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Fanfic / MLP Next Generation: Know Fear!

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"Starburst of Equestria, you have the ability to instill great fear!"

MLP Next Generation: Know Fear! is a crossover between My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the Green Lantern series writtenby Michael_Ravencroft.

The story centers around Kilala97's OC: Starburst (or Star for short), the daughter of Twilight Sparkle and Flash Sentry. Who has always wanted to be a Royal Guard. Training everyday, working hard to make her dream come true. But when war is threatened on Equestria, Starburst fights for the safety of her home and country. But soon, she will realize that her strength alone will not be enough. Poor Starburst is in need of power, the power to protect her family and friends, the power to defend her homeland, the power to instill fear in the hearts of her enemies!

Little did she know, that that very power would seek her out. But when she obtains it, how will it affect the rest of her life, her relationships with her parents, her little brother, and her friends? But more importantly, will she become the hero Equestria needs or become an even greater threat than anyone could've possibly imagined?

Complete with 17 Chapters, a sequel has already been announced under the name: MLP Next Generation: Love Conquers All! Avarice Takes It All!


Know Fear! provides examples of:

  • Achilles' Heel: Ring constructs are vulnerable to magic.
  • Action Mare: Star was already one before she got her ring. She becomes an even deadlier one once she learns how to control her new powers. Rainbow Dash, Spitfire, and Sunny Skies count as well.
  • After-Action Healing Drama: Star wakes up in the hospital after the fight at Stalliongrad.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Any of the griffons' attacks on Equestrian cities count as this, but the occupation of Cloudsdale is probably the most clean-cut example.
  • An Arm and a Leg: When Shadow Wing tries to steal the ring from Starburst, it violently rejects him as a host, blowing off his arm in the process.
  • And I Must Scream: The Royal Guards brainwashed by Pinpoint appear to still be aware, but unable to stop themselves from committing treason.
  • Anti-Hero: Star has no problem using lethal force, justifying it by the fact that they're at war. When this gets her locked up, she decides to outright go rogue and gets declared a criminal.
  • Badass Creed: Being a Fear Lantern, she has an oath like all the others, however she changes hers up a little:
    "In Blackest Day, in Brightest Night,
    Beware your fears made into light!
    Let those who try and stop what’s right,
    Burn like my power–FEAR LANTERN’S LIGHT!"
    • She retools it completely during her rematch with Shadow Wing:
    “In twilight’s dusk, in moonlit night,
    Evil shall cower before my might!
    When darkness comes to cloud my sight,
    I’ll shine like my power – Fear Lantern’s light!!!”
  • Bad Powers, Good People: The yellow light of Fear is generally considered a power of evil, but Star uses it as a force for good.
  • Batman Gambit: Steel Wing was counting an alicorn Royal to come after him in Maretonia, so he could capture and publicly torture them, in order to lure out the Fear Lantern.
  • Beam Spam: Star fires a beam blast from a sphere, and has twice used a cannon to blow away her enemies.
  • Berserk Button: Star has two — hurting her family, and betraying the Royal Guard, both of which get pressed hard during the battle in Maretonia.
  • Big Bad: Emperor Stratus. Until Nox betrays him during his fight with Starburst, killing him and taking on the role.
  • Casting a Shadow: Nox, the Shadow Wing.
  • Cool Airship: Twilight has the warship Avalon.
  • Co-Dragons: The Wing Commanders are this in the Griffon Empire.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: After capturing Twilight, Steel Wing has her publicly flogged for the "crime" of defying the griffons' conquest.
  • Les Collaborateurs: Pinpoint betrays Twilight and Valiant Heart to Steel Wing, out of a belief that they griffons are going to win anyway, and this way at least he and his family will be safe.
  • Combat Tentacles: Steel Wing uses these when he initiates his Metal Reaver Armor transformation. Allowing him to thrash Starburst with tentacles embedded with razor sharp blades that slice and bash at the same time, and at a high rate of speed.
  • Companion Cube: Star's Ring.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu: The Pretenders are a supposedly elite cadre among the griffons. Star still takes down half a million of them in Cloudsdale by herself.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Almost any griffon mook Star encounters is easily dealt with.
  • Dance Battler: When Star realizes that the only way to defeat Steel Wing and get in close enough to deliver a killing blow, is to make her moves fluid and graceful. She then begins to combine her secret love of dancing, with her fighting skills, allowing Starburst to dodge and counter with well timed construct attacks. This inevitably gets Starburst close enough right as Steel Wing is about to shift to Iron Defender, being exposed, and finish off the Wing Commander once and for all.
    • She starts incorporating this into all her fights after this.
