Original upload date: 2019-03-24T02:17:27Z
Original uploader: Marker
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I first learned about the fanfic called “Fallout: Equestria” via one of ’s drawings. At first it sounded like matter and antimatter; combining one unrelentingly happy and upbeat universe with one that is just as unrelentingly dark, oppressive and hopeless? Nonetheless I was curious (and a Fallout fan too) so I gave it a glance, and was completely hooked within 2 chapters. By the time I was up to Chapter 18 the muse woke up after all this time and loudly demanded fanart in tribute.I have no idea if Kkat has any presence here on dA or if he/she writes professionally in any way, but damn if this isn’t an extremely well-written piece of work. If anybody here happens to have any contact with Kkat, please tell him/her to keep up the awesome work.Characters from left to right: Velvet Remedy, Littlepip, Steelhooves and Calamity.Story here: [link]Movie poster version here: >>[Derpibooru]1993352s“Fallout: Equestria” created by Kkat
Based on “My Little Pony Friendship is Magic” created by Lauren FaustEDIT 6-13-11 @ 8am – I’ve just been informed via dA-note that Kkat likes this quite a bit. Guess I’ll have to draw more.
Somewhat.
But it does do a few things well. The “how did the world get this way” mystery that is woven through the story is pretty good. And unlike many crossovers, the Fallout elements are attempted to be explained as though they emerged organically from the MLP universe.
I think the worst element of the story is the raiders. The sadism of the raiders in Fallout 3 was entirely played as comedy. But Fallout Equestria plays it completely straight. Ponies have an overwhelmingly conformist nature, they simply aren’t capable of such open antisocial sadism. It just makes the whole story unbelievable.
You’re not wrong.
There is, in “fandoms” with a lot of nerds a contrarian urge that I think has its roots in lifelong rejection. It’s why nerd culture in the 80s, when pop culture was all about nuclear war and ecological apocalypse, retreated to Tolkien pastiche escape fantasy in the form of Dungeons & Dragons. In the 90s, when American popculture was one enormous awkward forced meme of sunshine and rainbows, nerd culture wanted morally ambiguous giant robot Armageddon in its Japanese cartoons and grimdark in its comics and RPGs. And in the New Century, as the normies are starting to twig to the idea that maybe things really ARE going to shit, and the normies are obsessed with the Zombie Apocalypse, nerd culture retreats to slice-of-life anime about schoolgirls, moeblob fantasy, and World of Warcraft.
And when nerds write fanfiction (but I repeat myself), they are often driven by an impulse some wit long ago called the Imp of the Perverse. They see something cute, and they want to drop it into the real world, or worse, just to see which way the characters will jump. They see something grimdark, and they want to fix it and make everyone feel better. The central problem here, from a storytelling perspective, is that the clash in tone does not lend itself to anything deeper than brief joke stories playing the contrast for laughs. FO:E takes cute cuddly ponies and drops them into radioactive Hell and allows the reader the voyeuristic experience of watching them die horribly, for hundreds of thousands of words at a time. No thank you.
Mind you, it’s not the weirdest mashup I’ve ever seen. About fifteen years back an author, now moderately well known in the horsewords community, created the damnedest mashup I ever saw, over the course of seven or eight years. It ran to one and a half million words when he abandoned it, and it mashed up Ah My Goddess, Ranma 1/2, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sailor Moon, and I don’t even know what else. It really didn’t know whether it wanted to be slapstick comedy, grimdark deconstruction–his take on Ah My Goddess is absolutely brutal–or the author’s soapbox for screaming at fictional characters he didn’t like. Some of the author’s weirder fantasies were on full display through the eyes of a memorably obnoxious Gary Stu self-insert protagonist, too. It is probably just as well that he dropped it and I’m a little surprised he hasn’t nuked it off the Internet completely.