To all members: Do you have a piece of work that you want to introduce or pimp? Add it to the folder! But of course, since we're being all smarmy and smart here, why not tell us a little about the piece you added?

If you're going to add a piece, drop it in the group folder, and give us an explanation HERE to your direction and what you were going for. Perhaps in that, others can comment on how effective that was and how well it was pulled. Also, knowing about the motivations and inspiration behind writing the fic as well can be just as fun as the fic itself. So tell us all about what you're darkly proud of!

Don't hesitate to drop someone else's work in as well!

OK here we go. This is piece was so dark that everyone who read it was like "wth is wrong with you?"
I wanted to write a grim dark about applejack because she doesn't have much of a creepy pasta.
I pulled from the dark side of American history so if you get offended by this one in any way I don't blame you. For some reason everyone who favorites this story is black. at least the ones who commented are.
Anyway here's the story http://www.fimfiction.net/story/58786/1/hanging-by-a-stem/hanging-by-a-stem i wrote this for nightmare night. There is no hardcore gore, but writing this one hurt me a little inside.

I usually don't do this, since it feels a little like thumbs-upping your own work, but since the thread impores me to, I'll drop Kaleidoscope in here.

I can't really say much about it without spoiling it, but it was one of those pieces that ran on pure, unleaded inspiration, sketchily reinforced by a plan written two weeks prior and then set aside until the mood was right. Personally, I didn't even think about the 'dark' aspect of it; it was just an idea I'd had that happened to be dark. I wanted a lot of things out of Kaleidoscope, and, by and large, I got most of them; what I wanted most of all was to make something that managed to have a lot of subtle things running in the undercurrents for people to find. From people's reactions, it would appear that I accidentally created an enjoyable piece whilst I was doing so.

604057
Well, considering that was the piece that made me invite you... I attest this one is a good one. =D

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/72117/three-wishes
I always like the concept of Fate. I don't know why.
Three Wish Folklore archetypes are commonly perfect. In movies, books, whatever... they're perfect. Each wish works however they want, and the antagonist always wins. I wanted something more realistic.

What if the Antagonist DID win, and the wishes were still perfect, but for all the wrong reasons?
I'm not talking about nitpicky lawyer genies who go through every word you say, I'm talking about interpretation.

I wanted the last wish to have a bit of negative space in it.

In this story I've spent 4 chapters building up a back story in a style I hope to be similar to the show so that, when I release the 5th chapter, it's all a bit more meaningful when the perfect world comes crumbling down. I've enjoyed putting some foreshadowing of darker things to come in these so-far light-hearted chapters. So far there has been one comment identifying some of the foreshadowing, but their guess as to what might happen was incorrect. Feel free to speculate if you'd like to give it a read...

King of Chaos. A story which I have taken to calling 'A Dark Comedy'. It's an alt universe where Discord rules as king of Equestria, after defeating Celestia and Luna during the chaos wars 3000 years ago.
As one would expect from a fic with Discord, there is a lot of inherrent humour in it—from Twilight turning her horn into an orange, to the rearanging castle, various gags pulled off by both Pinkie and Discord and so forth. But scratch beneath the surface and you see a very dark world. Everypony is little more than a slave to Discords whims, toys before an immortal god. Celestia was trapped inside the mirrorworld, Luna was turned into a shadow and Cadance was forced to dance the cancan for a hundred years. In the current story arc, after an offhand comment Discord is now forcibly marrying Twilight against her will.
Everypony other than Discord is compleatly powerless to stop him from doing what he wants, and he has little care for concepts such as 'consequences' or 'responsibility'.

Well, I like stories that make you think, especially if they're really twisted and horrific. One day I had an idea for a story, and I nursed that in my mind for several weeks until I had finally wrought out a fittingly dark story idea: "What really is in a name?" This was The Name Game. If you too like to have stories that turn over in your mind, try this one out.

I wrote this in an attempt to harness my "dark and spooky" side. Although I don't really go to that side anymore, at least the story still turned out good.

Shameless self-promotion thread? Yes, please!

Researcher Twilight

So, what originally started out as a direct-novelization of the Ask Researcher Twilight Tumblr blog, has taken on a life of its own and decided to go off on a tangent and do its own thing.

