• Member Since 12th Aug, 2017
  • offline last seen February 22nd

chris the cynic


Someone who doesn't know how to describe herself, is always struggling with debilitating depression, and won't stop hanging onto the hope that happy endings are possible.

T

As Twilight predicted, Sunset Shimmer gave out a lot of apologies after the Fall Formal.

As Princess Celestia told Sunset long before --when she dismissed Sunset as her student-- apologies aren't always enough. Sometimes actions have consequences that can't be escaped with a simple: "I'm sorry."

Sunset remembers Celestia's words after a run in with fellow students --ones who weren't satisfied with mere apologies-- leaves her lying on the ground, in pain, in a Canterlot alley.


This wasn't originally intended to be a quiet thinking and reminiscing piece, it just sort of turned out like that. Ditto on it being both long enough and complete enough to be a legitimate one-shot.

As noted in various places, my depression has been . . . pretty much killing my ability to do anything remotely creative. So when something breaks through that it's very, very welcome. This was such a thing.

It's simple and short and exactly as straightforward as the above description implies.

Chapters (1)
T

Sunset had hoped that showing the Rainbooms what she'd written about them would remind them of the good times they'd had and the kind of person she'd become. That if she could just get them to listen they'd realize she would never betray them.

She was partially right. Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash believed her, but --with no likely suspects-- Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie were unmoved.

The Rainbooms split. Sunset's group become targets for the students of CHS to vent their frustrations on. And Anon-a-Miss keeps posting.


Yeah, another Anon-a-Miss story. It comes from a lot of things. A lot of it is just trying to answer some, but not all, of the questions posed by Dainn when he wrote his seminal work:

But what if things happened differently?
What if Sunset never figured out who Anon-a-Miss really was?
What if her friends refused to listen after her little chat with Twilight?

What if Sunset's friends did listen but Sunset didn't figure out (and the CMC didn't confess)?

The conversation in the comic is open to interpretation, but it looks to me like Sunset was able to convince Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash of her innocence but failed to convince the other three.

And what happens then? What happens when the guilt of Sunset Shimmer is a split decision? What if things don't die down or escalate but instead drag on into the new year without a clear end in sight? What does Scootaloo do when Rainbow Dash is the one being bullied in the halls?

So many stories put their major point of divergence at the exact same place: Things might differ before that point, but they don't go off the comic's rails until Sunset goes to Sugarcube Corner / The Sweet Shoppe in a last attempt to get the girls to listen to her, and it utterly fails.

This pushes things back just a page and a half, but that little bit of difference will make everything change.

(Main Seven tag is because I can't tag six characters. There is no plan to include Sci-Twi at this time)

Chapters (1)
T

[Long overdue update below]

Octavia Melody and Vinyl Scratch have been dating Sunset Shimmer for a while now. While they've known from the start that Sunset happens to be a unicorn from another world, they're finally going to get the chance to see that (and, hopefully, truly understand it) when Sunset takes them to Equestria over vacation.


All that follows is meta stuff that can safely be ignored unless you happen to be interested in it.

This was originally conceived as an entry for Oroboro's Sunset Shipping Contest: Journeys. I knew that I wouldn't finish it on time, but pretending that I was totally going to win if I entered --and therefore absolutely needed to finish before the deadline-- did allow me to actually write something in spite of my depression. (Sometimes silly solutions can achieve limited success.)

Much of what I produced wasn't particularly good, the prologue being the exception (at least I think it's pretty good), so I took it down for desperately needed revision. I thought that I had enough momentum to finish the revision before my depression fully reasserted itself.

That was over seven months ago, not even one of the chapters in question has been revised. So, obviously, that didn't work out the way I had hoped or expected.

This isn't on hiatus, but it is on "the author's clinical depression fuels her writer's block" which may be worse.

Chapters (1)
T

Unable to convince her former friends she isn't Anon-a-Miss, and out of contact with Princess Twilight, Sunset gives up on everything and tries to end it all. Instead a new chapter in her life begins when she's helped by total strangers, two of whom have familiar names and faces.

As she recovers from surviving her suicide attempt, she rebuilds her life in a new home and at a new school, though lingering forces from her past refuse to allow her a fresh start.

[Do note that the self-harm isn't shown directly, and is limited to the prologue. The story is about recovering.]


Meta notes, abridged version:

Moon-Lite gave me permission to do my own version of Fall of Harmony / Like the Phoenix / Flaming Sun. This is that story.

