End of Ponies
The End of Ponies is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic by "short skirts and explosions".
A horrible cataclysm has turned all of Equestria into a Wasteland of barren ash and twilight desolation. The Sun and the Moon have been destroyed. Everypony has died — including Princesses Luna and Celestia. But one pony miraculously survives; she is a lone wanderer, the last of her kind, surrounded by menacing creatures that hate her. She navigates the Wastes in an airship and scavenges off the blighted landscape to keep herself alive.
Then one day she meets an old companion who grants her a gift: the chance to go back in time to Pre-Cataclysm Equestria, when her friends were alive and well. How far will the last pony venture into these joyous days of Equestria, even if she fully knows that there is no way to change the horrible fate of everypony she loves?
- After the End
- Apocalypse How: Class 3. Excluding the protagonist, ponies have gone extinct.
- Bald of Awesome: Sort of... For survival purposes, the Protagonist shaved of her mane and tail hair off, but some of it remains. In later chapters, it's slowly starting to grow back.
- Broken Bird: The protagonist. Years of living in the Wastes have jaded her, and even her life before that, as a homeless orphan in Ponyville was tough. On the other hoof...
- Broken Ace: Years of living in the Wastes have given her a large repertoire of abilities, such as her engineering skills.
- Cool Airship: The protagonist owns one called "Harmony".
- Crapsack World: Goes without saying: there's no sun, no moon, almost all of the surface is blanketed with snow/ashes and inhabited by mindless beasts, etc.
- Doorstopper: As per the end of chapter twenty-four, The End of Ponies is longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. And it's still incomplete.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Referred to as "the Cataclysm"; discovering how it happened drives the plot from Chapter 5 onward. As of Chapter 14, the Cataclysm may also be called (or have something to do with) the Onyx Eclipse.
- Last of Her Kind: The protagonist.
- Late Arrival Spoiler: The description of the fanfic implied that time travel is involved in the story, but that doesn't come into play for the first few chapters. Other than that, the protagonist is Scootaloo and therefore a pegasus, and the "old companion" of hers mentioned in the description is Spike.
- Non Indicative Title: The titles of chapters 16-24 (the Pinkie Pie/Dredgemane arc) are all references to the titles of films, books and episodes of television shows, edited to include "Pinkie", "Pink", "Pinkamena" and/or "Pie". Any relation between these references and the contents of the chapters is not immediately obvious.
- Older and Wiser: Spike, thanks to his experiments with time travel, is 300 years older than in canon, even though only 25 years are stated to have passed since the time of the show. He serves as a mentor and ally to Scootaloo, and provides the means of her time travel.
- Scenery Porn: Pre-Cataclysm Equestria, to the protagonist, at first.
- Shout-Out: At one point, Pinkie Pie finds a book titled "Suis tsbd" (most likely from being Pinkie, she read the title upside down).
- Title Drop: The protagonist often refers to herself as the end of ponies, as she is the last one alive.