BlueDude posted:

Amen. Now can we please get back on track?

For starters, let's play a little game: without clicking on the link, can somebody tell me what the trope "Voodoo Shark" refers to?

Wanamingo posted:

I was skimming through that, and apparently instead of using the term MacGuffin they say plot coupon?

That's dumb as hell.

Lottery of Babylon posted:

What's your favorite fanfiction written by grown men about cartoon ponies?

Could it be Zestar Apple Flambe?


Or maybe it's Project Sunflower?


I bet a discerning gentleman like yourself would be instantly drawn to the 100+ chapter masterpiece known as Ponies One Half.


Or perhaps you'd prefer a socially conscious Deconstruction that deeply explores an important real-world issue, like Bittersweet?


Is your favorite is something more mature, like Pages of Harmony?


No... your favorite, it... it couldn't be... the Xenophilia-verse... could it?

quote:

Cupcakes is a dark and extremely gory fanfic of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic by Sergeant Sprinkles.

Plot synopsis: Pinkie Pie invites Rainbow Dash to her bakery and offers her a cupcake. Rainbow Dash discovers too late that the cupcake was drugged; she wakes up some time later strapped to a table in a darkened room decorated up like a party, but in place of streamers and balloons are bloody, bones and body parts. Pinkie Pie appears wearing a dress made from pony flesh and a necklace of unicorn horns. She reveals that she has killed many other ponies and then tells Rainbow Dash that "her number came up". She then proceeds to slowly and brutally mutilate Rainbow Dash as described in graphic detail, eventually killing her.

Perhaps what makes this story so disturbing is that, throughout the entire story, Pinkie Pie keeps up her bubbly, cheery personality, cracking jokes and insisting that she and Rainbow Dash are having a party, even as Dash pleads and begs for her life. The fic is notorious among the fanbase, to the point where it inspired several pieces of artwork and multiple alternate endings.

Read it here. But dear lord know what you're getting yourself into. The original version can be found here

A Dramatic Reading of the story can be found here. The sporking of this story from the continuum by the PPC can be found here, if you'd like to sleep a bit easier tonight.

For those of you who don't want to be mentally scarred for life, this intentional bastardization will basically tell you everything you need to know. It's also good for if you have read "Cupcakes" and need some Nightmare Retardant.note

An alleged (former) Hasbro animator worked on this beauty in his spare time. If you need a version to giggle with the ghosties with, this would probably be the one for you, though still easily graphic and on the disturbitude scale of Invader Zim and Ren and Stimpy put together.

There have also been several musical works dedicated to the Fan Fiction: Including a Portal 2 "Want You Gone" cross-over/cover (and a "Still Alive" cover) and two tribute albums; by Futret and Tarby, respectively.

This fic has also caused an ever growing amount of related fanfictions by other authors. Prequels, parodies, and sequels. It even has a (worse?) Spiritual Successor called Pattycakes.

ungulateman posted:

Isn't it when the writers of a series come up with a dumb explanation for something that doesn't need explaining? I think it's a reference to one of the later Jaws movies, where there is in fact a shark with a voodoo curse on it.

SerialKilldeer posted:

You posted all that and forgot Cupcakes?

ungulateman posted:

Isn't it when the writers of a series come up with a dumb explanation for something that doesn't need explaining? I think it's a reference to one of the later Jaws movies, where there is in fact a shark with a voodoo curse on it.

SerialKilldeer posted:

Cupcakes

Hammurabi posted:

I think I vaguely remember seeing that on the Creepypasta Wiki. What's more, it's not even the stupidest thing I've seen on the Creepypasta Wiki.

quote:

A malevolent, inter-dimensional being is driving our favorite cartoons insane.
This being is responsible for many "lost episode" Creepypastas; let's start with Squidward's Suicide. The story consists of Squidward comitting suicide after a horrible day. Note Squidward's red eyes on the page image. Next, we have ''Suicide Mouse'', a surreal clip consisting of Mickey Mouse walking down a road (Worse than it sounds). Note the theme of suicide occuring. This image◊ (Nightmare Fuel warning) has been associated with the video. Note the red, bloodshot eyes not unlike Squidward's. So what, right? Bloodshot eyes are used for horror, that doesn't mean that something's killing off cartoons. Enter Red Mist. It's Squidward's Suicide, except with a buisnessman telling Squidward that "the Red Mist is after you", and a lot more emphasis on the red eyes. But that's not enough evidence, right? It's just one story where the Red Mist's presence was explicitly shown. Take a look at Rectified Anonymity, a (gruesome) fanfic (I'd add a link but I can't get it to work). Why did David have red eyes if red isn't a natural eye color? David met the Red Mist, and his sanity didn't survive the encounter. It's not a coincidence. Something is in our beloved cartoon universe, hunting its denizens, and it will not stop ever, until they are dead.

