Main Reviews #14: One In A Million (part of the Million Words in June) (spoiler warning) · 6:01pm Jun 4th, 2015

I first noticed today’s story when it made the feature box back in December 2013. The concept seemed fascinating, and one I hadn’t seen before. A pegasus getting a cutie mark in magic? Colour me intrigued. Of course I was preoccupied with my own things back then, just starting out as a writer myself… but now, a year and a half after its publication, I’ve finally gotten around to it. Geez, took me long enough!

Whew. What a read. It’s been such a long time since any story did what this one did to me. But don’t just take my word for it; get my review of One In A Million below!

Author: Ocalhoun

Synopsis:

After years of trying, Scootaloo finally discovers her special talent.
It's the worst thing that ever happened to her. She'll have to leave Rainbow Dash and all her friends behind as she's forced to go off and learn about her new talent... and then it gets worse.

Length: 53,741 words over 10 chapters, averaging 5,374 words per chapter

Status: Complete

Review: This has been around for a decent amount of time, and continues to garner an audience due to its interesting hook and subject matter. While not a new idea in current times, One In A Million dared to be innovative upon its release. While the first few thousand words don’t really offer anything new, thematically—Scootaloo wants to fly, she goes out to train with Rainbow Dash, her other friends already have cutie marks and she wants to catch up—that soon changes.

One In A Million focuses immediately on Scootaloo, and never leaves her PoV for the entire story, a very competent use of the first-person limited style. From her very beginnings, we see and feel everything that she does. The writing is relatively easy to read, and allows us deep inside to share Scootaloo’s most intimate thoughts: her insecurities, her hopes, her wishes, etc. It’s never been a secret that she adores Rainbow Dash and wants to fly just like her someday, and so the first chapter treads a very familiar path to ease us in.

To quote New Found Glory, it’s

Congratulations on creating such an innovative cutie mark story, Ocalhoun. Really. It’s ingenious.

So, Twilight and Rainbow insist that Scootaloo immediately gets to work on honing her new magical abilities, even as Scoots herself continues to protest and shake her head. She doesn’t want this. She just wants to fly. Is that really too much to ask?

Following one of the most contrived reasons for initiating the start of an adventure that I’ve ever seen, we find Scootaloo bound for Canterlot with a letter of recommendation to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns from Princess Twilight herself. Scootaloo is to attend an accelerated course on magic control and basic spells in an intensive week of Magic Kindergarten. “Surely,” Princess Twilight believes, “they will be most taken aback by such a rare example of magic, and will take most kindly to you and help the first pegasus in over 400 years with unicorn magic to develop her unique powers!”

Yeeeeeeeah, no. Absolutely everyone is a racist bigot hell-bent on treading Scootaloo down into the mud at their superior unicorn hooves, where she belongs.

What follows is the most harrowing week of school I’ve ever experienced in fiction of any medium. Students either ignore her or snicker behind her back, teachers either completely ignore her or only speak to her when she’s messed something up, and even the headmaster proves from the get-go to be the biggest bigot of them all. All of their attitudes toward “the pegasus” are blatant and unapologetic in the most literal sense of the words. They don’t even try to hide their disdain for the filthy pegasus who dares to cross their hallowed halls of unicorn superiority.

Now, I understand that kids can be cruel, and so I expect Scootaloo to be picked on, singled out, abused, ignored, whatever it is that spoiled little brats do whenever someone dares to be (born) different. This would have been totally believable, even with the lengths that Scootaloo’s bunkmate went to to make her life at the school an absolute hell. And I mean this particular filly makes Diamond Tiara look like a patron saint.

But where the story truly crossed the line for me (many, many times) was the fact that none of the teachers even pretended to care about Scootaloo’s plight and her constant teasing and unfair behaviour. They acknowledge her in classes only as “the pegasus,” completely ignore her even if she asks a question in class, or even in one teacher’s case—and I’ve yet to decide whether or not this is better or worse—repeatedly emphasising that she did “pretty good, for a pegasus” constantly. The abhorrent, unceasing racism just set my blood boiling, and so much of it just felt completely unnecessary.

But! If you can persist through this miasmic environment, you will find a few moments that shine. Night Whisper—who for the greater part of the story seems like a cross between Silver Spoon and Fluttershy (mostly the latter)—is a character you can’t help but feel sorry for. If you look up doormat in the dictionary, her picture would be there, if it existed. And while I may have had a lot of initial rage and disdain for the portrayal of an 1800’s-black-slave-type Earth pony called Sugar Cookie, he proved to be a lovely and refreshing respite from all the torturous abuse, tar-thick accent aside.

I’ll be honest. Come entering chapter three (and there are ten of them to wade through), I was hoping the story would involve Scootaloo harnessing her newfound magical powers to incinerate all of her antagonists, a la Stephen King’s Carrie. Seven hells, they already deserved it by this point.

