Fanfic / Sunset Shimmer Is Mad About Everything

Sunset Shimmer is MAD About Everything is an Alternate Universe My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic by Justice3442. It retells the events of the season 6 premiere, with Sunset Shimmer, having ascended to alicorn status after the events of Friendship Games, appearing as an additional character. Initially, she just snarks about weird aspects of the episode, but the fanfic goes in a very different direction from the episode thanks to the mere inclusion of Sunset's presence.

As is common of Justice3442's works, expect a lot of off-the-wall humor, Lampshade Hanging, and Mood Whiplash ahoy as Sunset tries to help everypony with the new baby and help Starlight reconnect with her friend... as well as deal with her own personal problems.

It can be found on Fimfiction here.

Tie-in stories include

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-jig

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

A Newspaper Solves Everypony's Problem

Some White Powder Solves One Pony’s Problems

The Beard with a Jerk-Ass Hanging off of It

the Official Chronological Timeline, as confirmed by Justice 3442 can be found here

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Tropes:

• Adaptation Expansion: Has several of the original story beats of the original episode, but is much longer, and spends a lot of time dealing with Sunset reconciling with Celestia and Cadance.
• Brick Joke: At the beginning of the story, Pinkie's made sure everybody has had their dose of brain pills.
• Chaos Architecture: Trains^note Sure, train cars are supposed to be rearranged as needed, but not while there are passengers aboard.
  Sunset’s brow suddenly wrinkled as she turned to stare at the train. “HOW IS THE CAR NOW AT THE FRONT OF TRAIN?!” She screamed wrathfully. “THERE WAS ONE CAR WITH A BLUE ROOF! ONE! WE WERE IN IT, IT WAS AT THE BACK OF THE TRAIN, NOW IT’S AT THE FRONT!” She began to point at the other cars on the train. “AND NOW THERE’S ANOTHER PASSENGER CAR WITH A BLUE ROOF ON THE TRAIN AND THE RED CAR IS AT THE BACK! AM I THE ONLY ONE SEEING THIS?!”
• Coincidental Broadcast: The Harmony Table in Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-jig because of the tiny dog inside of the table.
  “Ugggh…” Sunset uttered. “Look, maybe the table just thinks Starlight could use some emotional support or something! I mean, Twilight can go!”
  Suddenly, Twilight’s cutie mark appeared above Canterlot castle.
  “Yes!” Twilight exclaimed enthusiastically.
  A red circle with a slash through it appeared over Twilight’s cutie mark.
  “No!” Twilight cried angrily.
  Sunset peered at the table suspiciously. “You know… For a table, it’s really tracking our conversation pretty well.”
• Covert Pervert: Fluttershy really doesn't want to risk offending anypony, but should a topic come up she has some input on...
  • That Twilight happens at the time to be running large-scale and comprehensive sex studies might not quite qualify her. That she's violating double-blind protocol to be in the participant group doing most of the kinkier stuff, however...
• Cutting the Knot: Starlight and Sunburst end up confessing their dark secrets MUCH sooner than the original episode.
• Deadpan Snarker: Sunset has a lot of these types of reactions.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Heavily played with in the 'verse as a whole:
  • The Order of Things is a pastiche of Silent Hill 2's Dog Ending and The Wizard of Oz, in which the Harmony Table is revealed to be controlled by a tiny (and rather incompetent and crotchety) dog named Order
  • It's strongly hinted in The Beard with a Jerk-Ass Hanging off of It that the Big Bad is Star Swirl the Bearded's goat, who happens to be Grogar.
• Doomsday Clock: Pinkie uses her grin as one for a time. It's even creepier in context.
• Enfant Terrible: In flashbacks, filly Sunset is clearly pure-hearted, a bit sadistic and yet adorable. She's doing the right thing - just in the wrong ways and acting too far ahead of her maturity and foresight - so often it becomes clear why Celestia never quite reined her in enough at any point.
• Everybody Must Get Stoned: The entirety of "The Beard with a Jerk-Ass Hanging off of It" is an exercise in this trope. It turns out immediately that the other five ponies making "The Pillars" tolerate Star Swirl by staying permanently drunk, and most of the existing cast soon decides to follow this example. Over the course of the story, most though not all of the sober ponies switch off roles to get drunk for a while, Sunset gives up and takes the Pillars out to reach previously undreamt-of levels of inebriation, the eventual celebration party is not a dry one, and ponies do a number of things they might never have gotten to sober. (The primary story has already established there exist any number of unicorn spells designed to produce instant sobriety, and the cast has learned these are good to know, so there's a greater fluctuation in level than is normally seen with the trope.)
