My Little Pony - How Equestria Was Made

You may know the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. After all it's been making quite a sensation on the internet, taking 4chan itself by storm, spawning countless artwork and fan fiction. A fan of the show at 21 years of age, I'm a "Brony", as they call us. Detractors call us gay, but we laugh at them. Honestly, Friendship is Magic is a great show. Contrarily to the previous generation, where the characters did little more than mindlessly partying, FiM has excellent plots (for the fans reading this: no, not plots in that meaning), good characterisation, humor, even villains that occasionally (I'm looking at you, Discord) are creepier than you would expect from a show about magical ponies, and fandom makes it all complete!

Yet now I have stumbled upon something that unnerved me greatly about it. I can't find an explanation for it. It's hard to dismiss it as the work of some prankster because it looks like a tremendous amount of effort would have gone into creating something like this to no great payoff. The alternative? I don't even want to think about it.

What I have found was located in the episode "Cutie Mark Chronicles" I have downloaded. The link has mysteriously disappeared soon after I had downloaded it, so don't bother looking, you won't find it. All other episodes downloaded from the same source seem perfectly legit.

As for "Cutie Mark Chronicles", it too seemed perfectly legit as I watched, up until the point when Pinkie Pie usually begins talking about her cutie mark. When she does, instead of cutting to her story of life on a rock farm and how Rainbow Dash's Rainboom made her discover her passion for partying, it cuts to something that should not have been in a cartoon at all.

Live-action, of all things. The quality of the image is good, but too shaky to be a professional movie. It's a battlefield. On Earth, or what appears to be Earth. Soldiers, humans, firing at an enemy, offscreen. There are explosions (from rockets?), detonations like landmines, decimating their ranks. Most disturbingly some of the soldiers' heads litterally explode, like in that Scanners movie, spraying blood everywhere. At first I kind of assumed some sort of gun does that, but I was swiftly proven wrong. Screams of pain and horror ring in the air.

Puzzled, I assumed that the file was somehow mixed with a war movie in the process, but no, that would have been too simple. The camera turned around to show the enemy, zoomed in. My heart skipped a beat or five.

Unicorns, by the dozens. Their horns are glowing. The evidence is there, they are at the origin of this massacre. Someone in the herd is generating a force shield to keep attacks at bay, apparently, since not one bullet makes it to the unicorns. Some are pelting the enemies with magical bolts. How could I have taken those for rockets?

This may sound silly, an army getting massacred by something out of a children's cartoon. But trust me, there is nothing funny in that video. The unicorns, I should precise, are also all live and three-dimensional. But they don't look like actual real life ponies. They look wrong. They look like ponies from FiM, but in live-action. Shaped like itself? But that's the best explanation I can offer. Same form of the snout, same oversized eyes. This is a lot more disturbing than it sounds like on paper. In a cartoon stylized proportions look cute, in real life those same proportions become disturbing, like a travesty against common sense and all we know and hold to be logical and true.

By now my windpipe felt crushed, like one of the beasts themselves held me in a telekinetic hold. I could hardly breathe, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Who had created something like this? And why? Those unicorns looked so real. The fear on the soldiers' faces, the explosions blowing them to bits and their heads being reduced to bloody chunks, it all looked real. I remember watching it, hypnotized, and muttering to myself: "computer graphics, computer graphics, computer graphics..." like a mantra. To this day, I tell myself this was computer graphics, even though it looked more real than any computer graphics I've heard of. Because the alternative is... what is it, exactly? I was watching a video from a parallel realm? A realm a lot like ours but where humans and magical ponies existed together? The idea is preposterous.

Preposterous! Laughable! Ridiculous!

...yet, so oddly plausible.

The damn video was not finished with me. I cannot remember everything I saw on that tape. The battle was no longer shown, but there was more footage, and some still pictures. There was a human head being crushed under a hoof, splattering brain matter all over the pavement like an overly ripe fruit. There was a child, a little girl, gruesomely impaled on a long, wickedly sharp unicorn horn like a shish-kebab. Her face showed horror and sadness alike. Perhaps this little girl had once loved unicorns, played with dolls of them. Now she was facing one first-hand, suffering an atrocious death at the hands of the magical creature. Footage again: a pegasus swooping high into the sky, carrying a man between its legs. Moments later, the man hurtles down from the skies, screaming in abject terror just before turning into a pancake on the ground.

For the grand finale, the camera starts showing the sun. For whatever reason, the sun is way too close to the Earth, looming, almost filling the skies. The silhouette of an alicorn appears in the sky, for a mere second or two.

And then the sun explodes, releasing a wave of fire. A hundred voices in unison start screaming in agony as the intolerable heat washes over them, to be suddenly silenced as the footage mercifully and finally ends.

I don't know what to make of this.

The footage cuts back to Pinkie Pie just as she says her famous line.

"And that's how Equestria was made."

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