There are only three real monsters: Dracula, Blackula, and Son of Kong.
Diamond Tiara is a rich, spoiled brat, and the only thing she cares about this Hearth's Warming is how many presents she's going to get. However, the night before Hearth's Warming she receives three mysterious visitors, each with something different to show her. With the help of these ghosts of the past, present, and future, she just might realize the true meaning of Hearth's Warming.
Edited and inspired by the ever-incredible, and increasingly belligerent, Sock
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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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3.bp.blogspot.com/-dQnlwJQJs6Y/UHYJpl3ANNI/AAAAAAAAAA8/6CnDesfHfHA/s1600/ur+a+faget+02.jpg
D'awww.
Ah, drugs. That explains so much.
And now Gibbs is Sweetie's cool uncle.
*sniff* If you'll excuse me, I seem to have caught a snowflake in one eye. I'll be fine.
this was great! I mean, technically a Crhistmas Carol, but in pony version and with Diamond Tiara! That was a great story!
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Come on now.
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i.imgur.com/cMg8xYr.png
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Aaah, I see said the blind wizard.
DAAAAWWWW you just earned yourself a follow
Am I the only one who was waiting for a twist ending? I honestly didn't expect DT to learn anything.
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Thought about it, but I decided I wanted to play it straight and have her actually learn a lesson.
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Same here!
Well this was fun, nice work!
I knew Luna had something to do with it.
The concept is nothing new, and the story was a little predictable, but it was a good story regardless of those very general drawbacks. After all, it's hard to ruin a classic. And it certainly wasn't dry; there were enough cute, silly littler insertions to keep it entertaining throughout. Good read for the season!
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wow, that's all you got for Christmas? just a notepad calling you a faget with incorrect spelling? sucks to be you
Why didn't this hit the feature box?!
(And/Or why did I just now find it?)
So I read winona > mecha trixie > this, in that order.
So many Celestia+Luna endings. Are you trying to make that your signature or summin. ??
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Uhh... huh. Kinda didn't think about that until now. I guess I'm not trying to do that, but it somehow keeps happening. I should probably stop...
One consistency I find in most stories involving Diamond Tiara is that whenever she gets into conflict with the CMC, she and Silver Spoon are the instigators. More often than not, the CMC are doing something on their own, and Diamond and Silver show up to give them a hard time with rarely any purpose. However, this story starts off with a reversal of the normal format. Diamond and Silver are doing some pony watching, and the CMC show up to spark the conflict. I guess we're operating in a world where having a bad attitude is just as wrong as actually doing something wrong. Certainly an interesting concept, but it does make it difficult to see which side I'm supposed to sympathize with during the first portion of the story, because the bad attitude seems to be evenly distributed between them.
It's a fairly straightforward retelling of A Christmas Carol. It's mildly self-aware, but mostly it's played straight. You start with the "Scrooge", progress through each of the ghosts, and end with the Scrooge learning some kind of lesson. The key differences are that Diamond's not an old guy who doesn't pay his employees enough, no one has a son who's going to die if Diamond doesn't change her ways, and there's no mystery behind the supernatural entity that brings about the four ghosts. Those are the key differences, but I find the more subtle ones to be more interesting.
First of all, I like that you attempted a more realistic portrayal of Diamond Tiara rather than raising her Scrooginess level past eleven and making her an unsympathetic, irredeemable, indirect murderer who takes money out of the charity buckets because she feels entitled to do so. However, I believe that fashioning such a tame Diamond worked against you in the long run. The original A Christmas Carol was designed for someone like Scrooge, someone who's grown bitter at the world and lost his sense of empathy for humanity. With Diamond here, you have an admittedly selfish character whose main problem seems to be that she thinks presents trump all else during the holiday season, to which a lot of people can relate. I can't help but feel that people would only think Diamond deserves to get haunted in a story like this if they incorporate their feelings about her from the show. Without that initial bias, I see no reason why this story's Scootaloo shouldn't be haunted as well for insulting Diamond's dad.
Unlike the original story, the ghosts don't show Diamond her sins of the past, present, and future as examples of why she needs to change. In fact, they don't show her anything about herself at all, which made for a pleasant twist. The ghost of the past shows her parents, the ghost of the present shows the Apple Family, and the ghost of the future shows what it always shows: death. Essentially, all three of them tell Diamond the same thing with different visuals: giving is better than getting. They don't tell a story or show a natural sequence of events that would lead Diamond to remember some lost sense of feeling. Because she hasn't lost any sense of feeling; she's just missing one. That's why the ghosts just try to hammer in the lesson until she spontaneously decides to accept it.
The end of the story reveals that Luna was the one behind it all rather than the CMC. It's an admirable twist since it answers all the questions and removes most of the negative implications behind the entire scenario. The only problem I see is the gigantic plot hole it creates in the process: why did Luna make the four ghosts look like Silver and the CMC? Why did she make "Silver" look like someone pretending to be Silver? Was she trying to make Diamond more comfortable with the situation by making her think it was all fake? I thought she was trying to teach her a lesson. Why would she want Diamond to feel comfortable about it? That would just make her more likely to ignore the whole thing. And how did Luna plan to go about Apple Bloom's part if she didn't reveal what she looked like? Hearing that a random stranger lost their parents is unfortunate, but it's not exactly emotionally powerful unless you know them personally. You could argue she wanted Diamond to think the CMC were behind it all along, but that would be horribly shortsighted on her part since Diamond would obviously ask them about it the next day. It just didn't seem like it made sense when all was said and done.
