“Twilight Plea-”  
“TWILIGHT IS DEAD, CELESTIA.”

Twilight Sparkle: After all the stuff you put me through? I thought at least you REDs would have our backs until after we defeated the BLUs!
 
Scout: Us REDs? What the hell did we do?
 
Soldier: Twilight is getting angry!
 
Twilight: You spanked me on the rump! You sent me to my bedroom! You let numerous things fall on me! You knocked me unconscious! You tied me up in the Everfree Forest! You ruined the Gala! You shot me in the head! You planted a tiny bomb in my guts! You blew me away with an inferior tank! And that’s just how we first met!
 
Demoman: Oh this is not good!
 
Soldier: Oh no! Twilight is getting angrier!
 
Celestia: Twilight, calm down! What could possibly be your problem?
 
Twilight: starting to get angry at her friends, mentor, family and the TF2 mercenaries YOU’RE MY PROPLEM! YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN MY PROBLEM! EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU ALL, ESPECIALLY YOU PINKIE, IS JUST THE ONLY FRIENDSHIP PROBLEM, THAT I HAVE TO DEAL WITH ON A DAILY… goes full Rapidash BASIS! echoing “BASIS”
 
Soldier: AAAAOOOOWWWW MY GOD! Everyone down! Twilight’s on a rampage!
 
Princess Celestia: No! Twilight! She can’t be! She can’t be a fire pony!
 
Rainbow Dash: She already is, Princess! Pinkie made Twilight angry enough to ignite without hesitation!
 
Twilight: still a fire pony I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE! charges at the cast to attack
 
To be continued

Sad

@d715  
Nah, that was beyond even Warhammer 40k standards. There’s a reason everyone gets pissed about that.
 
A better example of grimdark would be how countless numbers of psykers are rounded up and caged up for the crime of being born, and are killed outright, forced into military servitude, or used as living fuel to keep the God-Emperor alive… and that despite being horrible, the entirety of humankind would be dead if that didn’t happen.
 
The real grimdark of WH40K isn’t just the horrible things everyone does–it’s how everyone would die to Chaos, the Tyranids, or the Necrons if the didn’t.

@Js T. Guy
 
Fuck that. Full Restores in every slot.

Damnit celly, don go up against a Lv.100 Rapidash without backup and 3 tankers of potion.

blood rily

Well… I liked ??Sunset??. Mostly because it’s always great to see Twilight lose her shit.

@Brony103 I just finished reading Past Sins a few days ago and WOW, I loved it! Perfectly written.

I remember this
 
yeah the golem
 
and near the end it threw in a random tyrant!Celestia bit wend Luna thinks about the past, which makes no seance and only there because all stories like this needs to make Celestia bad somehow.
 
@Brony103
 
what are you talking about that’s what grimdarks IS. The term itself comes form 40k fans wend they talk about a pointless dark element in 40k’s fluff.
 
like oh say wend Grey Knights kill a bunch of nuns and use there blood to protect themselves form chaos, despite Grey Knights whole stick is being immune to chaos in every way and have a shit ton of protection wards already and so don’t need any more. Plus the fact that they fought there way to the temple

@Zombie_Trotsky  
Star Wars reference. Not too shabby.

Am I the only one here that actually likes Past Sins? MLD was a tearjerker and simply that, Fallout E I can’t say yet because I haven’t read it yet. The only fic I absolutely hate is Sweet Apple Massacre. Not because it kills the CMC in the most brutal way possible, but because it’s fucking boring! I mean holy crap! The mindless gore, rape and overall grotesqueness of it all has no fucking storyline, plot, or explained reason whatsoever! Cheerilee’s Garden deserves more hype than that boring piece of crap!
 
I want my grimdark to be a story, not a clusterfuck of mindless gore just so the author can see how many people he can make throw up! Put in a story line at least dammit!

Sunset is awful. The premise is alright enough, I think it might even be canon that Celestia manipulated them on some level, whatever it takes to get her sister back, right?
 
But… Just… ugh
 
Terrible

lololol  
Blew through Sunset pretty quickly.  
Holy damn that shit is ridiculous. XD  
That fic was almost Lynchian with the wacky plot twists. A golem? SRSLY?
 

