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The Doom that Came to Tambelon
[Adventure] [Comedy] • 4,397 words

Starlight Glimmer. Trixie Lulamoon. Tempest Shadow. Three ponies that are definitely really great with foals. But there’s no way they’ll mess this up, right? They just have to keep Flurry Heart out of trouble for one night — what could happen in a couple hours?

FROM THE CURATORS: It’s always a pleasure to find stories which can successfully fuse the best parts of classic MLP and the newest canon.  “Here we have Grogar, goat villain extraordinaire from the original G1 series, spiriting Flurry Heart away to his banished city of Tambelon while she’s being babysat by Starlight, Trixie, and Tempest,” AugieDog said in his nomination. “And it’s one of the ding-dang funniest stories I’ve read on the site in quite some time.”  That sentiment was echoed repeatedly as the story sailed to a rare unanimous approval.  “This is absolutely hysterical — never once afraid to take pot-shots at the characters, or have them snipe at each other,” Present Perfect said, while FanOfMostEverything quipped: “Oh, this glorious bit of madness. … Horrible people doing horrible things in the funniest way possible, only in this case, they’re wonderfully horrible in canon. The three heroines (for a given definition of the term) play off of each other and the obstacles they face fantastically, and I always love seeing a serious villain facing silly heroes.”

But regardless of its silliness, there was a core of authenticity in the humor that drew widespread praise.  “It’s humor that’s the opposite of character destruction — the kind where an author says, ‘Let’s take how these characters are in the show, tighten the focus, and dial that up just a bit’,” AugieDog said.  Soge agreed: “It is a really funny comedy executed with great flair, and a sense of how to stretch the characterization just enough to avoid concerns of them being out-of-character, yet making all their actions as fun as possible.”  And Horizon loved its touch with details: “MagnetBolt has a master’s eye for extracting hilarity from the little quirks of the show.  Starlight’s solution to entering Limbo is priceless, as is Trixie’s reaction when Grogar rings the bell.”

That eye for detail extended throughout.  “It is full of delightful passages, to the point I would be hard pressed to pick a favourite,” Soge said, while Present Perfect appreciated its callbacks: “The G1 building material was handled really well, crafting a legendary Tambelon that lives and writhes and all that other good stuff, and yet is in no way safe from being skewered.”  All in all, as Horizon said, its exemplary humor made this stand out even among the author’s other major works: “The Witch of the Everfree would have been my go-to for a MagnetBolt feature, but this was hilarious start to finish, to the point where I had to awkwardly explain to my boss why I was grinning at my desk.”

Read on for our author interview, in which MagnetBolt discusses all-star zones, insufficient explosions, and Bowie anatomy.
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