The magic has come back to the land of ponies and the three great cities have reunited at last.
But it's not all flower circles and sleepovers. Massive new markets have opened up for products and media, and Izzy Moonbow is aghast at a new sensation that has swept Maretime Bay, these uncanny, singing, shilling dolls calling themselves "Harmonoids".
She doesn't like 'em. Not one bit. And as anyone from the era of the Heroes of Harmony knows, when a crazy unicorn has a problem, it's everybody's problem.
This story is predominantly comical with an Izzy pity party throughout the consecutive chapters "Falling Down", "Keeping Your Head Down", and "Getting Up".
The cover art is temporary because I forgot how to draw again, will replace when I remember.
Hello! This is a comment I added before I published the story.
If you aren't seeing 15 to 16 chapters, don't worry, like every other damn story it's 90% done while I freak out over the last few bits, I'm just publishing them one at a time. I was told this gets you better views than slamming them all down at once.
The last chapter is titled No Rest for the Cutie. If that's not there, then I haven't finished publishing. Thanks for understanding!
Hello! I said screw it and started publishing the chapters because I have spent quite long enough freaking out over it. Some of them might still be '''''''''''''bad'''''''''''''. Sorry if so!
The cover image is temporary and gets the point across. I want to draw one myself later. Maybe. We'll see!
Cute start. I like it.
Pro tip: Just set it to incomplete even if it's technically completed and you're just releasing the chapters once a day. It's just better that way.
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Okay! I guess it makes more sense to everyone that way.
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Yeah, basically, the "Completed" tag on a story means "completely posted on the site, with no further chapters to come", not "complete on my hard drive (or in my head) but only partially posted here and there are more chapters still to be posted."
When I started writing this story I didn't write it from start to finish. I basically had these first two chapters (Harmowhats? and Cue Laughter), a chapter in the middle (Disconcerted), and the ending (Judgment Day), and everything else is improvised to go between those. I'm still not quite happy with the flowchart of the story, but that's beside the point.
When first writing Cue Laughter I intended for everything about Harmonoids' performance to be awkward and cringy and bad because that's how I see Vocaloid, the primary thing they're a parody of. However, as easy as it is for me to legitimately write badly, intentionally writing faux-badly is very difficult and I can't be sure anybody will read it the way I intended even if I did a good job at it, so over time this chapter became less nauseating to read. I also cut it in half from its original length, removing a whole second song and focusing on Linking Lonely Hearts to avoid muddling the plot any further.
Later down the road I might say "screw it" and revise Harmonoids with an actual effort at quality, sort of like how Zombieland Saga is supposed to be a shitpost in anime form but is better than most actual idol anime. Come to think of it, aren't Harmonoids basically the zombies of the Heroes of Harmony... I might have already included it in the parody more subtly than the Vocaloid analogue, for some reason I feel like there's some detail vaguely inspired by that somewhere.
For now however I'm tired of editing this damn story and will leave this chapter with these caveats.
I totally forgot to publish a chapter today! So I did. But that also means I forgot to look over it one last time before publishing. Busy playing Kirby sorry!
Up until now I always felt Knock Knock was the weakest chapter in the story and it used to also be the shortest one. Hopefully I've enriched it enough by now
EDIT: I contradict myself, Tolerance was always the most difficult chapter in the story to write and might be the weakest one. Knock Knock's main problem was enriching it without making it waste the reader's time, Tolerance was a nightmare to figure out what exactly even happens in it.
Ch. 4 get! Nothing much to say about this one.
If you don't know who Dahlia is, don't worry, neither did I until I saw the name assigned to one of the background ponies in Maretime Bay.
EDIT: The article appears to have been deleted, so I've no idea if that's even her proper name! Whatever. She was pink with sea-green hair.
EDIT 2: Hitch greets Mayflower and Dahlia by name while trying to stop Sunny from entering Canterlogic right after "Gonna Be My Day".
I did not upload a cruddy version of it by the time I published this.
Like I said earlier, this is actually one of the first few chapters written, and all the others are cruddy improvisations to get from the start to here to the ending (+ mild edits to it to reflect those other chapters.) Immediately after this chapter is where all the complications in the writing start, so I hope the rest of the story is still OK!
As foretold in the story description and possibly the comment I made earlier I don't remember, this is part of the obligatory "oh it isn't funny anymore" section of the story, which is maybe two and a half chapters.
I found it a bit difficult to return to clownery after this segment and hopefully have revised it enough to be presentable, but you won't be seeing whether that worked for another day or two, I guess!
Overall the hardest chapter to write for several reasons. Hopefully it's good!
EDIT: The hardest chapter to write was a toss-up between this and Tolerance. I think this one was slightly easier, actually, it only went through 2 or 3 revisions, Tolerance went through a dozen or more.
Sad part done, back to baloney.
It's Saturday and here's Saturday! It's completely a coincidence the chapter is named the day I posted it on.
This was another hard chapter to flesh out but I hope I've enriched it enough by now.
This was probably the hardest chapter to write (EDIT: It seems I said that about two other chapters, no, this was the hardest one by far), which went through like 20 very different ideas and which I continued editing until shortly before publishing it, and may be the weakest chapter in the story.
But I really wanted to have Terminator jokes which led to having a nice Recalloid showing up (retroactively affecting previous chapters) and there was no question it had to be Kind☆Harmonoid.
As a consequence, I worried this might make the story feel like it's building up when it's actually very close to the end. Oh well.
It finally happens.
As I was writing this story, I became keenly aware that horn-bonking was being mentioned too often, which ruined the big event. So I removed most mentions of horn-bonking from the story. Of course, my story is not the only one people are reading and even if it was those mentions are over 10 chapters apart, so they may not even remember that it was foreshadowed in the first chapter and echoed here word-for-word, but whatever.
After deciding partway through writing this to have a nice Kind☆ show up, I actually removed the hostile Kind☆s from this chapter and had Zipp lampshade it.
Story's done.
One more jab at iconoclasts whining about the movie's "wokeness" due to racism angle!
Oh yeah I wanna mention something else.
I completely forgot that Izzy has hippie sense - she can see ponies' magic auras, which she calls "sparkle". But coincidentally, assuming that isn't a global unicorn ability, that fits right in with the psychic powers I gave her. I only went with that because she is unicorn-Pinkie and it's like a variation of the Pinkie Sense, but it all works out anyway.
Maybe I'll do a quick edit to slip some references to it in.
EDIT: Done, Izzy now complains about the lack of sparkle in Chapter 2.
I am loving this story!