Fanfic / Green

Green is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Shipping Fic, focusing primarily on Rarity and Fluttershy but including the rest of the main cast as well.

Rarity and Fluttershy have been friends for years, and every week they go to the spa. But after every trip, Rarity finds herself growing greener with envy over Fluttershy's beauty and grace; if not something more than just envy... And what may happen, if she finds out Fluttershy feels the same way about her?

Green has been completed, and there's now a sequel in the works, called The Folly of Princesses.

Green and The Folly of Princesses contain examples of the following tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance: Pinkie Pie invents cold fusion. By accident.
• Affectionate Nickname: Once Magnum comes around to the idea of Rarity having a fillyfriend, he starts calling Fluttershy "Kiddo".
  • Equestria's Royal Siblings tend to call each other Lu and 'Tia when they get some time to themselves.
  • Pinkie Pie has these for almost everyone, most notably Twi-Twi for Twilight, Dashie for Rainbow Dash, and Celly for Princess Celestia.
  • Princess Luna, while still on a Full-Name Basis with most other ponies, is close enough to her Beleaguered Assistant Midnight Oil to call him "Middy".
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Luna almost seems to be trying to make up for a thousand years' lost time in the bothering department.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: It's an understated moment, but for all his guff Angel really is glad when Fluttershy comes home from Canterlot.
• Bait-and-Switch: Before we meet Fluttershy's parents, Silver Lining is built up as the adoring father Fluttershy fondly remembers, while Posey is The Dreaded. Then when we actually get to meet them, it turns out that Posey is a distant but still loving Reasonable Authority Figure, the counterpoint to Silver Lining's intensely overprotective father.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Fiend and Celestia go toe-to-toe in the Canterlot of Celestia's nightmares.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Midnight Oil, personal assistant to Princess Luna.
• Berserk Button: Pretty much anything Fiend says tends to tick Celestia off. Justified, because Fiend is the manifestation of her suppressed id and is deliberately trying to get a specific reaction.
• Beta Couple: Applejack and Rainbow Dash have been together longer than Twilight and Pinkie Pie or Rarity and Fluttershy, and their relationship is a stable counterpoint to both the newer couples.
• Big Damn Kiss: After chapters upon chapters of Fluttershy and Rarity being unable to speak their feelings for each other, they finally get theirs in Chapter 9 and 10. Chapter 9 has the kiss and everything leading up to it from Rarity's point of view, while Chapter 10 puts us in Fluttershy's horseshoes.
  • Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom get one in Chapter 12, much to Scootaloo's shock and dismay.
• Brick Joke: Twilight manages to pull the ol' ink ring on the telescope eyepiece prank on Pinkie Pie.
• Brutal Honesty: Fiend's modus operandi revolves around pointing out truths that Celestia doesn't want to acknowledge.
• Cannot Spit It Out: The biggest thing standing between Rarity and Fluttershy becoming an item. Fluttershy is too timid to say anything, while Rarity is too worried about ruining their friendship and Fluttershy reacting badly to spit it out. In the end, Fluttershy makes the first move after deducing that the anonymous Love Letter was from Rarity.
• Casting a Shadow: This is still within Luna's powerset as Princess of the Night. She uses it to help Pinkie Pie set up a surprise party.
• Chewing the Scenery: Deconstructed. Princess Luna is as large a ham as they come, but earth-shaking theatrics aren't really the best way to go about interacting with a populace you're trying to calm down.
• Continuity Nod: Fluttershy finds an inner reserve of confidence and assertiveness somewhere and initiates her relationship with Rarity. Rarity finds this side of Fluttershy incredibly attractive, but it also scares her, as she remembers New Fluttershy a little too clearly.
  • When Fluttershy is telling Magnum about herself, she begins with the story of how she got her cutie mark.
• Covert Pervert: Fluttershy, to everyone's surprise. Twilight somehow manages to be even more covert about it. And then, of course, there's Princess Luna, whose reaction to Twilight explaining the nature of her and Pinkie's relationship is to take notes.
• Death Glare: Posey invented The Stare, and unlike her daughter, who only busts it out in emergencies, she can use it on command.
• Determinator: A trait shared by all of the Mane Six.
  Astra: And this is why you trust these ponies when the world is doomed. They don’t back down.
• The Dreaded: Fluttershy's mother, to the point that even Angel is terrified of her.