Where the blog just jumps straight into the insanity, the story I'm writing rolls back chronologically to well before that, giving a detailed account of Twilight's very slow, painful decent into her obsession-fueled madness. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes here than what the Tumblr story delves into, and I think these revelations into the background work well to 'set the stage' for the truly dark portions of the story later on.

At this point the story has deviated so far from the 'source material' as it were, I wish I would've titled it something else altogether. Not to say that it's bad (because it is really good), but the plot-line of the Tumblr is extremely disjointed and rather hollow (like so many of them are), probably mostly due to its original nature as an 'ask blog'. So I took the liberty of creating a huge story around it, with conspiracies, insanity, and death.

I'm rambling...
Yeah, so give it a spin, you might like it... or hate it, it's definitely not for everyone and you won't hurt my feelings if it's not your cup of tea.

P.S. If anyone would be willing to do a review of the currently posted chapters (the story is about 1/3 complete) it would be greatly appreciated to get some critical feedback on this thing.

I'm not sure what kind of dark genre my story fits in but I'll try to explain it

Dreams of Broken Promise

My story is about Discords slow descent from relative good guy into his more chaotic self. The reason i classify it as dark is due to the events that take place throughout. Next chapter i write will delve into racism and that touchy subject. Certain aspects of character are touched upon, such as revenge, hate and later madness. 'Bout half way done and just about ready to write some more. So yeh give it a try and see how well it fits the dark context.

P.S. I enjoy creative feedback, so feel free to tell me how to improve or anything of that sort

Here we go;

A few months ago, I put up a fic entitled Lethe, to what I would consider a small, somewhat vocal, chorus of praise. In my own, untried, untested appraisal, it's a damn good story, despite its many rough edges.

Lethe takes place over a few days, roughly six years after FiM. The majority of action is concentrated in the Everfree Forest, dealing primarily with memory loss and identity. At 32,000 words, it is much, much smaller than the ongoing continuation, The Moon Also Rises.

I consider these stories to be rooted in, if not explicitly, Dark. While not specifically dealt with in Lethe, the original inspiration for these stories is the concept of the Veil. Without spoiling anything, the Veil represents an example of how far we might go to protect ourselves, and those around us.

I am still working on this, and have committed to regular, weekly updates. Fair warning, I am sitting on 80,000 words, and the end isn't even in sight. But if you like a huge scale, upwards of ten POVs, a focus on character development, and complex plot-lines, give me a try.

/blatant self-promotion

These are also Crossover/Alt-U, set in Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. If you don't know what the Cosmere is, go buy Elantris, Warbreaker and all four Mistborn books right now. Mistborn especially fits the theme of this group exceptionally well, and I highly recommend everything he's written.

Here's my fic: Omega

Inspired by Fallout: Equestria and End of Ponies, Omega takes place not in a post-apocalyptic Equestria, but rather in the world outside of Equestria. Due to the history I've developed for said world (which I won't detail here because that's part of the mystery of it), the Outer World as it's called, its civilization developed in an entirely different way from that of Equestria's. Where ponies are peace-loving and harmonious, the denizens of the Outer World are selfish and brutal. It's a tough life out there, and they're tough people.

To summarize the general feel, I'd say... take Fallout: Equestria, remove the post-apocalyptic setting, keep the general mindset of the society, tone down the crazy just a bit, turn up the sociopathy/disregard for life some, and then move it outside of Equestria.

If I had to put it into any one category of the dark ones you listed, I'd say it's dark in the psychological way the most, as the protagonist is steadily changed from a simple pony into something more ruthless. There's also some comic relief, but is dark comedy.

Also, they don't get to the Outer World until chapter five. That's where the dark really starts.

Gutterloo

Steeped in the works of Lovecraft, King, Lansdale, Glukhovsky, and Serling, I have known for the length of my life that dark stories are the most appealing variety of literary works to capture and hold my attention. Unlike so many, my stories are nearer, in comparison, to the old Twilight Zone episodes in which it's not the blood and violence, but the story and plot twists that make the fiction interesting. Many authors, using the term loosely, believe that simply showing scenes of brutality and extreme harm are what make a story great. I find this approach to hold literary value about as well as an anvil floats. We haven't delved into any of the Heroic Journey that Campbell identified, or the mythological theories and practices that have shaped human storytelling since cavemen drew on walls.

