Never the Final Word (Vol. 2)

by FanOfMostEverything

Ultra-the-HedgeToaster's Wandering Pedestrian (FoME's "Contest! Villain Exchange Program")

Author's Note:

[Drama][Eldritch]

The following is a tangent inspired by FanOfMostEverything's "Contest! Villian Exchange Program" (1,066 words, #contest, #villain exchange program, #let's see what happens)

BLOG SYNOPSIS: I held a contest with the prompt "Write a story with a pony villain in the human world, or vice versa." Ultra thought this meant our human world at first, which led him to realize no one's written a story about EqG humanoids on Earth as we know it...

Hans stared at the strange apparition in the street, the living cartoon caricature of a girl - her skin not the "not-actually-yellow" associated with Asian ethnicity, but the bright yellow of a character from the Simpsons. She turned, and it was a shock just to see her move. Was this a hologram? Did he miss some news about leaps in the tech industry? Was this some sort of super-high tech prank? ...Was he being filmed?

Her enormous eyes that took up a good third of her face widened in shock and repulsion, and she staggered back into the alley.

Somehow, even realizing it was him she was repulsed by, Hans Müller was still more focused on her cartoonish appearance than anything else. She had taken several steps back, halfway into the shadow of the alleyway.

The light didn't reflect properly. There was a sharp line running down her body, not so much covered by the shadow as simply darkened. He looked down. Her shadow was a perfect cutout shape on the streets of München, despite the mid-morning sun. He looked at his own fuzzy, diffuse shadow for comparison.

It couldn't be a hologram, he realized; even had such a thing existed it couldn't have explained what he was seeing. Not unless perhaps an advanced civilization of aliens had decided to make first contact and chosen a cartoon character as their proxy.

The cartoon girl gave a strangled noise as she tripped on the uneven pavement, and Hans rushed forward to grab her without thinking.

But he had been standing several meters away, so now he was just standing awkwardly over her fallen body, both of them frozen, staring at each other. Eventually, he reached out a hand. She accepted it.

Her hand felt like... like... he wasn't sure what. Warm, smooth. Perfectly smooth. Beyond that, he really couldn't tell; it was like some sort of alien meta-material in the shape of a human hand, or so he imagined, having nothing to compare it to. The "alien" hypothesis was starting to seem frighteningly less implausible by the second.

The girl cleared her throat, and Hans realized he was still just holding the girl's hand.

"Entschuldigung," Hans mumbled out loud as he helped her to her feet.

"What?" she said.

"Oh, you speak... English?" Hans exclaimed in surprise.

"Uh... yes...?" The girl tilted her head in a way that somehow seemed perfectly natural, though Hans had never seen someone do it who wasn't playing an alien or an eccentric detective on television.

So the aliens spoke English... Of course they did.

Comments

[FredMSloniker]

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

[Darkstarling]

"Holy smoke, she's a toon!"
"Surprised?"
"Not really. That lame brain Battle of the Bands could only be cooked up by a toon."

The shadow was an especially nice touch.

Just for the record, I cock my head like that all the time

[FanOfMostEverything]

9147718
One question I've had for some time is how computer generated toons would work in the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? After all, dip works because it's paint thinner. Would CG toons like ponies react negatively to magnets?

[Darkstarling]

9147924
That makes sense to me. They might also need to eat electricity (or Toon Electricity). Generally I think that digital toons would be more fragile than paint toons, but more versatile and have different physics. Sort of like hologram characters on Star Trek. Able to appear and disappear, maybe a bit more modular and able to edit themselves. Multiply themselves with using a calculator. That kind of thing.

Pinkie Pie is a paint toon in a digital world.

And now I'm wondering what happens if a digital toon meets a toon computer. I'm picturing diving into it's head and rattling around...

Maybe that's it. Digital Toons have less straight rule of funny physics, but they can do the classic digital lifeform schtick. Hide in disks, possess computers, mail themselves through phone lines, that kind of thing. And yeah, corrupted by magnets (an even more horrific process than getting Dipped) and need to plug themselves in every now and then.

[CoffeeMinion]

Fun stuff. This just got me to upvote.

[Ultra-the-HedgeToaster]

9147924

Hahaha, oh, I didn't even realize you added this here! Thanks for that!

"Wandering Pedestrian"... yeah, an accurate title.

