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// Prompt #442-TVTropes Is More Correct Than It Knows 
// Story: Ponywatching 
// by ThunderTempest 
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There are many ponies in Equestria. There are unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi. There are even a small number of alicorns, ponies who possess all three racial traits bound in perfect synergy. And then there is Pinkie Pie. Pinkie Pie is about as much a pony as Discord is. Perhaps less so.

Pinkie Pie is, in every sense of the phrase, Fun Ponified. No, we are not talking metaphorically. She is the physical manifestation of fun. She is an abstract idea made solid, pink and somewhat adorable. Whenever she meets a new pony, she gets what their idea of fun is through plain eye contact, absorbs that into herself, integrates it into her personality, and immediately rushes off to prepare the customary ‘Hello New Friend’ Party. With each new pony met, her concept expands, and so do her little eccentricities. Pinkie being what she is, she is assured existence as long as one pony wants to have fun, effectively rendering her immortal or at the very least, exceedingly long lived.

Being the physical ponification of Fun, Pinkie Pie is also not bound by the normal laws of physics. As long as someone is having fun, or laughing, Pinkie Pie can do anything to keep it going. This includes little things, like stretching or compressing her body beyond its natural limits, all the way up to breaking the fourth wall. If someone thinks its fun, Pinkie Pie can do it. And since she is the Element of Laughter, this also applies to anything which gets a laugh out of someone, somewhere. This is also why Twilight completely failed to analyse Pinkie Pie. One, because fun is completely subjective, and two, because you can’t explain fun. You just have it.

Of course, with so many ideas of what is fun swirling around Pinkie Pie, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that she is a little scatterbrained, being constantly distracted by the next fun idea, or party. Yet she can concentrate if she tries. There are also other downsides to being the projection of Fun into the physical plane. Madness is a kind of fun. Not a particularly nice kind, but it still is to at least one pony in the room. Maybe that pony is the only one having fun in the room, but it’s still fun to someone, and that means that it’s part of Pinkie Pie. Rejection by those she holds dear, perceived or otherwise, will cause Pinkie to draw on the darker aspects of Fun, often causing her to shift into the state called ‘Pinkamena’.

The Mirror Pool, unable to replicate the Avatar of Fun perfectly, simply copied Pinkie’s surface aspects, taking only the simplest idea of Fun. When Pinkie Pie realised this, she realised exactly what she had done, and had to set out to correct her mistake. But with all her copies taking all the fun in Ponyville, she began a slow slide towards the not-so-nice end of the Fun Scale. This actually allowed Pinkie to concentrate long enough to win the ‘watching paint dry’ contest, whereas the shallow copies, who lacked the deeper understanding of Fun, couldn’t keep their focus.

***Time***

Now that we have explored the What and the How of Pinkie Pie, we must attempt to explore the elusive question of Why. This is naturally a difficult question to answer, as Pinkie Pie’s entire existence is mostly dictated by the eloquently named ‘Rule of Funny’, which states that ‘As Long as an event is Funny, all other concerns are overridden.’ This means that large parts of Pinkie Pie’s abilities manifest because they are inherently funny, and thus cannot be explained any further.

“Let’s not forget the Sugar Rush ability which I was denied! That would have been really Funny!”

Yes, Thank you, Pinkie Pie. The aforementioned ability, which was planned for Pinkie Pie...wait. What.

“Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie! I would have interrupted earlier, but you were having so much fun, and I didn’t want to ruin that.”