so with great events as breakpoints. The Second Age of Heroes was unanimously declared to have started with the return of Princess Luna and the changeling Invasion of Canterlot.

For thousands of years, the changelings survived beneath The Great Tapestry, that which connects all living and nonliving things. Hundreds of generations worked endlessly to keep their existence a secret. With one command from Queen Chrysalis, the Masquerade was broken.

In a single night, the changelings waged war against Equestria and took the Kingdom by storm. Months later, the war between changelings and ponies has ended. A new tapestry, a new story, must be woven between the two species. Equestria and the Fifth Hive have gone through a dark chapter and have emerged stronger for it.

One war ends and another begins.

As The Sword of Damocles hangs above the heads of the formerly-human King Phasma and his Equestrian counterparts, the forces of light must work on an ever-shortening window before war once again brings Hell to Equus. Dark powers grow in the places that the light does not reach, and they bring one irrefutable truth.

Epitaph is coming.

Cover art by Nixworld.

Special thanks to my pre-readers!