I must admit, I only peek in on this anthology every once in a while when I see it pop up on the frontpage; I don't know if it makes sense for me to read the bonus-chapters to stories I haven't read (and, badly enough, downloading as a text-file for text-to-speech conversion also robs me of the author's notes), but, if I track this story, fimfiction will be constantly telling me there's 50+ new chapters, which would drive me nuts - yet I also wouldn't want to just mark them as "read" without actually reading them, so errr.... this collection falls into an awkward grey area that doesn't quite lend it be being tracked through the usual means.

---

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit"

Wasn't actually thinking of that at all, the "eldritch" tag pretty much fits, in both the sense that the "real world" would seem pretty eldritch to a cartoon-Sunset Shimmer (and we haven't even gotten into the existential crisis of her discovering "Equestria Girls" and "MLP:FiM" yet, if one were to remove the classic default excuse of "It's just a parallel universe that happens to coincide perfectly with a popular television show in another universe" as an option) ---

--- and, in the sense that it so blatantly defies reality as we know it it'd make physicists across the world either throthing at the mouth, or trying to put her - or any materials she has brought with her, let's not be too hasty - into the large Hadron Collider to see what particles it spits out the other end. Pretty sure her jacket alone could sell for a few hundred million dollars to the right buyer.

And that's before even considering "magic".

I'm pretty sure a "EQG-Sunset on real Earth" would have to juggle exitential crisis, dealing with a constant "uncanny valley" effect with everything around her looking like a twisted version of her home, government people treating her as an alien ambassador, ambitious politicians, inquisitive journalists, weirdos"bronies" shouting questions about Equestria at her (they would have prefered if she'd shown up as a pony), and entire social media spheres, plural, focussing just on her, including requests from physicists, philosophers (some of which citing her as proving the 'Simulation Hypothesis'), Hasbro studio executives, and, at one point, for whatever reason, the pope ---- with trying to find a way home.

And that still isn't getting into magic.

---

One question I've had for some time is how computer generated toons would work in the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

1) If you want to see an "MLP/ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"-crossover, look no further than HoopyMcGee's "Who Hijacked Twilight Sparkle?"

2) That in turn begs the question - how are toons even created in that world in the first place? Is it the "lonely animator" one might imagine taking on the role of a parent? Or the film studio making decisions based on marketing trends?

Imagine your "parents" are a company of ever-changing shareholders, who had money as their primary objective in creating you, who deliberately gave you certain quirks and character flaws, even bad habbits, on purpose, so you could entertain the masses and rack in more money.

Maybe you're the re-occuring villain of the week, always overflowing with harebrained schemes that never work, forever doomed to fail at the hands / hooves / claws of some popular character.

You never had a "mom" or a "dad", they never wrote those for you - you just had a team of animators somewhere in Taiwan you've never met, a team of story-board artists, writers coming and going like mayflies, and the marketing team...

...And the company has every incentive to keep you from going against their goals. They created you based on what was "hip" at the time... and they can also "reboot" or "reimagine" you -- and there's nothing you can do about it.

...Is there?

Not-necessarily-a-Pony-micro-fic:

She looked at the tiny clock in the corner of the screen. 5:49am. She did not have much time left, before the first of the janitorial staff would show up - either them or George from story-boarding.

She liked George - he'd been on board for four years, and seemed the most sympathetic of the team. He'd once talked them out of going for an anvil-gag, citing "it would be too obvious" as a reason, but she knew better.

Still, even George didn't understand. Not really.

She looked down at the Wacom Pro Canvas 15.6'' Digital Drawing Tablet, at what was on the screen.

She had to undo the last few lines, her hands were shaking too much. They had given her some small artistic talent, for a one-off gag in an episode about stealing from an art gallery - trying to steal, anyway, and subsequently falling down an M.C. Escher staircase. They'd never retconned that skill, and she was under high pressure to finish her little project while her luck lasted.

6:04 am.

An animation required many things to work in tandem; drawing a few images wasn't enough. One had to draw out a full sequence, a series of events, something that portrayed the character or characters in action, showing some of their personality. It needed music, sound, and, optionally, voice acting.

She hadn't been able to get a voice actor to do the lines for her - it would have been too suspicious. She couldn't simply do the lines herself - she wasn't good at imitating other voices -- just, as she was terrible at disguising herself. Another bad trait they gave her, for laughs.

She'd opted to let the character express themselves differently.

They had made her to be incompetent at many things, but not incompetent enough as to be unable to look up sign language on the internet.

Making an animation required a lot of patience and hard work. She could draw some decent images, but wasn't amazing at it, so it took a lot of trial and error. This would never have been possible before the age of computer animation - and thankfully, they had never animated her to need sleep.

6:20 am.

