This story is a sequel to Pinkie Pie’s Clone Wins a Game of Hide-and-Seek
Shining Armor and his daughter Princess Flurry Heart visited Ponyville. At the last minute, Shining Armor realized that he promised to show up at Rarity's fundraiser, his daughter's restaurant's grand opening party, and visit his old friends, all at the exact same time of day. To avoid letting anypony down, Shining Armor uses the Mirror Pool to create clones, then gives them a copy of most of his memories.
While Princess Twilight Sparkle's away dealing with a bigger friendship emergency, Princess Flurry Heart must send the clones that her dad created back to the Mirror Pool before they rebel or make more clones.
Flurry Heart's cursed by several problems: The clones insist they're the real ones. Prince Shining Armor gave his scions a copy of most of his memories. Many of her plans don't work. The clones have the same magic, special talents, instincts, and most of his knowledge, and guess or cheat when they don't know things. Her magic naturally isn't as strong as any Shining Armor's, and even a simple barrier would stop her spells.
This dark, comedic story is set around the end of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, in a universe where Shining Armor is a Terrible Dad of Princess Flurry Heart. Shining Armor and a few other characters have different flaws including, but not limited to, impulsiveness, obliviousness, forgetfulness, stupidity, recklessness, selfishness, indifference, and poor communication skills.
This is a submission to the Shining Armor is a Terrible Dad Competition!
A/N: Not a crossover, but this story contains references to scenes in Gurren Lagann, mostly in the last chapter.
A/N: There's only one human of any form, and they're not a main character.
A/N: In a sense, Shining Armor is a father of the clones.
So is the Human tag for everyone, or is it limited? I honestly can't tell every time it's used.
Just a single impostor possessed by a human. The rest of the characters are normal ponies.
I'll add an author note mentioning that.
This story was something alright, but I kinda liked it? There's problems but I think it'll get a good enough place on the contest!
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Thanks!
Hopefully it'll get mentioned, but for the most part, I'd wanted to finish writing the ideas I'd had for this competition, and I believe this fiction was the only one with those ideas or concepts (etc.) so far.
I'd proofread this, and rewrote parts of it multiple times before publishing and after. There's definitely things I could expand on or rewrite, but I'm already at the 5k word limit after including scenes for all of the Shining Armor clones, cloning, and other scenes I'd wanted to keep.
I'm impressed by the other submissions. https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/1033811/the-shining-armor-is-a-terrible-dad-2024-competition
E.g. I loved https://www.fimfiction.net/story/552953/shining-armors-not-so-very-great-and-powerful-day and https://www.fimfiction.net/story/552147/a-makeover-for-algernon-why-all-my-hamsters-are-goths and https://www.fimfiction.net/story/552254/flurry-heart-sacks-rome , and haven't finished reading some of the other submissions.
I'm writing prequels from Finger Food's (Pinkie Pie's Clone's) perspective, to try a more serious writing style in the first person point of view, instead of the third person limited point of view used in this story.
https://www.fimfiction.net/group/217460/shining-armor-is-a-terrible-dad-2024-competition
One of those even follows the (joke about) "rules" and won't even feature Flurry Heart, Shining Armor, or Princess Cadance as characters.
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Is there anything that you (or anyone else reading this comment) sees that's easy to fix before the Shining Armor is a Terrible Dad contest I'm submitting this to closes, if you still remember?
E.g. I fixed a few grammar issues, rewrote some parts, and I made it clearer that Shining Armor was a dad (in a sense) to those Mirror Pool clones.
I'm still happy with the story and hope that readers found some of the random comedy funny. But I'm aware of some major things that I can't change, though. This combined multiple writing ideas I had, where focusing on a single idea and a shorter story could have been better. I didn't need to have that quantity of Shining Armors being terrible dads for the contest's scoring, but I thought that the idea was hilarious. The characters are deliberately written as flawed because Shining Armor is a Terrible Dad in that setting. I couldn't add more descriptions of characters actions and thoughts, because of the 5k word limit. A much shorter story would have been better for the contest. And content referencing other works of fiction obviously doesn't have broad appeal because few readers would be familiar with the source material.