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Fanfic / Becoming Ponies

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Also known as Pony Earth.

It all started when Lauren Faust became Princess Celestia. Discord appeared before her and explained his master plan: To take over the world by randomly transforming ordinary people into ponies! In order to keep the world safe, Lauren Faust called a press conference and made a public announcement requesting anybody who woke in the body of an Element Bearer to head for New York City.

This seems straightforward until people start actually waking up as ponies. From working in an entirely new body, to having a roommate in their brain, to determining whether they even can afford to get to New York, the counterparts to the ponies have quite a lot of work ahead of them. Of course, Discord believes the best reward for all that work are a few... surprises along the way.

This is the shared setting of Becoming Ponies, an intriguing spin on the Ponies on Earth genre with multiple authors trying to tie it all together in one big story. Thus far, it seems to be a decent Alternate Reality experiment; Fluttershy's character has a fictional facebook page, which influences the story itself, and events in any one story can reference and influence each other.


Tropes

  • Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: Fluttershy's counterpart wears a hat and glasses.
  • All Stories Are Real Somewhere: Discussed.
  • Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Pinkie's counterpart. He argues that his "fingerbands" count as spats, but since they're on his forehooves...
  • Buried Alive: Applejack's story STARTS with this.
  • Call to Adventure: Most of the stories treat the people waking up as ponies as this with the Mane 6 and others heading to New York.
  • Crossover: In the Twilight story, SCP-173 makes a brief appearance in one of the chapters.
    • This is happening in other stories too, with the implication being Discord is pulling random villains to attack the mane cast.
  • Embarrassing Nickname: Max's high school nickname: Maxipad. AJ's counterpart uses it to cool him off when she's feeling crowded by his fanboy appreciation.
  • Fangirl: The Pinkie counterpart encounters three of them (and a guy). They follow him around. He's mostly cool with it.
  • Fantastically Indifferent: Pinkie's counterpart seems to handle the transformation pretty well. Seems being the key word here.
  • Flat "What": Given by Linda near the end of her encounter with Doofenshmirtz
  • Furry Confusion: Ponies meeting Horses. Fluttershy has a short and simple conversation with one, while Pinkie Pie describes the experience as "giving [her] Uncanny Valley twitches."
  • Gender Bender: So many of the ponies's counterparts were originally male that it's almost easier to name the ponies who weren't gender swapped by the transformation.
  • Heroic Safe Mode: Pinkie's counterpart enters this after he hears Fluttershy's been shot.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Applejack's chapters in When the Mare Comes Around are all Johnny Cash song titles.
  • Ignored Vital News Reports: Lauren Faust had a press conference calling for ponies to come to New York. Most of the ponies find out about this not from the actual conference or viewing it online, but by word-of-mouth.
  • Literal Split Personality: Twilight Sparkle, courtesy of Discord.
  • Marshmallow Dream: Apparently a side effect of lucid dreaming.
  • The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Very much so. The personalities of the ponies are slowly overriding (or merging with, depending on the characters) the personalities of the people, in some cases without them even being aware of it.
  • Mistaken Identity: To a mild degree. While the characters do look like the mane cast, they constantly reiterate that they are not; some people still treat them as though they were. However, Twilight prefers herself to be referred to as that, as she believes it would be awkward if she was called by her real name.
  • Noodle Incident: A few, but Pinkie's IHop incident leads the charge.
  • Redemption Equals Death: Private Investigator Jim Matthews.
  • Refusal of the Call: Applejack's counterpart drags her hooves. A lot. Applejack calls her on it, so it may be becoming a case of The Call Knows Where You Live.
  • Running Gag: In the various fics, whenever the transformed wake up after talking with whom they transformed into in their dreams, they always wake up with a pillow in their mouths. Goes up to eleven when Rainbow Dash's counterpart wakes up with a pillow in their mouth while sleeping on a cloud.
  • Sharing a Body: Played with. Initially, it appears that the counterparts only gain the forms of their ponies with the original personalities sharing mental space. As time passes, it becomes clear the minds are merging or the counterparts are being overwritten by the original pony.
  • Shout-Out: With a lot of the ponies sharing headspace with geeks and pop culture savvy characters, this is inevitable.
  • Sir Swearsalot: Sweetie Belle's counterpart.
  • Split-Personality Merge: "Call me Ericashy."
  • Stalker with a Crush: Pinkie encounters one.
  • Stepford Smiler: The Pinkie counterpart seems to be denying, even to himself, that Pinkie is slowly overriding his personality.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: Lyra insists to her counterpart, upon being prompted about her human obsession, that she doesn't have an obsession "with humans."
  • Talking in Your Dreams: Either this or Anxiety Dreams. The counterparts talk to their associated characters.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Pinkie Pie's counterpart is quite deliberately avoiding self analysis.
    • Likewise with Lyra's counterpart, although he's far more blatant about putting it off.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Pinkie's character attempts to invoke this. It's not entirely accurate....
  • Wham Episode: Becoming Fluttershy chapter 20.
  • Yamato Nadeshiko: Invoked by Pinkie's counterpart when describing Fluttershy. She denies it of course...

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