• Dream Walker: One of Princess Luna's duties, as in canon. Celestia apparently also could do this in the past, but something happened that's left her traumatized and terrified of entering the Dreamscape. However, Luna insists that Celestia accompany her as Luna can't snap Twilight Sparkle out of a serious nightmare, and she believes Celestia is the only pony Twilight would respond to at that point.
• Cannot Dream: Princess Celestia. When Celestia banished Luna to the moon all those centuries ago, the Dreamscape didn't take kindly to the imprisonment of its mistress and lashed out at her. Celestia has now slept with powerful psychic blocks to protect herself for centuries. Which is why Luna freaks out when she steps into Celestia's dream the day that Twilight returns to Ponyville, because she shouldn't even be having one.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Fluttershy's mother Posey, a drill sergeant in the Royal Guard.
• Enemy Mine: Princess Luna and Dragon Lord Torch form one during the Time Skip to deal with Yongling, a five-mile long evil serpent menacing Chineigh.
• Enemy Within: Celestia has to deal with an antagonistic doppelganger within her mind, which manifests mostly as an incessant voice that is slowly driving her mad. Celestia calls the thing a fiend, which Twilight decides to use as its name because it has none of its own. Played with in that Fiend isn't an outside enemy but rather a manifestation of Celestia's long-suppressed id, and thus an important part of her psyche. Coming to terms with the circumstances that brought Fiend into being is a big part of Celestia's character arc.
• Epic Fail: When we first see Sweetie Belle using her magic, she's trying to put out a fire she caused trying to cook dinner. That's not impressive. What *is* impressive is that the water she's trying to put the fire out with has somehow caught fire too.
• Ethical Slut: Luna, so very much.
• Fairytale Wedding Dress: Fluttershy and Rarity both get to wear them at their wedding in the finale. Designed by Rarity, of course. She also spends some time looking forward to making dresses for Rainbow Dash and Twilight (on the assumption that Applejack and Pinkie Pie would wear tuxedoes.)
• A Father to His Men: Well, more a Mother to Her Ponies; while she is an unapologetically tough Drill Sergeant Nasty, Posey genuinely cares about the ponies under her command.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Celestia is the Responsible to Luna's Foolish. Celestia has been doing her job every day for over a thousand years, while Luna frequently skips out on her duties for parties and other escapades, leaving an already overworked Celestia and Midnight Oil to pick up the slack. Which means Luna's in for a pretty severe learning curve when Celestia is temporarily depowered, leaving leadership of the country solely in Luna's hooves (with help, of course, from Middy.)
• Freudian Excuse: Luna believes that the underlying reason for Twilight's relationship issues can be traced to her longstanding unrequited crush on Princess Celestia.
• Fridge Brilliance: Pinkie Pie and Princess Luna get along really well. It seems like a bit of an Odd Friendship, but it makes more sense when Luna points out that she once held the Element of Laughter, long ago.
• Friends with Benefits: Twilight comes across this term while researching the Magic of Friendship, and she asks Pinkie Pie to explore this type of friendship with her. It gets complicated, of course, when they actually start falling for each other.
• The Good Chancellor: Midnight Oil, Princess Luna's Hypercompetent Sidekick and Celestia's official Regent during her stay in Ponyville.
• Hearing Voices: Celestia begins hearing (and arguing with) a voice in her head that provides a voice to her darker impulses, which eventually comes to be known as Fiend.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Luna can't stand dealing with the press, which comes back to bite her later on.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Luna has a hard time running a modern government; she's incredibly lucky to have Midnight Oil to assist her.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Spike takes the news of Rarity and Fluttershy getting together remarkably well.
  • Celestia also feels this way about Twilight, but is considerably less personally happy about the situation.
  • When Pinkie Pie finds out how Celestia feels about Twilight, she also starts feeling this way, trying to get them together, even as Celestia argues for Twilight to stay with Pinkie.
• King Incognito: The Folly of Princesses opens with Celestia getting tired of staying cooped up in the library, so she and Astra start working on a disguise so she can go out among the citizens of Ponyville without causing a panic.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Rarity and Fluttershy.
• Love Letter Lunacy: Rarity's plan for dealing with her inability to spit it out verbally and her belief that Fluttershy isn't attracted to her is to leave Fluttershy an anonymous Love Letter. Her plan failed to account for Angel Bunny, though.
• Love-Obstructing Parents: Rarity's father Magnum. He successfully derailed Rarity's first real relationship and she is determined that that never happen again.