What I liked most about this story was your portrayal of Diamond's parents. Though they themselves didn't have strong personalities, the positive light that was cast on them made for an interesting deviation from normal stories where the dad's either a pushover or always busy and the mom's either deceased or a layabout beauty queen. They were just typical parents who believed in discipline, hard work, and the virtues of sacrifice if Luna's flashbacks are to be believed. And looking at how things have come in present day, we can see that whatever struggles that came before have paid off. Personally, I saw that as this story's true happy ending.
On the flip side, my biggest problem with this story was its attempted happy ending, starting with the resolution of the Ghost of Christmas Future section. If we're supposed to sympathize with the ghosts and the lesson they are trying to teach, I think it's very important that they avoid resorting to tactics that a sadistic supervillain would use. Showing someone a vision of the future, warning her of what may happen if she doesn't change is one thing, but lying to her by saying that her parents are dead now and that they're never coming back is absolutely cruel. It wasn't any kind of omniscient prediction; it was basically just a joke. That goes beyond whatever platitudinous advancement of common sense Luna's trying to pass down here. That's almost psychological torture, and the fact that it actually works eclipses the happiness of the ending and hollows it of any emotion it might have given me. It's just too mean-spirited for my tastes.
The story had good structure, following the one from the original basically point for point. It was also well-edited, as the spelling, grammar, and punctuation had negligible problems. Overall, the story needed a stronger driving force. Diamond did nothing to exhibit any extreme amounts of selfishness that would require a need for intervention, especially one that would try to make her believe her parents are dead. Also, though it's not directly stated one way or the other, it doesn't seem like Silver Spoon gets visited by Luna, and given her portrayal in this story, I can't imagine she's any more or less deserving of it.
I wish I could say I liked this story more, but the grasshopper on this fruitcake that resolved the Christmas Future portion just didn't have the right texture for me to enjoy it. I'll give you the credit for at least preparing the fruitcake correctly and using some interesting fruits, but ultimately I couldn't get a strong enough grasp on the flavor to say I truly enjoyed it. Don't let that discourage you, though. The only dish that's truly bad is the one that's left unmade.
Make the most!
Somehow I read and enjoyed this and never commented. *Gasp* Either way, retellings of a Christmas Carol, just never seem to get old for me. Bravo.
All the Pony's in Ponyville say that BrianPony's heart grew three sizes today...and then exploded! The end.
A Christmas Carol is my favorite story for this time of year and I absolutely LOVE this story. A fave, upvote and watch!
Well, that's my morning cry taken care of. Well done!
Just read this a second time. Why can't the show have a Christmas special like this?
It got a reading in time for Christmas!
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Welp, this is awesome. Now I have something to put in my obligatory Christmas blog post. Sweet.
And the moral of the story is... If someone's being a douche at Christmas, just scare the living shit out of them!
Wow, that was a nice and refreshing variation of "A Christmas Carol"!
One could think after three years of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and probably hundreds of variations of ponyfied versions of this story, that it would get boring and that there wouldn't be any new ideas for that anymore, but this fanfiction proofs the opposite.
Very great story! And the idea with the star at the end..... That's just marvelous! Absolut perfectly thought out! Have a favourite for that!
There are just two major things I have to criticize here:
First, Diamond Tiara's reformation comes a bit quick. With a pony like her, so selfish and vile, that literally does not care about anypony else, that goes so far to bully another filly into literally giving up on life altogether, you would expect that it would need a bit more for her to change her ways than realizing that her parents will die ONE DAY and a little pep talk by "Applebloom".
I would have expected for her to protest more, to say something like she doesn't care either way, something that would make it necessary for the ghost of Hearth's Warming future to show her something more traumatic to get her out of her selfish state.
And, second, at the end, Diamond Tiara asks her parents what day it is and then she says that she hasn't missed Hearth's Warming Eve.
In the novel your fanfiction is based on, the old partner of Scrooge told him that the ghosts would come in three different nights, always exactly at midnight, and so, Scrooge had a reason to believe that Christmas Eve would be over when the ghosts were all gone.
But Diamond Tiara has no reason to believe Hearth's Warming Eve is over and for her, it simply looked like everything happened over the course of one night.
So, that she asks her parents that doesn't make sense for her.
Aside from that, I noticed some small grammar issues and missing words clattered across your story.
It would help you to take a look at this guide:
http://www.fimfiction.net/writing-guide
And maybe you should also get a pre-reader, who helps you eliminating the mistakes you don't caught on immediately.
That is, only if you still need all of this, of course. Considering that your story here is already one year old, you maybe have seen these mistakes already by yourself and improved on that in your future stories.
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I also expected that.
Although the twist at the end was rather obvious, this was still rather heartwarming. Nice work!