Time I uploaded an OC I wrote quite a lot of lore for, and one that plays a large role in my own internal headcanon: Mirthful; the Demon of Laughter.

In case you’re wondering, no he’s not actually a demon. Though some do believe he might have been possessed by one, he was simply a particularly infamous character back in his time and one that travellers would dread to be caught by on the open road. It would take the Pillars of Equestria to bring him down, and even then his legacy lived on a millennium past his own death. Both in the form of his own branch of magic, known as “Gigglemancy”, and the disciples he left behind to continue his work as a proud tradition, passed down the generations.

My main inspiration for Mirthful (apart from the fact that jesters look great and that I wanted to make a tickle-magic based character) is that I wanted to take the "Evil Clown" archetype in a different direction. Most examples in media are just sadistic creeps that torture or murder people because they find it funny, an overplayed trope and one that doesn’t really fit into the world of MLP.

I wanted to make a variant of that archetype that would work within the more light-hearted nature of the show. If Mirthful looks rather silly and non-threatening, that’s by design. I wanted him to still recognisable as a silly clown, but one that believes he has a higher purpose then himself. An end goal that he strives to attain by any means necessary, and it’s those four key words that serve as the root of his villainous behaviour. I believe the term for this kind of villain is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.

When drawing Mirthful, the main rule is that he should look and act goofy and fun, not threatening and sadistic. Even after losing his marbles, he still sees himself as a jester and his mission in life is to make ponies laugh, to make everypony laugh. He does this mostly by tickling them against their will, but hey…it works~

I’ll upload the story in parts on each picture.

Part Three: The Demon of Laughter

No pony was quite sure what exactly triggered it. Or why.

But on one fateful day, offering neither notice or reason, Mirthful did not show up to court for his usual performance. Instead, he made his way to the centre of the city, to make the citizens of Unicornia laugh…

…and laugh they did, thanks to the magic he had been working on, perfecting over the years. Scholars at the time believed it was some variant of the Hideous Laughter spell, but on a mass scale. While not deadly like the well-known version, everypony in the square was caught in the grasp of a fit of uncontrollable, hysteric fits of screeching laughter. Hundreds of ponies rolling and wriggling on the ground, feeling like hundreds of tiny feathers where tickling their bodies all over…

Something in Mirthful snapped. He was distraught by his inability to bring smiles to ponies who had none of their own. Soon it became determination, and later obsession…finally a single, uncompromising urge. He decided he would make them all smile, even if he had to do it by force.

That day is the moment scholars agree that Mirthful: Jester of the Royal Court of Queen Majesty of Unicornia died. In his stead was born Mirthful: The Demon of Laughter, as he later came to be called.

He became of founding father of his newly patterned 'school' of magic, which he aptly named 'Gigglemancy', a taboo art that has persisted through cult practice through the millennia even in spite of Celestia’s Extreme Prejudice. As for the Jester himself, he would go on to roam the countryside of the Pre-Equestrian world in an endless search for ponies to make laugh.

As the years went by his reputation and infamy grew, and travellers learned to dread the sound of jinglebells outside the walls of a castle…or the sight of a brightly coloured stallion on the road, far from town. For the Demon of Laughter was on the prowl, and those that earned his attention where never heard of again…save for distant squeals of tortured laughter carried on the breeze.

Anyway, that's the set-up to the Mirthful series, which is going to be an anthology of tickling related fics that I'll upload to FiMfiction someday (maybe somewhere other than FIMfiction, I dunno about that site anymore). Please let me know what you think.