Subject: Re: MLP legendary badfic (+Farewell)
Author:
Posted on: 2014-10-13 14:10:00 UTC
You shall forever be remembered, O great Anonymouse. Depart with the knowledge that we shall always hope that you will be succesful in your endeavors against the problems that besiege you. Farewell, Anonymouse. As a farewell gift, what do you wish for? Nothing is to precious to mourn your passing with. *Removes hat in respect*
After a bit of inspection, MLP's legendary badfic seem to not achieve legendary status by how bad they are, or how notorious they are. Instead of filth or notoriety, legendary badfic from the ponyverse are measured by fame.
The three biggest candidates for such legendary badfic are Cupcakes (of course), Rainbow Factory, and Sweet Apple Massacre, although the latter is more a classic "notorious" legendary badfic than a "famous" one.
Cupcakes is known by pretty much every brony, nor/mlp/erson, /pone/friend, pretty much any pony fan, so much that its central replacement!Sue has gotten its own name outside the fic ("Pinkamena"), is referenced almost constantly, has gotten cameos and central/side character status in everything from fanfics to videos to comics to fan songs, and even has nor/mlp/eople and /pone/friends calling her thier waifu. Despite its being killed by the PPC, I think it's reaching canon break status, as Pinkie's depressed state in "Party of One" (which aired about the same time Cupcakes was released) has been co-opted by Cupcakes fans as Pinkamena in canon, with most Pinkamena fanart using depressed!Pinkie's straight hair.
With Rainbow Factory, it's easier to see why it got famous. Rainbow Factory, a songfic noteable for having an author-insert bit character who is killed in the fic, was based on a song of the same name (that is just as grimdark and uncanon) by WoodenToaster that pretty much exploded in popularity, and piggybacked off the song's success when WoodenToaster himself put a link to the fic in the song's Youtube description. Since then, WoodenToaster has teamed up with H8Seed to make a sequel to the song ("Awoken") that has become just as popular (and is just as grimdark and uncanon), and a third artist, SylphStorm, has made a song inspired by "Rainbow Factory" (both song AND fanfic) AND "Awoken", called "Pegasus Device". The reason I mention "Pegasus Device" is because it is auditory gold, and explicitly references the fic, which is a prime example of fanart that C[EXPUNGED]n and other non-mlp legendary badfics (well, except maybe Half Life: Full Life Consequences, but that's more parodic than fanart) still haven't claimed to themselves. Luckily, unlike Cupcakes, it is not an impending canon break scenario, but it does have its fair share of pretty much every kind of fanart.
With that said, I must now leave. I apoligize, but I have abandoned plans to create a PPC spinoff at the moment, as I have other, more pressing problems to tackle both elsewhere on the Internet and in real life. However, I will be monitoring this, my last thread, for a while, and sometimes may pop in and create a thread.
This is Anonymouse, signing out.
You shall forever be remembered, O great Anonymouse. Depart with the knowledge that we shall always hope that you will be succesful in your endeavors against the problems that besiege you. Farewell, Anonymouse. As a farewell gift, what do you wish for? Nothing is to precious to mourn your passing with. *Removes hat in respect*
That's...fairly disturbing information, to be honest. We need to reboot the Royal Fanfiction Academy of Equestria pretty soon, I'm thinking, if badfic can have that kind of impact even after the PPC kills it.
Good luck with those problems you mentioned. I hope I see you again someday, cause you seem pretty interesting. *hugs* *gives brownies*
Thanks for the brownies, and if the Royal Fanfiction Academy is rebooted, I'd focus on FIMFiction.net, 4chan's /mlp/, and 8chan's /pone/.
The set of fanfic that has its own fanfic, or other fanart (or fansongs, in this case) has to be pretty small. Obviously there's the PPC and OFUM - and a lot of the other members of the broader Canon Protection Initiative - but we're weird. People write parodies of 'My Immortal' all the time, but that's different - it's not serious fanfic, it's, well, parody.
There's always Girls Next Door, the fancomic of Roommates... the theme here seems definitely to be 'megacrossovers'.