The true lowpoint of the story though came at the Hundred Moons Festival (I think it was called?). I was naive enough to think that maybe, just maybe, one of her antagonists had actually turned over a new leaf. She and he spent a truly lovely day together, going on all the scary rides, pigging out on ice cream and cake and other blissfully unhealthy foodstuffs, and just generally enjoying each other’s company. After five previous chapters of being completely downtrodden into the ground more than Cinderella by her evil stepsisters, the universe finally seemed to be giving Scoots a break.

Haha, great joke, right?

I’m not going to go too much more into the plot, which I think I’ve already spoiled enough. Onward now to the more technical aspects of the story, and then some final thoughts.

For the great majority of the story, there were no noticeable errors, misspellings, or slipups in grammar. Ocalhoun had as large a team for this story as I did for my own story, Essenza di Amore, and it really shows; aside from just a couple of random close-quote speech marks in the narrative and the occasional missing comma for direct address, the read was squeaky clean. I did, however, pull up the matter of the consistently incorrect use of the en dash, of which Ocal assures me he has learned from in the time between this review and the story’s initial publishing. So as far as actual writing quality goes, it can’t really be beat. It flows fluid, and nothing leaps out at me as feeling wrong. The story also takes the daring approach of being formatted as a book would be, with only indentations for the next paragraph and no double-spacing. While lots of people whinge, bitch, and moan about this layout on a screen—supposedly it’s hard to read, the poor little princesses; honestly, you’d think they’d never read an actual book before—I had no problems at all with it.

Before I close this review, I have two major issues with the story: one, to do with the resolution, and two, to do with the shoehorned plothole that essentially renders the entire story redundant from the beginning.

Issue one: Deus Ex Machina ending. Oh, lord, I thought this fic was above (or below) such things. Earlier in the story, Scootaloo had overexerted herself to the point where she suffered “magic overload,” which limited her to using only the barest amount of magic without developing a severe headache and becoming lethargic. Barely two days after entering this state, her final practical exam comes up where she is expected to perform two standardised and one exceptional piece of magic for the judges. Even during the judging itself, Scootaloo struggles with the most basic of the two tasks… and then suddenly as if from nowhere she manages to tap into her hidden wellspring of power at the last critical moment. All her pain vanishes, and she’s pulling off magnificent, stupendous displays of magic that Rainbow Dash and Twilight would be in awe of.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Perhaps I might have if she managed to force out this incredible power through the head-splitting pain, and blacked out from said pain after her demonstration, but no… she’s just suddenly amazing and completely pain-free.

But the other, single most story-breaking plothole / contrivance occurs right in chapter one, and it either makes or breaks the story for you right at the beginning. Twilight and Rainbow are scheduled to leave on a diplomatic mission to the Griffon Kingdoms the day that Scootaloo discovers her magical talent, and it’s for this reason that Twilight hurriedly writes out her recommendation letter and basically forces Scoots to go to Canterlot under the idea that “it’s not safe for a magical pony to not have any training.” She also gives the whole “life isn’t fair but you have to deal with it” spiel to Scoots, which comes off as rather cruel, even after trying to justify that outlook by describing her own experience in having to come to Ponyville when she didn’t initially want to.

Issue two: Why did Twilight and/or Rainbow not simply cancel their trip to the Griffon Kingdoms to train Scootaloo them/herself? If she had simply done this, the entire story could have been avoided. I’ve honestly not seen such a story-breaking plothole since I read It’s a Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door, in which nopony thinks to tell Celestia that Twilight is dying, therefore forcing Aj, Rarity, and Rainbow off on an adventure spanning beyond the borders of Equestria. It just really felt completely against Twilight’s character to palm Scootaloo off to her old school while she left on some mission that surely could have been postponed, given the circumstances. The worst part about all this is that at no point in the story is the purpose of this “diplomatic mission” ever explored or brought up, and it has absolutely no bearing on the plot at all save to get Twilight and Rainbow as far away from Scootaloo as possible.

Whew. What a ride, though. If there’s one thing the story does incredibly right, even with its highly questionable and downright unfair methods, it sure knows how to get a reader’s blood boiling. I have never been so angry at a story and its characters before. No, this isn’t anger at the author. Far from it: I absolutely commend him for being able to manipulate my emotions in such a way, to make me really feel for Scootaloo. If there’s only one thing you take from reading this, whether you like or detest the story and its methods, you have to admit: it is a resounding success when its purpose is to draw out rage from the reader, and they do indeed feel rage.

To close, One In A Million is a story best read by those who aren’t opposed to seeing characters suffer through horrendous psychological torture and total indignation. It will make you angry, unless you’re like, not human or something. But even so, it has merit, even if many parts could have been done differently to greater effect. I personally feel that, had the teachers at least have been more compassionate, that it would have balanced out the malicious fillies and colts determined to destroy Scootaloo. Having the teachers be just as viciously racist as their pupils was the major rage point for me, and the fic would have been better and more balanced overall had the teachers just been less harsh.

If reading about competently written suffrage is your jam, you’ll like this a lot. If you’re not the sort of person who enjoys a story drawing out all of your hatred and malice, you’ll want to steer clear. I enjoyed it for what it was, even if it did make me seethe like an over-boiled cauldron.

6/10

Words read this June so far: 78,126 (I need to step up my game, particularly since I started three days late )