Present Perfect vs. Pinkie Watches Paint Dry · 5:20pm Sep 8th, 2014
After a week-long hiatus, I'm suddenly doing all the things. (I could potentially post one more journal today!) Today's review post is brought to you by not one, but two readings, by DrWolf001 and Indubitably Ponified. (Points to the latter for the ensemble cast and actually reading out the acronym.) (Here's another one by Mic the Microphone. And another by Savrin Drake. Yet another by BleedingRaindrops. A further reading by MelancholyIguana.)
Absolute Anonymous was one of our brightest stars a good two years ago, and her leaving the fandom was a sad moment. (Actually, upon checking her account, it seems she was here only last week, posted a journal about something, and then deleted it. She hasn't written anything since 2012 regardless, so the results are the same.) She left us with a lot of really excellent stories, and quite the name for herself. So it was that someone once told her she could make a story about Pinkie watching paint dry good. In the spirit of good humor, she thus wrote Pinkie Watches Paint Dry and ended up proving that someone right.
The concept is deceptively simple: while painting her room, changing the color from orange to pink, Pinkie Pie has an existential crisis. Honestly, "Pinkie has an existential crisis" all by itself is a quick route to comedy, but needs to be handled with care in order to avoid falling into the "you're so random" pit of Pinkie Pie characterization. AbsAnon straddles this gap by making the primary scene third-person limited and interrupting it with asides that let us see Pinkie from without.
Language use is a big factor in this story's success. You wouldn't expect Pinkie to use words like "fleetingness", especially in relation to a heady concept like "the individual". That she might is part of the comedy, but in making the existential scenes not exist directly in Pinkie's head, the focus is placed on the thought processes and not so much the words used to think them. Then again, we have things like the acronym and the bit about burnt sienna that let us know, in no uncertain terms, that this is Pinkie having these thoughts. It is, again, a balancing act, one that ends up working.
Likewise, the scenes featuring Rainbow Dash and Twilight could be seen as interruptions, but they serve a very important purpose: keeping everything show-tone. It would have been incredibly easy for this story to delve into Sad Pinkie territory -- Rainbow Dash even speculates on this possibility -- becoming just another maudlin example of a tired fandom trope. Instead, their trying to figure out what Pinkie is doing keeps the reader grounded: this may be a huge philosophical conundrum for Pinkie, but things are going to be okay. It doesn't hurt that Rainbow's quip about Pinkie getting sad after eating a cupcake is the funniest line in the whole story. Where the Pinkie scenes derive comedy from "isn't it funny that this is happening to Pinkie Pie?" the "exterior shots" are more purely comedy in the classic sense.
Gummy's appearance ends up being an interesting symbol, specifically due to the line that states he is "gifted with dubious levels of sentience". It takes a pony who can have conversations with a creature like that to end up in a situation like the one Pinkie is in. Her main concern is that the room is losing its identity, and that she's the one who has made the choice to erase its essence. This level of anthropomorphization (equinomorphization?) stems from Pinkie's somewhat child-like outlook. It makes sense to her that a room's walls could have feelings and identities in the same way it makes sense that a toothless, potentially brainless alligator would make a good pet and a friend. This ends up being a really cutting look into Pinkie's psyche, and it sure doesn't hurt that it was canonized in Too Many Pinkie Pies (and in more ways than one!)
Of course, this wouldn't have been nearly as good without the sunny ending to top things off. Pinkie learns something about life, the universe and everything. Not only is it in line with her personality to learn what she does, but it doesn't fundamentally change her. This is important, because despite the assurances given by the show-tone scenes, Pinkie's very core is in jeopardy of the same essential rewriting the room is going through. A change that left her more serious, or more dour or moody, would have been an overreach on the author's part and tanked the whole piece. Instead, what Pinkie ends up with is a deeper understanding of herself, in terms of her approach to life, and the importance thereof.
5/5
The guy who thought Absolute Anonymous could make a good story out of Pinkie watching paint dry was 100% correct.
For those who keep track, I've decided to get back to all the stuff I've been avoiding since Outside Insight ended, which means a good Fallout: Equestria worth of longfics at least. I had an idea for a themed review journal, but it'll have to wait. So it'll take me a while to get to Antipodes. I do at least have Somewhere Only We Know lined up for a read sometime. It's been a while.
I miss AA. I heard some bad things, like you heard bad things about everyone in those days, but she was never anything but pleasant to me.
It's a shame she's not writing anymore. I loved The Games We Play.
I love how "a Fallout: Equestria" is a unit of measurement now. I used it recently to describe how long a story was ("it's five-sixths of a Fallout: Equestria") and I kinda want to see it spread.
I did read that blog post (I am following AbsoluteAnonymous on the off-chance of a return); nothing new, unfortunately.
As for Pinkie Watches Paint Dry, it was good enough to get me to follow an author that had vanished from the site for, as of when I read it, nearly two years. That is how good I thought it was.
The rating got me to reread this one, and I completely agree. It's a real shame that she's gone.
I also find it funny that Fallout: Equestria is used to gauge story length now.
And PP, you gotta get reading Austraeoh and its sequels, too.
In keeping it all Greek, I once used "hippomorphic" in a story...
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I'm kind of regretting not having followed her. She was gone before I knew she was on this site, so I kinda figured there was no point. :/ There probably isn't one now, either.
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Sadly, English being the hodgepodge language that it is, that reads to me initially as "fat and lives in a river".
But which Fallout Equestria? Do you count the 6000 words of chapter 20.5, or not? It's almost 1% of the story! Who could live with that kind of uncertainty?