Thread 42534727

Come one and all to the meta-writefag and help raise the quality of MLP fanfiction! Featuring: Signed books!

ITT: That dead fic you still miss, making no progress, no Fimmy updates, demographics, Is reading slow burn SoL mlp fanfic gay?, what's the deal with Harmony?, using long titles as compensation, tagging system, accidental nacional socialism, referencing early episodes for that old fanfom vibe, post-S9 Twilestia, great aunt Princesses, pegasi piss in the sky, /fimfic/ in Equestria, who would've thought a story named Biblical Monsters would be subject to much debate and interpretation, in-person mating, crying over spoiled milk, erroneusly thinking blank lines look cool, and Sunset Shimmer banishes chat to the moon.

>/fimfic/ Secret Book Club
The one hundred and twentieth book is Lost and Found:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/38138/lost-and-found
If (You) want to join in the discussion, read to the end of Chapter 22 by September 7th.
Past bookclubs: https://ponepaste.org/11255

>Recommended stories:
Tired of authors crossing over a dozen IPs? Fed up with downer shipping? Well, we've compiled the best of the worst in order to bring you our absolute average!
New Starter Kit - http://mlpficreviews.org.uk/starter/
Old Starter Kit - http://i.imgur.com/vuTA7EN.png

>Common fic abbreviations used by the thread:
https://ponepaste.org/7317

>A list of reviews made by the Anons in this thread:
http://www.mlpficreviews.org.uk
Use the commands ">review " and ">discuss " to add reviews to a story.
Userscript for extra features: https://ponepaste.org/8619

>An in-depth writing guide for beginners:
https://eznguide.neocities.org/

>Additional material for authors:
Rhorse's Horse Behavioral Notes - https://ponepaste.org/932
Politics and the English Language - https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/
Vhatug's tips for anatomically correct clop - https://poneb.in/g4VpEg4f
Setting a story in motion - https://youtu.be/ufO8LbwTdu0
Purdue Online Writing resources: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/index.html and https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/creative_writing/writers/index.html

>Can you pre-read my story?
Post it on Google Docs or HackMD with comments enabled and give us a link.

>Various reviews and riffs:
Fillyanon's Bookshelf - https://ponepaste.org/5555
Notkickass222urmom's Reviews - https://pastebin.com/u/notkickass222urmom
IHeartShinzakura's Reviews - https://ponepaste.org/user/IHeartShinzakura
Appleanon reads fics - https://poneb.in/wmGX7FPm
Deluxe Big Master Review List - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z9Bz7UnEbxo-svlXa2tV49PJkP-yFuR7pRXiBUn-IeU
A Guide to Rational Fics - https://files.catbox.moe/3jzrfm.png
The Royal Canterlot Library's Top 16 Fanfics - https://royalcanterlotlibrary.net/top16/

Previous Thread: >>42506792

Stupid five minute delay...

2nd for best 2uo!
Enjoy this conveniently packaged Tuna: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/224306/i-watch-the-moon

>>42534748
Third for fucking exhaustion. Jessi, and the other guy, we may need to meet up tomorrow after I get good sleep. I nearly signed my name in the Hold Your Horsewords book for the charity auction with two Zs, kek.

>>42534829
I need to lurk this thread more, I forgot HYH was finished. Are there any copies left?

I've had coffee now. Get the fuck over here already, Jessi. We're at the vendor hall.

>>42534886
No.

>>42534886
You can order it online at least

>>42535043
I'm at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the second floor

Also get in the fucking marefair thread so we don't shit this thread up

Your writing FUCKING SUCKS DONKEY BALLS.

>How dare you I wrote an amazing Fallout AU drama!! and it was 100% pony!
>Meanwhile that asshat writing Anon in Equestria keeps hogging the front page!!

Precisely why you can't write worth a shit. You can't write a feelsie comedy adventure with heavy world building and whimsy folktale characters if your life was on the line.

If I put you right now to take any episode from any season and write it better you'll suck complete donkey balls at it so shut your fucking trap about Anon In Equestria. Go ahead try and make Meghan In Equestria , watch as you can't write a normal sane in the head female protagonist self insert for little girls to save your ugly face.

Well go ahead *Abbot & Costello smack smack smack* go ahead, go ahead *smack* show me.
Write a NORMAL STORY THAT COULD AIR ON TELEVISION FOR CHILDREN and not your retarded 2deep4you meta drama without substance.

I like fics where fillies don't get murdered.