SerialKilldeer posted:

Speaking of which, let's see what our favorite site says about creepypasta. They have a pretty extensive page (though of course it's nothing compared to the pony ones):
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Creepypasta

From the WMG (Wild Mass Guessing, some weird troperspeak for "insane fan theories") page:

SerialKilldeer posted:

Speaking of which, let's see what our favorite site says about creepypasta. They have a pretty extensive page (though of course it's nothing compared to the pony ones):
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Creepypasta

From the WMG (Wild Mass Guessing, some weird troperspeak for "insane fan theories") page:

graybook posted:

Touching on a point from last page, I'm kind of glad that I don't have as much contact with one of my old hallmates - he kept trying to convince me to read FO:E one of the last times we talked; I told him I wasn't interested in fanfiction and he then painted my position as being "i don't read fanfiction therefore i think all fanfiction is poo poo and the medium is poo poo and i can't ever recognize that any fanfiction can be good".

SirPhoebos posted:

He doesn't act like it's our problem for not 'getting' his niche

ungulateman posted:

(although SA has a weird anti-fanfic culture which I still don't understand even after all this time. What happened to judging stories on their own merits rather than their medium? )

SerialKilldeer posted:

You posted all that and forgot Cupcakes?

Literary Analysis posted:

Cupcakes occupies an interesting space in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic lexicon, in that despite its reportedly 'written on a whim' status, it can justifiably be called the most infamous fan fiction of the Friendship Is Magic fandom (Or simply, brony community), or even of all time. It has become so ingrained in the considerably vast FIM fandom that one will miss a boatload of references and jokes throughout the fandom if they have not, themselves, taken the plunge and read Cupcakes.

On the surface, it's a paradoxical story, taking the candy-coloured characters from Friendship Is Magic and transplanting them into a plot straight out of Hostel. What's more, the torturer in question is one of the show's more upbeat and saccharine characters.

At a cursory glance, the answer as to why this fanfic has cut so deep into the collective consciousness of the fandom is simple: human nature compels us to slow down as we pass the car crash.

But there's potentially something more behind it. Ever since the first episodes aired, Friendship Is Magic gained popularity amongst teen and adult males not out of some misplaced ironic bent, but by dent of the strength of the writing and the strong characterization. Further, despite its original target audience of little girls, the show has never shied away from the darker side of Equestria: our protagonists reside at the edge of a deep, dark forest full of things your worst nightmares would be hesitant to touch, there exists wanton Gods of chaos, filthy scavenger dogs who enslave hapless ponies who wander too far into their territory, and the writers take particular care in mentally deconstructing their protagonists' psyches to pieces, with all the zest that Supernatural's writers put into that very subject.

So it can be said that the author's savage butchering of Rainbow Dash by a psychotic Pinkie Pie is not merely an infantile mashing-up of two things that are fundamentally detached, but rather an extremified fulfillment of the brooding darkness of an already Crapsaccharine World. It is not uncommon to find fanfics of one of the 'mane six' dying, albeit it is often played for emotional purposes, to tug at the heartstrings for characters that the fans have such a deep attachment to. In all, Friendship Is Magic has never shied away from the darker side of life, and such concepts are clearly not alien to Equestria. Cupcakes is, in that way, the farthest one can take the scale of darkness as presented by the fandom, to such a bleak, absurdist end that there is absolutely no hope to be had.

And it is, indeed, absurd, in the same way as Samuel Beckett's absurdist plays: there is an inherent meaningless to the text of Cupcakes. Every little motion or plea that Rainbow Dash makes is in vain, while Pinkie's behavior - the same as her canon, happy-go-lucky self, only with the bloodthirst of Freddy Krueger, remains unexplained (although fanfic writers have taken it into their own hooves to theorize anything from a schitzophrenic disorder to a parasite in the brain). She is simply going about the motions, her only intent is to live out her intent, without a higher thought process. It is, essentially, My Absurd Pony: Murder Is Magic.