I asked for permission to do a version because Moon-Lite is not going to do a straight-remake and the old versions are gone, thus leaving no version whatsoever on Fimfiction. I want there to be at least one version on Fimfiction.

Moon-Lite's own new story, which he described as the straight-remake being reworked --kinda-- in a very abstract way, is Phoenix.

For the longer version of the meta stuff I'll make a blog post at some point and put a link to it here when I do.

Chapters (1)
E

Sunset Shimmer's entire world collapsed overnight. It did it without her even noticing. Upon finding out she has no idea why, and neither she nor Princess Twilight can figure out how it's even possible.

All she knows is that when she met her friends the day after, they weren't her friends. When she meets other students they still hate and fear her. When she tries to remind people that she's changed, they don't remember any of it, but they do remember all of the bad things with crystal clear quality.

Everything she regrets --from being a bully, to being a monster, to yelling at Twilight during the Friendship Games-- remains. Everything she's proud of is gone. With the entire world convinced the truth is a lie, no friends amoung humans, and time running out, Sunset races to understand, and hopefully fix, whatever has happened.


Meta Notes:

When A Friendship to Remember came out I remember being extremely underwhelmed. This is my attempt at taking the basic story and making it whelming.

Well, most of it. You see, most of the book (Chapters 3 to 23 of 23) is the official prose version of Forgotten Friendship, and that is the story here. I feel like the story, at its core, has some real potential, but it did not live up to that potential.

This is a straight up retelling, that means that while it is AU it isn't divergent. More . . . parallel. It doesn't spin off in a different direction, it just tells the same core story with different execution and details.

Chapters (1)
T

Sunset and her friends had no idea that Anon-a-Miss was a plot to break them up. They had no idea that it was targeting Sunset. When Apple Bloom was outed as Anon-a-Miss the account had leaked all of one secret, and everyone believed it was simply a younger sister having fun at her older sister's expense.

They certainly had no idea Apple Bloom would respond to Anon-a-Miss' failure by resorting to a Plan B that had all the subtlety of a Plinian eruption and all the precision of a hurricane.

What they do know is that in one night the veil of secrecy around magic at CHS was obliterated when a video of Sunset Shimmer, with full demonic transformation, doing physically impossible things exploded across the internet.

Now they have to prepare for the fallout, even though they have no idea what form that will take.


[Everything that follows is real world stuff about where the story comes from.]
[Definitely not required reading.]

When you become unexpectedly popular for writing a story in a certain genre, you end up being exposed to more and more of what's in that genre, and your imagination runs away with ideas you encounter as a result, and suddenly what was meant to be a topic you touched for one or two stories at most instead becomes a mainstay of your corpus.

I was most definitely not looking for a new Anon-a-Miss fic. I've got two that have already been released and two in the oven, which makes four that I need to finish. I had no particular desire to start number five.

Then I encountered this idea. The idea in short:

Anon-a-Miss falls apart almost immediately with almost no damage done, which you would think is like dodging a bullet given how the genre tends to go, but because the underlying cause isn't dealt with it doesn't avoid the problem at all. It amplifies it by having Apple Bloom resort to releasing the one bombshell secret that was originally so far off the table it wasn't even considered.


Here's why it interested me enough to start up a new story:

The idea of the magic at CHS being exposed to the world presents seemingly infinite possibilities in itself, but there's also the fact that Anon-a-Miss occurs at a key juncture in the timeline. The human Twilight Sparkle is already on the case. If nothing major changes then you get The Friendship Games but changes could result in things that range from full blown apocalypse to her equipment never malfunctioning in the first place.


Credit must be given:

Uria came up with the idea at five AM with the help of fatigue and Pringles. Even now, as we speak I type this, a shadowy group of individuals are operating in a loose coalition in an attempt to bring that idea, kicking and screaming as it may be, into some form of reality and then unleash it upon the world.

This story is emphatically not the fruit of that particular labor. This is just me writing my version. That is, in part, why this isn't called "Your Past Is Here To Stay"; I wanted that title to be reserved for the official version created by the collaborating cabal.

None the less, this is inspired by Uria's idea, the first chapter extremely so, and credit must be given. Also, given my ties to the currently undisclosed syndicate working on the official realization of Uria's idea, there will probably be a fair amount of cross pollination between this story and the eventual "Your Past Is Here To Stay".

Chapters (2)
T

Sunset doesn't know what she expected from the snap decision to go back to the town where she was born. It certainly wasn't this.

People left and right knowing her name.

Somebody pretending to be somebody pretending to be her.