>>42535210
Me too.
This is a good fic where a filly does not get murdered.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/259898/a-guide-to-magic

>>42535106
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/500819/

I've had chapter 24 of A Dream of Dawn (the 2012fic where NMM wins but is then overthrown by Discord) bookmarked for months now, but I haven't been in the mood to get back to it. It wasn't bad or anything, just wasn't clicking with me—felt a bit slow paced.

I was just at the point where Discord and Twilight set off to find Celestia. Are there any really standout moments after that or should I just drop it if I haven't vibed with it that much so far? I feel tempted to try and push through anyway since I'm well past the halfway point.

>>42535210
I seem to like fics where they do. Not sure why.

>>42534748
Imagine Luna boring a hole into her skull on the tip of that crescent moonafter waking up from a bad dream and jumping up in fright.

>>42535620
Imagine Luna boring a hole into Twilight's skull as an archaic means of relieving intracranial pressure.

>>42535800
>luna gets a bad infection in her hoof and desides to cut it off
>celestia vehemently objects
>”what is the cause of thine concern dear sister? It will grow back will it not?”
>celestia sighs internally and signals for a servant to bring some tea as she prepares herself for another explanation about how equestria has changed in the past 1000 years.

>try to go into fimfiction
>404
Anyone else???

>>42536038
Works right now

>>42536229
It's not working properly for me.

>>42536354
It had to load Cloudfare for me, but it's working normally.

>>42534748
Imagine Luna and Twilight waking up in their bed in the late evening, after a long night of studying dream theory and a restful sleep.
The only thing for them to do is breathe at each other's snoots and enjoy themselves.

This is because Twilight has a plan to extend the limits of Luna's dreamwalking by having her come even in her daydreams. It hasn't worked yet, but there's no hurry.

>The ponyville chapters
holy kino...

Have you ever read a crossover that actually felt like it had a non-fanservice reason to be a crossover, like the main characters of each series having arcs that complimented each other or the narrative themes of each series being similar?

Alternatively, what is the most hilariously dogshit crossover you've ever read? I remember reading "jeff the killer vs cupcakes" (but the title had a typo) on crappypasta (the now-dead official reject bin for creepypasta.com, it had so much funny shit before some rich asshole bought it) around the tail end of creepypastas actually being relevant. It was as bad as you'd assume, just like everything else on that site, and I just wish I could read it again. There are numerous other fics with the same premise, but none of them are as spectacularly bad as the one I remember.

fimfic is 404ing again. I am sad.

It is over...

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/518190/the-princess-and-the-kaiser

Recently started reading this. It is really good, if not a bit daunting to start. Would recommend.

>>42538469
>unfinished
Fool me twice, shame on you. But fool me three times, shame on me. Not falling for that

>>42538510
It was updated recently, so it's being worked on.

Since several of the regular posters (and much of the board) are at the at the Galacon or Marecon, we could postpone the second week of the bookclub.
I don't like proposing that and ruining our perfect record, but that probably beats a week with no discussion.

>>42538855
I'll be ready but i guess I don't mind either way. I just finished the extremely kino ponyville chapters and stopped yesterday to let the feeling linger but I can just not read the rest until whenever we wanna club

>>42538855
It doesn't matter to me either way, although I also haven't finished last week's reading yet.

>>42538233
>Have you ever read a crossover that actually felt like it had a non-fanservice reason to be a crossover, like the main characters of each series having arcs that complimented each other or the narrative themes of each series being similar?
I haven't seen it yet but Warframe 1999 and FiM fit too well, considering both are about a group of colorful themed misfits that have to come together to learn love and friendship because that's the only thing that hurts a corruptive chaos god. Not sure how the eldritch hivemind version of the Backstreet Boys gets incorporated, but one thing at a time.

How's that writing going, guys?

No writing, only marefair

>>42540491
Productive and hitting the desired levels of saccharine and schmaltz.

>>42538233
I've never seen a crossover that was able to justify its existence. Thematically, One Piece's whole "power of friendship" thing and Luffy uniting a bunch of lonely orphaned outcasts fits really well with MLP but the settings are oil and water and would be impossible to blend well, which is the core problem of all crossovers. MLP just has a very isolated setting that doesn't mix well with others.

>>42538469
>updated every few days for a year-and-a-half
>then a two month gap
>then a year-and-a-half gap
Yikes. That's a huge red flag for a longfic.

>>42540491
Finally got the anthology collab entry done. Reminder the final deadline's Thursday (unless we want to push it back to JFK's assassination).

>>42540491
Redoing some outlined parts to make the story flow better. Starting to wonder how much shit I'll catch for making a pony in her mid twenties pork an immortal time god.