• MacGuffin: Referenced. The Daring Do book that Celestia's reading in Chapter 69 features Daring Do's search for the Guffin of Maxwell, a very important doohickey from the race of Nevaherdufums, deep in the hidden jungles of Nawarinpaticula.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Any relationship Princess Celestia or Princess Luna embarks on is one of these, and they've both had several over the centuries. Rarity also points out that this would also be true if Spike were to start dating ponies, as dragons also have a life expectancy measured in centuries.
  Rarity: You'll likely be having tea with the Princesses long after the six of us are gone.
• The McCoy: Fiend, who is literally Princess Celestia's id, which she's forcibly suppressed for so long that it's become its own psychic entity within her brain.
• Meaningful Rename: Once Celestia comes to terms with the idea that Fiend is not in fact malevolent, they decide to give the voice a less insulting name, eventually settling on Astra.
• Meet the In-Laws: Rarity suggests that Fluttershy meet her Amazingly Embarrassing Parents before her mouth catches up to her brain. See Love-Obstructing Parents for why this is something she'd rather avoid.
  • This is eventually followed up by the pair traveling to Canterlot to meet Fluttershy's parents. It...doesn't go as well.
• Mind Hive: Functionally, Celestia and Astra.
• Motor Mouth: Fluttershy, of all ponies, launches into this when asking Applejack for relationship advice.
• MST3K Mantra: Twilight has to frequently do this in her Inner Monologue; it's a necessary survival mechanism for living with Pinkie.
• Mundane Utility: Princess Luna uses her powers over darkness and shadow to help Pinkie Pie set up a surprise party.
• No Indoor Voice: Princess Luna is still trying to break the habit of continuous use of the Royal Canterlot Voice. And if she's to be believed, before Luna's exile, Celestia's Royal Canterlot Voice was even louder.
  • And keep in mind, No Indoor Voice is Luna's default. When she intentionally yells...
• Offscreen Teleportation: Twilight gets to experience this firsthand when Pinkie drags her along to Sweet Apple Acres in her own way.
• One True Threesome: The Cutie Mark Crusaders.
• Opposites Attract: Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle.
• Order vs. Chaos: Twilight and Pinkie Pie. It's perhaps best illustrated when they try their hooves at hoofblade fencing, a sport that Twilight mastered the rules of back in Canterlot. All of Pinkie's technique was learned from movies, which is almost nothing like real fencing. Twilight, reasoning that they're just doing it for fun, decides to throw all the formal fencing rules out the window, and Pinkie, no longer constrained by having to keep track of a complicated ruleset, proceeds to wipe the floor with her.
• Playing with Fire: Sweetie Belle's magic has the unfortunate tendency to set whatever she's manipulating on fire, in a similar manner to Seamus Finnegan.
• Polyamory: The Cutie Mark Crusaders.
  • Luna later suggests this as a resolution to the Love Triangle between Pinkie, Twilight, and Celestia.
• P.O.V. Sequel: Some chapters serve as this to other chapters. For example, the Crusaders visit the library in Chapter 12; Chapter 16 begins at this point but from Twilight's point of view.
• Relationship Upgrade: Rarity and Fluttershy, eventually. Rainbow Dash and Applejack already did this before the story started.
  • Twilight and Pinkie Pie are an unusual variant on the trope. Pinkie concludes that their present arrangement as Friends with Benefits can no longer work now that they're actually starting to have genuine romantic feelings for each other, so she immediately heads over to the library to break up with Twilight. Twilight had just realized that she was falling in love with Pinkie and is absolutely crushed, but almost immediately Pinkie knocks on the door again and asks Twilight out to dinner. Pinkie's reasoning is that you can't ask someone to be your fillyfriend when you're already dating them.
• Really Gets Around: Princess Luna, of all ponies, and much to her sister's consternation.
• Red Baron: Posey is referred to in reverent whispers as Wildflower.
• Rube Goldberg Device: Twilight builds a pie-flinging device with 112 distinct parts.
  Pinkie Pie: “This is way more work than I normally put into pranking, Twilight.”
  Twilight Sparkle: “If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right! Now get me that wrench, please.”
• Running Gag: Ponies almost walking in on Twilight and Pinkie.
  • Related to that, there's the fact that nopony has replaced the lock on the library door that Sweetie Belle melted.
  • Luna adding to her mental tally of the raise she plans to surprise Midnight Oil with every time his political savvy saves her bacon.