  • Date Peepers: Claire, Cotton Candy, Prism Bolt, and June do this when Star and Del finally admit their feelings and go out (though June's really only there to keep them in line). And it turns out that Star and Del knew they were there the whole time but ignored them.
  • Deep Cover Agents: The Pretenders spent three years infiltrating Cloudsdale before the war broke out.
  • Doppleganger Attack: During the fight in Cloudsdale, she creates seven other copes of herself to fight against a group of griffons.
  • Dreaming of Things to Come: After getting her ring, Star has a dream about the seven lights fighting each other and the arrival of Light and Darkness...
  • Due to the Dead: Starburst insists that Sunny Skies gets a burial with full honors for saving her, and Valiant unhesitatingly agrees.
  • Dynamic Entry: For when Star busts into the Core Driver room and saves both Rainbow Dash and Spitfire from the griffons, Lazarus and Lara.
  • Emotion Eater: Starburst's ring becomes stronger by feeding on the fear of her enemies.
  • The Empire: The Griffon Empire.
  • Et Tu, Brute?: The pegasi of Cloudsdale all have this reaction after the Pretenders reveal themselves.
    • Twilight and Valiant's reaction when Pinpoint betrays them to the griffons.
    • Starburst when her family turns on her out of the belief that the Ring's corrupting her.
  • Everypony Can See It: Star and Del's crushes on each other.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Discord is offended by the organized chaos of the griffon invasion and what it's being used for — even when he was evil, he never killed anyone.
  • Fantastic Racism: The griffons' reasons for going to war with Equestria seem to be nothing more than disdain for the ponies' very existence.
  • From Bad to Worse: Chapter 14. Nox kills Emperor Stratus and frames Star for it. She ends up killing him, but then he's brought back as a Black Lantern.
  • Godzilla Threshold: The war is going badly enough that the alicorns decide to have one of their own (Twilight, as it turns out) unlock their full power and take on the griffons as a show of force to make them stand down and end the war. It works at first, but the griffons turn out to have countermeasures already prepared.
  • Guilty Pleasure: Starburst likes to dance to classical music, but does it in secret in order to protect her tomcolt image.
  • Heroic Second Wind: During Star's rematch with Shadow Wing, he overpowers and critically injures her, taking her ring for himself. However, this just makes Star fear what he'll do with its power, powering the ring enough to draw it back to her enabling her to kill him.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: It's been commented that Starburst is becoming little better than the griffons she's fighting.
    • She eventually realizes this herself during her fight with Stratus when he says they're not that different, refusing to kill him in cold blood. But then Nox does it anyway.
  • Homosexual Reproduction: Sunny Skies is the magically conceived daughter of Spitfire and Fleetfoot.
  • How We Got Here: The story opens with Starburst, already the Fear Lantern, fighting griffons in Stalliongrad. The next couple of chapters show how this came to happen.
  • I Did What I Had to Do: Valiant Heart justifies his seemingly harsh decision to permanently ban Star from the Royal Guard (ending her dream) by stating it's not only a proper punishment for what Star did, but also that it probably keeps her from getting herself killed.
  • Imagination-Based Superpower: Her constructs stem from her imagination as well as the imaginations of the ones she fights.
  • Insult Backfire: After Shadow Wing destroys the Core Driver holding up Cloudsdale:
    Starburst: ARE YOU INSANE?!
    Shadow Wing: Jury's out.
  • Intangibility: She can pass through walls with the power of her ring and she can't be touched thanks to the aura field.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: Starburst starts wielding one during and after her duel with Valiant Heart after hitting her Rage Breaking Point.
  • Long Game: The griffons have been planning this war for years.
  • Mood Whiplash: The story switches between the Original Flavor of canon, Black Comedy, and straight drama/action very often, sometimes at the drop of a hat in the same scene.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Starburst's reaction when she realizes that of those "traitor" Royal Guards she killed, only one was an actual traitor the others being brainwashed.
  • No-Sell: The Fear Shine affect, the Yellow Ring's ultimate attack, has no affect on Shadow Wing, because he has no fear. When she uses it again during her Heroic Second Wind moment in their rematch, she overpowers his mental defenses with enough fear to kill him.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Stratus says this of himself and Starburst when she prepares to kill him. This snaps her out of her bloodlust, and she decides not to kill him... only for Nox to do it for her.
  • One Mare Army: The Fear Lantern.
    • Also the Wing Commanders.
  • The Paralyzer: Sunny knows how to do this via pressure points, as she demonstrates to Star while making a point.
  • Please Wake Up: Star when Sunny dies.
  • Poor Communication Kills: All this might have been avoided if Starburst and her family had an actual sit-down and talked things out!
