Anypony for a comedy about Twilight Sparkle causing the apocalypse?  Today’s story delivers.

Anypony for Doomsday?
[Comedy] [Slice of Life] • 11,613 words

“All unicorns build doomsday devices!” Those five words were words that Twilight Sparkle never expected to hear next to each other and in that specific order in a sentence.

King Sombra has returned, and upon discovering that Twilight Sparkle has not even considered building a doomsday device, has given her an ultimatum: Either she builds a device that has the sole purpose of destroying the world, or he starts defacing her books.

The clock is ticking: Will Twilight be able to get in touch with her inner mad science and save her imperiled reading material? More importantly, is she really destined to bring about the end of the world? Are unicorns really nothing more than a cosmic reset button, poised to bring a halt to all existence at a moment’s notice even in the face of past evidence suggesting that they’re not very good at it? Will Twilight succeed where all others have presumably failed? Does she even want to?

Join in as we follow the journey to answer the question on minds the world over: “Anypony for Doomsday?”

FROM THE CURATORS: If there’s anything rarer around here than all of us agreeing, it’s all of us agreeing on comedy — and yet this story scored a unanimous approval for exactly that reason.  “I was laughing from just the description,” Soge said, while AugieDog called the story “just plain full of chocolate-sprinkled giggles.”  Present Perfect upped the ante: “I cannot remember the last time I read a story so serious about being silly.  It’s gleefully goofy, wonderfully wacky, and quite a larf indeed.”

But if this fic is serious about its comedy, it’s a special sort of seriousness that toes up to the line of the Random tag.  “This is a purely ridiculous story, one that’s perfectly willing to destroy its own internal consistency, to casually toss aside its very premise, or to unapologetically break the fourth wall,” Chris said.  “But if there’s one thing a cracky fic must absolutely be, it’s consistently funny, and there is precisely zero dead space to be found here.”  Present Perfect seconded that: “This wastes no words not being funny. The running gags (doorbell!) are funny, the sudden status quo changes are funny, the premise is funny, everything’s funny.”  And AugieDog drew comparisons to the classics.  “This made me think of Mark Twain’s line about the weather in New England: ‘In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours,'” he said.  “There were so many chuckles per column inch in this story that when I hit something that didn’t work for me, I knew that I just had to keep going to find something that did.”

It wasn’t just the joke density that impressed us, but how many of them landed.  “This fic is golden,” Soge said, “with many different and clever running jokes that always seem to work, like the constant weather openings, the naming conventions, and the editing mistakes.”  Horizon specifically called those out as well: “The jokes about editing mistakes are an example of the comic touch that makes this story exemplary.  The first time I saw one, I disliked it as a cheap fourth-wall cop-out — but it kept pushing on with the gag, and owned it so thoroughly and so creatively it broke through into something hilarious.”

Read on for our author interview, in which PhycoKrusk discusses exciting underwear, deserving joy, and lion/eagle errors.

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