I saw Jinxed going to the elevator and asked him how he was doing. He asked me if I were gay. I asked him if he were serious, and he confirmed that he was, because he already knew that I'm a fucking weirdo. I told him no, and he bemoaned that he wasn't going to be able to drain his balls then.

It was gross.

>>42541408
Bisexual, actually.
Also, unprofessional of you to post about my drunken rambling.

>>42541408
/fimfic/, everyone.

>>42541408
That's just the con experience. But blogging about it itt is gay enough that you might want to reconsider your answer.

>>42528422
>>42528496
>>42528854
Bookshelves don't solve this problem. You can't grep a bookshelf.

>>42528854
Show the document.

>>42541408
Based Jinxed

>>42541408
That kind of interaction is what you get for being a massive degenerate and also actually interacting with other horse fuckers irl. I’d rather go for a walk in south Chicago than meet you freaks.

>>42542967
I'm glad I can't put a face to anyone here lol

Where were you when this mystery meat mexican bastard set the precedence for how shitty youtube reviews can get?
Why didn't you contact him and tell him you can analyze storytelling a million times better than him?

>>42542705
Old Homestuck general tier OP energy.

>>42543479
based

The printed and signed anthology sold at auction for $550. I wasn't expecting it to go for $100.

>>42543629
I guess a word is worth a million dollars. Or something.

>>42543629
Coincidentally, the Alicorn Adventure series (Celestia Code, Luna Cypher, &c) went right after it for only $350. That means all of (You) who contributed are better writers and better people than iisaw. Fuck phoneposting by the way.

>>42543197
I miss Byter and BronyCurious.

>>42543651
Someone just really wanted that pregnant horse porn.

>>42543629
We're hopefully getting one to Galacon next year.

>>42543651
I think what that actually means it that iisaw is better than any five of you put together, on average, but it probably matters which five you put together. And that 6 are better than him. Probably.

>>42543651
iisaw should have pushed his lesbian fetishism on the cover too then.

>>42543707
If I still lived near Everfree Northwest and Ciderfest i'd have helped sign it, but

>>42517226
>>42539519
I finally finished last week's reading, and definitely continued enjoying the story. The Malices were pretty good as a sort of failed and discarded Starswirl project. Otherwise, it really seemed like they should've got more useful resources out of that mansion than just a pair of blankets and pillowcases.

The scene with the princesses and Twilight was great, it definitely made up for Dashes dumb blue horseness and more. If it weren't for the Dash scene, I would've said that I liked the Found chapters more than the Lost chapters, despite how few of them there were.

The main thing to add is that between the princesses scene in Canterlot and AJ&FS's scenes after the Malices, the dialogue is really good. It might just be a result of watching some Deus Ex MD playthroughs, but it stood out to me how none of the characters actually said every line in the conversation in both of those scenes. There's a foreground dialogue and a background dialogue going on and the story blends the unsaid words into the tone, nonverbal cues and narrated thoughts really well.

Definitely looking forward to the next scene with Twilight and the princesses.

>>42543629
Hmm. After accounting for the number of pages I contributed, I still feel responsible for an actual, real, and meaningful amount of money going to charity. That's probably the best thing my writing has ever accomplished.

>>42544437
What if your writing made someone cum?

>>42544465
I can imagine someone cumming to a few of the scenes I've written. But contributing to charity still feels more meaningful.

>>42544465
That'd undo all the charity work.

>>42541334
Nobody cares if they're both adults. Otherwise all those Celestia romance fics wouldn't go down right.

>>42545370
I wouldn't call Discord an adult.

>>42545497
Oh people bitch about Fluttercord having an age gap all the time

Any fics out there that approach Grogar as a Morgoth like figure?

>>42541408
Every time I wonder if I missed something by not going to a con, someone posts something like this to remind me that I have not.

>>42541408
What I don't understand about this story is why it matters whether you're gay or not. It's not like you could stop him from whipping it out in the elevator and cumming all over you.

I wish Sombra was explored more in fics. Do you think he enslaved absolutely everybody or did he leave a section of society free under the assumption they'll serve him willingly out of fear and pragmatism. And what does the rest of the Crystal Empire look like? It can't just be one city.

>>42546114
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/116325/the-return-of-tambelon might be the one you're looking for. I don't remember much of what Grogar does to draw similiarties to Melkor but there isn't a lot of fics about him in the first place anyway.

>>42546144
You missed out. That was a few minutes from over three days. Mare Fair was really fun.

>>42545667
>people
only late zoomoids and alphas, fluttercord has been a thing since S3 and I've never heard of this happening which means it's almost certainly confined to the nu-fandom tiktok/twitter/similar areas populated by underages

>>42545667
>She's 30 years old you sick fuck!