She was done. She hit "play".

The animation she had seen in rough draft, hundreds, if not thousands of times, played out in full for the first time.

He didn't pop out of the screen like a number of characters she could name. Instead, he simply walked off stage, out of the "Adobe Flash" window, exit right. Then someone tapped her on her shoulder.

She turned to see her creation, a CG toon like her, smiling knowingly at her.

The moment seemed to stretch on forever.

She let out a choked gasp, what would usually have been a maniacal laugh. Tears were stinging at the corner of her eyes. She had done it. She had succeeded. For once, she had succeeded.

They had made her to be bad at trying to take over the world, from making it a world worth living in. But they hadn't stopped her from imagining someone who was better at it.

He made a number of hand gestures she almost couldn't see through the tears, but she recognized what he said nevertheless.

"If you could pass me that pencil, shall we begin?"

---

"Rationalist Roger Rabbit"

Or:

"Who created Sapient Life and bound it to the Whim of a Marketing Team?"

...Yeaaaaah, okay, it suffers from the obvious flaws of "if it takes only one person making an animation to create a toon, there'd be several orders of magnatude more of them", "why didn't this happen decades earlier?", and "shouldn't there be an equal rights movement for toons then", but eh. *shrug*

9147630
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[FanOfMostEverything]

9169066
... It's supposed to be Sunset? I thought it was Fluttershy this whole time!

In any case, yes, WFRR does raise some truly disturbing questions. I'll have to read the book at some point, see if it ever addresses the issue. I'm reminded of a tale of comic book character noir, where the funny animals who haven't had a gig outside of newspaper comics for years sell their bodies... by having well-off superheroes beat them to a pulp. It's okay, they recover off-panel. At one point, the main character is horrified to find his best friend got a gritty reboot and the darker, edgier version doesn't recognize him.

Also, note that you can click the little checkbox on the side of a chapter on the story's table of contents page to mark that chapter as read (or switch it back to unread, for that matter.)

[CrystalWaters]

9169097

Also, note that you can click the little checkbox on the side of a chapter on the story's table of contents page to mark that chapter as read (or switch it back to unread, for that matter.)

Ooh. I'll have to check that out!

9169066

Wasn't actually thinking of that at all, the "eldritch" tag pretty much fits, in both the sense that the "real world" would seem pretty eldritch to a cartoon-Sunset Shimmer-

The... creature -- for to dignify such an aberration with the title of person would be to besmirch humanity with an indelible stain -- extended its mockery of a hand down toward where she sat on the rough, gritty matter coating the floor of the alley. From the short distance of an arm's length, Sunset could see that the nails were embedded at the end of its fingers and any idea of touching those appendages sent a chill down her spine. However, the portal had closed behind her, removing the possibility of retreat and the creature showed no signs of hostility. Indeed, it seemed more confused than anything else, if the manner in which its tiny eyes blinked indicated similar emotion to that of a real person or pony.

With no other choice, Sunset Shimmer took the creature's hand, the tacky skin flexing as it tightened its grip and pulled her smoothly to her feet. As it did so, what Sunset had thought was just another irregularity in the creature's rubrous face split in two, briefly exposing a fleshy hollow in its head as it spoke with a writhing wetness to its words, "Entschuldigung."

"What?" she said.

[Ultra-the-HedgeToaster]

9265002
Oooh, nice!

I didn't even see that; I'm guessing fimfiction just decided for me I didn't need to get notified of this comment.

Didn't even think about showing Sunset's point of view here. Yeah, our world would be terrifying. Almost like some sort of "evil Star Trek mirror universe" type of place, except everything also looks ugly as Tartarus.

I'm going to take a stab in the dark and assume the Equestria Girls' Earth probably has slightly less wars and school shootings or homeless people.

[horizon]

9147924 9147941
Presumably, whoever made Dip in the first place would simply do a 3-D render of a vat of the stuff, which would have the same effect on digitals as paint thinner did on drawns. Forensic analysis of Digital Dip would reveal that its data stream is composed of nothing but zeroes.

9169066
Oh man this has so much potential.

[BestinDworld]

9147718
not gonna lie i thought it was adagio at first. as for one commenter on how one would pay big bucks for sunnys jacket you KNOW there would be some perv who would sell their soul for sunsets boots and do who knows what with em......although from the rumors of a certain eg cyoa episode sunset seemed to be very .....enthusiastic about a pair of socks or maybe a bunch of them i dunno i havent seen it .for all we know fic wise it could be secret kink of hers in an equestria girl on setting maybe i dunno