 
Well, even in that case, it’s implied Twilight is still part of the alicorn Collective, she just needs a body to call her own. Rarity can be handled similarly if anyone can be arsed to find all those figurines. RBD we never find out about, could be she got caught by the enclave and quietly disposed of, could be she decided to flee to the griffons after the enclave closes the sky. Whatever, there’s lots of possibilities!
 
One grimdark element that was missing though that I would have liked to have seen: Pip has some of those memory orbs with her…What if one of them is Scootaloo’s hateful rant? And Celestia managed to access that one? That’d probably hurt as much as losing her sister, knowing how much one of her own ponies hated them. One who was so close to the mane 6 and their sisters even!  
Idk I guess since I don’t see Celestia in a losing position so often I’d like to drag that out a whole bunch with a big ol’ humiliation conga for the lulz. And you can’t get better than Scootaloo purposefully making Stable 1 stay sealed until every ‘noble’ in Canterlot is dead.

It’s been a while, a long while. But isn’t “Sunset” just “Spark” minus the Twilight/Luna shipping?

Despite being named “Faggot” he is a perfectly reasonable individual.
 
Chances are that’s the point he’s making, but whatever.

… You guys did realize that the dudes name is “Faggot,” right?

Yeah, it’s the memory orb stuff that’s really grimdark to be honest. As a whole, FOE is pretty dark but it’s ultimately a FiM story at heart, it’s a story of friendship prevailing against impossible odds.
 
But the individual deaths of the Mane 6 are super rough. Pinkie and Twilight especially. Celestia got a pretty raw fucking deal, too.

Nah, not really. It only seems that way because it’s post-apoc. But it’s obscenely optimistic by post-apoc standards. The memory orb stuff leading up to the apocalypse is really bleak though.
 
I mean come on, Pip managed to get raiders and slavers to band together and build a community by slaying an evil dragon! That is totally some transplanted high fantasy fluff right there. Also the grand finale, though there were some ‘forced’ moments such as letting the enclave mop up the ‘good’ steel rangers (why would they suspect anything is at Spike’s cave when he’s busy attacking them head-on?). Overall though the ending is super-optimistic with Pip succeeding at restoring the world after a few stumbles along the way.
 
Contrast that to standard post-apoc stories such as Doomsday (Everyone frikkin dies, heroine carves a path of destruction, winds up leader of the cannibalistic raider band after offing its leader and half its members), Boy and his Dog (Hero is a rapist that finds creepy totalitarian underground community, meets and falls for girl, escapes with her to surface, then kills and eats her) and Tank Girl (The movie is campy but the background for it is definitely bleak, future is controlled by water corporations that don’t care about letting whole cities die of thirst) and you’ve got a good litmus as to what FoE is up against. All things considered, especially the moral impact Pip leaves on the wastes, it is SUPERBLY optimistic in contrast.

FoE is a fucking masterpiece.
 
The others are pretty absolutely fucking terrible, though. No argument there. FoE is just an acquired taste I guess. It is pretty damn bleak.

Luna became angry and turned into Nightmare Moon? Surely that sort of thing will neve rhappen to a perfect student like me!

MLD was a crime against literature and it raped storytelling in the ass, ripped its intestines out and dumped it in a gutter to bleed out. Okay, FO:E wasn’t BAD bad, but it was sub-par at best and dragged out to all fuck. Past Sins was just bad. BAD bad. You can’t be seriously talking about “every single horrible ‘bad fanfic’ cliche clumped together” in Sunset while letting Past Sins pass off the hook with “more or less logical and readable”.

Sorry, but no. FO:E was competently written, if a bit boring. MLD is a cheap tear-jerker, but still acceptable. Past Sins’ author at least tried to make it more or less logical and readable, and it was an examination of a concept of responsibility of children for their parents’ sins (well, kind of). Sunset is a crime against literature, every single horrible ‘bad fanfic’ cliche clumped together.

Yeah, Sunset was retarded. Don’t know why it gets such a good reviews. Then again, shit like Past Sins, FO:E or MLD gets recommended a lot, too, and it’s even worse.