But as far as I'm aware, your MLP examples don't fit that theme (though I suppose 'Fallout: Equestria' comes close - it definitely has its own fandom, whether you call it good or bad). You're right - they're definitely different to the classic style of badfic.
I wonder if this might be down to the general structure of the fandoms in question? LotR fandom, for instance, has always been (well, since the movies) primarily teenaged girls who have a crush on one of the characters. ;) The writer of 'Clbr__n' wasn't one of those - and that's not the sort of fic they tend to write - and so it hasn't gone 'mainstream'.
MLP, from my understanding, has an older fanbase, and fans are typically male. I dunno... it seems like there's a key difference in there somewhere, but I don't know enough to spot it. Something to do with what brings people to like MLP, in contrast to something like Harry Potter? Perhaps either the nature of the show or the makeup of the fandom makes them more inclined to focus on dark-themed stuff (even if hideously overdone), whereas other hosts of LBs - LotR, HP, Redwall - have enough dark themes of their own that uber!dark!gruesome fanfics are just over the top and generally ignored.
Honestly, I'm just rambling here.
hS
The MLP fandom is notorious for this. The crowning pinnacle of MLP legendary goodfic is Fallout:Equestria, and it's popular enough to trump Cupcakes, gaining tons of fanart, tons more of spinoff fanfics, and even an entire Fallout:Equestria general on /mlp/ that was one of the first generals to make the jump to /pone/, beating out both Anon in Equestria and Flutterrape, mentioned in my other reply to this comment. (For the record, there may be occasional Pinkamena threads, but never a Cupcakes general, and often, half the thread or more refers to the actually-canon depressed!Pinkie as Pinkamena instead of Cupcakes!Pinkie.)
The problem here is that there's not much difference in theme between Fallout:Equestria and the legendary badfics Rainbow Factory and Cupcakes. In the two legendary badfics, it's a straight injection of grimdark into one part of MLP, while in Fallout:Equestria, the entire world is fused with the very, very grimdark Fallout universe. The difference between FO:E and the two legendary badfics is the execution- it's set a long time into the future, almost all of the canons are either dead and depicted as pretty much in character plus a few years, justified by maturity in the case of Spike, or justified by something going wrong in thier mind, like Trixie. (At least until the point I've read.) The ENTIRETY of the rest of the world is either Fallout canon modified to fit Equestria's world- and pretty well, I might add- and OCs. TONS AND TONS of OCs, allowing the author to create her own characters. The good thing there is that there are no sues.
In contrast, the legendary badfics focus on the actual characters, and are exexuted badly. However, Sgt Sprinkles and Aurora Dawn got the same kind of fans that FO:E did because they kept the same theme, except not hiding behind Fallout.
So yeah, they aren't teen girls with crushes on the characters, they're teen-to-young-adult guys with crushes on the characters (seriously, they call them "waifus" and "horsebandos" on /mlp/ and /pone/) and a taste for grimdark.
Well, I do believe that that's the difference. Many MLP fans do actually like grimdark things- in fact, reading Cupcakes, Rainbow Factory, and other MLP grimdark fanfiction actually brought me into the fandom.
In addition, the pony fandom started in 4chan, where the fandom was and still is tolerant (ha ha) of such fanfic to the point of it being written there as greentext on a daily basis. The fact that Cupcakes's author is unknown and had to be claimed by Sgt. Sprinkles, and had horrible grammar, points to its being created originally in a comment box for /co/'s MLP general, for a pony thread on /b/, or, later, for /mlp/.
Pattycakes (brought up elsewhere in this thread) probably has a similar genesis, as even now on both /mlp/ and /pone/ there's a "diaper general" for diaper/age regression fetishists, where ponies of various ages are posted wearing diapers and other baby gear in various states of use in various circumstances. In fact, a readthrough of it tells me it wouldn't be out of place posted in that general.
