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@CogWeaver  
I guess that’s true. The whole “ultimate universe” thing is probably better suited to more visual medium. Unless someone is telling a story in a drastically different style, it’s really hard to be original with someone else’s characters, plots, and concepts in prose, even if you do have the goodwill of the original author.
 
It just interests me that, as a fandom, we’ve kinda accumulated all sorts of fanon about FIM (what the princesses are, the personality of this background pony, etc.) and I feel like it would be fun to distill it. Maybe it could be done with a multi-universe-hopping story, but I worry that a story like that wouldn’t be accessible to, say, a casual brony.
 
@RaineV1  
Yeah, sure. I mean, personally, bad futures never sit well with me because if it’s an alternate timeline, then that means it’s not the “real” future and the bad stuff that happens there can all be considered “non-canon. Whereas, if it is the true future of the universe, well, that’s pretty dark for the setting, certainly. But, considering FOE’s one of the most prolific fanfics, it would be cool to homage something from the stories in a hypothetical “ultimate fanfic universe.”

The only sensible way of doing it that I can see is if you did the whole “Magic Mirror: Multiverse” thing, where instead of just mixing the stories into one story that sort of has allusions and nods in the direction of the most popular fanfics (as pretty much most of the popular fanfics do that anyways in trying to be appealing to the fandom as a whole), you have a group of adventurers go through the AUs firsthand, sometimes just witnessing events from other fics and not derailing anything and only really being there to give commentary and/or another side of the events, all the way to sometimes causing havoc and completely derailing the original timeline a fic took from how its original author told it.  
Multiverse stories are most easily told when in the mindset of doing exploratory work in what others have already made than actually making up whole worlds and universes on the fly, though I very strongly recommend making original universes of your own than just playing off of the creativity of others and trying to call that ‘original’. As long as you pay credit where credit is due, it should be fine. But overall, I’d be careful when treading on the storylines of others. People can get fairly sensitive about that, no matter if the story you’ve written is actually good or not.
 
I personally have been toying around with this idea for a while, actually, though for me it doesn’t just stay in fandom, it would also cross over to other fandoms and the AUs within those fandoms. I’ve written a few first drafts of the first parts of the first adventures, but nothing really set in stone as of yet (aside from the main characters I want to use).  
Really, though, I’d just like to see this done by someone, doesn’t have to be me. I’d be more happy to read a multiversal story written by someone else than write one up myself. I just want to see it done.

It could be hilarious if done right.

I remember that something similar to this was tried before, which Doctor Whooves took Nyx into the future to what was supposed to be a utopia but something happening while they were traveling and the Fallout Equestria future happened instead.
 
I’d want to see the Fallout Equestria universe involved in it somehow (maybe a bad possible future world shown to the mane 6).

I love alternate-universe distillations of long-running franchises, boiling down its plot to key characters, events, concepts, etc. Justice League/Justice League Unlimited and The Spectacular Spider-Man are two examples that come to mind of shows that take the sprawling, often contradictory comic history of their characters and boil it down to a series of fantastic interwoven stories.
 
And surfing through FIMFiction made me think of a crazy (and possibly dumb) idea: what if there was a fanfic that attempted to distill all the fanon, OCs, AUs, etc. into a series of AU Fanfics? Kind of like a series of shoutouts and character-crossovers to various fanfics, but something still entertaining for a casual reader and fan of FIM. One arc could be a homage to one fic, another to another fic, several OCs could be combined into a single OC or Background Pony with a similar personality, etc. It would be written like reading through pages and pages of fanfics in a single page, taking the “best of” the MLP fandom’s works (while crediting their original creators, of course) and making it into a cohesive, streamlined fanfic.
 
So, if you were part of this, what fanfics or kinds of fanfics would you like to work into this “ultimate universe” fanfic? Post-apocalypse stories? Slice-of-life? Action-adventure stories? Fixfics? All of the above?