More is Less

by EpicGamer10075

Maniac

How many times have they defeated her?

How many times had she carefully crafted a masterful plan and tirelessly went through with it, only for it to be so easily ruined by them?

How much time and effort had been wiped away because they kept getting miracle after miracle given to them?!

The Mane-iac could only seethe in contempt and rage at everything that they had so carelessly ripped away from her, only for them to get the praise for being ‘heroes’. She had never hurt anypony in her efforts, always tying them up carefully and keeping any of her more dangerous creations doing little more than temporarily paralyzing them, and yet they all still claimed her evil.

They, who she had to note, were far worse than her in this context, as their ‘heroics’ left roads cracked, machines and houses smashed, and ponies getting an inordinate amount of physical trauma from how they were thrown around so hastily as the ‘heroes’ sought only the attention from their actions, lapping it up so eagerly while not caring in the slightest about any of the collateral damage that they wrought.

But above all else, they never cared about her.

It was all self-righteous shouts of ‘Don’t you dare, Mane-iac!’ and ‘Stop right there, Mane-iac!’ and ‘You’ll never get away with this, Mane-iac!’, with never a concerned or worried mention of ‘Are you alright?’ or even a confused ‘Why are you this?’.

She could tell beyond their vail of the title ‘Heroes’ that they didn’t care about anyone but themselves and their reputations, as they immediately branded her as a complete and utterly deranged criminal that sought only what she desired at the expense of herself, despite how she’d gone out of her way on multiple occasions to prevent ponies from getting hurt when one of her creations went awry, and how they had repeatedly ignored problems or even made them worse, but were still all seen as ‘heroes’ because they kept getting the ultimate victory given to them!

The Mane-iac was sobbing at this point, so taken by her rage and grief that she could hardly suppress the sounds from her position atop a tall skyscraper in Maretropolis, sitting on the edge and overlooking the myriad lights that kept the place bright even in the dark and cloudy midnight sky that covered it all. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to be there specifically, but apart from the relative silence, there was the lone thought of... well...

But, she never gave in; she couldn’t give up on her goals and let them win, after all. She couldn’t give them that, too!

All she ever wanted with all of her ‘crimes’ was just to make her own life better, with no reason to help anypony else, especially because of how they always branded her as ‘insane’ and ‘evil’ and... ‘crazy’.

She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t... a maniac.

Did it... all really hive to be like this?

She remembered a time before all of this, where she was just a normal pony working a middling job at a shampoo company, but one wrong step made everything go wrong.

She had a family back then, and she wasn’t sure if they knew what had happened even now. Had she been written off as dead, and they mourned her before moving on? Did they still think she was alive somewhere and were still searching for her? Or... did they know what happened to her, and were they now afraid of her...?

She could hardly bare the thought, which is why she never bothered trying to find them, even keeping herself away from them, with that possibility being too great and far too terrifying for her to ever want to approach.

Her mane was reached around and tightly gripping some of the metal pipes that poked out of the rooftop behind her, as she didn’t trust her body to stay under her control with all her emotions plaguing her as they were, and her eyes turning downward to watch her teardrops falling all the way to the ground far, far below made her mind feel so numb.

There was nothing stopping her, and she was sure nopony would mourn her; heck, they’d probably celebrate it!

But, again, she would never give them that satisfaction.

Not on her life would she let those bullies truly win against her, and she would fight them again and again, for however long it took to beat them, and finally prove them wrong.

She wasn’t a lunatic that did nothing for any reason, and she wasn’t an evil that only wished ruin on everypony and everything around her; no, she was just so tired of everything going wrong that she just wanted something good, no matter how hard she had to try to get it.

She wasn’t... crazy for wanting something like that, right?

She wasn’t... a maniac.

Author's Note:

You know, for the longest time, I’ve really hated the idea of superheroes.
These people who think they can break the law and do whatever they want in the name of something as arbitrary as ‘justice’ or whatever.

And so often they’re seen as heroes, while the ‘villains’ are the ones who just want to do their own thing, sometimes for an objectively good goal, just with negative means.

Obviously, not all villains fall into that group, and their are those that are straight-up evil, but I know the Mane-iac isn’t one of them.

A lot of canon MLP characters are so severely under-explored that we have so little to go off of in terms of who they are, and so much of the fandom just takes that 1-dimensional side of them as-is and just does whatever with it, rather than actually bothering to explore the hidden depth that ought to exist in these horribly tragic characters.

Both of these ideas, superheroes and simple fandoms, aren’t all too similar, but still do share the idea that entire characters, who ought to have actual depth to them, are just projected onto an archetype with maybe a slight catch, and then spread around with no-one bothering to care about the truth behind it.

While I could certainly make some case about Marvel or DC superheroes and post that somewhere, I feel like it’d be rather hollow, but in the rare case where MLP and superheroes collide, I can actually use this to make something interesting.