• Secretly Wealthy: Fluttershy. Turns out she's still getting royalty checks from her brief stint as a professional model. Not knowing what to do with all that money, (and apparently not understanding the point of banks), she's just been burying it around her property for so long that even she doesn't know how much there is.
• Shipper on Deck: Aloe, Lotus, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, and even Spike try to help with the maneuvering to get Rarity and Fluttershy together.
  • Luna, meanwhile, is trying to set up Celestia with Twilight and Pinkie.
• Shout-Out: A whole flood of them when Twilight is trying to figure out what movie Pinkie's based her fencing style off of. She guesses The Knight of Mounte Crisco, The Mare In The Iron Mask, and Robin Hoof: Princess of Thieves. After the duel, Pinkie reveals that she'd been channeling The Princess Bridle.
  • The title of Chapter 25 is "Let's Not Go to Canterlot (It is a Silly Place)".
• The Shrink: Princess Luna displays a great deal of psychological insight which she uses to help Twilight and Celestia sort out their unresolved relationship-related issues in a healthy way.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Angel and Rarity. Actually, Angel and anypony who isn't Fluttershy or Applejack.
• Spanner in the Works: When her relationship with Pinkie is at a very rough patch, Twilight is determined to not let on to Princess Celestia that anything is wrong. She forgot to take into account that of course Princess Luna would know about her nightmares.
• Spit Take: Celestia manages to inflict this on herself via talking to herself while drinking coffee.
• Staring Down Cthulhu: In a rare non-Fluttershy example, Applejack stands up to an enraged Celestia and gets her to back down.
• Supreme Chef: Rarity's mother.
  • Pinkie Pie even more so, since she isn't constrained by such petty concerns as the laws of physics. However, it seems that Pinkie's supremacy only applies to baked goods, since when she and Celestia (who hasn't been in a kitchen in six hundred years) try their hooves at making pasta, it doesn't go nearly as well.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Rarity delivers a very cathartic one to Silver Lining after the exhibition match.
• Tempting Fate: Luna almost makes the mistake of asking if it could get any worse, but Rarity is Genre Savvy enough to stop her before she can finish the statement.
• Third Wheel: Scootaloo briefly wonders where she fits in her friendship dynamic with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle after the latter two have a Big Damn Kiss. They end up becoming a One True Threesome.
• Time Skip: In the final chapter of Green, the period between Rarity and Fluttershy's engagement and their wedding is entirely jumped over. The first couple chapters of The Folly of Princesses includes Luna and Middy discussing things that happened in the world during that time, including Luna battling the Kaiju Yongling and Middy's belated honeymoon.
• Time Travel: Things Pinkie Pie isn't allowed to do anymore, for the sake of the fabric of the universe.
• Too Much Information
  Rarity's Inner Monologue: There can be no greater horror than finding out too much about your mother’s sex life.
• Tranquil Fury: Prince Blueblood manages to make Fluttershy angry beyond New Fluttershy levels, to the point where she enters a state of chilling calm that would terrify anypony less inebriated than Blueblood at that point. It's possibly the scariest thing Rarity's ever seen.
• Unexpected Character: Of course a story focusing on Fluttershy would prominently feature Angel Bunny, but did anyone expect he'd be a viewpoint character?
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: When she was a filly, Twilight had a Precocious Crush on Princess Celestia, and got her a Hearts and Hooves Day card and a box of chocolates to tell her. Celestia, not realizing Twilight meant anything by it, laughed at how adorable it was, unintentionally hurting Twilight's feelings. Fast-forward to the present, and Princess Luna deduces that this is the underlying source of Twilight's insecurities that is sabotaging her relationship with Pinkie Pie, and that Celestia is the only one who can set things right. Unfortunately, when Luna tells Celestia her conclusions, Celestia has a Love Epiphany, but by this point Twilight's heart belongs to Pinkie Pie, and so she pulls an I Want My Beloved to Be Happy and decides that the only thing she can do is help Twilight and Pinkie mend their relationship.
• Victorious Childhood Friend: Rarity was the second real friend Fluttershy ever made, after Rainbow Dash.
• Wedding Finale: Fluttershy and Rarity get their wedding in the final chapter.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: In Chapter 28, Princess Luna gives a heartbroken Twilight Sparkle an epic pep talk, revealing how much the Princess of the Night admires her resolve and confidence.