And here's this

Thoughts on this being canon?

I don't see this as being good for canon. It's too dark; it features the killing off of an entire town.

For fanfiction, it's fine in my book. Very well written, and I like the story. So I'd vote fanfiction.

3695431
That's what I was thinking, too.

3695431 3707793
I'm not really seeing the problem. A good half of this fic is part of a "dream" sequence that is trying to force Luna to give in to despair, so it's hard to say what REALLY happened with any certainty. We know the entire village wasn't wiped out though since at the end refugees are mentioned. Besides, much like with Tambelon, anyone who actually died in this fic did so off-screen as part of the "backstory".

The story is a little on the short an insubstantial side though, but I think it's otherwise fine as its own little semi-canon tie-in.

I think it works fine as a side story, if nothing else.

That's 2 for fanfic and two for side story tie in. I'll PM Fizzy and let him know we need a tiebreaker.

I'm fine with it being a side story.

3747198
Well that seems to break the tie...

3707793
...though I've never been much of a fan for simple majority when it comes to canon. Personally, I still don't think it's too dark, but if RDD still thinks that might be a problem, maybe we should actually DISCUSS the matter further before finalizing any kind of decision.

3749004 Personally I've always been much more leniant on dark story if they happened in the past. Makes it more clear than Equestria is presently a very nice place, but it wasn't always like that. Ponies had to work for it to be like it is.

3749004
3749769 :

I personally don't think that 'it was all a dream' (or other variations of 'it didn't really happen') can allow for darker content than we would otherwise have in the real world. It's still happening on screen, as it were, and a reader will 'feel' it just as much in either case. It also puts the 'dark' concepts into the Lunaverse world, even if they aren't being used at that time, if that makes sense. (E.g., we probably aren't going to have a serial killer character. I thus don't think we should have a pony dream or hallucinate about a serial killer character either, because that indicates that there are serial killers in the verse somewhere for the pony to know to dream/hallucinate about, even if they don't happen to be onscreen at the time.)

To put it another way: early on in my conception of Siege of Stalliongrad, it ended with Carrot Top using the time-bubble artifact to go back in time and prevent the siege from ever taking place. I took that out because I decided it made the whole story feel like a big time-waster ("those last thirty chapters never happened!") However, I feel that, even if I had kept that ending such that none of the deaths/suffering in that story was 'real', the story would still have been rejected as being too dark for canon. I think the same rule should apply here. We wouldn't allow a village to be annihilated now, so it shouldn't be annihilated in a dream world/unreal timeline either.

3749794
There still is notable if subtle difference in regards to "historical" stories. It add a buffer of distance when the deaths are of characters that would be long dead by the present day anyway. Moreover still, we never see the village populated in the first place, which only further adds distance in the form of the deaths being more hypothetical in implication.

Further more though, I don't think the story ever explicitly states that the village was wiped out. We know that it was abandoned because of the fear inducing artifact, but the shadows that supposedly "ate" the population were only ever an aspect of Luna's nightmare. There probably were deaths, but we also know there were refugees as well. We don't know which there are more of, leaving it open to individual interpretation and so meaning the story only needs to be as dark as each reader wants it to be.

Lastly though, yes I do think "it was only a dream" can be a perfectly valid excuse for allowing darker content fro lessening the ramifications. Besides, it's not like dangerous monsters don't exist. Much the same as how a villain with terrifying intentions is more okay if they are prevented from acting or any damage the cause is later undone. Besides we've had villains, like Grogram and Antithesis, that have engaged in blatant acts of out right attempted acts of murder -- or even on a more mundane level when the mafia ponies kidnapped Dinky and threatened to mail her bavk in pieces if Ditzy didn't cooperate. Our characters don't live in a sugar-coated world where bad things never happen, even if as a rule we lean toward positive outcomes.

As such, I don't see any validity in your "serial killer" example. Just because that's not the kind of story we would be likely to approve, doesn't mean that such terrible thing don't exist, nor that our character are unfamiliar with the concept and so could dream about them.