Rainbow Factory, Cheerilee's Garden, and a few other grimdark fics tell me that the early-in-the-genesis-of-the-fandom Cupcakes set a theme for other grimdark fics to follow, and each one existing is bringing fans of such grimdark tales that would love for it to be canon, explaining Cupcakes as a canon hazard.
However, a greater hazard to canon is /pone/ and /mlp/. While they are sticklers for SPaG- you learn to be when the only true content someone can make for a year or two is greentext or CYOA- nobody blinks an eye if a greentext takes a pony out of character, and they have no qualms about self inserts somehow appearing in Equestria. The pinnacle of both is "Flutterrape"- a general consisting of greentext where Fluttershy is thrown so out of character that the general has to define what the Flutterrape Fluttershy is supposed to do in the OP- and "Anon in Equestria"- a general about Anonymous, which is a self insert sue designed so that anyone reading the fic can simply say it's themselves, landing in Equestria via various means, including magic portals, suicide (yes), and magic teleportation spells gone wrong. Many greentexts don't die anymore when the thread dies either- they are capped (screenshot) or copied into Pastebin first.
And we wonder why MLP is in so much canon danger.
But I can understand how Real Life can get in the way sometimes. Good luck in your other endeavors, and I hope to see you return!
But going back to the main point of your post, I've heard that Rainbow Factory was based off a song, but for some reason, I haven't been able to find the song when I actually tried looking for it quite a while ago. Am I just looking in the wrong places, or is it more obscure than we've been led to believe?
I'm not sure how you couldn't find the song, WoodenToaster/Glaze is a pretty big artist. He's also known for Avast Fluttershy's Ass- a remix of Avast your Ass by Kitsune2)- and Beyond her Garden- which pretty much takes the record for the most remixed/covered song I've ever seen.
You were looking in Youtube, right?
All I knew at the time was that "Rainbow Factory" was based off a song, not that it was a brony who wrote it. I looked for the song the way I look for any song when I know the lyrics but not the title: I looked up the lyrics in Google. IIRC, I ended up finding links to the fic and to riffs of it, but not to the song.
Here it is! Despite its totally sinister lyrics, it's actually pretty catchy.
Yeah, the lyrics are pretty "dark"--and I use quotes because it's pretty tame overall--but the Rainbow Factory fic takes the darkness up a whole 'nother level! One cannot say that the song directly led to the fic; some imagination definitely needed to be added.
Either way, thanks for the link.
You're right, both Rainbow Factory and Awoken (the Woodentoaster ones, Awoken being a collaboration with H8Seed) leave a lot to the imagination as to what actually happens in the factory, evidenced by the various music videos. Both of the most popular versions involve sucking the color out of adult ponies, and I've seen a third (possibly for a remix) showing the grinding up of dead bodies that have to be pulled out of coffins. However, it does go "In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through..."
Sorry to see you go, but if real life is giving you problems, then focus on those first. If you want to return to the PPC someday (and I hope you do), then I'll be waiting here on the Board.
Until then, best of luck with your future endeavors! :)
Yeah, I may return to the board someday. In the meantime I may pop in unannouced and comment on something, watch for the name "Anonymouse"...
I hope your other problems and duties turn out well! Have fun!
-Aila
I sure hope I will. You take care as well.
And this is why I'm determined to enjoy my last year as a kid.
*offers cake and hugs* You take care, okay? :')
Will do. Thanks for the cake :D
I may not have been here for a long time either and may not know you very well, so I gueess I am sad because I won't get the chance to know you better, if that makes sense.
But, still, I get that you have preceding matters in your life, but even if you can't write a spin-off, you could just hang out occasionally.
So, MLP Legendary Badfics. I guess that based on fame, you could probably add Pattycakes to that list. It also hasn't reached canon break status yet, but it is pretty bad and fairly notorious.
Yeah, I've heard of Pattycakes, but if it's a legendary it's a more classic legendary without fans and fanart.
It is more of a classic notorious Badfic. And good riddance, cause we certainly don't need more of Fluttermama running around. Though the disturbing amount of ageplay fics shows that there is at least an indirect fandom for it. * shudders *