The apparent existence of a world of magic and unicorns.

And in the middle of everything, a girl who looks like her, sounds like her, and has stirred up a whole mess of trouble and drama just waiting for anyone who happens to be named "Sunset Shimmer".


This is an Anon-a-Miss story, which means that it takes the 2014 comic My Little Pony: Equestria Girls Holiday Special as it's jumping off point. As is generally the case, if I write this properly it should be self-contained and thus completely accessible to people who have never read laid eyes on the comic.

The idea behind this story is that the point of divergence from the comic is human-Sunset's arrival, and that is the whole of what has changed from the original premise. As a result you won't see many of the the things that have become common in the genre as a result of the influence of Dainn's version (the sirens showing up, things escalating severely, Gilda, so forth.)

Chapters (2)
T

A life spent seeking power, in which she viewed others as only tools or obstacles, left Sunset Shimmer a smoking wreck in the bottom of a crater.

Now she has to figure out where to go from there.


This is a "filling in the gaps" story. It takes the Equestria Girls movies as canon then tells a story without the the discontinuities caused by the gaps between movies or, sometimes, between scenes.

This picks up where Equestria Girls left off and will follow Sunset's life at least as far as the ending of Rainbow Rocks. The early focus will be on how she went sobbing and alone at the end of Equestria Girls to reasonably well adjusted at the beginning of Rainbow Rocks. After that it will follow the plot of Rainbow Rocks to the point where she was no longer a pariah.

Chapters (2)
T

A story, written in first person, about a pony who works in Canterlot castle learning about a mare who is kept behind a mysterious quadruple locked door.

In some ways this is a response fic. It is definitely a fast fic. It was written in two quick spurts yesterday and given a final pass this morning. Take that as a warning, if you like.

I took something said in a discussion about Knowledge of the Holy (by Cynewulf) and used it as a prompt. Here's that something:

Imagine you were told there was locked room in the building you work in. No one ever goes in and no one ever comes out. They tell you a woman lives in there. She's been in there as long as anyone can remember. Why is she there? For how long? Who is she? One thing they know is she can kill people just by willing it. Doesn't need a weapon. Doesn't need to even touch you. She just has to want it, or maybe not even that, and bip, you're dead, like she flipped off your light switch. Now someone tells you you have to go in there and talk to her.

(The spoiler is for Knowledge of the Holy, I don't think knowing in advance should be a problem for this fic.)

That's not actually a writing prompt, but it says, "Imagine." So I did imagine, and this is the result.

Like Knowledge of the Holy it's written in first person. Like Knowledge of the Holy the woman is a mare and the workplace is Celestia's castle. It is not, however, an alternate version of Knowledge of the Holy. It's entirely original, simply using the "imagine" statement as a prompt.

Note on the tags: there isn't a "sad but hopeful" tag, but that's what I was shooting for.

Chapters (1)
T

This story is a sequel to Anon-a-Miss


So much has happened, and most people are still focused on the debacle. They aren't asking "What now?" or "What next?" but it's not mistakes, tragedies, and trauma that define people, it's what comes after them.

Before winter break, three little sisters framed Sunset Shimmer for spreading everyone's secrets across the internet under the name Anon-a-Miss. Sunset didn't figure out who was behind the account in time. The sirens were incorrectly suspected. Rainbow Dash felt a betrayer went unpunished. Gilda served up misdirected vengeance and called it justice.

When Sunset was left to die, two people she thought wanted nothing to do with her, Snips and Snails, were the ones to help her. Then the truth came out, punishment was doled out, and injuries slowly healed.

That's all come and gone.

Winter break will soon be over and the only certainty is that whatever comes next will be nothing like it would have been if the Anon-a-Miss incident hadn't taken place.


At the end of Dainn's version of the Anon-a-Miss story, adapted from the execrable Equestria Girls Holiday Special, Dainn gave permission anyone who wanted to do "spin-offs, alternate endings, or whatever" provided credit was given.

This takes as canon Dainn's story all the way through the last chapter proper but not the epilogue. I wanted to include the epilogue but a detail I'd forgotten means that it doesn't fit my timeline, so I'm going to have to rewrite it to fit with my story. It'll flow better this way anyway.

It should be possible to read this on its own, but you're a Hell of a lot less likely to feel like you've jumped in the deep end before learning how to swim if you go and read all 13 regular chapters of Dainn's story, and if you're doing that you might as well read Dainn's epilogue chapter as well even though it's not canon for this. So, you know, go and read that story.

Chapters (2)