This is my submission to the Equestria Daily Fanfic Horror Fanfic Contest Fanfic Championship Horror!
Pinkie Pie requires strawberries, so she leads the Mane Six into the Everfree Forest to search for only the freshest of wild strawberries.
So, this is a Horror fic, and as such there is a bit of shenanigans involving light gore, et cetera. I tried to make it more or less accessible for everyone, but if you're worried about that sort of thing, maybe give this one a pass.
Thanks to andygrey for prereading, and to Ulyanovetz for letting me use his cover art.
Chapters (1)
This fic is a another example of why I find the mane six harder and harder to like with every such one I read. It makes me wonder if the ponies in canon have even bothered to take into account that they're the only friends Spike has, or if they just assume he's totally okay when they run off to do stuff without him.
Except the one who could've saved them all.
But at least it was a good spooky read.
This fic is also a good example of my newest reason for getting excited as Samhain draws near: the delightfully dark and creepy fanfiction.
It was only thrown off a little by Pinkie's fourth wall humor. Normally I would disagree with the people who feel it's superfluous or distracting, but in this case I must agree; her initial fourth wall breaking, to say nothing of the rest of her zany antics, really didn't fit with the dark, bloody turn the story took halfway through. The steady disappearance of humor probably could have worked as a method of creating the sense of a normal, happy, chipper day in Ponyville descending into a nightmare. But for that, you would have needed to spend a lot more time and words setting a scene, creating an atmosphere, describing senses, and generally making a reader feel like they're inside the story.
Another thing I noticed was that, in two instances, you do a nice job of providing sufficient information to get an idea across without letting it spill. The gore, firstly; your simplistically gruesome descriptions were enough to paint a bloody image in my imagination, but not so extreme that they warranted a Mature rating. You struck a good balance there. The second instance was the monster. It's pretty clear - unless my geekish mind is just seeing things - that the ponies were dealing with a xenomorph. But you were vague enough that no crossover tag is needed (just like my own fanfics, one featuring Spike as Kick-Ass, another featuring ponified Muppet characters). That's where your horror tale got really exciting for me.
3350758 Woah, a comment! And a really insightful and friendly one, at that!
I will admit that I didn't even think about Spike the entire time I was writing this, at all! Not even a little bit. I actually feel kind of bad now. I don't think I would've brought him into the forest with the rest, even if I did remember him. I don't know, something about murdering Spike seems a lot less palatable than murdering the rest of them... But you're right, I should have at least tried to explain his absence.
I think I also agree with you about the humor. What I was trying to do was show a believable interpretation of the Mane Six as they realized that they were in life-threatening danger, so Pinkie was joking around until (just after) it stopped being appropriate. But this is actually the first prose anything I've ever written. Literally. I've never written a story, never even written poetry. Add that I wrote this in about a week, and you can probably see why the pacing was off. Pretty much all of the editing I did on this story was just adding words between scenes, because it felt like I was rushing between them. Eventually I ran out of time, though.
Busted! The monster is a xenomorph. This fic actually comes from a friend's challenge to write a Pony/Aliens crossover. But I thought, considering how it was supposed to be a Horror fic for the contest, that it would be really hard to make a xenomorph scary to my audience, because it's so hard to be frightened of such a known quantity. That's why Alien is a horror movie and Aliens is an action movie, because as soon as the viewers know what the xenomorphs are and what they can do, they're no longer scared of them. I thought if I put the crossover tag up or made it more clear that it was a xenomorph, it would lose its mystery.
But yeah, thank you! Your comment is a very fair analysis, I think, and I'm glad I got it. I was actually really worried that I'd only get, like, one comment that just read, "this suks" or something.
3351673 Your first prose ever? Well, you did a pretty bang-up job with it. Just a few hiccups here and there. I'm actually quite baffled that this doesn't already have more attention. Here's hoping it kicks ass in the Nightmare Night competition!
(Gosh, I remember my first written prose. I was 9-10, I was loving a show called Hercules: The Legendary Journeys because there were monsters and adventure in it, so I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and wrote: "One day, Hercules" ... Then I couldn't think of anything so I crumpled it up.)
You're right, all the horror in Aliens comes from gore and jump-scares. But was is kinda terrifying in this fic is the idea of a xenomorph lurking unseen at the edge of the cheerful, innocent, defenseless town of Ponyville. Then there's the mystery of how it got there, what it's going to do, whether or not Zecora is safe, and finally the revelation that there are two of them. It was a good call to keep it as mysterious as possible. That's what made it scary, I think.
3352369 Oh, well, if we're counting stuff like that, I guess I have written before. A few months ago, while looking through some old stuff, I found what must have been a ten-year-old sheet of paper with just this phrase:
I have no idea what my thought process was.
But yeah, this is my first serious attempt as an adult to tell a story about something. I've written a lot of nonfiction stuff, essays, blog entries, journal-y things. But never prose, until now.
3352556 It would be cool to see what you could do without a time limit.
3352576 I'm hoping you'll see soon!
I'm not sure how clear it was just from reading this, but I consider myself much better at writing dialogue and characters than actions and events. (Something else that I've written that wasn't prose was a few scripts for short videos on a friend's YouTube channel) If this fic wasn't for a contest it would not have been Horror.
With that in mind, what I really want to write is light comedy/romance thing, basically like the setup to this story except nothing horrible ever happens. I have a few editing obligations to take care of first, but I'm hoping to start working on that around the first week of November.
Hey, sheep. Thought I would drop by and add something official to this particularly palatable and passionate piece of prose.
I love the little expansions you made upon the end pieces, specifically the scene with the foal being tripped. I feel that they add a few extra layers to the fic as a whole. I'm sorry if I came off as a little bit disregarding of your disputes with a few of my edits. looking back, I figure I could have been more sober about the whole thing.
Either way, I'm practically painfully proud of your version of the wonderfully withered wonderment that is the eternally expanding extravaganza that is the frightfully, fearfully free fictional forest...
aaand now I'm just messing around(not even skilfully so). Have a good one lad.
3352606 Good luck with it.
3352733 Sorry to keep bothering you, but if you'll indulge my curiosity: how did you find this fic?
3352806 Hey, you're the on filling your comments section with this conversation.
But that's fine, it's your story. I found it my skimming the New Stories column on FiMfiction's homepage. The cover art and synopsis heavily implied that it was a Halloween-themed fic (my newest holiday pleasure, thanks to this fandom) and the tags confirmed it.