  • Power Nullifier: Horn Seals, which prevent unicorns and alicorns from using their magic, and Feedback Collars, which shock them if they try to channel magic to overpower the seals. The griffons use both to restrain Twilight and Valiant.
  • Rage Breaking Point: Starburst is horrified when she hears that her mother and cousin have been captured by the griffons, but when the griffons then proceed to start broadcasting Twilight's live public flogging, she snaps and transforms into the Fear Lantern in front of half of Ponyville, flying off to Maretonia to tear the griffons apart.
    • Which is nothing compared to what happens a couple of chapters later: when Sunny Skies is killed protecting Star from the Royal Guards trying to arrest her, Star is enraged, and she proceeds to curbstomp all the Guards around her — even her cousin, who she was previously outclassed by — denounces her whole family and the Guard as being too weak to protect Equestria, and makes it clear she won't be taking anyone else's crap anymore.
  • Rain of Blood: When Star battles the griffons in Cloudsdale, she tears them apart with her constructs.
  • Redeeming Replacement: The recorded message from Sinestro in Star's Ring states that the Fear Lanterns are meant to be this to the Sinestro Corps — after his Heel Realization following the events of Wrath of the First Lantern, he's redesigned the Yellow Rings to choose bearers who not only are capable of inspiring fear, but also have a strong sense of justice to balance it, therefore making them champions, rather than monsters.
  • Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Sunny breaks Star out of the Canterlot dungeons and helps her retrieve her Ring, most likely ruining her career in the Royal Guard, because she's knows that it's the right thing to do to win the war.
    • Likewise, Star going rogue and letting herself be branded a criminal, if it means that she's free to fight the war her way.
  • Secret-Keeper: Sunny Skies becomes one for Star, promising to keep her secret as payment for Star saving her life. Which becomes a moot point after Star's identity is revealed.
  • Sequel Hook: It has three: Starburst dedicates herself to continuing to fight the war, even as a renegade; meanwhile, unknown to her, Nox is raised as a Black Lantern; and in the final scene two more rings — one orange, the other violet — arrive on Equestria.
  • Self-Made Orphan: Nox kills his own father, Emperor Stratus. See The Starscream.
  • Shout-Out: When looking for new material for more fear based attacks, Starburst "borrows" some books from the horror section of the comic shop. Among the books she reads are Rainbow Factory, Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), and Cheerilee's Garden. Needless to say, by the time she's done reading them she's practically begging for some Brain Bleach.
  • Ship Tease: Between Star and Golden Delicious.
  • Sibling Team: Lazarus and Lara on the griffon Pretender team.
  • Social Darwinist: The griffons have this mentality in mass.
  • Spanner in the Works: The Fear Lantern is this to the griffons, being the one factor they couldn't possibly have planned for.
  • The Starscream: When Star refuses to kill Stratus, Nox does it for her, in order to frame Star and martyrise the Emperor.
  • Storming the Castle: After Sunny's death, Starburst gives into her rage over the war and all the pointless death, launching a one mare assault on the griffon capital Griffonia, curbstomping her way through the defenses to attack Emperor Stratus in his own palace. She comes within a hairsbreadth of killing him, until his "Not So Different" Remark knocks her out of it... and then Nox kills him anyway.
  • Take Over the World: The griffons seem to be using any grievances with the ponies as an excuse to do this.
  • Taking the Bullet: When some overeager Royal Guards decide to shoot down Starburst during her duel with Valiant, Sunny pushes her out of the way, getting shot through the chest, killing her almost instantly.
  • The Worf Barrage (and/or) There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Starburst, after seeing that Steel Wing survived her initial attack, creates Gatling cannons, heavy cannons, and rocket pod constructs and unleashes it all in a unceasing barrage of destruction on the armored griffon, finishing it up with a charged shot from a construct blaster for good measure. Unfortunately this leads to Steel Wing surviving the entire attack, turning Star’s earlier assault into a Worf Barrage.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Starburst puts herself through heavy training after getting her Ring so that she can more effectively fight off the griffons.
  • Unstoppable Rage: Prism goes into one when Cloudsdale is taken over, due to his mother being up there.
  • Unresolved Sexual Tension: Between Starburst and Golden Delicious.
  • War Fic: The plot is driven by a war between Equestria and the Griffon Empire.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Starburst gets a lot of this after joining the Royal Guard under a fake name and almost getting killed.
    • She gets even more from her mother and Valiant after they learn she's the Fear Lantern.
    • In turn, Prism Bolt and Rainbow Dash both chew out Valiant for his and Twilight's reaction to the above branding Star a criminal.

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