  • The primary story itself is a downplayed example. Pinkie Pie mentions baking "brain pills" into everyone's food at the beginning, and at the very end, their true nature is revealed:
    “You said it, Flim!” replied another stallion’s voice. “Ponies just can’t get enough of these brain pills.”
    “Right you are, Flam! Too bad they actually impede intelligence and merely being around them, much like we are right now, makes a pony uncontrollably exposition every little thing they’re doing!”
• Fun with Acronyms: At least two examples:
  • Sunset, Starlight, and Spike form their own mutual support group, called the Parents are Missing Society. (Sunset seems to realize the other two couldn't get the problem and goes light on it.)
  • Twilight dubs her first friendship lesson checklist for Starlight the Anytime Workshop Friendship-based Utility List. (And is the only oblivious one.)
• Gone Horribly Right: Any problem as solved by Starlight without the input of anypony else. Her mind works in extremely straight lines and she's too focused to spot-check where she's going until she arrives. As an example, a typical Starlight solution to "I see a fire" is "1) Realize fires need air. 2) Spend as many years as it takes to work out a way to remove the entire planet's atmosphere to deny the fire its air. 3) Cast spell or fully implement solution. 4) Go back and see if the original fire's still there."^note In fact, removing the planet's atmosphere is the exact solution she suggests for the storm in chapter 17 of SSIMAE
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The premise of the story. Sunset has less of a Berserk Button and more of a Berserk Switchboard. She's slowly getting over it. Slowly.
• Heroic Resolve: Celestia has this to an unfathomable degree - it's what allowed her to continue functioning as the kingdom's ruler after banishing her sister to the moon, after all. When she tells Sunset that this is an important part of being a princess, Sunset responds by deconstructing it HARD - Sunset sees this is Celestia's biggest flaw, as she inadvertently forces this mindset onto everyone else around her. Since nopony else is capable of living up to her perfect ideal, and she herself refuses to show weakness for even a second, they all are bound to eventually suffer some form of mental breakdown as a result of the stress that comes in trying to please her.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Sunset ends up doing this a lot. Starlight, Spike, and even Celestia also get in on the act at various points in the story.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Sunset's is exaggerated from canon, explainable as the result of having your only parental figure setting an impossible example to live up to combined with enough worldly insight (Twilight inherited Sunset's old tower quarters, but not Sunset's rooms in the palace proper) to know early on she wasn't expected to just spend her life in study and research. As much as she always tended to megalomania, it was also an escape from stress in the form of a "leadership" role she could adequately play.
• Lack of Empathy: The difference between empathy and sympathy and their varying shades is a major source of characterization in this work (and the author's related ones). An example of the most obvious contrast scale:
  • Rarity is a basic, realistic take. She's intelligent, sensitive to social cues, and knows she may not be able to relate to another's experiences so tries to think the best of others when in doubt.
  • Sunset even in the pre-Everfree verse is a natural empath. She may wish you ill or just not care the slightest bit about your welfare, but she intuitively gets where you're coming from and how you see the world. It's noted that this can be a horrible gift when you're around friends and are too worked up to care what you're saying.
  • Twilight is the opposite: she totally cares about everypony, even strangers, and they're all instinctively predisposed to care back, but the mare has a shocking lack of empathy. All the feels, but she's the last one to consider that others have different worldviews and won't react the same way to everything that she would. Exaggerated from canon and used for comedic effect.
  • Starlight is a high-functioning near-sociopath. She is capable of believing that other beings are as real as she is. Almost all of the time. But she has trouble treating them that way. Social interaction is a labyrinth of actions with no consistent results. Even when she's trying her very best to play by the unspoken rules of society, her attempts to make anypony happy or satisfied tend towards looking for dialog trees or usable triggers.
• Mood Whiplash: Hoo boy. Chapters can go from funny, to sad, to heartwarming, and back to funny again in all sorts of ways.