>>42546181
Well, the second half of Anemoia is right over there....

>>42546241
With all the stories that so desperately want a Super Evil Big Bad Guy that even the elements can't defeat you'd think you'd see him in more stuff.

>>42548120
Meh, anemoia is great but IMO its use of Sombra makes for a pretty weird AU. He's better off as an OC of sorts.

>>42548256
>He's better off as an OC of sorts.
Sombra doesn't have an actual personality, at most he's got Things He Did

>>42548256
Not only is Sombra right in character in Anemoia, it expands on the early Crystal empire in exactly the way >>42546181 wants. It would be absurd to substitute Sombra for an OC in that story. It was clearly designed around him.

>>42548144
He does show up in quite a lot of stories, not just because he's canon, but also because he's a reusable villain from G1.

>>42548286
But Anemoia makes the Crystal Empire into a completely and utterly AU direction, which is completely fine but he didn't even Do Those Things from the show because the entire context is completely different. You can't even say "the history from 1000 years ago that we see in the show is distorted" because everything is so different, even in the modern day when Twilight rediscovers the ruins of the empire it has nothing to do with how it went in the show, and there's zero tie-in to how the S3 episodes went.
Which again is completely fine but it just means Sombra from anemoia is basically completely disconnected from Sombra in FiM.

>>42548297
The Zircon Empire or whatever it's called (it's been a little while since I've read it) is, again, so utterly different from the Crystal Empire that if I was that anon I wouldn't really say this answered my question.

>>42548328
It's not such a far AU. The main difference is the tech level. They have computers with screens, basically.
I find that pretty easy to ignore. TCE has its crystal transformation spell to complement Equestria's many non-crystal transformation things, Equestria has AI (Luna makes the Tantabus), necromancy (A Christmas Carol), tangible soulstuff (MMC, Twilight's Kingdom if you want), and various magically powered machines with incredible capabilities. Those are most of the other main tech concepts in the fic.
Besides that, Sombra does all the things that he does. There aren't many of those in canon, so it's hardly difficult for Anemoia to slot them in. I guess the other difference is Anemoia is T and the show is E. There is that on-screen cruelty level, but someone wanting to read about Sombra obviously wants that, and the pre-unification tribes were pretty mean in HWE.

>>42548461
The main difference is the fucking zircon engine(s) with the city functioning literally like a frostpunk colony rather than anything resembling the empire we know. The second main difference is literally everything about the crystal ponies, the setting, the city itself, etc., such as the fact that absolutely nothing got "banished for 1000 years" but the ponies just went into hiding and then when an entire expedition from Equestria arrived they emerged back out to make contact. Does this have anything in common with "sombra cast a spell to disappear the empire for 1000 years, then one day it re-appeared, celestia knew exactly what it was and sent Twilight on a mission to defeat sombra"? Other than the extremely, incredibly broad strokes of "Twilight discovers the ancient crystal empire and meets the crystal ponies, also sombra was there 1000 years ago", I don't see anything.

>>42548536
The zircon engine and frostpunk setting is really not different from canon, I don't know why you're saying they are. Are you getting hung up on the post-revolution state in the first half of the fic that was particularly survival-oriented? Just because Anemoia isn't temporally set during the peak of the Zircon dynasty doesn't mean all of the background lore is incompatible with the canonical crystal empire. Its worldbuilding is pretty compatible with canon.

The fic offscreens the disappearance of the city. Sombra still did whatever he did to disappear it. The crystal ponies wake up from their mind controlled stupor, etc. If I had to guess, you're headcanoning stuff like "they're golems now, they can't reproduce" but the fic doesn't say that.

And no, the epilogue doesn't take place during the S3 premier. The earliest it could take place is probably S4, but Twilight's confidence suggests a post-S7 fic.

>>42548657
>The zircon engine and frostpunk setting is really not different from canon
Anon did we watch the same show?

>>42548779
You do realise you're talking with the Lunafag, right?

>>42548788
The Lunaflag*

>>42548779
Anyway, yeah. The Crystal Empire, weather-uncontrolled, is quite similar to what is described in the fic.

Well, Mare Fair's over, so it's back to the commissions for me. What of you?

>>42549470
Finishing my entry for the anthology. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'd almost forgotten what fun was.

>>42549470
Wishing there were more hours in the day so I could have time to write and play videogames with my friends.

>>42549617
Write while watching let's plays and pretend you have friends.

>>42549642
I can't write and watch something at the same time. What do you think I am, normal?

>>42549561
Right, I'd completely forgotten about that.