Freud and Jung pioneered the concepts of psychology through mythology. What symbols represent and how they reflect upon the people who created the story. Our minds are far more creative, inventive, and susceptible to the symbols we have created than we realize, and undergoing analysis, we can find that truly good stories follow the tenants of certain theories. What we get is the framework that all literature, movies, games, and oral tradition are made of. Therefore, fiction that has nothing to do with these ideas are bared and picked clean of their "plots". THis is also the reason that the feature page is a sickening place to venture as about 70% of the stories being displayed are masturbatory fantasies with no literary value, cop-outs that display the newest video game mixed with ponies, or the dime-a-dozen recycled HIE fics.

This being said, there are a great many good stories with much dedication and hard work that gets overlooked. THis site harbors the truly talented as well as those who find writing to be a form of relieveing their sexual tensions.

So, in my stories you will find concepts of human nature, heroic journey, and mythology. They reside under the surface and require some critical thinking. With thise being said, Gutterloo is the first story I am going to drop and promote.

Gutterloo is a tragic story, we all know this. Scoots gets a lot of ill treatment from us. She represents the hero in many stories, finding her call to the path and coming home with the elixir after a typically maturing adventure. This story foregoes many of such steps and moves more towards the mythological pyschology. Scootaloo is all of us. She fears her own demise, struggling in the cold alleyways to overcome that which stalks us all. Death. Her sword and shield are her friends and her dreams. Scootaloo is not a quitter and faces a much grittier world than that of her friends. She struggles on a daily basis to see the morning sun rise once more, another day added to her life. Hers is a lonesome world where meals are scarce and the basic luxuries of warmth, comfort, and family are abandoned. Like us all, our eventual mortality lurks behind our conscious minds and slowly changes us. The acceptance of our ends is truly our greatest journey. Many go mad or fight the natural end instead of accepting what must happen. (Looka t any Hollywood actress who was known for their beauty after they turn 30. The puffy lips and plastic surgery gives testament to their inability to cope with their fears.) Scootaloo has a terrible time but in the hour of her finality understands how natural her premature demise is and recieves a blessing as the sands of her hourglass trickle away. Hope you enjoy it.

Let's talk about inspiration for a moment. Inspiration, for me, strikes out of nowhere. I find it interesting to see how and where it strikes. Usually it shows itself out of the blue and completely unrelated. A single word is thought of and maybe it rhymes with another and from there you have a story. Harlan Ellison is one of the, if not best, short story authors. He has written over 1500 short stories and was the writer of the rebirth of The Twilight Zone series in the 90's. It didn't last long, but it wasn;t due to bad plots. Ellison is one of the more notorious 20th century writers and can literally knock out a well crafted and thought provoking short story in less than an hour. Once, as proof, he was being interviewed by a radio show and during the hour he waited to be interviewed, sat down and wrote a complete story to read over the air. Most people can't do this. (Not of quality anyway. Anyone can sit down and write drek in an hour.)

For most of us, we have to wait for something to set our thoughts into motion. Some writers get by with writing a specific type of story and then making the variations different. Such as, a love story between X and Y. In all stories X and Y will be shipped together by the end, or already be shipped at the beginning, but they will endure some difficulty along the way. THe only variation is the difficulty. This time; an earthquake, next time; maybe families, the time after; one of them is sick. Others create a couple quality pieces of work and then many stories that are just exercises, churning low quality jumbles of words that might resemble a single plot device. There's nothing wrong with these, but they show the struggles in creating unique stories with individuality. For my own writing, I simply go into periods of hiatus while I wait on a new story idea.

I think many of us have specific places or emotions that help us churn out ideas. For me, it's the shower. I have 8 stories on this site and 6 were thought up in the shower. Something about the relaxing heat and nothing to do but think seems to fill my head with free floating fragments that sometimes jolts an idea. Withering Bloom is no exception to this.

Withering Bloom is a fun little story. It's very simple and easily predictable, but knowing doesn't take away from the story. This story is about maturation. Sometimes we grow up fast and hard, a single event breaking the confines of childhood. The happy set that we travel through every day, happy little trees and flowers painted on its plyboard construction assuring us that life is beautiful. Until it falls apart, revealing the world for what it really is; hard and cold. This story is how Apple Bloom discovered the shadows that stalk just behind the lush greenery of our personal oases. Check it out.