There's also the possibility that after so long, the fic's infamy has come to feed itself: "There's so many fanfics based on Cupcakes, I might as well make one of my own", for example. Certainly its own infamy has helped to maintain itself; what other fanfic can claim to have a music video made of it by one of the show's official animators?

But it seems that this fanfic has come to transcend traditional notions of personal like and dislike. Anypony who dares to give it a read may leave disgusted, but at the end of the day, it has become so ingrained in the Friendship Is Magic fandom, such a decisively piercing part of the Brony subculture, that it simply IS, in the same way that the original Star Wars has more or less become beyond praise or criticism, and is now simply a part of history and 20th century culture.

It IS Cupcakes, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to change that any time soon.

Wanamingo posted:

That's right, though?

graybook posted:

Personally, I don't want to discount the idea that there might some good fanfiction out there (granted, this thread has severely hindered my ability to believe that), but at the same time, I have zero interest in reading it.

Little Blackfly posted:

If it's really so good, that could change the names and sell it as an original work. The fact that this has happened and still produced only terrible schlock tells me all I need to know.

Little Blackfly posted:

If it's really so good, that could change the names and sell it as an original work. The fact that this has happened and still produced only terrible schlock tells me all I need to know.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Uh, no. I wouldn't characterize a lot of writing that actually gets sold good.

Galick posted:

What do you think 50 Shades of Grey was?

SuccinctAndPunchy posted:

did either of you actually read the post you quoted properly

SuccinctAndPunchy posted:

did either of you actually read the post you quoted properly

sweeperbravo posted:

Still can't get over the fact that they added "relationship status" to whatever you call the poo poo that gets framed along with every person's post

Ratspeaker posted:

Wanamingo posted:

That's right, though?

Darth Walrus posted:

As I mentioned before, there's two problems with fanfiction (as the concept's generally understood) that place a hard cap on how good it can be. First off, there's no filtering process, so Sturgeon's Law is in full effect. Second, you absolutely cannot make money from it. This means that pretty much all writers and editors good enough to make money from their work are doing that instead, in either original fiction or fanfic of public-domain work. Writing and editing high-quality stories is difficult and time-consuming, and people need to eat. Consequently, if you're writing fanfic, you're unlikely to be a saleable author, you're unlikely to be putting as much work into it as you might (this even applies to the million-word behemoth fanfics, which are churned out with minimal quality-control), and you won't have any professionals around you to hammer your story into something readable.

Runcible Cat posted:

Cassandra Clare's first trilogy was a reskin of her Harry Potter fanfic. 50 Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfic. I'm not going to defend either as quality writing, but they sold.

Darth Walrus posted:

Yeah, but I'd say that's pretty much the upper cap. Notice how they switched from fanfic to sort-of-kind-of original fic as soon as they had the skills to do so.

GIANT OUIJA BOARD posted:

But then you've also got things like Wicked, which may not be amazing but it's a drat sight better than 50 Shades.

Darth Walrus posted:

Yeah, but I'd say that's pretty much the upper cap. Notice how they switched from fanfic to sort-of-kind-of original fic as soon as they had the skills to do so.

Runcible Cat posted:

Nowhere near the upper cap. The upper cap is around, say, Elizabeth Bear's Shoggoths in Bloom; Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald; Michael Chabon's The Final Solution; Peter Watts' The Things - they're all writing someone else's universe, and they're doing things with it that work brilliantly but that the original writers couldn't have written (and might not have agreed with, in Lovecraft's case at least).

I'll even argue with the skills - publication isn't dependent on skills; there are plenty of skilled writers who don't get published, and plenty of lovely published work. Publication demanded sort-of-kind-of-original fic so that's what they switched to when they got the opportunity.

99% of fanfic is utter garbage, mind you, I'm not arguing about that. But that's not to say there isn't the possibility of good stuff in there; it's just that you have to wade through scalp-deep poo poo to find it and life's too short as a rule. Publication is a sensible filter to use.

(So is "no pony fanfic".)