• No Ontological Inertia: Averted. The Crystal Heart's restoration clears away the ice storm just as in canon, but in this story the effects of a prolonged freak blizzard are left behind and take a significant amount of time and effort to overcome. This is at least partially Starlight Glimmer's fault, since she used her own magic - boosted by a fit of drunken rage - to contain all of the snow and ice created by the storm into a super glacier that she unintentionally formed directly above the Imperial Palace.
• Off the Rails: Very quickly goes in a different direction from the original episode thanks to Sunset's presence.
• Only Sane Man: Subverted. Sunset tries to act as this but her poor temper and frequent bouts of Not So Above It All only mean that she can identify the madness around her, not be exempt from embracing it.
• Running Gag: Quite a few show up throughout the story.
  • Sunset's Leaning on the Fourth Wall moments where she points out various plot holes, Twilight's tendency of going Mr. Exposition on the Mane 6, artistic inconsistencies, and Pinkie's defiance of continuity and physics.
  • Sunset undergoing Cuteness Proximity for Flurry Heart - not because she is adorable (though she totally is), but because she is insanely powerful.
  • Sunset and Celestia both have a deeply ingrained habit of hiding from each other in the nearest available storage space whenever they get into an argument. This includes closets (cleaning or otherwise), wardrobes, cupboards, and pantries.
  • Pinkie is terrified that Flurry Heart will kill everyone.
  • Everypony seems to agree that Applejack's flanks are the best heavy object around to take cover behind.
  • In the human world, Sunset frequently gets triggered by small incidents that make her think she's still being persecuted for her time as an antagonist. These would be perfect moments for Twilight to give her some friendship advice, but Twilight is invariably distracted by some piece of human technology when they come around.
  • Applejack's countryisms become increasingly nonsensical as the story progresses.
  • Starlight's repeated and escalating demands that Sunburst be named a wizard. No, super wizard.
  • Sunset's never quite giving up on the idea that Shining Armor is the perfect father for her potential foal and that this can be arranged in a way everypony will be fine with. (Also, a significant subset of "everypony" noting how fine they are with it.)
  • Made into a Running Gag once there are more stories set in this timeline: Luna, the Dazzlings, and Oddjob immediately assuming that Sunset is Celestia's biological daughter (with the questions that brings up) and being disinclined to believe she's only adopted. (Not just for the cutie mark and alicornhood: the author takes pleasure in showing them as similar characters minus Celestia's greater age and practice keeping her mask up.)
  • Also a timeline-wide one: Various magical effects causing Idiot Ball, Exposition Ball, et cetera.
    Starlight Glimmer: Say, when do you think that strange curse the fake Hay-Burger King hit us with to make us converse in bizarrely specific sentences will wear off?
• Ship Tease: A LOT of these between Starlight and Sunburst.
• Shout-Out: Many examples.
  • Throughout the story, many quotes and references are made to Dragon Ball Z Abridged.
    • "Oh, crap baskets."
    • "Nothing, just... nostalgia."
    • Sunset referring to Sunburst's old nickname back in their CSGU days - Firecrotch.
  • While being ferociously cuddled by Flurry Heart, Pinkie describes her as some alien creature what hugs faces.
  • "Now, I’ve been asked to come and get you out of the closet again! Man, this is some crazy—" (Beat) Stuff.
  • Celestia's students have historically shown a disturbing pattern to want to solve all of their problems by blowing things up, but Twilight is the first to give her a reason she can't immediately rebut: as the size of the explosion increases, the number of problems it can't solve goes to zero!
  • The Map of Harmony being controlled by a tiny Shiba Inu named Order living inside of it and pulling a bunch of switches is a reference to the Silent Hill 2 joke ending and the Doge meme.
• Too Dumb to Live: Rainbow Dash fails to understand collateral damage.
  “Aw, man!” Rainbow Dash said in a disappointed tone. “I wanted to watch an epic alicorn smackdown!”
  Applejack raised an eyebrow. “You do realize if that happens, we’re all in the same train car, right?”
  “Well, yeah!” Rainbow Dash said. “Front row seats!”
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Discussed.
  Sunset was suddenly next to Rainbow Dash staring the pegasus down with a glare as fiery as her mane. “I will bleach your mane and tail in your sleep...” she said in an icy tone.
  Rainbow Dash leaned back a bit. “Whoa! I thought Twilight taught you about friendship and stuff!”
  “Friends threaten to deface each other in their sleep sometimes!”