I’m glad you finally got around to watching it! I stopped watching new episodes as they were coming out around season 6, but would still catch up occasionally until about midway through season 7, where I’ve been stuck for a while. This seems like as good an impetus as any to make it up to the end of season 8.
One thing worth mentioning about fanfiction—which I originally read from Bad Horse but couldn’t find the original source—is that one benefit ponyfic has over other source materials is that you can write basically any story in the Equestria universe, enabling fanfic ‘about people’ rather than, say, ‘about wizards’ or ‘about vampires’ or ‘about ninjas’ or so on. I could more easily find his claim that fimfiction is just better than other fanfiction sites, from a UI perspective.
But why would that be an advantage exclusive to MLP? One could say the same about the Star Wars universe, for example (and indeed, there is a lot of Star Wars fanfiction out there).
I was thinking more of Harry Potter: it’s similar in that we have a pervasively magical/fantasy universe in which the main characters often are engaged in adventures and are special or elevated in various ways, but there’s enough worldbuilding that you can easily imagine writing a fanfic simply about ordinary everyday life (eg about a Ministry of Magic clerk struggling with goblin negotiations or Ollivander experimenting with wand R&D tweaks—“I have not failed 100 times, I have discovered 100 ways to not process unicorn hair for wands”). The Potterverse is entirely flexible enough to let you write almost any story you want—just set it among muggles, or in America, if you need to. Even J.K. Rowling does it… That doesn’t seem like a major driver of HP fanfics, though. And the MLP fics I’ve personally read do tend to draw heavily on the main characters or at least fantasy or genre tropes (eg that one based on Death Note, or the isekai Myou’ve got to be kidding). One counterexample that comes to mind is Twilight fics which discarded all of the vampire stuff entirely, and that niche spawned 50 Shades of Grey, but I never would’ve heard of that niche if not for 50 Shades, of course, so maybe it’s not the best example. If we sampled fimfiction.net randomly (whether weighting by work, chapter, words, or pageviews), would we really come up with a lot of MLP fanfics which weren’t either very based on MLP adventure/fantasy plot or based ‘on wizards’ or ‘about vampires’ or ‘about ninjas’? I’m doubtful.
(I agree that from what I’ve used of it, fimfiction.netdoes seem a lot better technically than fanfiction.net, which certainly can’t hurt. That thing must be running on 30 year old code by now… and I’ve always been irritated by their dumb little tricks like CSS for disabling copy-paste.)
This is worth reading for the excellent review of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
At https://www.gwern.net/MLP specifically.
I’m glad you finally got around to watching it! I stopped watching new episodes as they were coming out around season 6, but would still catch up occasionally until about midway through season 7, where I’ve been stuck for a while. This seems like as good an impetus as any to make it up to the end of season 8.
One thing worth mentioning about fanfiction—which I originally read from Bad Horse but couldn’t find the original source—is that one benefit ponyfic has over other source materials is that you can write basically any story in the Equestria universe, enabling fanfic ‘about people’ rather than, say, ‘about wizards’ or ‘about vampires’ or ‘about ninjas’ or so on. I could more easily find his claim that fimfiction is just better than other fanfiction sites, from a UI perspective.
But why would that be an advantage exclusive to MLP? One could say the same about the Star Wars universe, for example (and indeed, there is a lot of Star Wars fanfiction out there).
I was thinking more of Harry Potter: it’s similar in that we have a pervasively magical/fantasy universe in which the main characters often are engaged in adventures and are special or elevated in various ways, but there’s enough worldbuilding that you can easily imagine writing a fanfic simply about ordinary everyday life (eg about a Ministry of Magic clerk struggling with goblin negotiations or Ollivander experimenting with wand R&D tweaks—“I have not failed 100 times, I have discovered 100 ways to not process unicorn hair for wands”). The Potterverse is entirely flexible enough to let you write almost any story you want—just set it among muggles, or in America, if you need to. Even J.K. Rowling does it… That doesn’t seem like a major driver of HP fanfics, though. And the MLP fics I’ve personally read do tend to draw heavily on the main characters or at least fantasy or genre tropes (eg that one based on Death Note, or the isekai Myou’ve got to be kidding). One counterexample that comes to mind is Twilight fics which discarded all of the vampire stuff entirely, and that niche spawned 50 Shades of Grey, but I never would’ve heard of that niche if not for 50 Shades, of course, so maybe it’s not the best example. If we sampled fimfiction.net randomly (whether weighting by work, chapter, words, or pageviews), would we really come up with a lot of MLP fanfics which weren’t either very based on MLP adventure/fantasy plot or based ‘on wizards’ or ‘about vampires’ or ‘about ninjas’? I’m doubtful.
(I agree that from what I’ve used of it, fimfiction.net does seem a lot better technically than fanfiction.net, which certainly can’t hurt. That thing must be running on 30 year old code by now… and I’ve always been irritated by their dumb little tricks like CSS for disabling copy-paste.)